Making the grade

Cochran teachers find ways to help students become successful

By HEATHER GACH, hgach@sungazette.com
(EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is the third installment in a monthly series called “Making the Grade” that focuses on the Williamsport Area School District and what it is doing to make Adequate Yearly Progress as measured by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The next installment will be published Jan. 28.)



By HEATHER GACH

hgach@sungazette.com



Achieving high scores on tests is one indicator of a successful student, according to David J. Michaels, principal at J. Henry Cochran Elementary School.

But to be a successful student at Cochran, he said, requires more from his students.

“Success means a lot of things,” Michaels said. “According to No Child Left Behind, success is ‘advanced’ or ‘proficient’ (on state tests), but I would probably bet that according to administrators and teachers and parents and students, it’s the continuing of developing strong students ... developing thinkers, not just test takers.”

Cochran certainly has many strong test takers. The school consistently has made adequate yearly progress (AYP) as required under the federal No Child Left Behind Act from its high scores on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) tests, the state tests used to determine AYP.

At the district-level, Williamsport fell short of making AYP for the 2006-07 year, placing the district under “warning” status. District AYP is based on attendance, graduation rate, test participation and performance targets, and Williamsport made the mark in all except its graduation rate, which fell at 71.9 percent when the requirement was 80 percent or growth from the previous year.

With Cochran’s successes and the successes at other schools, Superintendent Dr. Kathleen R. Kelley shrugs off the notion that the district is “failing.”

This article is the third in a series “Making the Grade” exploring what Williamsport schools are doing to improve student test scores and keep them up as NCLB continues to raise the bar toward its goal of 100 percent student proficiency on state tests by 2014.

“As a building, as a school, as a district, No Child Left Behind sort of covers us as an umbrella, but it doesn’t consume us,” Michaels said.

Being one of the first districts in the state to begin using the Pennsylvania Value Added Assessment System (PVAAS), Michaels said, helped Cochran and all the Williamsport schools to determine strengths and areas in need of improvement through data use, and then develop appropriate curriculums and supplemental programs to meet students’ needs.

Value-added analysis “is a statistical method used to measure the influence of a district and school on the academic progress rates of individual students and groups of students from year-to-year,” according to the state Department of Education’s Web site.

Michaels said he’s a firm believer in charting students’ academic growth over time, and continued, solid improvement, he believes, is an indicator of a successful student.

“I think the big thing to note with No Child Left Behind: yes there’s a level of accountability and there are some great expectations, but I think one thing that it has done is it has allowed (Williamsport) schools to focus on success and, most importantly, focus on student growth.”

In keeping the emphasis on student growth, Michaels said his teachers don’t focus their efforts solely on preparing students for the PSSAs.

“Quite honestly, in going from classroom to classroom and looking at what we have here at Cochran, it’s woven into our curriculum ... a lot of our instruction is driven by the eligible content, but our teachers continue to do an outstanding job across the board in just providing learning experiences and not just developing test takers,” Michaels said. “They’re developing strong students and even better children.”

Eligible content, Michaels explained, is the material students need to learn for the PSSAs. At Cochran, he said, they try to incorporate eligible content into lessons and activities.

The growth element, he said, comes into play because not only is eligible content taught at the grade levels that take the PSSAs — third, fourth and fifth — but also at the younger grades so those students will have a stronger foundation when they enter those upper grades.

“(Grades three, four and five) are the ones who have to face the rigors of the assessment. But we believe it starts at kindergarten. Kindergarten, first and second grades,” Michaels said. “We’re continuing to use data at these levels. We’re continuing to develop ways to use student data to drive our instruction.”

Michelle Boyles, a second-grade teacher, said though her students don’t take the PSSAs, she and her second-grade teacher colleagues incorporate eligible content, such as reading comprehension and writing, into their lessons so the students are better equipped for when it comes time to take the PSSAs in third grade.

“We cover a lot of the eligible content (at the second-grade level),” Boyles said. “We try covering reading aloud and doing interactive writing ... Interactive writing is where the kids are basically doing the writing. You would read a book and then maybe talk about what they learned or what they need to know or what they want to learn and basically the kids are doing all of the writing themselves.”

Boyles said the second half of the second-grade year is referred to as “transitioning ... getting them ready for third grade and getting them ready for the PSSAs.”

“We basically talk to (the students) and explain to them ‘you know, next year when you go into the third grade, you’re going to start taking the PSSA test,’ ” Boyles said.

More eligible content, she said, is worked in their curriculum. Students begin using the Accelerated Reader and Accelerated Math software, which helps build reading comprehension and math skills, and more advanced readers begin writing Readers Responses where students read and write about the reading, but the teachers look for a deeper comprehension level in the writing, Boyles said.

Amy Twist, a fifth-grade teacher, said they avoid the “drill and kill” technique of teaching PSSA content over and over and over.

