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| Oak Forest, Illinois |
| District Solution |
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| Marilynn Strein's kindergarten/1st-grade class at Fieldcrest Elementary School had been reading Gregory the Terrible Eater. But when Lynn Barbour stopped into Strein's room in the suburban Chicago school, she wanted to know about students' reading habits rather than Gregory the Goat's eating habits. |
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| Barbour is part of a cadre of distinguished America's Choice regional educators who play a central role in delivering high-quality, long-term technical support to America's Choice schools. |
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| The support starts with the creation of America's Choice model classrooms in every school and extensive training of school-leadership teams that include in-school "math and literacy coaches," who help teachers fully implement America's Choice strategies to improve teaching and learning. |
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| Barbour and her colleagues (each of whom work closely with up to a dozen schools) sustain the assistance through frequent on-campus, regional and national training institutes that are conducted with the help of America's Choice experts in teaching, curriculum and school organization. |
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| Fieldcrest is one of four elementary schools in Prairie-Hills Elementary School District #144, located in the working-class South Chicago community of Oak Forest, Illinois. The district has brought the America's Choice program to each of the schools. Barbour was at Fieldcrest to conduct a "quality review," a study of the school's implementation of the America's Choice design. Barbour and her colleagues do the reviews in every America's Choice school twice a year to help schools fully implement the America's Choice model. |
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| An important part of that effort involves helping schools build strong links between standards, tests and teaching. America's Choice teachers take part in frequent in-depth discussions of student work and what teachers must do to ensure students produce work that meets high standards. America's Choice also trains its school's Leadership Team to analyze student test data and take steps that respond to student weaknesses. |
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| The first thing Barbour did during her day-long Fieldcrest evaluation was meet with Principal Luke Pavone and the rest of the school's Leadership Team. They reviewed a list of "next steps" in implementing the America's Choice program that Barbour had compiled after her last quality review. They discussed Fieldcrest's progress against a set of "rubrics" that America's Choice has created to measure the depth of school's implementation of the program. And they talked through priorities that the team had set for the school. Then Barbour, Pavone, and the of the Leadership Team embarked on a tour of Fieldcrest's 21 classrooms. |
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| Barbour liked what she saw in Strein's class, including a chart highlighting ways students had "predicted and confirmed" elements of Gregory the Terrible Eater. Gregory would surely eat a lot of grass, one of Strein's K/1st graders had predicted before reading the story, because "grass is good for goats." |
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| The investment in the America's Choice design has paid big dividends at Fieldcrest. Within two years of adopting the America's Choice model, the proportion of Fieldcrest 3rd graders meeting Illinois standards jumped from 39 percent to 64 percent in reading, and from 46 percent to 76 percent in math. The school held a celebration last year when it went off the state watch list. |
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