For 14 years, a banner proclaiming "High Expectations" adorned our school entrance. Three years ago, our staff decided to investigate what those words really meant and whether we were living up to this promise. When a close look at our gradebooks revealed 11,274 missing or incomplete assignments (a lot for a school of 500 students), we knew we needed to make a change. Those missing or incomplete assignments represented a gap in knowledge and practice that our middle schoolers would carry to high school. To increase their chances for success in high school, we had to raise our expectation that all students would complete all assignments and produce quality work. This was not an easy task, but we were able to increase expectations by creating a culture of learning support in our school community.
Intensive Care
A presentation by Danny Hill and Jayson Nave, the authors of The Power of ICU, helped our staff create a plan to redefine accountability and build an academic support system in which teachers, parents, and students would work together to ensure our adolescent learners could succeed academically. The goal was to influence student achievement by creating a positive school culture and developing support strategies for struggling students. We focused on four things:
- Improving communication between parents, staff, and students.
- Allowing students extra time to master the standards.
- Requiring all students to complete all summative assessments.
- Providing extra help to students before, during, and after school.
Clear Channels
We began transforming our school culture by sending a letter to parents and holding class meetings. Going forward, we told parents that all students would need to complete all summative assessments and produce quality work. We defined quality work as "70 percent or to the best of a student's ability." Students with missing or poor-quality assessments would have their names placed on a missing assignment list that could be viewed by all staff members. Staff members would then ask students on this list questions such as
- "Whom do you owe?"
- "What do you owe?"
- "What do you need?"
- "How can we help?"
Teachers would reteach content material to struggling students and assign extra practice if necessary. Students who needed extra assistance could meet teachers before school, during lunch, during intervention period, and after school. Once students produced quality work, their names would be removed from the missing assignment list.
To provide this type of intensive care for struggling students, parents, teachers, and administrators all needed to be on the same page. We purchased an electronic database to send automated text and e-mail messages to our parents. We notified parents when their children had missing assignments and gave them the option to reply directly to classroom teachers. Follow-up messages informed parents when the assignments were completed.
Added Time and Resources
We needed to match logistical supports to our cultural shift if it was going to be successful. We stationed two teachers at the school’s front doors every morning, thirty minutes before school began, to warmly greet all who entered. This served two purposes: to make all who entered our building feel welcome and to direct students with missing work to our Help Room so that they could complete their makeup work and receive tutoring services before school.
If the work went unfinished, students could continue to get assistance through additional arrangements during working lunches and their 30-minute intervention period. If they needed more time and assistance with assignments, qualified staff members and paraeducators provided after-school tutoring on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Our local United Way organization provided funding for a late bus to ensure our after-school students had safe and reliable transportation home.
Supportive Grading Policies
Early in our improvement process, we realized we needed an approach to grading that would support students working toward mastery and hold them accountable for quality work and completion. Our grading purposes and practices, however, were all over the map. We established the following grading guidelines (developed from Ken O'Connor's A Repair Kit for Grading: 15 Fixes for Broken Grades):
- Grades will measure and communicate student performance in mastering the academic standards.
- Quality assessments will directly relate to the stated learning objectives and standards for the courses.
- Effort, participation, attitude, and other behaviors will not be included in grades but may be reported separately.
- Only summative assessments will be graded; formative assessments will be considered practice for learning.
- Students will be held accountable for all missing summative assessments.
- Students must redo summative assessments with a score of 70 percent and below and any work that is not completed to the best of their ability.
- Reassessment scores will replace original scores; multiple attempts will be noted.
- Students may redo any assignment provided steps have been taken to improve performance.
- Points will not be deducted for late work.
Academic Lifeguards
The responsibility of motivating and assisting struggling students cannot rest on the shoulders of only a few; it takes a team. Therefore, our improvement committee determined we would implement a "lifeguard approach" to save struggling students. The primary lifeguard was always the instructor to whom the assignment was owed. The teacher who put the assignment on the list was responsible for making initial parent and student contacts, providing additional assistance, and verifying content mastery. The second layer of lifeguard support involved many people. In our school, that level included the student's grade level teacher, the advisory period teacher, or the intervention teacher. Our third support layer included administrators, counselors, coaches, secretaries, paraeducators, and other teachers who had a relationship with the student. Our lifeguard approach ensured that every student had at least one advocate in the school, and multiple layers of support provided options for those students we struggled to connect with, for parents who needed more reminders, or for teachers who had a lot on their plates and needed help providing interventions.
An extra layer of lifeguard support came from our students. Peer tutors were recruited and trained to work individually with struggling students on reading, math, science, social studies, and elective coursework. Tutoring sessions took place during school hours under adult supervision. By providing peer-tutoring opportunities, we developed youth leaders who discovered the rewards and importance of serving others and strengthened relationships among students across grade levels.
Learning Held High
Since providing the supports to make high expectations a reality for all students, we've had no failing grades for the first time in our principal's 13-year tenure. All students passed all subjects in all four quarters. In addition, our students (grades 6–8) exceeded Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) growth projections in math and reading. And finally, we collected 11,274 missing assignments! All students completed all assignments and produced quality work.
My colleagues and I are pleased with these numbers; however, our goal is bigger and harder to quantify. We want to make a difference by encouraging our adolescent learners to take responsibility for their own learning. Our true test will come in a couple months when our pilot class of 6th graders (now 8th graders), who played a role in this schoolwide transformation, head across the street to high school. We are delighted with the number of 8th grade students who have begun to demonstrate personal responsibility and are confident they will continue to grow as young adults. Now, when our community walks through our doors, our banner of "High Expectations" represents more than just words; it's a living reminder of what can happen when we set the bar higher in support of our students.