“We look at PSSA standards, I think, more as expectations for our students, so you’re not going to hear us repeat terminology and say that ‘this is what you need to know for PSSA.’ It’s more as an expectation,” Twist said. “We’re not focused totally on PSSA when we teach. We look more, I think, in terms of the perspective of our expectations for our students. We know that they need to be strong writers. We know that they need to be good problem solvers, so you’ll see that in every aspect of our curriculum.”

To prepare fifth-graders to transition out of Cochran and into the intermediate and high school grades, Twist said the fifth-grade teachers team strives to align their curriculum with the district’s expectations for sixth-graders. For example, she said, Cochran fifth-graders use the Everyday Math program as the district’s sixth-graders do.

“We also look at modeling behavior as well, not only the academics but the emotional and the social aspects as well,” Twist said.

Michaels said the school as a whole benefits because it is one of two literacy collaborative schools in the district, which means it has access to the district’s two literacy coaches who spend half their days in the classrooms teaching literacy and the other half working with teachers on their literacy instruction.

“It’s teachers teaching teachers. It’s teachers working together to develop stronger instruction, better instruction,” Michaels said.

Debbie Goff, a fourth-grade teacher and intermediate literacy collaborative coach, said she was trained for the literacy collaborative coaching position at Ohio State University “and the purpose is to use the literacy collaborative program from Ohio State University and Leslie University in Boston as the format for our reading throughout this building.”

“We had had this program for (kindergarten) through (second grade) and we felt it was successful enough that we wanted to extend it into (grades) three through five,” Goff said. “My role is to take that program, which is reading, writing, spelling, so it’s all the language arts in the intermediate grades of three through five, and I train teachers to use the program.”

All the skills from the program, Goff said, are eligible content for the PSSAs, but that wasn’t the sole reason behind implementing the program.

“It is absolutely part of making (students) well rounded and lifelong readers,” Goff said. “Testing is definitely a focus because it has to be, but maybe the even greater focus is to make them lifelong readers and writers and make sure that those skills that they need to begin that are in place.”

For students that need some extra help, Michaels said the school offers a three-day-a-week after-school tutoring program focused on oral and reading content areas for students in grades three, four and five.

“It’s focused on reading ... for our basic and below basic students ... but we also look at those students who may be on the bubble and need a boost.”

Michaels said Cochran teachers and teachers from the district staff the program “and it’s really beneficial because we know our students.”

For all Cochran students, Michaels said the after-school Social Skills Recreation Program (SSRP) is available for students to not only work on homework but also work on improving social skills while also having some time for recreation.

“These are our at-risk children. They come from teacher recommendations,” Michaels said. “There’s a homework component. There’s also social skills. It’s also neat to see some students interact you know, the older kids work with the younger kids.”

Michaels said the school also promotes involvement with the Community Alliance for Progressive Positive Action (CAPPA), which often uses the school building for its weekend activities.

CAPPA is a nonprofit organization within the City of Williamsport that serves more than 700 youths by providing academic support, youth employment initiatives, recreational opportunities and positive role models with assistance from Williamsport Area School District officials, law enforcement officials, community leaders and volunteers.

Community support, Michaels said, will help develop better children and in turn, develop better students.

“When available, I’ll stop in maybe for an hour on a Saturday and it’s very telling the number of Cochran kids who are involved,” Michaels said. “They’re our kids, and we develop good kids and solid kids and solid students.”

To promote community and parental involvement within Cochran, Michaels said that with the help of grant money the school was recently awarded, they soon hope to start a family book club similar to book clubs they host for students.

Goff said “the goal is to mimic for parents what we do for children in the book clubs so that when the children are at home and reading, the parents can work with them and use the same kind of process to help raise their reading levels and their reading skills.”

“That will be a four-session book club and that will begin for parents in January,” Goff said, adding the program will be held in the evenings.

Michaels said many teachers offer book clubs during lunch or recess periods where teachers select a text based on the students’ interests.

Goff said that some sessions are open to all students, while others are restricted to more or less advanced readers to better meet students where they are at academically.

“We have what we call ‘Lunch Bunch book clubs’ and they are (grades) three, four and five children and I go to classrooms and give what we call ’book talks’ and that is to promote different books and then the children can decide which book they would like to read. They read it independently and then we break the book into sections and have a schedule and we have lunch together and we sit around and discuss the book that they have read, and it is available to all intermediate students.

“We also have a particular group going on right now because we have some accelerated students ... we have pulled in some of these higher-end readers with some adults to have discussions, same sort of thing as ‘Lunch Bunch,’ but that’s been a little more restricted,” Goff said.

Goff said the response to both clubs has been wonderful.

“They can’t wait to come, and it is all voluntary. We sit around and absolutely at the end of every session their comments are ‘I can’t believe it’s over.’ ‘Can’t we stay?’ ” Goff said. “I can barely get them out the door to get to their next class.”

Michaels said information on the family book club will be available soon.