Dramatic Academic Growth
Dramatic Academic Growth
Academic gains are the ultimate door opener – they are the foundation of a truly transformational teacher. Students make dramatic levels of academic growth (that is measurable and rigorous). Families know the level of rigor necessary for college and career readiness in the 21st century.
Benjamin Franklin once said, “Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.” This sentiment still rings true to this day. In our current society, so much stock is put in academic achievement as an indicator of success for our students, yet only recently has the focus shifted to, and acknowledged, the importance of growth. The achievement gap in America has been present for decades; underprivileged students and regions have systemically lacked the necessary resources to succeed and to have an excellent education. But through the recent developments and shifts towards academic growth as an indicator of success, we have seen the achievement gap narrow, slowly but surely. As the Social Studies Department Head this year, I have been extremely passionate when it comes to development of Social Studies curriculum and skills at my school. I have been in charge of creating the long term plan and corresponding unit plans for 6th grade social studies at Wheeler Middle School, and as such I have had a lot of liberty when it comes to what I include in the curriculum. As a school, our mission this year has been geared towards creating cross-curricular writing opportunities for students. Because of this, we have seen 5 paragraph essays coming out of math, science, English, and social studies classrooms across the campus. For the purpose of my portfolio, I have chosen to highlight my students’ ability to make inferences and analyses about primary sources in Social Studies as an indicator of their dramatic academic growth in my class.
Tracking social studies can be tricky. If I were able to track my students growth in content knowledge, they would all be showing 90-100% growth! If I were to track content area knowledge, my pre assessments would be something like “what do you know about Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Japan, India, Rome, Greece, etc.”, and I’m sure I would get a lot of students with little to no background knowledge. Because of this conundrum I found myself focusing instead on their ability to articulate their understanding of the content knowledge, and analyses of historical documents and sources. For this purpose, I created my assessments to demonstrate growth and performance throughout the year. Instead of tracking content knowledge, as a school the social studies department is tracking skill in applying social studies concepts and understanding primary and secondary resources. The standards and skills that I chose to focus on are my students’ abilities to “cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources, and to determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary of the source distinct from prior knowledge or opinions”, as seen on the common core website for history standards.
Many students come into sixth grade with very little experience analyzing social studies documents and primary sources, as elementary social studies is more focused on learning about history rather than analyzing it. Because of this, we always start off the school year with less difficult writing assignments and easier to comprehend sources and build them up to higher expectations and higher levels of reasoning and thinking. For my quantitative data, I am highlighting my first piece of evidence where I tracked my students’ performance on social studies written assignments from quarter 1 through quarter 3. In this data, I highlighted my students’ abilities to provide evidence/ reasoning for their quarter 1 and quarter 2 written assignments. The first written assignments are what we call “perfagraphs” or perfect paragraphs. These paragraphs are a formulaic strategy for introducing the idea of a claim, evidence, and a conclusion. For the three data points that I tracked using these perfagraphs, my general education students grew 26% in their ability to support their evidence with reasoning, and my inclusion setting students grew 17% in the same skill. Again the social studies skill that we are focusing on is their ability to “cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources”. At the basic level that we were requiring here, as shown in the “perfagraph” rubric on page 1 of the tracking sheet. Both of these classes demonstrated their mastery in their abilities to adhere to the formula of a perfagraph by the end of quarter 2, and as a result in towards the end of quarter 2 and at the start of quarter 3 we shifted them to the Smarter Balanced rubric that they would be tested on for their state test, and which proved to be a solid resource to use as a guideline for the students’ writing.
