In June, BASD selected Broughal MS for a Comprehensive Support & Improvement (CSI) plan based on the school’s three-year average of math and English Language Arts (ELA) scores on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) tests administered annually to eighth-graders. Broughal’s CSI plan, using $545,000 of Title I federal funds, encompasses three main areas: culture and mindset, instruction and assessment, and professional development. Today’s feature – part two in a series about the CSI plan – looks at the changes from the perspective of educators at Broughal and coaches from the two consulting firms hired by the district.

‘It’s the stories that pull people in’

Growing up in Franklin Township, N.J. – population 3,000 – Alyssa Gammel knew she wanted to change education in America. She chose Penn State – undergraduate population 40,000 – as the place to learn to become an educator, earning her BA in 2018.

Gammel, a new sixth-grade ELA instructor, brings her change-oriented mindset to a school in transition. Broughal ELA teachers are assessing students’ skill gaps with a new tool, Acadience, and teaching ELA with a new online software suite, StudySync. BASD has deployed StudySync at all middle and high schools this academic year. Although the change is not part of the Title I-funded CSI plan, it is part of a larger, coordinated effort to improve grade-level instruction in BASD secondary education.

Gammel’s energy and enthusiasm for StudySync is contagious.

“The big push is to get everyone reading grade-level content,” she explains. “In the past, kids who had skill gaps were allowed to read texts that were below grade level, [but] with StudySync, the scaffolding works really well.”

She walks through a sample exercise, in which students are asked to show how an author characterizes the figures in a story. Students who have a skill gap in understanding how an author develops a character can click a tab in StudySync to access a “scaffold” – a tool that helps them access a grade-level text by assisting them with the missing skill – which in this case is a graphic organizer showing the “PEEL” technique (point, evidence, explanation, link). Students aren’t held back from accessing grade-level texts simply because of skill gaps.

“I love this technique,” fellow sixth-grade teacher Ethan Turner says. “It’s not limited to ELA. You could use it for social studies, too.” Turner, who grew up in Topton and earned his master’s in elementary education with a focus on fourth through eighth grade, is a new social studies teacher at Broughal.

“I remember hating middle school,” he confides. “It was all about ‘sit down, get quiet, nobody move.’ I wanted to go into education so I could give kids what I didn’t have.”

As a non-ELA teacher, Turner will be part of team teaching and peer coaching sessions as ELA teachers help content area teachers use literacy skill scaffolding to provide grade-level instruction to all students. He’s up for the challenge.

“History used to be names, dates, lots of memorization,” he recalls, “but it’s the stories that people remember, the stories that pull people in.”

Teachers embracing new methodologies

Gina Kutz is in her 16th year at Broughal. She has a BA and an MA in education, as well as a reading specialist certificate.

“I interact with pretty much the entire building,” she explains, “as one of the two reading specialists.” (The other Broughal reading specialist is Amy Santanasto, who joined the school this year.)

The reading specialists’ role in the CSI plan will involve more than direct instruction of students; they will also be developing a partnership with the subject area teachers. To put it simply, they’ll be showing science and social studies teachers how to scaffold students’ literacy skills to fill gaps – without sacrificing subject area content.

“We’ll be planning lessons with them, then modeling lessons for them and co-teaching lessons with them,” she explains. “We’ll start with ELA, but eventually we’ll be working with all the subject area teachers.”

Some of the instructional methods are new, Kutz explains: “The science-based approach we’re learning is new for middle school.”

Kutz also knows that building literacy skills in middle school is a challenge: “The students are older, so a larger skill gap may have accumulated.”

However, she believes it’s the right time to make the change.

“The students at the elementary schools are being taught to read using this new approach, and they’ll be coming to us in a few years. That’s exactly why we need to start doing this now.”

And it’s an exciting moment.

“Being on the corrective action list was not what anybody wanted,” she acknowledges, “but it means that we’re receiving the investment and developing our resources, which is a really positive thing. We’re all learning it together.”

What works at Broughal will likely be rolled out to all district middle schools, so Kutz and her fellow teachers will be ahead of the curve. In this way, BASD is using Broughal as a proving ground for pedagogical innovations aimed at improving outcomes across students of all demographics, at all academic achievement levels.

A number of local literacy advocates and educational consultants were interviewed for this article series. One consistent theme voiced by individuals unaffiliated with BASD is that students with a strong ability to memorize, as well as students who receivea great deal of academic and intellectual support at home, can achieve deceptively high scores on standardized tests, regardless of the efficacy of the pedagogy employed.

“As long as the teachers have a pulse,” one individual remarked, “some schools will havegood scores.” “There are a lot of highly affluent school districts that have been getting away with teaching methods uninformed by the latest science,” another person told us. However, improved teaching strategies that focus on skill development and metacognition-awarenessof thinking and learning processes-will boost achievement across all student groups. Every BASD student stands to benefit from the improvements being piloted at Broughal.

Teaching teachers:

Literacy skill-building

Mike Grabarits, president of Step by Step Learning (SBSL), believes in what he calls a “business solution to an academic problem.” The former food and beverage executive and founder of business education company ExecuTrain explains: “My job in business was to formulate solutions for customers … so that the people we were dealing with were more effective.” Training teachers to use science-based learning approaches is a natural extension of the solution-oriented mindset that led him to create a software training company for businesspeople.

