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At Sauk Prairie High School, I've had the privilege of working with teams of educators and school leaders doing some of the best school improvement work in Wisconsin over the last four years. After adopting the SAIL framework, our district has seen consistent growth in student learning metrics as reported by the DPI's school report card. I was inspired to join the SPHS School Improvement Team because I saw that the SAIL process works by bringing coherence and alignment from the Superintendent's office to the classroom, and that kids benefit.
Some numbers to quantify our progress:
In the 21-22 SPHS was ranked 311th for the overall report card score; now we are 91st.
We were 206th in overall growth; now we are 49th
We were 176th in ELA Growth; now we are 39th
We were 319th in Math Growth; now we are 70th.
Growth Percentile, as you probably know, measures the amount of progress students are making each year. It's the school report card metric we have been most focused on recently at SPHS. Slides courtesy of Principal Chad Harnisch.
Working with the School Improvement Team has shaped my understanding of how multidisciplinary teams identify and commit to the most vital goals and strive to chase those goals with coherence and distributed leadership over a series of 100-day improvement cycles. At SPHS, we have used this process to tackle standards-based grading, disciplinary literacy, Universal Design for Learning, 1:1 conferencing, instructional rounds, and student voice initiatives. These efforts have dramatically improved student outcomes over the last five years by formalizing and systematizing a process of collaboration and data sharing.
Example: teachers engaged in visible sharing of pre-and-post assessment vocabulary data. This represented a major shift in our culture of professional inquiry and accountability.
I am excited to continue doing this work as long as I'm at SPHS, and grateful for the experience that I can bring with me to future roles. When paired with thoughtfully-aligned professional development and strong PLCs, the SAIL improvement framework represents an authentic manifestation of the educational vision we've been trying to create since John Hattie first popularized the idea of collective teacher efficacy.
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