How to Meet Student Challenges and Create Success

There is a lot of pressure to raise student achievement in our public schools today. I advise stepping back and taking stock in what we do that is right for kids. Eliminate the non-essential and focus on the essential.

As teachers, we have always felt so good when we’ve done what is right—that thing that turns a student around and leads to success, whether it is behavior or academics. Trust in your ability to reach the children you have and give up those old outdated ideas that you have to do it all yourself.

Provide Interventions

One idea that has worked in my schools has been to engage your grade level team in problem solving and come up with solutions that will work for groups of kids. Choose a high stakes concept or benchmark you can all agree on. One highly successful one is graphing, for instance. Then pre-test, divide the entire grade level into groups according to how well they did, decide who will teach each group (involve your administrators and special ed folks, too), schedule the intervention times, and off you go. You will be amazed when you post test these kiddos. They will all be proficient on graphing and many will exceed proficiency. That will be great news when state testing time rolls around.

Don’t forget to plan for the needs of accelerated students who must also get what they need to raise their achievement and to eliminate boredom of our brightest students.

Response to Intervention

To raise student achievement for students about whom you have serious concerns, I established a broadened system of accommodations in alignment with what we now know as Response to Intervention (RTI). A meeting with parents, teacher(s) and an administrator (me) was set up to learn more about the student’s challenges and to collaborate on a plan for support, including accommodations that will make them successful.

Accommodations are not modifications to the curriculum. Many teachers, even those in Special Education, are not clear about this point, and it is one of the reasons so many lower their expectations of struggling students. Accommodations help children access the curriculum without lowering the standards. Modifications are for children with severe disabilities who simply cannot do the work for cognitive reasons.

An example of an appropriate accommodation follows: There was a boy, we’ll call him Richard, who had a very difficult time focusing on his work. He had been diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder) and was very bright. He drove the teacher crazy! Still, during our meeting we came up with accommodations to help him be successful.

It is essential to explain the plan to the child and get his agreement to participate, with clear consequences if he does not follow the plan. Explain that this plan is to help him be more successful in school. Most children will appreciate the care you show on their behalf.

In the plan, Richard was to be allowed to get up and walk at the back of the room when he could no longer sit quietly and do his work, and as long as he was not disruptive to others. Richard was to use a small hour glass provided by the parents. When the sand ran out, it was then that he could get up and walk around for a minute and the back of the room. During instruction, he was given a tactile ball to squeeze and play with while he listened to the teacher.

His parents had some accommodations to support at home. They would make sure Richard had a list of things he had to do before he went to bed each night, including getting his homework in his backpack ready for pick up the next morning. Forgetting homework had been another problem.

After a month, we had a follow up meeting (very important) to see if the accommodations were working. Indeed, the teacher had noticed great progress, and he was no longer a distraction to the class.

Use Student Data

Analyzing student data provided by formative and summative assessments is essential for raising student achievement. Administrators should provide teachers with reports that can help teacher group students with similar needs. There is simply not enough time in the day to meet everyone’s needs individually.

Teachers should be given time to meet together to analyze student writing, for instance, to develop inter-rater reliability for scoring student work and to determine what proficient writing looks like. This is done with other subjects as well to create a school that has the same understanding of each level of proficiency.

Student Engagement

In order for students to learn, they must be interested in the content and approach. Teaching students to think at higher levels is essential. Understanding the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy and aligning it with each standard and objective is another activity that raises teacher understanding of the standards and how to teach them. At McREL it was called Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum. There is so much that you can do with teachers and students to raise student achievement.

See McREL’s Classroom Instruction That Works for great ideas and strategies for creating meaningful activities that will raise student achievement.