Wood School Plan 2005/06

Wood Middle School was a 6-8 school with an enrollment of 749 in 2005/06. To review Wood's state Academic Performance Index scores since 2000 click here.

Disclaimer: Single School Plan were hand typed and transcribed from source documents. Please pardon the typos as the webmaster is a poor typist. While an effort was made to spell acronyms, here is a reference guide for those acronyms.

Single School Plan Components

What Did You Learn from 2004/05 Cycle of Inquiry?

1. Looking at your data what general trends do you see? What does the data tell us about how the focus group did? How much progress did they make? How does this compare to growth of other subgroups? Is the student achievement gap closing?

Ofour African American targeted student population, most students moved from Far Below Basic (FBB) and Below Basic (Below Basic) to either Basic or proficient in math. However in ELA, while students moved from FBB to BB and BB to B, the growth was not significant. In fact some Basic students moved to BB and some Proficient and Advanced students moved down a level. Therefore we realized that while we are meeting the needs of our FBB and BB students, our Basic (strategic) students were not being served as successfully. We also realized that there were no intervention programs in place during the school year to address the specific targeted needs of these strategic students.

Of our Hispanic targeted student population, similar results as our African American students were noticed. Thus, we realized schoolwide, our strategic student needs were not being met both in ELA and math. Upon further examination of data, we realized that this trend crosses ethnic boundaries with similar strategic needs of our White/non-Hispanic population. Therefore, we had to revise our problem statement to include not only the African American and Hispanic student population but to the needs of our strategic learners school wide.

While the student achievement gap may be closing for our ethnic targeted sub groups, it is in fact widening for our strategic learners.

2. What evidence/data do you have regarding the level of implementation of the teacher/instructional practice and/or schoolwide practice that you planned in your last Cycle of Inquiry? Include information about what was not implemented as well as what was implemented.

In 2004-05, the only effective and data proven intervention programs were our learning center which serves RSP and SDC as well as students identified as needing mentoring and monitoring academic strategic services. Math support was offered to all students as an after school program. Math support was offered to all students as an after school program, and most of our intensive and strategic students did not avail themselves of that opportunity. There were two math intervention classes which served approximately 50 of our intensive students. We also had a pilot of one period of REACH decoding class for some intensive learners.

We did not have in place any intervention programs built into the school day to address the needs of our strategic learners.

Classroom observational data and teacher self assessment data indicated that instructional best practice strategies need to be shared, learned and consistently implemented school wide in the areas of content literacy strategies and math delivery.

3. What evidence do you have that your focus on these students has positively impacted their learning?

Our REACH decoding intervention data indicated that while these few stduents were successful, we needed to implement REACH with fidelity in its expanded form. The data also told us that we needed to more accurately pre assess, post assess, and provide assessment throughout the school year to track student improvement. Teacher anecdotal data told us that extensive professional development was needed to train REACH teachers and the three REACH coaches.

Math data from our two intervention classes indicated that students were learning basic skills to help thembe more successful in their regular math classes. However, we needed to address the needs of all of our intensive learners by inceasing the number of sections of math intervention. Futhermore, our data indicated that there are increasingly more students entering Algebra classes each year, and this we wil have two sections of Geometry.

4. Is there anything else you learned in examining your data that will inform your revised problem statement?

Through classroom walk through and teacher discussions, we realized that our strategic students were lacking basic content literacy strategies that kept them from comprehending academic texts across the curriculum. After researching our student skill needs and from teacher anecdotal evidence, we further concluded that there needed to be consistent intructional content literacy practices school wide and delivered on a consistent daily basic. We also learned that our African American and Latino strategic students learned better when there were consistent instructional practices across disciplines.

In response to this evidence, the entire staff decided to read Lisa Delpit's Other People Children over the summer to gain further insight in how to support our targeted student population.

Fall 2005

1. What are your problem statements?

Student Achievement Problem Statements

• Of the 749 students at Wood Middle School, there are 36 African Amercian and 39 Hispanic students scoring Basic in English Lnaguage Arts and 24 African American and 31 Hispanic students scoring Basic in math who have no targeted support systems in place to help them be academically successful.
• .

Teacher Practice Problem Statements

• The staff has not agreed upon specific methodology to support strategic students and meet the learning needs of our African American and Hispanic students. Staff needs more focused collabration time to address these needs.
2. What are your inquiry questions?

Student Achievement Questions

• What are the specific skills sets that are lacking for African American and Hispanic strategic students who are scoring at BASIC in English Language Arts and Math as measured by the CST subtests and district multiple measures?

Teacher Practice Questions

• What best practices strategies can be consistently utilized school wide to address the needs of our African American and Hispanic strategic students scoring BASIC in English Language Arts and Math as measured by the CST subtests and district multiple measures?
3. What are your measurable goals?

Student Achievement Goals

• Of the 36 African American students scoring BASIC in ELA, we will move 9 students to Proficient. Of the 39 Latino students scoring BASIC in ELA, we will move 12 students to Proficient.
• Of the 24 African American students scoring BASIC in math, we will move 7 students to Proficient. Of the 31 Latino students scoring BASIC in ELA, we will move 8 students to Proficient.

Teacher Practice Goals

• In addition to implement vocabulary development across the curriculum, teachers will identify and implement two additional content literacy strategies that will be used across disciplines.
4. What are your major strategies?
• Vocabulary development
• Establishing purpose
• Key concepts

Wood 2004/05 Single School Plan

Wood 2003/04 Single School Plan

Wood

4 Year District API Base Data

Definitions

School Mobility Percent - Represents the percentage of students attending the school for the first time.

Parent Education Average - The average of all responses where "1" represents "Not a high school graduate", "2" represents "High School Graduate", "3" represents "Some College", "4" represents "College Graduate" and "5" represents "Graduate School".

School Classification Index - A mathematically computed index using other non academic API components to create indicator of similar demographics and school environment to be used for similar school rankings.

Disclaimer: All data has been hand created. If there are questions about the validity of the data, please contact the webmaster.

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Last modified: February 8, 2005

Disclaimer: This website is the sole responsibility of Mike McMahon. It does not represent any official opinions, statement of facts or positions of the Alameda Unified School District. Its sole purpose is to disseminate information to interested individuals in the Alameda community.