BASD selected SBSL to train Broughal MS teachers to use a new approach to literacy education, as part of the CSI plan. SBSL coaches are showing teachers how to teach students to read via phonemic awareness – rather than the older “whole language” approach – a technique that has documented success in a series of case studies performed by Dr. Edward Shapiro, who directed the Center for Promoting Research to Practice at Lehigh University before his death in 2016.

Grabarits touts the fact that the SBSL methodology is both effective and cost-efficient.

“For years,” he comments, “funding has been allotted to reduce class size” in an effort to improve educational outcomes, but little data supports that approach. Instead, BASD and Broughal MS have chosen to invest in targeted professional development, “improving instruction by enhancing the teachers’ knowledge,” leading to a sustainable rise in academic achievement.

Grabarits acknowledges that teachers could leave the school after receiving the training, but asserts, “When you improve the quality of an organization, typically there’s less turnover [ditto] Dr. Silva and Dr. Roy specifically create, every day, a great environment to work in, [especially] as the academics have grown tremendously in kindergarten through third grade.”

Grabarits believes that the work environment at Broughal will only become more attractive as teachers are equipped with the tools they need to arm students for academic success.

Mary Doe Donecker, the SBSL consultant coordinating the effort at Broughal, acknowledges that many things are changing at the same time.

“The ELA teachers have a curriculum that’s new to them, and that’s on top of learning a data-driven approach!” she says. “That’s a lot of change.”

This professional development is happening at the same time that Broughal is striving to improve students’ performance and reduce the number of students who need intensive interventions, a combination of efforts that would daunt many instructors. Donecker believes the biggest challenge in remediating students’ accumulated skill gaps is scaling.

“While I’m learning as a teacher,” she explains, “the number of students who need me to be at my best, fully confident and competent – while I’m learning – that’s the emotional and psychological challenge.”

Donecker sees what she terms a “process challenge,” as well: “[having] enough time for tailored instruction, [because] one of the things we’re committed to is teaching grade-level standards while filling skill gaps.” She believes the “what you need” portion of the school day will be important to success in the program’s early days.

Perhaps most important, Donecker sees a talented and dedicated faculty at Broughal. “I have grown to have such affection and respect for every BASD teacher,” she says. “They know how to teach. Our job is to show them where to go. I find them to be inspiring, really.”

‘I believe wholeheartedly that every teacher is doing the best job they know how’

Broughal has also retained math consultant Jason Adair for the professional development portion of the CSI plan. Adair has a bachelor’s of science in mathematics, a master’s degree in educational leadership, and a doctorate of education. While acknowledging that his deep knowledge of math “helps in an initiative like this,” Adair says that when he got a bachelor’s degree in math and became a math teacher, he wasn’t taught to make connections in math. It wasn’t until later in his career that he was trained to approach math conceptually, which he believes can change a student’s perspective on what math can really be.

Part of the change for students, Adair explains, has to do with the concept of the “mathematical mindset” advanced by Stanford University mathematics education professor Jo Boaler. It’s important for students to recognize that it’s not a matter of being or not being a “math person,” but of approaching math with a will to reason from a conceptual basis – and the key to learning math this way is a radical change in teaching strategies.

Most readers will recall being instructed via an “I do, we do, you do” methodology – known to educators as “gradual release of responsibility” – in which the teacher models problems and solutions on the board, the class works on additional problems together with the teacher, and students do more problems on their own. What math students really need, Adair asserts, is for teachers to “open up the math.

“If I teach solving proportions by saying, ‘X over a number equals a percentage over 100,’ or any shortcut like that,” he says, “it hides the math … There’s nothing to anchor the learning to.”

Adair believes “kids need to know why,” and to be encouraged to make connections. His approach to coaching teachers – showing them how to “teach a balance of factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive knowledge” – reflects this belief. He also believes BASD has made a sound curriculum choice by shifting a few years ago to a program that leads lessons with “Here’s a problem I haven’t taught you how to solve; use what you’ve already learned in math to try to solve it,” which educators call “exploration before formalization.”

“When you learn by exploration before formalization,” he contends, “you can figure out [the problems on a test]. You have the tools in your tool belt to figure it out, and you’ll do better.”

The math professional development at Broughal involves in-person coaching sessions – some of which will involve Adair teaching classes while math teachers observe – as well as a component that clearly excited Adair: teachers recording themselves while teaching, using a wearable microphone-camera device called a Swivl. Pointing to the “Best Foot Forward” study undertaken by the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, Adair wholeheartedly endorses the practice of having teachers record their own lessons and critique them before sending them to him for review, culminating in a Zoom online meeting for the teacher and Adair to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the lesson and plan the next steps.

“They’re going to shift their instruction incrementally,” he says. “You’re not going to move from being a 20 handicap in golf to being Tiger Woods overnight.”

Shifting teaching methods incrementally will help teachers make steady progress toward amassing the instructional toolset that they need to help students learn math conceptually, and using videography between Adair’s on-site visits is an efficient use of the grant money that funds the program.

“I believe wholeheartedly that every teacher is doing the best job they know how,” Adair says. He is confident that the professional development program underway at Broughal is giving the teachers the tools they need to do an even better job.

This is the second part of a four-part series on the Comprehensive Support & Improvement plan at Broughal MS. Part one outlined the CSI plan; part three will include student and parent viewpoints; part four will revisit Broughal at mid-year to evaluate the school’s progress.