School-wide Instructional Focus at Jacob Hiatt Magnet School / Worcester, MA

wo years after converting to an Principal: Patricia E. Gaudette expanded-time school, leaders School schedule: 7:50am3:35pm at Jacob Hiatt Magnet Additional time compared to School in Worcester, surrounding district: 80 min/day Massachusetts, guided the entire school faculty Student Population through a collaborative Grades served: PK6 process aimed at Number of students: 456 developing one schoolQualify for free/reduced lunch: 71% wide instructional focus. The specific goal of the Students Scoring At or Above Proficient instructional focus work on the Massachusetts Comprehensive was to prioritize and Assessment System Test in 2010 direct the schools efforts (difference compared to surrounding to strengthen instruction district) and improve student performance. Rather ELA: 59% (+14%) than trying to improve Math: 59% (+17%) everything at once, faculty members decided to come together around a very clear goal in one area, learning to work together to strengthen instruction and improve student achievement in a very targeted way. Working with Focus on Results, an educational consulting group hired by the district to work with multiple schools, Hiatts teachers and administrators analyzed student performance data to understand the key areas where students were showing particular weaknesses. Almost immediately, faculty recognized that students were scoring very poorly on open-response questions. These teachers and administrators also recognized that open-response writing and the skills associated with it (analyzing text, making claims, identifying evidence) cut across all subject areas and are fundamentals for academic success. For this reason, faculty members decided on a school-wide instructional focus on open-response writing and crafted the following instructional focus statement that is clearly posted throughout the school:

Jacob Hiatt Magnet School

Working together to establish goals for student improvement in this area, the Hiatt educators created data displays for each classroom that would reflect how students were progressing. They also settled on three school-wide best practices for teaching open-response writing and have worked to ensure that all teachers implement these practices every day, in every classroom. The current focus on writing drives how time and resources are deployed at Hiatt. Additional time was added to the daily schedule for literacy and writing, including a daily, two-hour, uninterrupted literacy block. Open-response writing is woven into other core subject areas math, science, and social studiesso students understand that writing isnt just an isolated activity in English class, but is actually at the core of academic success. Even Hiatt specialty teachers (in art, music, PE, and technology), along with community partners, are familiar with the focus and best practices, so they can integrate a writing component into enrichment classes using these same teaching strategies. Hiatts instructional leadership team also has organized teacher collaboration and professional development around the school-wide instructional focus and team members use the time to improve each teachers ability to implement the identified school-wide practices. By establishing a schoolwide focus, and using it to guide their new school day over the past several years, Hiatt has seen significant improvement in the quality of student writing across grade levels, as measured by school and district interim assessments and Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) scores.

Instructional Focus Statement All Jacob Hiatt Magnet School students will show measurable growth in their ability to read and respond to open-response questions, using details and relevant information from all text for support. Teachers will implement writing strategies for open-response questions to support our instructional focus. Success will be measured by student performance on MCAS 4-point rubric and school performance-based writing.

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