Page 6 of the standards tracker demonstrates their transition from the perfagraph to creating essays using the correct writing rubric and format. We then moved to paragraph and five paragraph essay writing where students had higher expectations for how they “cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources”. Pages 7-9 of my first piece of evidence highlight the growth that my students made with these higher expectations, shown on page 9. Whereas in the perfagraph writing students just needed to have evidence and reasoning that has a transition word and supports their claim, in quarter 3 and 4 we focused in on more specific requirements such as having comprehensive evidence integrated, and relevant and specific references. They are also expected to have an “effective use of a variety of elaborative techniques” which will contribute overall to their abilities to argue their points about their social studies topics because of the necessity for being able to articulate your ideas effectively in order to properly analyze sources. In the SBA rubric, my general education group grew 23% in their ability to properly cite relevant evidence, and grew 38% in their ability to effectively reason their claims and evidence. My special education inclusion team grew 21% in their evidence, and 20% in their reasoning skills. If 80% mastery is what we are shooting for, then both sections showed at least one year’s worth of growth in just three quarters. I believe that with this trajectory, and our continued emphasis on writing skills in social studies lessons, my class average for both classes can be closer to 95-100% in their ability to make claims, select proper evidence, and effectively reason their arguments and points.
In addition to the writing tracker, I am highlighting the examples of the student writing samples that I used to track my students’ writing skills. The first data point that I tracked is shown in my second piece of evidence. This piece of evidence is one of the first perfagraphs that these students worked on for social studies. As you can see, the writing is very basic, it aims at encouraging students to pull evidence and reasons that support their claims, or “P1” statements. In this first perfagraph assignment, page 9’s perfagraph is an example of what a perfectly written perfagraph looks like. It reads: “Cuneiform was a very important economic tool. First of all, they kept track of their credit and debits. Second, they used it for documents like in paragraph 1, the cylinder wheel. Lastly they used it to communicate to warn people. In conclusion, cuneiform was an important economic tool”. This assignment comes after they analyzed primary source documents to gain a better understanding of the uses of cuneiform. As you can see from the perfagraph on page 8, this is not a skill that many of the students came into 6th grade with, and as such it gave me an example of what I needed to work on. The perfagraph in paragraph 8 is lacking transitions, references to the text, and specific reasons. This was echoed throughout other perfagraphs from this assignment and gave our grade an example of what to look for moving forward. The whole class averaged averaged 57% on the assignment, 50% on ability to write a claim, 56% on evidence, and 67% on their conclusion. It is important to note in the writing tracker in evidence 1 that by October 30, nearing the middle-end of the second quarter, students were averaging 80-90% on their ability to write a basic claim, evidence, reasoning paragraph. You can see this in my third piece of evidence showing student perfagraphs after looking at primary sources related to Alexander the Great of Macedonia. This assignment was given in the first quarter, and while the students were still developing their writing skills with me through English as well, they were using this opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of a nonfiction text as opposed to English analysis of literature. This perfagraph response is the first perfagraph that I included in my tracker.. This skill is important for students to meet the social studies standard of being able to cite claims about nonfiction topics with evidence and reasoning. Over the course of about a month, students dramatically grew in their ability to understand how to cite evidence to support claims. Also in these perfagraphs, specifically on page 8, they have advanced in their ability to pull quotes to support their claims, and begin developing their reasoning skills further. I put so much emphasis on the reasoning and the “why” in my class that I have actually started hanging memes around my room that pertain to the “why” of the matter; my students are starting to get it. While they were writing these perfagraphs on Alexander the Great, the most common assistance that I was giving them when I would work with them was asking them “why?” every time they made a reasoned statement; this helped them to get to the point where they could reason out why their evidence proves their claim, rather than just stating that it does.
