Category: Overview

School Climate Overview

Curtis Griffin

Successful schools create a shared vision for high academic achievement and student success that reflects the vision of the community and is supported by the entire school staff. Schoolwide efforts to increase student attendance, promote positive behaviors, and increase student effort allow students to take full advantage of classroom instruction.

Overview of School Climate, Culture, and Partnerships

Principle 1: Create a can do school culture marked by a shared mission among the staff members that centers on academic achievement and a shared belief that they can collectively enable students to succeed.

  • Practice 1: Organize the school around teams of teachers working collectively with a common set of students that is stable and of a manageable number.
  • Practice 2: Establish a distributive leadership structure so that all key stakeholders are involved in school decision making and committed to do what it takes to raise student achievement, with time and effort invested in mission building among the staff.

Principle 2: Create a school environment in which mutually supportive relationships between students, teachers, and parents can develop.

  • Practice 1: Use surveys to gather information on school climate and culture.
  • Practice 2: Use teams of parents, teachers, administrators, and students to analyze survey data and to create and implement action plans based on the needs the survey identified.

Principle 3: Engage in schoolwide efforts to increase student attendance, promote positive behaviors, and increase student effort (where needed).

  • Practice 1: Measure and analyze data on chronic absenteeism, suspensions, and sustained mild misbehavior.
  • Practice 2: When chronic absenteeism and student misbehavior are at significant levels, implement evidence-based, whole-school strategies to prevent and reduce these behaviors.

Principle 4: Focus the school-family partnership on communicating to students the importance of high academic and educational aspirations and showing the steps that need to be taken to actualize these aspirations.

  • Practice 1: Provide parents, supportive adults, and students with information on the important role the middle grades play in high school readiness, high school graduation, and postsecondary success.
  • Practice 2: Create and provide parents and students with ready access to high school readiness benchmarks.
  • Practice 3: Make adult participation a critical part of your process.

Principle 5: Conduct student-need and asset analyses and select community partners and supports based on student need. Design and manage a plan to link community supports to success in school and use common metrics to gauge their impact.

  • Practice 1: Create and maintain on-site, in-school coordination and monitoring of community support programs.

Student Behavior Overview

Curtis Griffin

A schoolwide behavior support system can improve attendance and behavior by instructing students in a consistent manner, reaching out to students who struggle in behavioral areas, intervening with research- and evidence-based interventions, and recognizing students and classes that reach their attendance and behavioral goals.

Overview of the Principles and Practices

Principle 1: Consistently teach, model, and recognize appropriate and positive academic and social behaviors across all classrooms.

  • Practice 1: Modify and reduce maladaptive classroom behavior through consistent teaching, modeling, and recognition of positive classroom behaviors.

Principle 2: Provide classroom instruction in self-monitoring and regulation, academic organization and study skills, goal setting, persistence, and healthy behaviors.

  • Practice 1: Teach academic and healthy behaviors that support success in school.
  • Practice 2: Embed the self-monitoring and regulation, academic organization and study skills, goal-setting, persistence, and healthy behavior skills into the academic courses students take throughout the middle grades.
  • Practice 3: Provide students with opportunities to practice and employ these skills through service learning projects, as well as high interest and participatory electives with strong cognitive content like drama, debate, and robotics.

Principle 3: Establish processes for identifying problem behaviors early, diagnosing their causes, identifying e ective interventions, applying the interventions at the scale and intensity required, and monitoring their effectiveness.

  • Practice 1: Implement an intervention framework generalized to student attendance, behavior, and course performance.
  • Practice 2: Connect teachers to one another or to mentors to help with ongoing problem solving, student behavior, and any other classroom management needs.

Principle 4: Make the value of schooling personal.

  • Practice 1: Engage students in activities that allow them to reflect on the influence school will have on their future life and goals.

Principle 5: Create a sense of belonging for all students.

  • Practice 1: Include information on social integration in middle school transition programs.
  • Practice 2: Carefully frame academic tasks to reduce the risk of stereotype threats.

Principle 6: Connect students’ academic success to effort.

  • Practice 1: Set high expectations for students and clearly communicate those expectations and the belief in their potential to succeed when providing feedback to students.
  • Practice 2: Eliminate the use of indiscriminate incentive programs and unearned praise.

extended learning time overview

Curtis Griffin

Successful middle schools provide students with opportunities to learn outside the school day that connect and align with students’ existing academic programs.

Overview of Principles and Practices

Principle 1: Align the Extended Learning Time (ELT) program academically with the school day.

