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School Improvement Plan  |
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The vision of our Comprehensive School Improvement Plan (CSIP) is to align our school's curriculum, technology and professional development with a plan for school wide change and improvements in achievement. We plan to involve teachers, administrators, parents, students, support staff and outside agencies, as well as the University of Northern Iowa and AEA 267 local resources to accomplish this comprehensive plan.  Our
plan began
with the development of a Building Leadership Team
during the 2003-04 school year. This team consists
of eleven members who have been trained on how
adults learn and process skills in groups, how
professional development models can be implemented
to align with district standards, how to use data
in guiding decisions and how to select providers
and topics for professional develop-  Goal number one focuses on Holmes students' learning strategies designed to improve reading comprehension across the curriculum. Our Reading subgroup has trained at our AEA on the use of Carver Reading Strategies and in turn has trained staff using these organizational skills and strategies. It is our goal to train all staff members in Every Child Reads metacognitive learning strategies through our building's ongoing Professional Development over the next three years so that we may incorporate ECR strategies as ongoing learning strategies in all curricular areas. Professional Development at Holmes Junior High began in 2004-2005. It has been patterned after the Iowa Professional Development Model and incorporates the research-based Every Child Reads strategies of: Reaad Aloud, Talk Aloud, Think Aloud, and Compose Aloud. These strategies will be introduced to all staff with collaborative "teams of four" working to implement and log progress while incorporating these metacognitive strategies. In addition, goal setting, activating prior knowledge, inferencing, making connections to prior learning, making analogies to personal experience, demonstrating fix-up strategies, using text features, using text organization, identifying important and less important information, processing meaning before and after reading, summarizing strategies, questioning strategies, visualizing strategies, and predicting strategies will also be a part of the professional development in our building. (See list of metacognitive strategies.) These strategies will be used in all curricular areas to allow students the opportunity to improve achievement. This process will include a three-year plan of implementation at which point we will evaluate progress of the plan as described in the Iowa Professional Development Model. To address the needs of our subgroups that include IEP students and Low SES students, we will implement the following strategies: students who are non-proficient readers will have the option, with parent approval, of being scheduled into a curriculum entitled Reading For Success. This curriculum will focus on reading strategies and will actually teach reading as the focal point of the curriculum for those students identified in need. Corrective reading strategies will be taught to those IEP students identified with reading needs. Collaborative reading periods have been scheduled so that IEP instructors may plan and implement those strategies together for student assistance. Goal number two focuses on improving our students' math achievement. Our math subgroup of teachers is focused on improving student proficiency in decimal divisors and fractions, which are weak areas as identified by standardized test item analysis. This subgroup has also worked to provide learning strategies for remedial help in our After School Program. Our third goal has been designed to increase student responsibility and participation as well as assignment completion. This subgroup will focus on "marketing" these concepts to students and parents through the use of weekly parent signatures in planners to promote home/school communication, weekly communication through our school website, a parent e-mail base of over eighty-five percent, our listserv, a teacher's assignment page based off our website which is updated daily, and the monitoring of D and F grade reports in conjunction with progress reports. Goal number four has been developed to improve student proficiency with interpreting scientific information by making inferences and predictions. This area was targeted based on item analysis of ITBS and ITED scores, and strategies are being implemented to enhance our students' ability to problem solve. We are testing to monitor student progress and designing strategies for remedial science help in our After School Program. The fifth goal of our comprehensive plan will be to offer academic support and assistance to all our students in our After School Program. We will be monitoring the effect our After School Programs (Academic and Recreational) have on our students in the areas of attendance, academic proficiency, and behavior referrals. Our hope is that these strategies will allow staff to connect with students who may not otherwise be motivated to be successful. Our overall goal is to infuse the Every Child Reads strategies into our curriculum and After School Program over a three-year period using a nine-step process to implement its content. Through the implementation of these steps in our comprehensive plan, we will improve student achievement in reading, math and science while involving all of the stakeholders at Holmes Junior High.
BASELINE AND PROGRESS DATA: EVERY CHILD READS:
THINK-ALOUDS & READ-ALOUDS:Selecting
Comprehension Processes to Make Visible to
Students |