Step By Step Process to Creating a Systemic Initiative in Literacy and Mathematics

Kenneth Stephen Burnley 1 Colloquium April 2007

1. Ensure that the school district’s strategic plan focuses on student performance and achievement, it drives everything else including the teaching learning process and the districts curriculum and instruction focus

2. Study disaggregated data on your students and their needs

3. Study the research

4. Identify school districts that are getting systemic gains in student achievement and are highly recommended

5. Put in place leadership to help you through the process as well as the implementation stages

6. Secure board and leadership buy-in on the rationale for the journey

7. Pull a team together to travel to the 2-3 top school districts who are getting systemic growth and achievement and study them

8. Identify companies and products that can systematically meet your needs

9. Form a team of teachers/administrators/parents to hear presentations of companies selected for presentations

10. Emphasize a turnkey program that is uniform and stresses phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension with a rich literacy component

11. Participate in an instructional audit with written recommendations for improvement by a team of successful instructional leaders

12. Engage the instructional audit team to return in a year to gage progress

13. Select winning vendor and develop a strong written contract with emphasis on three years of comprehensive professional development culminating in a “train the trainers” model

14. Put in place quality control

15. Create a Principal’s Academy

16. Teach principals how to do curriculum walk throughs

17. Teach someone in each building how to use data and have them be the lead member of the faculty

18. Develop “Pacing Guides”

Step By Step Process to Creating a Systemic Initiative in Literacy and Mathematics

Kenneth Stephen Burnley 2 Colloquium April 2007

19. Address Student Mobility by being sure that each building is working on generally the same thing within a day or so of one another, so if a student moves from one school to another, stability will be provided

20. Include metrics in the Superintendent’s evaluation which monitors achievements gained and expectations

21. Inspire the leadership team (visualize the journey and talk freely about it to the leadership team) to motivate them towards success

22. Insure that the program challenges students at the top and accelerates learning in the bottom two quartiles

23. Address the new student civil rights gate keeper of the 21st Century/Ability to take and pass Algebra by the 9th grade

24. Look for innovative programs especially in mathematics that teach for understanding and concepts rather than memorization, drill and practice

25. Train everyone from the Superintendent throughout the faculty and anyone in a line relationship to the classroom including substitutes

26. Create additional time during the day for students who are not keeping up with the rest of the class to get more sessions on reading and mathematics even at the expense of holding back on other subjects