In the school where you are now, what changes do you propose that may need to take place in order to see this kind of "skyrocketing scores?"
In order to see skyrocketing scores in my current school I believe teachers need to be deeply analyzing state standards and analyzing what they are doing in the classroom to meet the standards. I believe benchmarks or some type of check in needs to be created that correlates. It may be that the teacher gives a benchmark prior to a unit (standard) and see what the students already know then compare that to what they learn after you teach. Teachers may need to be looking at what they did during the unit. And deeply analyzing their teaching strategies to meet the standard. Did the students improve? What did you do? What could you do in the next unit to make scores higher? Do teacher’s need to reteach the unit.
Maybe you have had an experience similar to the one at Worthington. What kinds of changes were put in place at your school to see this happen?
In a previous school, the new principal had higher expectations and did want his staff to look deeper into scores. We had county benchmarks and were able to compare our school versus other schools in the district. It helped to make things a little competitive for schools especially with rivalries among the county because of sports. As a teacher I was able to label and show data on a board in my classroom showing students how they ranked on their benchmark versus other schools. I was even able to show them class to class so they tended to enjoy and get engaged in the unit and take the tests more seriously because of the student’s competitive drive.
What suggestions can you make to your classmates from your school's experience in raising test scores?
I would say that as a professional teacher it is our job to teach the standards. That means, finding ways to engage students. The more engaged students are in the material and the more they can relate the material to their lives the higher the scores will be.
Perhaps you have seen your school start out well with well-intentioned goals, but enthusiasm and motivation have waned. What may have been the reason and how could you change that as an administrator?
As an administrator it is important when changes are made that there is a follow through. It will be up to the administrator to keep on task with the changes. They need to model these changes and encourage staff members. There needs to be deadlines as well. A previous administrator had us analyze our benchmark data and we had to send via email what our goal was and how we were going to achieve the goal. We then completed our units, took our benchmark looked over our data and reflected. What could we do differently? We constantly had to reflect after teaching a unit and make changes. I really enjoyed doing this because it really did make me think and add things to my curriculum for future use and make changes going into the next curriculum.