NCA CASI e-NEWS December 2003

About e-News:
e-News is a bi-monthly newsletter of the North Central Association Commission on Accreditation and School Improvement (NCA CASI). The mission of e-News is to provide you with up-to-date information to aid you in your ongoing efforts to continually improve student achievement. To subscribe or unsubscribe, go to Your Profile at the NCA CASI website.

Mary Jo Rasmussen is the Associate State Director for NCA CASI in Michigan. She is also a staff member of NCA CASI's Assessment Service Center. Over the years, she has helped many schools tackle reading goals. She shares with us four steps that she has used to help schools improve their reading performance.

It will not come as a surprise to anyone that reading is the most frequently selected goal in the NCA CASI region. Elementary, middle, and high school faculty write goal statements such as:

Perhaps you are on the reading committee at your school. You might be wondering:

Step 1: Essence-Define what reading comprehension means at your school.
What skills will your committee focus on? Analyze your student achievement data. As you look at your data, identify the reading skills that are the most challenging to your students. Reading skills include: predicting, summarizing, analyzing main idea and supporting details, inferring, using context clues, interpreting tables, graphs and charts, drawing conclusions, discerning author's purpose and point of view, to name few. Choose a reasonable number of skills for your school to tackle, perhaps three. Remember, these are the skills you want all faculty members to use in their teaching. These skills become the essence of your goal. After defining the essence, your goal might look like this: All students will improve their informational reading skills across the curriculum.
Essence:

Spending time to tease out the essence will make a huge difference in the success of your goal in two ways. First, you are not expecting the art, science, or math teachers to become reading experts. You are expecting them to use inference, for example, in teaching art, science, and math concepts; and they probably already do this to some degree. You are asking every teacher in the school to purposefully infuse inference in his/her instruction.

Second, you are now able to narrow your intervention search. Using the words "reading comprehension" in an ERIC search results in thousands of references. How will you know which ones are most applicable to you? If you narrow your search terms to "reading" and "inference," the number of documents found is greatly reduced-and the search is targeted to your students' greatest needs.

Step 2: Identify Assessments.
NCA CASI requires that both standardized and locally developed assessments (a minimum of three assessments per goal) be used to document student performance. It is critical that the assessments be credible with the larger educational community and that they be aligned with the goal.

When choosing assessments, the first place to look is your state assessment. Most states give a reading assessment at elementary, middle, and high school. Use the one appropriate to your school level.

When researching your other two (or more) assessments, make sure they align with the goal and essence you have identified. For example, using the informational reading goal and essence provided earlier, a reading committee would not want to consider an assessment that uses mostly fictional passages because the assessment would be not be aligned with the school's goal and its essence.

NCA CASI's Reading Assessment Guide, produced by the NCA CASI Assessment Service Center, will be released in the spring and will provide further guidance for choosing both standardized and locally developed assessments.

Step 3: Identify Interventions.
Interventions are the actions teachers take with students to achieve a goal. Interventions must be aligned with the essence and the assessments. Some interventions are appropriate for developing knowledge, while others are appropriate for applying knowledge, developing habits or patterns of behavior, and/or developing attitudes. It is important that the interventions chosen match the performance being assessed.

To continue with our example, interventions are the classroom instructional practices that will increase student learning in the skills of inference, interpretation of tables, graphs and charts, and summarization. The reading websites listed later in this e-News provide good places to start in locating research-based interventions that match your goal and essence.

Step 4: Create a Staff Development Plan.
Staff development should be directly linked to the steps listed above. The topics of staff development will be varied. Faculty members may need staff development on student performance goals, on the implementation of assessments, or on the implementation of interventions. Effective staff development moves teachers from an awareness level to an implementation level. Staff development answers the question, "What will it take so that teachers feel comfortable using the interventions in their classroom instruction?"

Assisting you in answering important questions like the ones raised in this article is a priority for NCA CASI. Contact your state office for assistance with any one of these steps, visit our website at http://www.ncacasi.org, attend our 109th Annual Meeting, or attend any one of the numerous workshops held across the region. And, be sure to look for more information on reading assessments to be released in the spring from the NCA CASI Assessment Service Center.

Success Stories -- Schools Share Promising Reading Interventions & Locally Developed Assessments

Representatives from the following schools will be presenting more information about their reading interventions and assessment strategies at NCA CASI's Annual Meeting in Chicago March 28-31, 2004. They join close to 100 practitioners who will be leading sessions at the meeting to share practices that work. Click here http://www.ncacasi.org/event/meeting to find out more.

The Four-Block Literacy Model - Southlawn Elementary School, Liberal, Kansas
By Gloria Quattrone, Principal; Jennifer Workman, First Grade Teacher; and Jennifer Hyde, Third Grade Teacher
Over the last 3 years, Southlawn Elementary School has implemented the Four-Block Literacy Model schoolwide (K-3). The Four-Blocks - Guided Reading, Self-Selected Reading, Writing, and Working with Words - represent four different approaches to teaching children to read and write. The school has discovered that this framework meets the needs of their diverse student population. Click here to read more.

