Status 240406
Status Report 240406
By Walker Umetaro, Vice Principal
The dialogue between MSS and McREL began in July 2022. We came together to focus on Teacher Effectiveness; how we can strengthen and enhance teaching and learning experiences inside our classrooms. To ensure effective implementation of any plan of action, the SMART objective should be considered, so that expected goals can be achieved. We were advised by McREL consultants, through four teacher training sessions and several leadership meetings, to develop a school improvement plan and begin work from there. After those four sessions throughout the school year 2022-2023, we finally were able to establish a manageable school improvement plan that we were to implement in the next school year 2023-2024.
Our main focus was to plan on implementing a school improvement plan for only one grade level first, and once plan is effectively implemented and goal is achievable, we may be able to then introduce the new and effective change idea to the other grades, for them to tailor it to fit their students’ needs and be able to deliver effective instructions and methods. We were constantly reminded that change takes time. Even though we have a plan in place, challenges may still arise that might require us to revise our change idea for effective implementation.
We chose to concentrate on third grade literacy. We only had one third grade section, but it consisted of 30 students to one teacher. As another significant aspect of teaching and learning, the recommended ratio in one classroom is 15 students to 1 teacher. School year 2023-2024 began and we finally came to an agreement as a school team, to divide our one third grade section to two sections (3A & 3B) with 15 students in each classroom, at the start of third quarter. This new arrangement with our third-grade class, made it possible for us to successfully activate our school improvement plan which is to start a 90 minutes reading block that will only take place every Thursdays and Fridays, from 9:50am-11:25am (see calendar). Through several walk-through, classroom observations conducted by the Principal and Vice Principal and teacher feedback and data sharing (mostly classroom assignments) in our Bi-weekly PLC meetings, we have realized gradual improvements with student performances in English phonics, writing, reading, and spelling. Of course, there will always be challenges, and the challenges we still encounter are struggles with comprehension skills and the lack of other useful resources for the improvement of students’ literacy skills. The available resources our teachers currently use are just the regular course text books for English reading and grammar and other resources that our teachers could get a hold of, usually from reliable education websites. In terms of collecting more reliable data, we prefer to give it more time, until the end of this fourth quarter, to be able to really compile all the available and necessary data, for the team to analyze and be able to interpret the positive impact of the recently implemented 90 minutes reading block.