During the 2020–2021 school year, a guiding coalition consisting of staff and administration from various grade levels and subject areas collaboratively reviewed the PLC at Work process. District leadership attended a virtual PLC at Work Institute and returned with a plan to share the online sessions in a whole-staff professional development day. This kick-started a districtwide commitment to the PLC journey. That commitment catapulted the district’s leadership team into creating a 13-step road map to form a personalized learning experience for all K–12 students.

Once the mission and vision were established, the next steps on the road map were to solidify the district’s collective commitments in the form of district values and goals–foundational tenets that proved to be critical anchors for the next two years of work.

One crucial takeaway from the PLC at Work Institute was the awareness of an overwhelming amount of standards for teachers to cover and students to learn. Having such an unattainable goal served no purpose but to frustrate staff and students. A key step for WCSD staff was to identify essential standards in their content areas and then align those with state standards. The entire district’s essential standards are kept in a shared spreadsheet so staff at the next grade level knows what is expected of students in that subject area.

Administration and teachers spent significant time the following summer building proficiency rubrics for each essential standard. Building-wide collaborative teams grouped by grade level and subject area started to engage in inquiry-based discussions centered around mastery—a practice that now occurs continuously. Formative assessments aligned with essential standards have become vital to monitor student learning. This allows collaborative teams to assess often and immediately implement instructional changes designed to further student achievement.

WCSD has also implemented Tiger Learning to support students’ unique needs. “Students are allowed to move at the speed of their own learning as they reach proficiency,” says Wagner. “This provides natural extension for students and frees up valuable, limited class time for teachers to work in small groups with students who struggle to attain proficiency.”

To support students struggling to reach proficiency in essential standards, grade-alike and subject-alike teams create SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound) goals, such as a certain percentage of students will reach proficiency on an identified standard by the end of a specified month. “This aligns to our district’s academic goal of having all students reach proficiency on all essential standards by the end of the school year,” says Wagner.

RESULTS

“We fundamentally believe the education system is broken,” says Wagner. “We believe that if you put good people in a bad system, the system wins everytime. It was important for us to create a system of personalization and student ownership of their learning, and that is exactly what we have done.”