By Kim Siebert MacPhail
Bedford High School Principal Henry Turner presented the annual school improvement plan to the School Committee on May 14, receiving unanimous support for the BHS Advisory-Council-approved proposal. Turner explained that this year’s plan for the coming academic year has four main goals:
- Integration of the one-to-one iPad technology into curriculum, instruction and assessment;
- Development of common assessments and the use of data analysis to inform instruction;
- Faculty collaboration to improve curriculum and instruction;
- Commitment to addressing students’ social and emotional needs as they prepare for work and college.
New to Bedford this year, Principal Turner said he used his first months in a structured entry process so that he could understand “where we are as a school.” After some reflection on what he observed, Turner shared his findings with the faculty in December.
“I spent the fall thinking and probing the issues,” Turner said. “Teachers were feeling that there were a lot of initiatives. At the state level there was the new evaluation system and there were also changes with the Common Core, as well as pending changes with the PARCC exams [Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers] replacing MCAS testing. We were also moving into our second year with the iPad program.
“The question was, what was our instructional direction?” Turner continued. “We’ve really spent from September through this year creating an instructional focus with the iPad initiative. Some of those instructional questions around using technology in the classroom, and looking at assessments, led us to the development of [this year’s] school improvement plan.”
The four goals of the improvement plan are detailed below:
Goal #1: Integrate 1 to 1 iPads into curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
Teachers have begun to create curriculum content, using the iPads to develop alternatives, augmentations and parallels to conventional textbooks.
“It’s actually neat stuff,” Turner said. “It’s not just notes or written texts. There can be videos or podcasts, debates, online documents. These are much more engaging resources than you would find in your traditional textbook.”
Turner went on to say that iPads are being utilized to enhance the higher-order, metacognitive thinking that is vital in 21stt century learning. Students are using technology to learn, explore, research and access a wide variety of resources in support of academic inquiry. Technology is also being deployed to check for student understanding “in the moment” so that teachers are able to alter their practices quickly if they find students have not grasped newly presented concepts and material.
Goal #2: Implement common assessments and use data to inform instruction.
Turner said that the Common Core assessments prescribe benchmarks that equitably measure student growth. This does not mean that each Biology classroom will be in lock-step with every other Biology classroom, but that students will end up in the same place, assessed by the same measure, and that there will be a shared understanding of what mastery is at every level. Turner emphasized, however, that the goal is not to standardize instruction.
Additionally, Turner reported that he has created a “Data Team” of teachers to gather information such as test scores, subject grades and grade point averages, with an eye to identifying achievement gaps within the student population. Next year’s school improvement plan, he said, will have its foundation in the findings of the Data Team.
Goal #3: Work collaboratively to improve curriculum and instruction.
Turner applauded the Bedford High School “culture of collaboration” among the faculty that he found already in place upon his arrival, saying it will be easier to develop a formal system of shared practices because of it.
“There are four essential questions,” Turner summarized: “What do we want students to know? When do we know that they’ve learned it? What do we do when they’ve learned it? What do we do if they haven’t?”
The district’s Program Administrators, Turner said, have taken the lead in developing common assessments and have debated how to structure professional development and teacher workshop time for the best results going forward.
According to the improvement plan, in the coming year, faculty will “engage in systematic, collaborative review” of data that will, in turn, inform instruction. Protocols will also be established to improve instructional practices and Common Core skills will be integrated into the curriculum and instruction in all departments.
Goal #4: Increase commitment to address students’ social-emotional needs and prepare students for college/career.
Stress and how to cope with it is the main focus of this initiative. “Some students are overly stressed and other students aren’t stressed enough,” Turner explained.
Learning how to cope with stress on the one hand—yet ensuring that the bar is high enough on the other— is the challenge. “Stress is not all bad,” Turner explained. “It can be a motivator. What are the kinds of stress we want them to have? We want to provide a safe environment in which to [try and to] fail, teach them how to cope and how to avoid [the] risky behavior [that can be a response] to stress.
“This is now the third school I’ve been involved in, addressing this issue. It’s really challenging,” Turner added.
To promote a wider understanding of the issue, the school improvement plan calls for more proactive parent outreach about stress, in the form of at least one workshop/speaker per semester.
The improvement plan also calls for greater support for students who are re-entering the school environment after long absences due to things such as hospitalization.
“The students would meet with the guidance counselors and set up a plan for how to transition [back into school]. Some students go into a part-time schedule, but others chose to [immediately] go back full-time, which can be overwhelming,” Turner said.
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