In quarter 3, we have been able to move beyond the formulaic structure of writing and towards five-paragraph essay writing. As you can see in my writing tracker in evidence 1, my students did have a hard time adjusting initially to the new rubric and its expectations, averaging 70% for claim, 70% for evidence, and 58% for reasoning, but by the end of February, they were demonstrating a high proficiency in their abilities to select relevant evidence and reason it out correctly. The first SBA assignment that we did was a compare and contrast of Athenian and Spartan civilizations, students were encouraged to give more reasoning than they had prior in their perfagraphs, but were showing difficulty in following through with that reasoning, as shown in their marked low score in reasoning skills. This was a good starting point for us as a grade to be able to identify what we needed to work on. Throughout the quarter, we emphasized the need for growth in ability to reason, again, the primary standard that guides social studies writing says that students need to be able to cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources, and to determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source”. The focus here is that students need to be able to support their analysis. In the perfagraphs, students were able to identify and explain their support, but lacked the ability to reason it. By the end of quarter 3, students were able to reason their arguments at a 94% average on the SBA rubric.My fourth piece of evidence shows this in the essays that my students wrote about Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, and his influence on the world. On page 13 of this evidence, you can see an example of a student making a claim, and reasoning it with multiple reasons that support strong pieces of evidence. When it comes to the standard, these students have demonstrated now in quarter 3 that they have grown immensely in their ability to do support their claims with evidence and reasoning when analyzing primary and secondary sources. When it comes to studying history, and social studies, the primary skill that these students need to develop is their ability to produce their thoughts, whether written or orally, and strongly support them. From the first quarter’s poorly structured formulaic responses, to more free form interpretations of the primary sources, my students have demonstrated a dramatic academic growth in their ability to reason claims made about nonfiction texts and historical documents.
My students have come a long way from where they were. At the start of the year, they didn’t know the difference between a primary or secondary source, or why it mattered. When asked to explain their reasons for statements that they made, they would give one word responses and be hard pressed to give me much more. Now in the third quarter they are producing well-written five paragraph essays in which they reason out the many pieces of evidence that they can pull to support their claims. As both and English and a social studies teacher I believe that these are some of the most important skills that a scholar can develop. These students are going to have to be able to support their claims and statements for the rest of their lives whether they are writing a resume, a cover letter, talking themselves out of being grounded, or defending a master’s thesis. The growth that they have shown in this year alone inspires me for their potential for the future, and for their ability to reason out their claims for years to come.
Dramatic Academic Growth Evidence 1
Dramatic Academic Growth Evidence 2
Dramatic Academic Growth Evidence 3
Dramatic Academic Growth Evidence 4
Academic gains are the ultimate door opener – they are the foundation of a truly transformational teacher. Students make dramatic levels of academic growth (that is measurable and rigorous). Families know the level of rigor necessary for college and career readiness in the 21st century.
Benjamin Franklin once said, “Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.” This sentiment still rings true to this day. In our current society, so much stock is put in academic achievement as an indicator of success for our students, yet only recently has the focus shifted to, and acknowledged, the importance of growth. The achievement gap in America has been present for decades; underprivileged students and regions have systemically lacked the necessary resources to succeed and to have an excellent education. But through the recent developments and shifts towards academic growth as an indicator of success, we have seen the achievement gap narrow, slowly but surely. As the Social Studies Department Head this year, I have been extremely passionate when it comes to development of Social Studies curriculum and skills at my school. I have been in charge of creating the long term plan and corresponding unit plans for 6th grade social studies at Wheeler Middle School, and as such I have had a lot of liberty when it comes to what I include in the curriculum. As a school, our mission this year has been geared towards creating cross-curricular writing opportunities for students. Because of this, we have seen 5 paragraph essays coming out of math, science, English, and social studies classrooms across the campus. For the purpose of my portfolio, I have chosen to highlight my students’ ability to make inferences and analyses about primary sources in Social Studies as an indicator of their dramatic academic growth in my class.
Tracking social studies can be tricky. If I were able to track my students growth in content knowledge, they would all be showing 90-100% growth! If I were to track content area knowledge, my pre assessments would be something like “what do you know about Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Japan, India, Rome, Greece, etc.”, and I’m sure I would get a lot of students with little to no background knowledge. Because of this conundrum I found myself focusing instead on their ability to articulate their understanding of the content knowledge, and analyses of historical documents and sources. For this purpose, I created my assessments to demonstrate growth and performance throughout the year. Instead of tracking content knowledge, as a school the social studies department is tracking skill in applying social studies concepts and understanding primary and secondary resources. The standards and skills that I chose to focus on are my students’ abilities to “cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources, and to determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary of the source distinct from prior knowledge or opinions”, as seen on the common core website for history standards.
