Going From Good to Great: Robert Frost Junior High School
Congratulations to Robert Frost Junior High School, this week’s AllThingsPLC featured school! Rick and Becky DuFour had wonderful things to say about this shining example of PLC progress:
"In 2005, 83 percent of students attending Frost Junior High in Schaumburg, Illinois, were proficient in reading and 80 percent were proficient in math. Good results. But the staff at Frost agreed they were not satisfied with 'good' and elected to implement the PLC process in an effort to become 'great.' By 2010, over 95 percent of Frost students were proficient in language arts, mathematics, and science, and the school received the Illinois Academic Excellence Award. The improvement impacted all students. The percentage of students with Individualized Education Plans able to demonstrate proficiency on the state assessment increased from 66 percent to 95 percent in mathematics and from 48 percent to 86 percent in language arts."
For more information on Frost Junior High and data exhibiting the school’s improvement, visit its Evidence of Effectiveness page.
Frost is the third in a series of five featured Evidence of Effectiveness schools. (The first two schools were Adlai E. Stevenson High School and Stults Road Elementary School.) We’ll be posting one school each week, leading up to the 2011 PLC Summit with the DuFours. Check back next week to learn more about the next featured school!
Comments
cheapcoach
Help me choose my dress!!
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MARIVEL
Wow! Currently I am working on my Master’s and am required to participate in an educational blog. The focus was to blog on a challenge I am facing within my school community. Then I came across this article, "wow!" With school one week away, we are discussing strategies to meet AYP for the 2011-2012 school year. For math, we must meet 60% proficient. The fact that we are meeting now to discuss strategies is great, but throughout the school year, we no longer meet. I see how effective PLC worked in your school and am excited to discuss this with my administrator and colleagues. This year I plan to arrive at school an hour early, so I will ask my colleagues if we can meet to discuss challenges we face in the classroom and analyze our data to improve student learning. I am so amazed by your determination for continuing to improve your scores and excited to present this information to my colleagues.
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Staff at AllThingsPLC.info
Response from Merrilou Harrison, PLC at Work associate:
Hi Janet,
Please see the list of elementary schools listed under the “Evidence of Effectiveness” on this site: http://www.allthingsplc.info/evidence/evidence.php You can use the PLC Locator map to search for an elementary school in your state and/or to search for a school that is similar in size & demographics. You can also access a copy of the book Raising the Bar and Closing the Gap: Whatever It Takes (Solution Tree, 2009) to read in more detail about the PLC at Work Process at all levels – elementary, middle, high, and district. The good new is, all of the schools and districts that have implemented the process effectively have done so with existing resources. Of course, they had to use their precious resources – people, time, energy, and money – in new and different ways.
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uzucker
It is encouraging to see dedicated Professional Learning Communities be so effective. I joined my current district/school four years ago. The building I joined was a new school with a clear vision dedicated to a PLC model. Each Tuesday is dedicated to a grade level PLC time guided by current student data examination, curriculum evaluation, and whatever professional needs may arise. It has been an honor to be a part of such an amazing process and I often marvel at the growth I have seen, both in the teachers and the student achievement as a result. My greatest respect to all five of the "Evidence of Effectiveness" schools!
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katkuhn
Wow! Those are amazing results! It goes to show how collaborating really does benefit our students. We are really beginning to focus on PLCs at my school, and I love it. I think we can learn more from our colleagues than we can ever learn by attending a class or reading a book alone. Sharing ideas about student learning and teaching strategies are the best ways for us to be able to better serve our children. Those numbers are very encouraging.
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swils056
That was the slogan for my district one year. We actually did it. Now we are moving to excellence!!!!!!!!!!!
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k_wagner3@yahoo.com
I really commend Robert Frost Junior High School for not being satisfied with a 'good' status. I believe that so many times schools are satisfied with 'good' because it keeps their school under the radar. 'Good' is not enough though, because it means that many of the students in the school are not proficient in the five core subjects. In implementing the PLC process Robert Frost increased the amount of students that were proficient in the core subjects to 95%. Imagine the schools that could also improve if they implemented the PLC process.
I also commend Stults Road Elementary school, because they too increased the percentage of students that are proficient in the core subjects. Stults Road Elementary school is different than Robert Frost High School though, in that at Stults, 78% of students receive free or reduced lunch. The teachers at Stults did not let the poverty of their students hold them back from improving and achieving. So, to me it seems that the demographics of the schools shouldn’t matter, what matters is the willingness of the teachers to want to implement the PLC process.
At the school in which I work, much of the thought process is: “The students are achieving as much as they can because we live in a high poverty district.” This is the wrong way to look at things. We should be saying “Although we live in a high poverty district, we can still have ‘great’ achievement. We can look to Stults Road Elementary school as an example; they are from a high poverty district yet, through the implementation of the PLC process, have achieved greatly. The biggest challenge is converting the mindset of many teachers. We as teachers need to believe that our students, although poor, are truly capable of more before we can implement something like the PLC process. If we don’t believe that, than there is no point in beginning the PLC process in our district.
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janet.smith4
What a coincidence! I just read DuFour's article, "What is a Professional Learning Community" as part of my graduate program. I was excited and impressed to learn about Adlai Stevenson High School. I had burning questions reading his article, and I have the same questions for you: Where did you get the time and money for these changes? I know my school is deep into budget cuts and I am thankful to have a job. How could it work for an elementary school, without study halls or advisory periods?
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