Guarantee Three… An Incremental Approach to School Turnaround

Within the first month of being appointed principal at Majestic Elementary, I was visited by my superintendent. This was the first year that the state of Utah was implementing the school grading system, and she was given advance notice that our school was to be given a failing grade. She told me that we were the only failing school in the district and I was given a charge to turn this school around.

This did not come as a complete surprise to me. Although I was new to the school, I was already aware of it’s history… Majestic Elementary was the most highly impacted school in the district, and had also been the lowest performing school year after year for as long as anyone could remember. While I was eager to accept the challenge, I knew that before I even started, I had to figure out what was preventing our school from achieving at higher levels. I was ready to think big, but getting different results with the same faculty was going to require my vision to be broken down into small incremental steps with plenty of opportunities to celebrate success along the way.

As we introduced ourselves during our opening meetings that August, we announced our school grade and collectively acknowledged that we had some work to do. We couldn’t fix it all at once, but I challenged the teachers to take a big leap with me. I asked them to Guarantee Three.

Implementation

Grade level teams were challenged to identify three standards that they felt were important foundational skills. In fact, I wanted them to come up with standards that were so important that they would guarantee me that 100% of their students would master the skill by the end of the month. Teachers were incredibly reluctant to guarantee 100% mastery, but they were willing to take this journey with me and just see what they could do if they really focused their instruction and gave it their all.

The first step was giving students a pre-assessment to determine what they already knew. The results often yielded class averages of 10-20%. Once again, teachers had a hard time guaranteeing that they could bring every single student up to mastery, but the stakes were low and at the very least this would be an interesting experiment. So they began planning their instruction based on the information from the pre-test and then brought their data to a team collaboration meeting each week to discuss student progress. In that weekly meeting with the principal, coaches, and grade level team, we all worked together as equals to generate ideas that could enhance tier one instruction, identify interventions and strategies that would help specific students, and brainstorm classroom management ideas to improve student behaviors to make learning more attainable.

Teachers were constantly teaching and gathering information about how students were progressing. As students began to achieve mastery, there was an energy that began to permeate our building. Our students really could learn at high levels. For the first time, the guarantee that 100% of students could master the concepts started to look possible. Things were starting to change at Majestic. We were starting to believe that disadvantaged kids like ours, really could achieve at high levels and we became committed to turning our school around.

Results

Throughout the first year of Guarantee Three very few teachers were able to attain the goal of 100% mastery on the standards that they had selected. However, what they did see was massive amounts of student growth. Students who had been grade levels behind, were now reaching levels near mastery, while others who had been complacent were giving me high fives as I walked down the hall telling me that they had achieved mastery… They could even tell me the specific standard that they had mastered!

Each month teachers identified three standards to teach to mastery. They used data regularly to track student learning, and pushed students to achieve their very best and the pay off was huge. In one year, Majestic Elementary left our failing score behind and earned a “B” on the state school grading report card.

Next Steps

Majestic Elementary continues to use data driven instructional practices to increase student achievement. This summer, we are planning an Instructional Boot Camp for teachers, where we will dig even deeper into effective planning, writing clear objectives, establishing learning targets using Proficiency Scales, checking for understanding, and managing difficult behaviors.