Emery Unified School District
Emery Secondary School
Literacy Action Plan
2005-2006
7-12th
Grade
Anthony M.
Smith, Ph.D., Superintendent
Date of
scheduled Curriculum Committee presentation: February 28,2005
Date of
scheduled first Board reading: March
7,.2005
Date of
Board approval: March 21, 2005
Names of persons who participated on the team developing the
plan:
|
David von Ter
Stegge, J.D. |
Emery Secondary
School, Spanish Teacher (Literacy Team
Chairperson) |
|
Julia
Antoniades |
Bay Area
Coalition for Equitable Schools, Reading Coach Secondary Grades |
|
Janice
Blumenkrantz |
Alameda County
Office of Education, Reading/Language Arts Specialist |
|
Fran Farley |
Emery Secondary School,
English Teacher (7-8 SLC) |
|
Joe Frantz |
Emery Unified
School District, Director of Curriculum & Instruction |
|
Heidi Gill |
Bay Area
Coalition for Equitable Schools, Reading Coach Elementary Grades |
|
Steve Hambright |
Emery Unified
School District, ELD Coordinator |
|
Mina Hutchins |
Emery Secondary School,
Special Education Teacher (7-8 SLC) |
|
Shira Meiss |
Emery Secondary School,
Special Education Teacher (11-12 SLC) |
|
Mark Miller,
Ed.D |
Emery Secondary
School, Principal |
|
Leslie Payne |
Emery Secondary School,
Reading Teacher |
|
Mark Salinas |
Bay Area
Coalition for Equitable Schools Coach, Emery
Secondary School |
|
Lisa Somerville |
Emery Secondary School,
English Teacher (9-10 SLC) |
|
Dawn Turner |
Emery Unified
School District, Librarian |
|
Leslie Watkins |
Emery Secondary School,
English Teacher (11-12 SLC) |
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I.
INTRODUCTION Page
3
II.
VISION &
MISSION Page
3
III.
THEORY AND RESEARCH Page
3
IV.
ANALYSIS OF CURRENT
PRACTICE Page
3
V.
OBJECTIVES Page
6
VI.
LITERACY ACTION
PLAN Page
6
VII.
BUDGET Page
11
APPENDICES
APPENDIX A: GLOSSARY Page 12
APPENDIX B: STAFF SURVEY RESPONSES Page 14
APPENDIX C: READING CULTURE REPORT Page 16
INTRODUCTION: HISTORY OF THE SECONDARY LITERACY TEAM’S WORK
Emery Secondary School (ESS) serves 375 students. The majority of these students reside in Emeryville, but 45% attend from nearby communities, primarily Oakland. Demographically, the school is comprised 68% African American, 12% Asian, 11% Hispanic, and 7% students who gave multiple responses or declined to state. Twenty-six students receive English Language Development services; 15 of these have English skills levels of Intermediate or less. Fifty-four students are identified for Special Education services, with 30 of those students in Special Day Classes. Sixty-two percent of ESS students qualify for the federal Free and Reduced Price Meal Program.
During 2002-2003, Emery High School (EHS) and Emery Middle School Academy (EMSA) sent teams of teachers to be trained as part of the Secondary Literacy Support Network (SLSN), a project of Region IV’s Successful Teaching of Academic Reading to Secondary Students (STARSS) program. Each team participated in 11 days of training which covered theory, strategies, leadership and planning. During the course of that year, the EUSD state administrator ordered EHS and EMSA to be combined into a new grades 7-12 school, Emery Secondary School (ESS). The literacy teams combined and wrote the first Emery Secondary Literacy Plan, which became a roadmap to help the entire school take responsibility for ensuring that all its students acquired the literacy necessary to be successful in their English classes as well as their other content classes. A major feature of this plan was the initiation of the READ 180 reading intervention classes, which helped many struggling readers to become more fluent and played an important role last year in raising ESS’s Academic Performance Index by 89 points, from 484 to 573.
VISION
Our vision is to produce students who possess literacy skills to enable them to transition into contributing members of society with rich career and post-secondary educational opportunities.
MISSION
The mission of the ESS Literacy Team is to develop a standards-based English Language Arts program which is designed to meet the literacy needs of all our students including a core instructional program, effective interventions to accelerate struggling students, and a strong resource program including a Library to support teaching and learning.
THEORY AND RESEARCH
The state of California distinguishes four levels of learners (with the performance levels to which they roughly correspond): Advanced (“Advanced”), Benchmark (“Proficient”), Strategic (“Basic”) and Intensive (“Below Basic” and “Far Below Basic”). Our mission requires us to design support for strategic and intensive learners to enable them to successfully achieve the English Language Arts standards. We will refer to this support as Strategic Interventions and Intensive Interventions.
