Understanding the Results: SEC Scenarios
Shady Tree Elementary
The Road to Alignment in English/Language Arts
Dr. Sandy Long, the principal of Shady Tree Elementary, had been concerned about making the best use of instructional time in the language arts. She was curious about what her teachers were emphasizing, and how that compared to the standards and assessments. While not decreasing, language arts test scores had not been increasing at a rate required by NCLB, and Dr. Long wanted to find solutions before they lost their long standing community and parental support.
Dr. Long needed a way to identify how well her teachers' curriculum aligned to the state standards and assessments. She found the Surveys of the Enacted Curriculum (SEC) and decided to use the Instructional Content survey as an objective measure of her teachers' curriculum. As she explored her various options for using SEC, she found lists of state standards that were already mapped for comparison. Her state standards were on the list. She read on to learn more about the administration of the surveys and opted for the paper and pencil version of the survey, so that all her teachers could take the survey at once. She set aside a teacher in-service day to introduce and administer the survey.
A few weeks later, Dr. Long received the results. They included grade level maps of the teachers' survey results, as well as maps of the standards for her state. She scheduled grade level meetings to review the results.
For each grade level meeting, Dr. Long brought the SEC graphs for that grade, SEC mapped state standards, text versions of the state standards, state standardized assessments scores, and the SEC guiding questions. The third grade was the first meeting she was able to set up.
The meeting started with a review of SEC state standards to look for content areas they needed to be concentrating on. The group found that the concentration areas in the state standards for third grade were vocabulary development, reading comprehension, writing processes, and developing listening and speaking skills. They agreed that other areas were important to review and discuss, but that the above areas required the most in-depth or hands-on experience and knowledge.
Next, Dr. Long placed their school's SEC results for their grade level teaching content in the middle of the table. The colorful graphs were very telling about what areas they were overlooking. They saw a discrepancy in the amount of emphasis they were placing on vocabulary when compared to the standards. In addition, while they were working with critical reading, they were not focusing enough on simple comprehension. And though they were looking at writing processes and different crafts an author uses, again they needed to go deeper.
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Even though this process was quite helpful for her third-grade teachers, in order to identify specific areas for improvement, Dr. Long wanted them to dig deeper into the data. Because they test in the fall, she presented the assessment scores of the current fourth grade to the third-grade teachers. The graph showed the difference between a school's average score and the minimum passing score that was the standard.
The zero line, Dr. Long explained, represented the passing skill score, and the graph displayed how far above or below the school performed on a specific standard. The graph showed that the two areas where their last-year students scored the lowest were comprehension and vocabulary, and this matched their findings from the earlier SEC comparison. It was quickly noted that this graph alone could be misleading because the difficulty of each standard was different, but they felt confident that this picture helped prove that vocabulary and comprehension were weak areas. She now wanted her teachers to look more closely at those areas' results from the SEC. These results broke down vocabulary and comprehension into the fine grain topics that are taught.
Dr. Long placed the vocabulary and comprehension standards on the table to highlight areas of concern. Then after some discussion, she placed the SEC results for each area on the table. Teachers noticed that they weren't getting deep enough in word definitions and word origins with their students. They were only covering them enough to have students recall and explain the words, but the standards asked them to really have the student analyze and create sentences with the words. Then looking at comprehension, they noticed overall that despite the amount of time the teachers spent on this area, they did not seem to be reaching the students as effectively as possible with their current instructional approaches to word, phrase, and sentence construction.
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With time running out, Dr. Long wanted to wrap up this meeting by using the SEC guiding questions to come up with some hypothesis on the mismatches they had found. In addition to these hypotheses, she wanted to come up with solutions to help her teachers implement what they had learned.
The group came up with a few hypotheses in the little time they had left, and then planned to meet again to talk more deeply. Their first hypothesis was that they may have overlooked the changes in standards when they were implemented a year ago due to time issues. Plus, they also knew that many of the teachers had developed their lessons and themed units early in their careers with few changes. It was time to make some updates according to the new state standards. In addition, they hypothesized that the students they received from second grade might have lacked some skills, so it caused them to back up and cover what the students needed.
After working with each of her grade levels, Dr. Long realized that many of the hypotheses were similar. She decided to let her teachers address them and would she would ask them to report back to her on the progress. She decided they would use the SEC surveys again next year, so that comparisons and checks could be made. One hypothesis came out that she felt was her job to find the solution—she needed to make sure content and teaching was aligned across grades.
As the end of the year came around, Dr. Long scheduled a full in-service day and grouped her teachers into K-3 and 4-6 for the morning. This morning session consisted of conversations around the SEC grade level work and where that was progressing.
Dr. Long then gave the groups the SEC standard and assessment maps, along with the grade level maps. She asked one person from each group to try and facilitate the discussion just as she had earlier in the year. They needed to pay attention to the level of instruction for a particular topic for a certain grade, and where the alignment was necessary by standards. Then they looked at their maps to have discussions around overlap and holes.
Dr. Long was happy with the outcome of her use of SEC. She was very excited to have started the necessary conversations and changes in her school. It was a collaborative effort that will help keep alignment with standards and curriculum. She looks forward to using it next year to see how all the hard work paid off.
