What Is the CMS Student Success by Design Collaborative?

Student Success by Design Collaborative

Overview

What is the CMS Student Success by Design Collaborative?

Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) is embarking on a significant rethinking of its approach to school design. With its partners for this work, Education Resource Strategies (ERS) and Public Impact (PI), CMS will increase principal capacity for thinking strategically and innovatively about how to optimally organize their resources – time, people, and money. As a result, the district should see a significant increase in the number of students receiving instruction from an excellent teacher. Schools’ designs will enable them to offer teachers opportunities to advance in their careers without leaving the classroom, and earn more in their new roles. These changes will help CMS meet the goals:

Recruit the most qualified candidates into the profession: Offering the chance for higher pay and greater career opportunities will make CMS schools highly attractive to top-notch candidates. When LIFT schools announced 19 positions that involved new roles and higher pay, over 700 people applied from 24 states.
Develop current professionals so that they can improve their ability to help students achieve. Most school designs organize teachers into teams, often led by an excellent teacher. These teams then become the ideal venue for the daily job-embedded development that research suggests is the best way for teachers to improve their craft.
Retain the highest performing professionals. As the number of high-paying, advanced teaching roles grows, CMS will increasingly be able to retain top teachers, who now too often leave the classroom for administration, for other school districts, or for other opportunities altogether.

Finally, the school design process will emphasize sustainability, with schools finding ways to boost student learning and teacher satisfaction within their existing budgets.

How is participating in this Cohort different from the support that a typical principal will receive this year?

This project leverages the previous successes CMS has had with PI and ERS - PI in its work to extend the reach of highly effective teachers in Project LIFT schools, and ERS prior to that in its school design support to a small number of Strategic Staffing schools. Broadly, we will build capacity amongst CMS principals - to position them as “lead designers” of their schools - along with their leadership teams, engaging them deeply on how to best serve their community to rethink how they organize their resources to build strategic designs that extend the reach of highly effective teachers.

Teams will go through the design process as a cohort of 18 schools, strategically selected based on potential for success and to provide a diverse range of school designs that CMS can leverage across its portfolio of schools. Teams will develop school designs through a series of working sessions and 1-1 facilitated coaching sessions. Designs will include: redefined instructional roles, career paths and compensation plans that motivate excellent teachers and inspire them to stay; master scheduling structures that employ flexible student and teacher grouping to focus on needs of individual learners; and optimized non-instructional spending to maximize support for teaching and learning.

What commitments will members of the Student Success by Design Collaborative make?

Design and implement models that meet principles of strategic school design
Prepare for and participate in five working sessions plus individual sessions with your school design facilitator
Form a design team, including principal and at least one lead teacher who will work through the entire process
Work with assigned ERS or PI facilitator on developing priorities, creating customized school design, implementation planning, andmeet required interim deadlines
Collaborate with other members of the cohort
Commitment to engage your school community in the planning process to ensure viability of desired priorities

A schedule of time commitments is included below:

What? / When?
Session I / 5-hour session on mid-December
ERS/PI facilitator visits school team / 3 hours (between session I and II) – facilitator comes to your school to meet with design team
Session II / Full-day sessionin January
School team working session with facilitator / 15 to 20 cumulative hours between session II and III
Session III / Half-day in February
School team working session with facilitator / 5 to 10 cumulative hours between session II and IV
Session IV / Half-day session inMarch
School team working session with facilitator / 5 to 10 cumulative hours between session IV and V
Session V - Wrap-Up and Presentation to Executive Staff / Late April or early May

*Half-day sessions will include lunch and will typically run ~4-5 hours

How do I apply?

If you’d like your school to take advantage of this opportunity, please submit the attached application by 6pm on Friday, November 22nd. Applications should be emailed to Akeshia Craven-Howell at .

Selection criteria will take into account the following:

Vision: School leadership team already has clear ideas around how to use resource autonomy to create a more strategic school design.
Drive: School leadership team has the energy and capacity needed to participate in an intense planning process while running the school’s day-to-day operations and follow through during the 2014-15 school year with effective implementation.
Credibility: School leadership team has a track record of strong leadership and working collaboratively through challenges, and the respect and trust of his/her staff.
Stability: School leader plans to remain at his/her school through at least 2016-17.
Experience: School leader has minimum 1 year at his/her school.
Recommendation: School leadership team has acquired a recommendation from the Learning Community Superintendentto participate.

Schools will be notified of their acceptance into the collaborative by Friday, December 6th.