ANALYSIS OF CURRENT PRACTICE
NEED: The ESS Literacy Team was formed because student assessment data showed that many secondary students at Emery lacked the literacy skills they needed to access the core curriculum in English Language Arts (ELA) and other subjects. Last year, only 13.5% of our secondary students scored “Proficient” or better on the California Standards Tests in English Language Arts, while 46.1% scored “Below Basic” or “Far Below Basic”; almost 1/2 of our 10th grade students did not pass the ELA portion of the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE).
|
Comparison of ESS 2003 & 2004 CST for ELA |
|||||
|
2003 STAR |
Grades |
|
|
|
|
|
CA Standards Test |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
|
English Language Arts |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Students Tested |
84 |
53 |
56 |
59 |
43 |
|
% Advanced |
3% |
2% |
4% |
2% |
0% |
|
% Proficient |
22% |
15% |
5% |
8% |
9% |
|
% Basic |
36% |
36% |
25% |
19% |
16% |
|
% Below Basic |
19% |
28% |
35% |
41% |
42% |
|
% Far Below Basic |
21% |
19% |
31% |
31% |
33% |
|
2004 STAR |
Grades |
|
|
|
|
|
CA Standards Test |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
|
English Language Arts |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Students Tested |
77 |
75 |
64 |
45 |
45 |
|
% Advanced |
8% |
1% |
2% |
4% |
0% |
|
% Proficient |
4% |
19% |
10% |
7% |
11% |
|
% Basic |
42% |
47% |
43% |
40% |
24% |
|
% Below Basic |
29% |
19% |
29% |
33% |
20% |
|
% Far Below Basic |
18% |
15% |
17% |
16% |
44% |
PROGRESS: A comparison from 2003 to 2004 demonstrates that while we have made sharp progress in reducing the percentage of students scoring at Far Below Basic (except in 11th grade), there was not similar progress in moving students to proficiency.
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS: The District has adopted as its core Language Arts instructional materials at the secondary level the Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes (TVTT) Prentice Hall series. All students have a TVTT textbook and teachers have supplemental materials such as adaptive readers which allow struggling students to access the same content with support.
INTENSIVE INTERVENTIONS: The primary reading intensive intervention program is Scholastic’s READ 180 which serves 80 students for double periods of 1½ -2 hours per day. Students in special education who are not identified for READ 180 work in the REACH intervention program by SRA/McGraw Hill. Students in English Language Development classes use High Point by Hampton Brown. The teachers of each of these series have received professional development in the use of their respective materials, but there is a need for additional professional development for one of the TVTT teachers and both of the REACH teachers. We saw average improvement of nearly two years for READ 180 students in the 2003-2004 school year. The first semester of 2004-2005, the 7-8th grades have increased their growth, gaining an average of 1.5 years in a single semester, but the 9-12 students gained only an average of ½ year. The Literacy Team is investigating the reasons for the disappointing results for the high school READ 180 students. Both the middle school and the high school REACH programs have made significant progress through their reading programs, which just began last fall.
STRATEGIC INTERVENTIONS: Strategic intervention occurs when a classroom teacher uses standards-based methods designed to make the curriculum accessible to all levels of students, including those who are below grade level. The strategies for this are contained in the instructional materials and are part of the professional development in their use. In addition, the school uses schoolwide strategic interventions to assist students to become stronger readers. For the school year 2003-2004, schoolwide strategic intervention at ESS took the form of teaching the Cornell note taking system. In 2004-2005, the school has provided teachers training in comprehension strategies (specifically, summarization) and vocabulary development strategies during four of the late start Thursdays.
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT: Two TVTT teachers received 40 hours of AB 466 professional development in Sacramento during the summer of 2004 including a wide variety of approaches to support strategic learners in their language arts classrooms. All TVTT teachers participated in a week of work under the guidance of the ESS Literacy Coach to develop their curriculum maps, which have guided their teaching this year.
ASSESSMENT:
All ESS students take the Gates
McGinitie Comprehension Assessment. Those who score 2 or more years below grade
level are given the one-on-one AIMSweb Oral Fluency Test or the Scholastic
Reading Inventory (SRI), a computer-based assessment which provides a lexile,
which is an internationally standardized reading level. These results are used
to identify students for intensive interventions.
Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes and the reading intervention programs include assessments which are administered by the teachers every 6 to 8 weeks to collect information on student progress The weekly meetings of the core teachers in the Small Learning Communities and the monthly meetings of the English Vertical Articulation Team provide a venue to reflect on the results of these assessments to monitor the efficacy of instructional strategies and the progress of individual students.
The team is planning to supplement these with assessments generated by Edusoft, which is an online system combining a student performance database with standards-aligned validated test items. Edusoft assessments can be scanned on the school scanner, uploaded to their server, graded, and the results printed out by student, class, or analyzed in combination with other data.
PROMOTING READING: Several programs were initiated this school year in an effort to establish a reading culture within the school culture. The library supports and celebrates multicultural diversity by encouraging students to read books on display and through monthly activities. An increase in teacher assignments has been instrumental in exposing students to library resources. A library scavenger hunt introduced ninth through twelfth graders to information retrieval strategies. Library orientation provided basic library skills (i.e. Dewey Decimal Classification, library catalog, library web page, online databases, etc.) as well as reference material exercises. Reading Counts labels have been added to one-third of the collection. This provides reading levels and incentive points on the spine of the books for easy identification.
To build excitement about reading, two incentive programs were kicked-off. Two-minute mysteries are read to students during advisory classes, students then submit answers to the librarian and redeem a prize. The “Spotted Reading” program recognizes students who read above and beyond school assignments. SAT novels were introduced to teachers to provide students with early SAT test preparation. The librarian sits on the literacy committee and collaborates with teachers to improve literacy and increase reading among students. The Spanish classes have increased their narrative reading by 50% this year.
LITERACY TEAM: The ESS Literacy Plan organizes the work of the Secondary Literacy Team, an inclusive organization which meets monthly to oversee the Plan’s implementation and to update it annually. The team is supported in its work by many people, especially Julia Antoniades, ESS Literacy Coach (2 days/week), Mark Salinas, BayCES School Change Coach, and Janice Blumenkranz, Alameda County Reading Specialist.