  • Practice 1: Use ELT program coordinators to develop relationships and maintain ongoing communication between schools and the ELT program about student academic performance and personal and social issues.
  • Practice 2: Designate a school staff person to coordinate communication with ELT programs.
  • Practice 3: Connect ELT instruction to school instruction by identifying school goals and learning objectives.
  • Practice 4: Coordinate with the school to identify staff for ELT programs.

Principle 2: Maximize student participation and attendance.

  • Practice 1: Design program features to meet the needs and preferences of students and parents.
  • Practice 2: Promote awareness of the ELT program within schools and to parents.
  • Practice 3: Use attendance data to identify students facing difficulties in attending the program.

Principle 3: Adapt instruction to individual and small group needs.

  • Practice 1: Use formal and informal assessment to inform academic instruction.
  • Practice 2: Break students into small groups and use one-on-one tutoring if possible.
  • Practice 3: Provide professional development and ongoing instructional support to ELT instructors.

Principle 4: Provide engaging learning experiences.

  • Practice 1: Make learning relevant by incorporating practical examples and connecting instruction to student interests and experiences.
  • Practice 2: Make learning active through collaborative learning and hands-on academic activities.
  • Practice 3: Build adult-student relationships among ELT program participants.

Principle 5: Assess program performance and use the results for program improvement.

  • Practice 1: Develop an evaluation plan for ELT programs.
  • Practice 2: Collect program and student performance data.
  • Practice 3: Analyze the data and use findings for program improvement.

C2 overview

Curtis Griffin

Moving from the protective environment of an elementary grades classroom—where in most cases, students spend the day with the same teacher and the same group of students—to the middle grades—where students may need to rotate between three or more teachers and interact with a larger group of students—can be challenging and intimidating for students. This transition often results in a reduction of the number of friendships in students’ lives,1 which can be an additional adjustment. Research indicates that when students transition to the middle grades, there is an increase in incidents requiring school discipline (e.g., in-school suspension) for disturbance to the class learning environment or unwillingness to follow rules.2 There is also evidence of a predictive association between the number of disruptive behavior incidents during elementary and middle grades years and school failure in high school, even when socioeconomic status and intellectual differences are taken into consideration.3 Middle grades students need common academic behavior and academic expectations, rewards, and consequences. Think of a middle grades student’s experience throughout the day. If it is vastly different from classroom to classroom, he or she will not internalize strong behavioral and academic norms.

This chapter identifies ways schools can support middle grades students through these challenges. First, we describe what research has shown to be effective school wide strategies for reducing the risk of students’ dropping out or disengaging from school. Second, we show how to develop and maintain a school climate and culture that emphasizes high academic achievement and student success supported by every member of the school faculty, and we emphasize effective strategies for forming a school-family-community partnership. Third, we describe specific school wide strategies for behavior support through the use of clear and common expectations. We also present targeted activities to motivate students and improve attendance, as well as academic and social behavior. Finally, we outline the expectations for effective extended learning opportunities that enable students to continue to learn in a way that is integrated with their regular school day and are also geared towards meeting students’ needs.

The following content dimensions are included in this chapter on student supports that enhance learning:
• Dropout Prevention
• School Climate, Culture, and Partnerships
• Student Behavior Supports and Motivation
• Extended Learning Time

C3 overview

Curtis Griffin

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) increased awareness of educational accountability and the need for greater focus on educational outcomes. Education stakeholders—from school boards to parents, teachers, superintendents, and even state legislators—are now using data as an important lever in education reform. This is a necessary condition for implementing performance management as a framework for improving school and student performance. For the purposes of this discussion, the term performance management has been borrowed from the field of business to describe an approach to building the capacity of educators at all levels to use data to prioritize activities that advance core goals, measure progress toward meeting these goals, and make informed decisions about the best ways to improve student achievement. Looking systemically at how all the components of the education system work together to support student learning is the primary goal of this new management approach.

While much of the strategic planning for performance management happens at the district level, implementation happens at each school site in a school district. School principals are on the front line, carrying out new programs, interventions, and curriculum and instruction. As managers of teacher and student performance, principals need information about how every part of the school is operating. Education indicators provide leaders with new understanding of capacity and productivity to meet students’ educational needs and can inform teachers and other educators of progress on improvements to the education system. Annual trends and outcomes, as well as day-to-day information on attendance, course performance, behavior, etc., are needed to monitor and fine-tune system performance. A primary goal of performance management is to aid schools and staff as they shift from an attitude of compliance to a new commitment to continuous improvement.

What follows are five practical and evidence-based principles that can be used to develop and implement effective performance management strategies in the middle grades, along with a description of the rationale behind each principle, and a few specific practices and examples that schools can follow to ensure success. These principles provide direction on using data to improve instruction and learning, monitoring progress toward goals, and evaluating the effectiveness of decisions.