Application

Please submit the following application by 6pm on Friday, November 22nd to

Part 1 School Leader Information

First and Last Name: Melody Sears
School: Northwest School of the Arts / School Level: ES K8 MS x HS x
Email: / Phone: 980-343-5500
Is the school leader willing to make the required commitments to participate? Yes x No
Please include any comments/concerns regarding the required commitments in the box below:
The school leader has no concerns regarding the commitment. Our School Leadership Team has voiced the need for clarity about the time commitment. We also have the concern that we retain our “unique-ness” as a school, and have voiced a concern about the process and our ability to reach consensus as a school community about the implementation of the re-design.

Please indicate if you have any specialty programs or initiatives at your school:

We are an Arts Magnet. We were awarded the National Magnet School of Excellence Award, this past year. We are a 6-12 school. We have programs and initiatives that focus on arts and core curriculum and opportunities for careers and internships in the arts.

Part 2 Please provide short answers to the following questions (bullets also acceptable):

What student and staff needs at your school would you like to address through this work that are not being met today? We want to look at the restructuring of our bell schedules for the greater benefit of our students and staff. Along with this, we want to help our teachers grow through inspiration and motivation initiatives, and focus on restructuring our curriculum to mesh core academics with the arts in a more seamless manner. We are looking at narrowing our achievement gap in the tested classes, and want to hone our strategies to address this need. We want to utilize technology more effectively in the classroom, prompting student higher level thinking skills through the utilization of technology. We need the “other arm” of the arts in our curriculum, media arts. We want greater competency for our students for higher levels of education and career readiness.

What is your vision for the evolution of your school (i.e., specific types of changesyou would like to implement during the next several years to meet the needs outlined in #1)? Or if you don’t have a clear vision for evolution in mind yet, how do you plan to define this vision?

Our school is the number one arts school in the nation and the world. The problem is that the world is just beginning to recognize this fact. With “The Color Purple’s” winning of the National Golden Stevie Award for the Greyhawk Productions Trailer of the documentary, and Eva Nobelzadda’s winning of the lead role in London’s “Miss Saigon,” along with other recent accolades on the state and national level in all our arts areas, we are well on our way. We even have other school systems in states like South Carolina and Wisconsin making visits to our school to see “how it is done” and to go back to build their arts school, using some of our “blueprints” for success. We attribute much of this to the dedication of our staff and a stellar arts program curriculum, but much of the publicity stems from our newly acquired arts director, a position we attained through talks with CMS leaders. We want to continue and rise as a star in the education world of the arts, and this will require more innovative ideas put into practice with the help of excellent plans, CMS leadership, and community involvement. We need innovations to push our imaginations beyond the box so that we can rise. We want a dormitory, for example, on our campus that can house students from all over the nation and the world, complete with host “parents,” much like The Lycee August Renoir in Limoges, an arts school in France that does exactly that. Our school administration has visited that facility in France, and is excited about the possibility of doing that, here. We realize that being an exemplary arts school also requires that our academic reputation must also be stellar, and that our more advanced classes, such as AP classes, reflect the rigor of an entire school curricular program.

Currently, we are on the bond package that recently passed for renovations of our auditorium/theatre space, and our D building classroom/media center/guidance areas. Meshing our physical redesign with our curricular redesign is a huge step in our vision to achieve our goals. All of the recent world-wide and national attention to our school is dovetailing with the re-design of our physical building, and if you add the re-design of our curricular areas and teacher-focused restructuring, we would have a very “critical mass.”

Given your student needs, teacher capacity, challenges you’re trying to address, and your vision for the evolution of your school, are there components of your current school design that you think are good candidates for change?

For example:

Master schedule (including start/end time of the day/year)

Yes. We would enjoy conversations that center around the start and end times for our high school and middle school students, including the possibility of “flex” times for some of our teachers to, for example, address the needs of students who may require different time schedules to operate more effectively in and out of the classroom. We would like to get expert and massive input into our scheduling processes, as we face challenges in addressing the specific arts curriculum, while trying to balance that with the core offerings. We also want to maintain the high levels of our core and arts offerings through our AP program, while addressing the special needs of students with special needs, such as our 504 and EC students, along with our other students with disabilities. We also realize that we need to include a media arts component in the curriculum to remain competitive with other schools, both public and private.

Class sizes and student teacher ratios

Yes. With our current master scheduling needs, we are ending up with very large class sizes. A master schedule that is re-structured with expert assistance would help us address these issues. We have already attempted meetings with CMS “experts” in the field, and those experts have left scratching their heads as to how we can do what we know needs to be done with our master schedule, given our specific course offerings. We know that we have had to teach our middle school core areas on the A/B day schedules in order to meet the magnet compact agreements and deliver our comprehensive arts curriculum, but that leaves us with delivering the full academic curriculum in half the time that other middle schools are allotted, which presents problems in our academic sector.

