Project Achieve helps Hodge Road Elementary focus on student achievement

January 29, 2002 - Hodge Road Elementary is making the extra effort to make sure none of its students are left behind. One of eight Wake County Schools participating in Project Achieve, Hodge Road is using the program modeled after a Texas school district's successful effort to boost student achievement.

Wake's Project Achieve and Brazosport, Texas


Jamee Lynch, Principal
Hodge Road Elementary

Hodge Road Principal Jamee Lynch said the Brazosport, Texas, instruction was based on the efforts of their successful teachers.

"The Texas folks started looking at the teachers who had successes in schools with at risk children," Lynch said. "They found pockets of teachers who were doing very, very well with their individual groups of students and got them together and said, 'What are you doing?' They wanted something very practical. They wanted something that was real world. It really works. Here are people who are making it happen."

Some Wake County educators visited the Brazosport school district to get a firsthand look at their instructional program and then invited Brazosport school officials to Raleigh to talk with Wake educators. From this exchange, Associate Superintendent Jo Baker and Curriculum and Instruction staff began to develop Project Achieve and recruit schools to participate.

"They brought the people from Brazosport here and then looked at the schools in Wake County that had the greatest challenges as far as where they needed to grow to reach Goal 2003," Lynch said. "Schools were invited to participate. One school volunteered to participate. That was Vance Elementary where I was the assistant principal last year."

The Wake County Schools in Project Achieve include Cary, Creech Road, Hodge Road, Rand Road, Smith, and Vance elementary schools, and East Wake and East Garner middle schools.

Project Achieve uses Brazosport's idea of providing a structure for best teaching practices, scheduling instruction tied to the state-mandated Standard Course of Study and offering frequent assessment to ensure students master the lessons.

Focus Lessons

"The Texas schools were teaching what they call 'focus lessons' at the beginning of every block of instruction for reading and for math," Lynch said. "They took the curriculum, mapped it out, put it into a time line to fit all the objectives that are going to be tested. How do we make sure that we test every piece of that curriculum so that every child has been exposed to it at the level that they need to be proficient? It sets a floor, not a ceiling. That's important. If we expose every child to this much of the curriculum throughout the year, they should have mastery of the curriculum by the end of the year."

The focus lessons cover one or two objectives, a very small amount of material, in direct instruction where the teacher and students are actively involved. The lessons are usually short, 15 minutes. The lesson sets up the block of instruction. It isn't all the instruction; it's the basic focus. The teacher continues with instruction on these objectives for five to seven days and then tests the students to determine if they have mastered the objectives.

"Their idea was teach one or two objectives, assess after seven days with a short assessment, then immediately do remediation on one or two very specific objectives," Lynch said. "They built into their daily schedule a remediation time. For those students who showed mastery of those objectives, they built in an enrichment time so that everyone was receiving what they needed at their level to make sure they were mastering or exceeding the mastery level for the objective."

Brazosport launched their program because they had a low percentage of students performing at grade level. Within seven years, they had 90 percent of their students performing at or above grade level.

"When you saw the numbers you thought, 'This can't be real!' How could they make those kinds of gains?" Lynch said. "People became believers when they saw how much growth those schools were showing over time. It worked. It wasn't heavily resource driven. It wasn't dependent upon a specific kind of expensive program or technology. It was a systematic way of making sure everyone was on the same page, all teaching the same set of objectives, assessing using the same assessments, re-teaching in an ongoing scope for the whole year."

In Wake County, WCPSS Curriculum and Instruction staff and teachers spent a summer working to develop focus lessons and a schedule for instruction. They worked with WCPSS Evaluation and Research staff to develop multiple-choice assessments tied to the focus lessons that students answer on bubble sheets. These are the lessons and tests Hodge Road Elementary teachers are using now.

"For example, all third grade classes have their reading blocks at the same time and their math blocks at the same time," Lynch said. "Every teacher will teach the same lesson today. Today is plot conflict and resolution. They have every day defined; the lesson is scripted. The teacher doesn't have to follow the script absolutely. They can integrate the script into what they are comfortable with and how they can present it while preserving the integrity of the lesson."

In covering the focus lessons on reading and math, the teachers help their students learn the lesson's objectives.

