Our Journey to Literacy AccelerationBy Ken Metz, Director of Secondary Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment, Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District Two years into my role as principal at Glacier Creek Middle School, our team achieved our first goal: to foster a healing environment, cultivate a family-oriented culture, and elevate expectations for our students. We focused on supporting our staff, engaging with our students, and demonstrating care and compassion for one another. Our administrative team's days revolved around being present in the hallways, classrooms, during recess, at lunch, and after school. Administrative tasks and planning were reserved for after our students had gone home. This often led to exhausting, lengthy days, but we believed it was essential work to lay the foundation for transformation. As behavior improved and culture data showed positive shifts in the second and third years, we felt encouraged by our efforts. We received commendations from district leaders; however, we also became increasingly frustrated. Our student data had not shifted. Despite setting a literacy goal each year since assuming this role, our data had remained stagnant. It was time to move our focus to academics and student engagement, but what would that look like? We reflected, studied, and discussed our next move. Our focus came from our instructional coach, Holly Reardon, who had been deeply engaged with research in reading and writing. She encouraged us to critically examine our current practices and prompted us to explore peer-reviewed research. This process led our planning team to focus on five research-based literacy accelerators. We began by revising our literacy goal to focus on high-quality literacy instructional practices. Staff would learn literacy strategies and culturally and linguistically diverse practices to increase student achievement. Then COVID came, and we shifted to asynchronous school. Just as we were forming our vision for literacy, the game changed. However, this shift allowed us to tackle another element of instruction we had struggled with, grading and feedback. During asynchronous school, we had all of our middle-level staff across two buildings to work on Standards-Based Grading (SBG). Before this time, we had some staff using SBG, others using traditional grading, and yet others using a combination. We spent the following year and a half identifying priority standards, unpacking skills, identifying reporting standards, and shifting our conversations with students from points to skills. We implemented SBG the following school year. Upon returning to school, we felt returning to our literacy-focused professional development made sense. We began with academic vocabulary, an accelerator, since it lived in all content. We used professional development to teach staff the strategies, give them time to plan implementation, and report back on how it went. We learned together and reflected together to increase effectiveness. Our staff were outstanding in their commitment to our students. While repeating this work across all five accelerators, we polished the process and learning opportunities for staff. The process took three years. We have increased our percentage of students proficient in Literacy/English Language Arts for four years on our local measures, STAR, and on the Forward exam. Our Black/African American students achieved the greatest growth on our 24-25 Forward exam.
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