"Somebody Wanted But So" Statements and Context Clues - South Middle School, Liberal, Kansas
By Sheri King, NCA Building Chair
To improve students' reading comprehension, the staff members at South Middle School are using "Somebody Wanted But So" statements and "Context Clues" (interventions researched by Dr. Kylene Beers of the University of Houston). The interventions have proven promising with their highly multicultural and transient student population. Click here to find out more.

Locally Developed Assessments in Reading and Writing - Proviso East High School, Maywood, IL
By Marc J. Frazier, School Improvement Specialist, NCA Chair, & English Teacher
After examining their student performance data, the staff at Proviso East High School decided to focus their school improvement efforts on: 1) vocabulary for reading and 2) organization and support/ elaboration for writing. To gauge student progress in these key areas, the staff developed local assessments. The staff involved all curricular areas in their efforts, since reinforcement in these areas would enhance student performance on the assessments. Click here to learn more about how they developed, administered, and trained the faculty on the assessments.

Click here for a list of reading websites aimed at helping you identify effective reading interventions.

Teaching Reading in Science - A Supplement to Teaching Reading in the Content Areas: If Not Me, Then Who? (2nd Edition 2001), Mary Lee Barton and Deborah L. Jordan, McREL, Aurora, CO.
Matt Thomas, a college professor who works with pre-service and in-service science teachers, reviews Teaching Reading in Science. Click here to read his positive review of this book and learn more about what the book has to offer.

NCA CASI accredited schools will receive information in January regarding the online completion of new and reassigned staff reports. The process is greatly streamlined from prior years. We think you will like the new format. Be sure to look for your packet in January.

NCA CASI Chair-Elect, James Ton, has been selected to receive the Outstanding Administrator Award from the Indiana Music Educators Association for 2004. James Ton is principal of Chesterton Middle School in Indiana and serves on the Board of Trustees of NCA CASI. We congratulate him on this recognition of his tireless work on behalf of students in Indiana and across the NCA CASI region.

NCA CASI 109th Annual Meeting
Improving Performance -- Student by Student, School by School
March 28-31, 2004 - Chicago, IL

Join us for three days of discussion, exploration, and sharing of practices and processes that result in improved student learning. Listen to Dr. Lorraine Monroe of the Lorraine Monroe Leadership Institute share "How to Create Effective Schools for All Children." Join Tom Guskey, university professor and assessment expert, as he shares tips for using research in efforts to close the achievement gap. Choose from more than 100 practitioner-led breakout sessions as well as several in-depth seminars designed to provide you with proven strategies for raising student achievement at the classroom, building, and system levels. Visit http://www.ncacasi.org/event/meeting to find out more.

Schools in several states across the NCA CASI region have found that they can use their Title I and Title II funds to support their professional development in research-based strategies for improving student and school performance. They are using the funds to attend NCA CASI workshops that deal with all of the components of school improvement. As you review the professional development opportunities listed here and consider attending the Annual Meeting, check with your local and state authorities to see how you may be able to take advantage of these funds to support you in your efforts to continually improve student performance.

This conference will demystify assessments. Keynote speaker Bob Marzano will set the stage for the concurrent sessions, which will focus on how to: 1) develop local and classroom-based assessments, 2) disaggregate and examine standardized assessments, and 3) select appropriate assessments for your own school improvement plan. To find out more and to register on line, visit http://www.nca.umich.edu/assessment_conference.html.

Would you like a workshop in your area? Do you have a workshop topic you want addressed? Just visit our website at http://www.ncacasi.org/event/workshoprequest and submit your request. We'll do whatever we can to accommodate your specific request.

(Note: From time to time, NCA CASI includes news items from organizations outside the NCA CASI network. We are simply passing along information that we think you might be interested in, not formally endorsing or supporting the organizations or their programs.)

Summer Seminars & Institutes Offered by the National Endowment for the Humanities

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) offers to K-12 educators each year approximately thirty seminars and institutes for the intensive study of important texts and topics in the humanities. Programs are held at locations throughout the United States and abroad and are conducted by nationally-recognized humanities scholars. Programs last from four to six weeks, and NEH provides stipends for all participants ranging from $2,800 to $3,700 (depending on the length of the program) to defray travel and living expenses.

Topics for programs during the summer of 2004 include: Shakespeare's plays, children's literature, African American history, Milton's Paradise Lost, Cervantes' Don Quixote, the novels of Balzac and Zola, Russian novelists, Mozart's operas, the Industrial Revolution, the Irish famine, Dante's Divine Comedy, the Holocaust, America's Great Plains, Spanish art and theatre, American state constitutions, cultures of the Himalayas, and much more. For full listings, please see http://www.neh.gov/projects/si-school.html. The deadline for applications is March 1, 2004.

Call for Interested Schools
The High School Survey of Student Engagement (HSSSE) is recruiting schools to take part in its first national administration in 2004. Click here to find out more.

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North Central Association
Commission on Accreditation and School Improvement
P.O. Box 874705
Tempe, AZ 85287-4705
800-525-9517
http://www.ncacasi.org