I frequently find myself telling people, “you either love middle school or you don’t.” It takes special leadership attributes to thrive at the middle school level. Kids will fist bump, high five, mess up your tie, ask for a hug, cry, laugh with you (and at you), share a joke, ask you to Dab, Floss, Make a Tic Toc and ignore you, all in the same day! Middle school is a time of rapid growth cognitively, socially and emotionally. Middle school is the land of adult mentorship and relationship building opportunities. The center of this role, are the teachers in the classroom with 30 kids each hour. Over the past few years, in an effort to support the whole child, we have made it a priority at Linden Middle School to get a positive return out of our professional development investments. Overall, while raising accountability and ownership, we have seen the staff at LMS take risks, try new strategies and collaborate on best practice. As you can imagine, there are days we take one step forward and two steps back. To raise accountability, you must first build trust and have meaningful relationships with your team members.
During the 2019-2020 school year, Team LMS has invested our time into increasing learner engagement, particularly in the areas of student talk, student ownership and differentiated instruction. As we have navigated the 5D path for more than five years, data showed these are areas we could continue to grow as a team.
To help guide the process and collect additional data, we have been participating in Linking Walks for the 19-20 school year. This instructional round process has focused specifically on student engagement. In a nutshell, Linking Walks consists of several small groups of trained staff members visiting classrooms and monitoring different levels of engagement. We were fortunate to have staff from Davison, Lake Fenton and Fenton also visit LMS classrooms. What started as nerves for team LMS turned into an eye-opening experience. We discovered we had a self inflated perception on the level of engagement in our classrooms. We have great kids who are generally compliant, yet we wanted to raise the bar to deep authentic engagement and student ownership. This discovery has led to risk taking in the classroom by our teaching staff.
To build upon this work, we were fortunate to have funds available to invite MASSP’s very own Steve Seward in to work with our teaching staff on four separate occasions, focusing on learner engagement. This process also allowed departmental teams to visit each other’s classrooms and have facilitated, non biased discussions around learner engagement and the Linking Walk data we collected.
Linden Community Schools adopted a revised strategic plan in 2018. One of our goals of this strategic plan is to “support the whole child, while engaging and challenging all learners.” Although we are seeing strides in the classroom centered around student engagement, we still had a subgroup of students whose needs were not being met. This realization, led our team in the direction of reviewing current systems we have in place to support the whole child. Moreover, looking to work on our academic and behavioral MTSS to ensure we have systems in place for our at risk population. Below are a few areas of our MTSS System we took a deep dive into with the goal of increasing learner engagement within our at risk population:
Student Assistance Team – Our SAT Team meets once a month and brainstorms academic and behavior intervention plans for at risk students. We started to analyze this system, as we felt we were missing students. Moreover, we were not being proactive, we were reactive. Thus, we restructured the student identification process. This process previously was centered around staff recommendations, not necessarily data driven. Although we still include staff recommendations, we have centered our student identification system around Illuminate Early Warning System/Report, attendance, grades, assessments and behavior.
Intervention – We are fortunate to have two reading and two math interventionists. We are able to service 12 students per hour in both math and reading intervention. Linden Middle School has a six hour day and this intervention service is a pull out model from one of the students two co-curricular classes. Our reading interventionists use the middle school version of LLI (Leveled Literacy Instruction) and math uses Do The Math. Last semester, 80% of the reading students met their year end NWEA goal while 60% of the math students met their year end NWEA goal. Most importantly, this service provides teachers relationship opportunities to students in a small group setting.
Promoting Positive School Climate (PPSC) – In collaboration with Genesee Intermediate School District (GISD), we recently have overhauled our PBIS system. For years, LMS had the slogan “Be Respectful, Be Responsible, Be Safe.” Because we are the Linden Eagles, this overhaul led to “SOAR: Stay Safe, Offer Kindness, Act Responsibly and Remember Respect.” Our PPSC Team meets monthly and develops classroom lessons, organizes assemblies/guest speakers, purchases rewards/prizes and analyzes student behavior and perception data. When staff is intentional about handing out SOAR tickets, we view this as another positive relationship building opportunity.
Poverty Matters – Because we are located in the southern portion of Genesee County and Northern Livingston County, we do not have large numbers of students living in poverty. However, we still have a population of “under resourced” students who walk into LMS on a daily basis with a backpack full of insecurities. The GISD has provided a year long job embedded learning opportunity with Dr. Tammy Pawloski, focusing on strategies to connect with under resourced kids. For Team LMS, learning about student motivation, stressors and proactive strategies has been an eye opening experience. Overall, this experience has provided us more relationship building protocols to include in our MTSS toolbox, with the goal of supporting the whole child of all learners.
Check In/Check Out – For students we deem as striving for attention and mentorship, we recently implemented a Check In/Check Out process. This has been a powerful resource in terms of relationship building. In a nutshell, students check in with a mentor at the start and end of the day. Each hour, students are to have a short conference with their teacher and get their CICO form filled out. This conversation is intentional and focused on the students' positive choices. Each student is striving for an individualized goal that is meaningful to them. Goals range from McDonalds, pizza, Rubix Cube, earning transition timeback, ect. Goals aside, CICO is providing students a platform to engage in positive conversations with teachers at least eight times per day.
For Team LMS, the 2019-2020 school year has been a year of connecting the dots. We must connect the dots as it is easy to become overloaded with building and district level initiatives. For Team LMS, we have been intentional about ensuring all our initiatives are aligned to the district strategic plan, while focusing on teacher growth, risk taking, improving current systems, reaching the whole child of ALL kids and fostering an environment that is focused on relationship building opportunities.
Written by Rob Pouch, Principal at Linden Middle School