Putting Kids on Track to Graduate on time
Putting Middle Grades on the Path to Graduation The link above will take you to the PDF text. I chose one of the paragraphs to begin our discussion.
Students who fall off track in the sixth grade tend to have one or two off-track indicators. Relatively few sixth graders have three or four indicators, that is, failing math and English and having low attendance and poor behavior (a pattern, by comparison, that is common in high school). The most common combination was for students to be failing either math or English (not both) and to have either an attendance or a behavior indicator. A significant subset of students, however, had just one indicator—failing a single class, not attending school regularly, or misbehaving. This suggests that students, at least in the sixth grade, are falling off the graduation path from different avenues. The avenues, moreover, appear to follow basic human reactions to uncomfortable environments. The students are fleeing (not coming to school), pushing back (acting out), or withdrawing (coming to school and behaving, but not paying attention or engaging).
Questions to Ponder:
How could we use the resources available to us to address the four indicators?
How could we integrate the four indicators to track individual students to monitor as well and intervene with intervention?
What experiences do you have that would enhance the concepts in this article and then work to apply it into our work at Wilson?
Wow... pretty heavy stuff. One idea for tracking could lie in what we already do with tracking our academics--- data walls. This year at AL our counselors started tracking students using a 3 tiered (vs. 4 levels we use for academics) system that was color coded "Green, Yellow, Red"... to represent students "on track" or "in jeopardy" or "not on track"... we could enlist the help of our counselors and grad. coach and challenge them to create a data wall that begins to track some factors... as you know well, the data wall gives teams (and us) a way to have substantive conversations around data and things that matter.
ReplyDeleteThese are BIG questions, I sense you may be needing a leadership "retreat"
ReplyDeleteI agree that a data wall is the direction to go. Wilson has a data wall for sixth grade students. It would make sense to continue this and work to apply it with grades 7 and 8. My hope that with the focus on formative assessment during professional development we could use a variety of measures to determine if a child is passing or proficient in literacy and math. Using the indicator of a passing grade is not enough.
ReplyDelete