Many students come into sixth grade with very little experience analyzing social studies documents and primary sources, as elementary social studies is more focused on learning about history rather than analyzing it. Because of this, we always start off the school year with less difficult writing assignments and easier to comprehend sources and build them up to higher expectations and higher levels of reasoning and thinking. For my quantitative data, I am highlighting my first piece of evidence where I tracked my students’ performance on social studies written assignments from quarter 1 through quarter 3. In this data, I highlighted my students’ abilities to provide evidence/ reasoning for their quarter 1 and quarter 2 written assignments. The first written assignments are what we call “perfagraphs” or perfect paragraphs. These paragraphs are a formulaic strategy for introducing the idea of a claim, evidence, and a conclusion. For the three data points that I tracked using these perfagraphs, my general education students grew 26% in their ability to support their evidence with reasoning, and my inclusion setting students grew 17% in the same skill. Again the social studies skill that we are focusing on is their ability to “cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources”. At the basic level that we were requiring here, as shown in the “perfagraph” rubric on page 1 of the tracking sheet. Both of these classes demonstrated their mastery in their abilities to adhere to the formula of a perfagraph by the end of quarter 2, and as a result in towards the end of quarter 2 and at the start of quarter 3 we shifted them to the Smarter Balanced rubric that they would be tested on for their state test, and which proved to be a solid resource to use as a guideline for the students’ writing.
Page 6 of the standards tracker demonstrates their transition from the perfagraph to creating essays using the correct writing rubric and format. We then moved to paragraph and five paragraph essay writing where students had higher expectations for how they “cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources”. Pages 7-9 of my first piece of evidence highlight the growth that my students made with these higher expectations, shown on page 9. Whereas in the perfagraph writing students just needed to have evidence and reasoning that has a transition word and supports their claim, in quarter 3 and 4 we focused in on more specific requirements such as having comprehensive evidence integrated, and relevant and specific references. They are also expected to have an “effective use of a variety of elaborative techniques” which will contribute overall to their abilities to argue their points about their social studies topics because of the necessity for being able to articulate your ideas effectively in order to properly analyze sources. In the SBA rubric, my general education group grew 23% in their ability to properly cite relevant evidence, and grew 38% in their ability to effectively reason their claims and evidence. My special education inclusion team grew 21% in their evidence, and 20% in their reasoning skills. If 80% mastery is what we are shooting for, then both sections showed at least one year’s worth of growth in just three quarters. I believe that with this trajectory, and our continued emphasis on writing skills in social studies lessons, my class average for both classes can be closer to 95-100% in their ability to make claims, select proper evidence, and effectively reason their arguments and points.
