Class Acts
‘School-Wide Success’ builds on ‘ExCEL’lent program
It’s not often that the goals of closing the achievement gap, providing professional development opportunities to teachers and benefiting children by using innovative and effective instructional methods coincide. But at Sutterville Elementary School in Sacramento, they do.
Begun in 2004, Sutterville’s School-Wide Success model, a program that provides individualized and differentiated instruction in English language arts to K-6 students in small group settings, has exceeded the high expectations the school community had for it. School leaders had concluded from data analysis a few years ago that they needed a way to better use the resources they had to serve their at-risk students and students with special needs, and to provide more challenges and enrichment for advanced students.
“We started thinking, ‘How can we do even more and service more students? How can we make sure that all kids are accepted? That they learn?’ ” says Cindy Bertacchi, the program’s lead teacher.
The next step in the process came when Sacramento City Unified School District officials invited a team from the Excellence—a Commitment to Every Learner program at Hesperia Unified School District in Southern California’s high desert region to conduct a workshop for Sutterville teachers and their aides. Described as an approach both to early intervention and prevention for at-risk students and to acceleration for gifted students, ExCEL had been incorporated with great success over a nine-year period in 12 elementary schools and two middle schools at Hesperia. Sutterville adapted the program for SWS, making a few changes here and there to better serve its student population, and the rest is happy history.
The SWS model is at the heart of Sutterville’s system to provide opportunities for all students to meet rigorous standards in English language arts. At the start of each school year, students are placed in flexible groupings using a variety of academic assessments, including weekly and end-of-unit Open Court assessments from the previous school year, as well as the most current STAR testing data.
The groupings are established during academic conferences that include current and previous teachers and support, and the number of groupings is based on the number of teachers at each grade level. For instance, if six teachers participate in the primary grades, the six instructional clusters might include a Far Below Basic group, Below Basic group, Low Basic group, High Basic group, Proficient group and Advanced group. At an intermediate grade level with three teachers, there might be three clusters: a Far Below Basic and Below Basic combination, a Basic group and a Proficient and Advanced combination.
“The SWS program allows us to individually address the assessed ELA learning needs of each of the 480 first- through sixth-grade students by delivering one hour of direct, differentiated instruction to flexible grade-level groupings on a daily basis,” Bertacchi says. “Differentiated instruction—a key strategy in SWS—enables us to meet the individual learning needs of all students. Acceleration of the curriculum allows us to meet the learning needs of our advanced students. [The small-group] strategies allow us to achieve greater depth and complexity while creating additional teaching time to better address students’ assessed learning needs.”
Weekly grade-level meetings and academic conferences every trimester provide the teaching staff with the opportunity for collaboration and discussion about curriculum and individual students.
“At these meetings, we are able to move students between groups to meet their ever-changing needs,” says Bertacchi. “This is also the time for us to continually evaluate our curriculum based on student needs to ensure that every child is supported by a knowledgeable, caring team.”
Evidence of the curriculum’s accomplishments is not hard to come by. STAR test scores and English language assessments have improved. Rising numbers of students are passing comprehension, fluency, spelling and grammar tests. In 2006, the Sutterville SWS program won a CSBA Golden Bell award and also a Title 1 Academic Achievement award.
Perhaps best of all, students are engaged.
“Kids like it,” Bertacchi says. “At the start of the school year, they want to know when SWS is starting. When they’re learning and getting access to the core curriculum, they really enjoy it.”
For anyone considering adopting the program, Sutterville Principal Lori Aoun has some words of advice.
“This is really a paradigm shift in terms of how our personnel resources are used,” Aoun says. “The traditional model calls for a special day class where only special education students are seen by that teacher and stay with them all day long. Or there’s a resource specialist who pulls kids out of a class for an hour or so. Rather than do that, we’re serving so many more kids.
“If you’re considering this, it will be a process of change and adjustment,” she says. “People will have to work in a very collaborative way, in a way that is very data focused and student-needs focused, as opposed to the traditional roles and responsibilities of special education and resources personnel and aides. So ongoing communication and collaboration is critical to making the SWS model work. In fact, it’s not possible without it.”
Bertacchi agrees with Aoun on what makes the Sutterville program work, and she credits the principal with setting the right tone for the teaching team.
“We spend so much time training together,” Bertacchi says. “We’ve collaborated on differentiated instruction, and right now we’re working on a series on Response to Intervention [strategies].Our principal is so fabulous at asking our SWS group, ‘What do you need in order to move forward?’ It’s a dynamic process, and you always need to do more. We continually revise and refine what we do.”
—Marsha Boutelle