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Reflection of first CORE Meetings

The purpose of the CORE meetings is to analyze the data of the FAIR, DRA, District Benchmark data as well as classroom data.  The purpose of these CORE meetings are to look at the effectiveness of our CORE instruction.

A concern last year was that coaches were "owning" the majority of the data and prescribing the majority of the interventions based on student need.  The challenge that resulted was that the teachers did not have a clear understanding of their student needs as determined by data.  The challenge became that teachers would take their students who were struggling to the Problem Solving Team to get support and not be able to discuss intelligibly the data, student needs or interventions.  The response that many teachers gave was "the coach or the interventionist" is providing the support for this student.  We know this is not the most effective way for a classroom teacher to work with his or her students.  Upon asking the coaches whether they were rescuing or scaffolding, the coaches admitted that they were rescuing.  The reason, according to them, was out of necessity.  They were on such a time crunch, with teachers that lacked experienced analyzing data and students who were high need, that they couldn't build the capacity they were hoping to build.  In moving forward this year, the coaches, with the support of administration, are working toward building capacity with the teacher's comfort level in obtaining data, progress monitoring data, assigning acceleration strategies to student need and making adjustments to groups based on the student growth.

OBSTACLES:
A challenge that we have is the scarce allocation of resources to support the teachers growth.  The text Data Driven Decisions and School Leadership explains that ...
              "public schools receive their fiscal resources from a combination of local, state and federal       revenues, with the largest percentage of funding typically coming from state government and lowest coming from the federal government" (pg. 32).   Additionally, Kowalski explains that "studies of of school superintendents have consistently identified a lack of adequate funding as [being] the most serious problem facing public schools" (pg. 32).  Manatee County and RGE are certainly no exceptions.  Limited funding makes it impossible for us to obtain substitutes to cover the teachers during this required time.  We are left to use alternative means of trying to provide the teachers with the support they need to become proficient with their awareness of data and its implications. 

The meetings last an hour and fifteen minutes.  The data has been pulled by the individual discipline coach.  The meeting breakdown is as follows:

Agenda:
A.  The coaches (both literacy and math) provide the teachers with their most recent data and discuss the groupings of students.  They are aligning student need directly to a particular intervention.  The coaches explain that the groups are fluid and not static and will continue to change as the needs of the students change.  Students will flow in and out of acceleration groups as deemed appropriate and evidenced by data.  The expectation was set that we make all decisions based on data and not as a result of our intuition.

  • The coaches also expressed the need for the teachers to analyze which benchmarks their students were proficient with "as a whole" and which benchmarks would require more time.  The teachers were shown how to access this data and the expectation was set that this point of reference would be revisited so that teacher can align instruction to needs.


B.  The administrator shows how to read and analyze FBA's (Functional Behavioral Assessments) and BIP's (Behavioral Intervention Plans.)  It is explained to teachers that these are legal documents that guide our reaction to student behaviors.

C.  Administration also explained that the teachers would be required to Progress Monitor the students. A folder is set up on the Principal's Bulletin to track the student data.  All grade levels have different requirements for tracking their data.

  • All students will be tracked once a month on their grade level progress using the agreed upon common progress monitoring tool.  
  • All Tier 2 students will be tracked bi-monthly (twice a month) on their instructional level.
  • All Tier 3 students will be tracked bi-monthly or more frequently as deemed necessary in accordance with the MTSS Problem Solving team.
D.  I facilitated the final piece of the CORE meeting, which was bridging the gap between the CORE Support meetings and the MTSS meetings whereby specific students are discussed who have needs that are not being met by CORE instruction.  

Key Points:
  • Programs are not intervention strategies (LLI, Voyager, Sidewalks.)  These are programs that are global and do not address specific student needs.
  • If a student has a problem with phoneme segmentation or deletion as delineated by data, then the intervention must be aligned to that particular student need.  
  • Brief explanation of how often to Progress Monitor.  
  • As teachers obtain their data, I will assist them with the data reporting piece as well as their graphs.  
  • Graphs need to consist of data that compares the student in three ways
    • Student to Benchmark
    • Student to Grade Level Norms
    • Student to Peer (For example ELL to ELL)
  • I closed with a video on the MTSS process.  The link is below ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrapFXnZIDE






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