In addition to the writing tracker, I am highlighting the examples of the student writing samples that I used to track my students’ writing skills. The first data point that I tracked is shown in my second piece of evidence. This piece of evidence is one of the first perfagraphs that these students worked on for social studies. As you can see, the writing is very basic, it aims at encouraging students to pull evidence and reasons that support their claims, or “P1” statements. In this first perfagraph assignment, page 9’s perfagraph is an example of what a perfectly written perfagraph looks like. It reads: “Cuneiform was a very important economic tool. First of all, they kept track of their credit and debits. Second, they used it for documents like in paragraph 1, the cylinder wheel. Lastly they used it to communicate to warn people. In conclusion, cuneiform was an important economic tool”. This assignment comes after they analyzed primary source documents to gain a better understanding of the uses of cuneiform. As you can see from the perfagraph on page 8, this is not a skill that many of the students came into 6th grade with, and as such it gave me an example of what I needed to work on. The perfagraph in paragraph 8 is lacking transitions, references to the text, and specific reasons. This was echoed throughout other perfagraphs from this assignment and gave our grade an example of what to look for moving forward. The whole class averaged averaged 57% on the assignment, 50% on ability to write a claim, 56% on evidence, and 67% on their conclusion. It is important to note in the writing tracker in evidence 1 that by October 30, nearing the middle-end of the second quarter, students were averaging 80-90% on their ability to write a basic claim, evidence, reasoning paragraph. You can see this in my third piece of evidence showing student perfagraphs after looking at primary sources related to Alexander the Great of Macedonia. This assignment was given in the first quarter, and while the students were still developing their writing skills with me through English as well, they were using this opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of a nonfiction text as opposed to English analysis of literature. This perfagraph response is the first perfagraph that I included in my tracker.. This skill is important for students to meet the social studies standard of being able to cite claims about nonfiction topics with evidence and reasoning. Over the course of about a month, students dramatically grew in their ability to understand how to cite evidence to support claims. Also in these perfagraphs, specifically on page 8, they have advanced in their ability to pull quotes to support their claims, and begin developing their reasoning skills further. I put so much emphasis on the reasoning and the “why” in my class that I have actually started hanging memes around my room that pertain to the “why” of the matter; my students are starting to get it. While they were writing these perfagraphs on Alexander the Great, the most common assistance that I was giving them when I would work with them was asking them “why?” every time they made a reasoned statement; this helped them to get to the point where they could reason out why their evidence proves their claim, rather than just stating that it does.
In quarter 3, we have been able to move beyond the formulaic structure of writing and towards five-paragraph essay writing. As you can see in my writing tracker in evidence 1, my students did have a hard time adjusting initially to the new rubric and its expectations, averaging 70% for claim, 70% for evidence, and 58% for reasoning, but by the end of February, they were demonstrating a high proficiency in their abilities to select relevant evidence and reason it out correctly. The first SBA assignment that we did was a compare and contrast of Athenian and Spartan civilizations, students were encouraged to give more reasoning than they had prior in their perfagraphs, but were showing difficulty in following through with that reasoning, as shown in their marked low score in reasoning skills. This was a good starting point for us as a grade to be able to identify what we needed to work on. Throughout the quarter, we emphasized the need for growth in ability to reason, again, the primary standard that guides social studies writing says that students need to be able to cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources, and to determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source”. The focus here is that students need to be able to support their analysis. In the perfagraphs, students were able to identify and explain their support, but lacked the ability to reason it. By the end of quarter 3, students were able to reason their arguments at a 94% average on the SBA rubric.My fourth piece of evidence shows this in the essays that my students wrote about Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, and his influence on the world. On page 13 of this evidence, you can see an example of a student making a claim, and reasoning it with multiple reasons that support strong pieces of evidence. When it comes to the standard, these students have demonstrated now in quarter 3 that they have grown immensely in their ability to do support their claims with evidence and reasoning when analyzing primary and secondary sources. When it comes to studying history, and social studies, the primary skill that these students need to develop is their ability to produce their thoughts, whether written or orally, and strongly support them. From the first quarter’s poorly structured formulaic responses, to more free form interpretations of the primary sources, my students have demonstrated a dramatic academic growth in their ability to reason claims made about nonfiction texts and historical documents.
My students have come a long way from where they were. At the start of the year, they didn’t know the difference between a primary or secondary source, or why it mattered. When asked to explain their reasons for statements that they made, they would give one word responses and be hard pressed to give me much more. Now in the third quarter they are producing well-written five paragraph essays in which they reason out the many pieces of evidence that they can pull to support their claims. As both and English and a social studies teacher I believe that these are some of the most important skills that a scholar can develop. These students are going to have to be able to support their claims and statements for the rest of their lives whether they are writing a resume, a cover letter, talking themselves out of being grounded, or defending a master’s thesis. The growth that they have shown in this year alone inspires me for their potential for the future, and for their ability to reason out their claims for years to come.
Dramatic Academic Growth Evidence 1
Dramatic Academic Growth Evidence 2
Dramatic Academic Growth Evidence 3
Dramatic Academic Growth Evidence 4