"They are spending six instructional periods on two objectives related to elements of plot, specifically conflict and resolution," Lynch said. "They have six days of focus lessons on that topic and they will have an assessment on Thursday. The assessments are eight to twelve questions. They are short and take about ten or fifteen minutes. That's when the kids fill in the bubble sheets. They do this about every five to seven days."

Assessment and Team Time

Since the assessments are done on bubble sheets, they can be fed through a scanner and teachers receive the results immediately.

"They receive a breakdown of all students, what they mastered and what they did not master," Lynch said. "They will see that these children did not get it. These others did. The following week when they come back to school, the children will be re-taught on those one or two objectives that they did not master. That usually is for about a week."

Hodge Road Elementary scheduled team time at the end of their day. During team time, students who need to continue working on the focus lesson objectives receive additional instruction. Students who master the lesson have an enrichment lesson.

"The teachers have experimented with this and tried different variations to try to get it where it is manageable and works most effectively," Lynch said. "And they have decided to do reading remediation and enrichment for one week and math remediation and enrichment for one week. If a child does not show mastery on the reading assessment this week, then they will do reading remediation during team time and re-teach those one or two objectives in the 30-minute daily sessions. It's short, but it's focused on very specific objectives."

There is no additional testing of students. For students who need help, the teachers may work with the students in class or direct Accelerated Learning Program teachers or volunteers to help strengthen the students understanding of the topic. Difficult concepts may be taught again during the year as part of the schedule of instruction to help students master and retain hard-to-understand concepts.

For students taking part in enrichment during Team Time, Lynch said there are suggestions from Curriculum and Instruction and the Academically Gifted Office.

"They work on the same curriculum objectives, but they do extension lessons, more higher level thinking activities," Lynch said. "We've used the Math Stars program, which is used across the state, as one of our enrichment activities. They are doing more problem solving. In fourth grade reading, some of the teachers are using literature circles for enrichment time where the students are actually reading a novel and discussing it everyday as part of the activities. They are still connected to the same objectives, but they are involved in enrichment."

Project Achieve and Hodge Road

Putting the new program into place at Hodge Road Elementary required some effort and has already brought about some changes.

"The teachers had something new and different that they had to plan and make sure things were coordinated. It required a lot more up front time, which was difficult," Lynch said. "From where we started in August, I think people are very happy where things are going. It's really smoothed out a lot as we tried to get things going and then adjusted based on what we were seeing. A lot of the schools had similar issues. Team time was our biggest challenge. Project Achieve schools meet together and share how we're doing and what's happening. That was the biggest adjustment we had to make."

Lynch said one result of the new programming is that teachers are working together more closely than before.

"The biggest difference here was the level of collaboration that they have with grade levels," Lynch said. "Central office this year agreed to provide our teachers some additional planning time. To do something brand new, especially when you are doing a lot of collaborating and sharing of students and working together, you've got to have that time. A 40-minute planning period time every day does not provide the time to do that. They agreed to provide some substitutes one day a month for a half day so the teachers have additional time to sit down, plan what's coming up, plan how we can work together on the focus lessons coming up, and what we need to do to extend this, as well as strategies that have and haven't been working, just sharing and collaborating. They have really appreciated having that. It helps a lot. The biggest challenge is always time."

Hodge Road Elementary receives challenge school money for its high population of students who receive free and reduce priced lunch and receives U.S. Department of Education 21st Century grant funds. The information they develop through their frequent assessments of students helps the school target ways to best use its resources.

"We had a an after school program that we meshed together with our Accelerated Learning Program so that we can offer more students more services because we have two pools to fund teachers from," Lynch said. "That gives us the opportunity to have more teachers working with more students. We also tried to broaden what we're doing with the Accelerated Learning Program by offering things like study skills and things that can help support them. Students get the reading and math tutorials that they need, but we provide them other skills and strategies to help them be successful in school."

Students and teachers are working hard in new programs such as Project Achieve and by putting in additional classroom hours, such as in the Accelerated Learning Program. The hard work is having an impact. And Lynch is looking for ways to continue to keep them going.

"We've tried to do a lot of positive communication within the school and also with children," Lynch said. "We have a committee that came up with a plan to reward students for small things. Every Friday they have certificates. Teachers can submit the names of students who have shown great improvement. There are kids who really need encouragement and rewards for making small steps as they are coming a long way. There have been situations where teachers have said that some students have really blossomed."

Project Achieve helps Hodge Road Elementary
focus on student achievement