Staffing/positions and roles

Yes. We believe that teachers need more autonomy in the classroom and at the building level to help move the school forward. We would like to look at models that have teacher leaders in place to support our programs and help in making decisions. This school’s administration attempts to make decisions in a mostly more democratic fashion, requiring teacher and parent input for major decisions, and even not so major ones, but we still have a long way to go to be where we need to be. In visiting Boston Arts Academy, for example, our arts chairs looked at different and more democratic modes of operation in the decision-making process. While our chairs agreed that emulation of their processes would be desirable, they wondered about the time required to develop such processes. We concluded that these would be unique to each school who attempted the design toward a more autonomous and democratic way of running a school.

We try to get the input of our department chairs in the hiring process, and often have teams of teachers in on the decisions, but the process is far from ideal. We would want to look at how to improve those procedures to acquire the best educators for our school when openings occur.

Teaming or collaborative planning structures

This is an area where we could use the assistance of experts. Our school lacks consistent protocols for team planning, and the teaming between our arts and core teachers often encounters gulfs in communication.

Given your student needs, teacher capacity, challenges you’re trying to address, and your vision for the evolution of your school, are there components of your current school design that you are unwilling to change?

For example:

Master schedule (including start/end time of the day/year)
Class sizes and student teacher ratios
Staffing/positions and roles
Teaming or collaborative planning structures

We want to reserve the right to agree upon any changes that may be suggested for implementation. We use a democratic way of making decisions, as noted above, and we must collaborate with students, parents, and teachers to reach a consensus about the re-design at any and every stage. We are committed to expediting the process, but we want the right to have the time to present all the elements of the suggested re-design to our community for consensus. We define consensus not by an “all –or-nothing” approach, but as a clear majority in agreement.
We are seeking to lower student-teacher ratios. We are not OK with losing staff and teachers. We must retain all of the programs we currently have. There are positions specific to our school, which are necessary to our vision. For example, we must retain our auditions coordinator and our arts director. In addition, in order to re-design our curricular elements, we must retain our testing coordinator, our academic facilitator, and our professional development coordinator.

Extended Reach involves a commitment to reach more students with excellent teachers and paying those teachers significantly more, within budgets. It involves creating new roles in your school in order to develop other teachers, and it clearly identifies the adults who are accountable for student outcomes. Briefly address your interest and commitment in implementing this work in your schooldesign.

As a former leader of a highly successful Bill Gate/Coalition of Essential Schools model in CMS, taking a low performing, low socio-economic population to North Carolina School of Excellence status, this is a no-brainer. Teacher Leader models are highly successful, and I have seen them work. As the Principal, I am deeply committed to the Teacher as Leader model.

Why do you feel that NOW is the right time to engage in this work?
If you see our answer, above, you realize that a convergence of the universe is happening at Northwest School of the Arts. Now is the time. We must take advantage of this momentum.

What would success look like for you at the end of next year? How will you measure progress against these objectives?
Improved test scores, significantly narrowed achievement gaps between black, white, students with disabilities, EDS, and EC student test scores, increased teacher collaboration in PLC and cross-curricular meetings, flexed school teacher and teaching hours, goals reflected in the cohesive master schedule that addresses class size and specifics within the arts, EC, core, and AP curriculum, more Teachers as Leaders with specific and targeted responsibilities for decision making and implementation of programs to address our needs, increased student and parent input into school-based decisions, more autonomy to deliver instruction, based on our unique student needs, more democratic decision-making processes, continued and increased national and world-wide recognitionor our school as “the place to be” as an arts magnet, increased and frequent out-of-district visits from school systems seeking to model their arts schools after ours (it is already happening) – for a start. We would use the regular CMS and state testing measures that we currently have, along with our CMS surveys for parents, students, and teachers. In addition, we would create more surveys to address cohesiveness within the master schedule, how well we are addressing student needs through our initiatives, and monitoring our initiatives in such a manner that it gives us time to adjust where necessary. We would also use qualitative and quantitative data that would be kept in hard copies and on flash drives to document our measures, failures, successes, and records of such.

Are stakeholders in your school community- teachers, non-instructional staff, students, and parents- ready to support you in implementing these changes? How do you know? Please provide evidence of engaging your School Site Team and/or other stakeholder meetings.

The information about this initiative went out to teachers and parents when it was presented by CMS. WE have had the School Leadership Team, which is composed of parents and teachers, take a good look at it. We also fielded positive comments and concerns from all stakeholders and have agreed that we should go forward with this opportunity. Our final vote to move on this application happened on 11/22/2013, at 8 AM.