Seven Action Steps To Improve Your School Now

“A Synthesis of Research by Craig Drennon on What Works in Schools"

1. Select teacher teams to create Curriculum Guides built around the standards
   • Create Pacing Guides for each grade and content area
   • Determine key concepts and skills in each standard, and link with Bloom’s Taxonomy (Unwrap the standard)
   • Determine the big ideas and essential questions of each standard
   • Generate non-fiction writing prompts linked to the standards
   • Construct common formative assessment items
   • Select effective teaching strategies, activities, and resources
2. Initiate opportunities for collaboration among teachers, and especially grade and content level teacher teams (PLC’s / faculty data teams)
   • Common Planning
   • Faculty Data Teams (PLC’s, grade-level teams)
   • Common Formative Assessments (predictive value)
   • Effective Teaching Strategies (Marzano’s Research)
   • On-going data analysis of common formative assessments
   • Differentiated Instruction based on student need
3. Implement a school-wide focus on balanced literacy instruction and especially non-fiction and constructed response writing
   • “At The Leadership and Learning Center, we have studied literally hundreds of alternative strategies to improve student achievement. The one that has, hands down, had the most significant long-term impact in EVERY subject and EVERY grade is nonfiction writing.” (Reeves, 2000)
4. Use Data Driven Decision Making to make school-wide decisions such as scheduling, teacher assignments, differentiated instruction, and double-blocking of Math and ELA
   • “Understanding and using data about school and student performance are fundamental to improving schools. Without analyzing and discussing data, schools are unlikely to identify and solve the problems that need attention, identify appropriate interventions to solve those problems, or know how they are progressing toward achievement of their goals. Data are the fuel of reform (Killion and Bellamy, 2000).”
5. Create strong Leadership and Accountability Systems that insure on-going monitoring of initiatives, strategies, results, and goals; Planning, Implementation, and Monitoring are the keys to school reform and improvement
6. Use Data Walls to show progress of improved student achievement
   • “Data Walls” is a proven strategy for measuring progress of groups, subgroups and sub-skills of students within schools. It is a way of telling your school’s story in data, and will provide topics for professional conversations among your faculty and staff to guide and focus school improvement. (Reeves, 2000)
7. Initiate monthly “Learning Walks” to encourage teachers to move beyond their classrooms, and to create “in-house” on-going professional development