El Dorado teachers will get an extra hour during the next school year to develop data-driven plans to ensure every student is learning and retaining the vital knowledge they need to graduate from high school.
Jim Tucker, superintendent of the El Dorado School District, announced during the district's closing session last week that schools will begin dismissing at 1:30 p.m. on Wednesdays each week. During the 2021/2022 school year, schools dismissed at 2:30 p.m. on Wednesdays.
During the 2021/2022 school year, the district introduced an extra 15 minutes of daily instruction with a Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday schedule that began at 7:55 a.m. and ended at 3:25 p.m. Tucker said additional instructional time won't be added this year, but the benefits that come from the work teachers do in the extra hour on Wednesdays will outweigh the time missed.
Professional learning communities
Before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, the ESD had already started working to implement professional learning communities (PLCs), where teachers can work with others in their grade-level or topic of instruction to dive deeply into investigations of student success.
The pandemic threw the ESD's timeline for implementing PLCs off, Tucker said, but last year -- in addition to adding before- and after-school and Saturday tutoring for students -- teachers were able to start devoting an hour on Wednesdays to working with their peers to ensure student success.
The district partners with Solution Tree, a professional development company, to organize PLCs and collaborative team meetings among teachers. A coach from Solution Tree works at each campus in the ESD, as well as the administration office to work with teachers and administrators through the PLC meeting process, Tucker said.
PLCs work together to determine what essential knowledge students can't graduate without.
"Arkansas has standards everyone needs, and we try to narrow that down into the essentials -- what is in this that's non-negotiable?" Tucker explained. "We teach the rest, but we focus on this the most."
After that, PLCs ask how they'll know whether their students have learned the material. They collaborate with others in their group to develop assessments that will test whether their students are absorbing the information they're teaching.
"Not necessarily for a grade, but they talk about how they're going to know if what we are teaching these students is coming across. If they're getting it, we'll keep on, and if not, we re-address our teaching," Tucker said.
Using the data they gathered from student assessments, teachers compare results to determine whether they need to try a different strategy to impart the knowledge to students or whether some students might need individualized intervention in order to attain the information.
For students who are mastering the material, teachers also work to devise ways they can expand on what they've learned.
Tucker said the time spent gathering data, working with their peers and developing assessments and interventions will help teachers develop as educators and ensure all students are learning what they need to.
"It's a very powerful process, but it takes a lot of time for teachers to look at that data and develop around it... It makes a powerful impact with student learning, because the best thing for a teacher to do is talk to other teachers," Tucker said. "They just don't ever have time to collaborate, but this gives them that time."
Teacher reaction
Approximately 380 teachers work in the El Dorado School District, and last Friday, they came together for the district's closing session that doubled as the annual Teacher Excellence Awards.
During the session, Tucker announced the new Wednesday schedule and teachers throughout the El Dorado High School theater cheered for nearly half a minute.
"I went to many, many schools over the course of the year, observed a lot of that and saw some really, really outstanding work being done. I know it's hard work, but it's good work and it benefits students," Tucker said, before announcing the new 1:30 p.m. Wednesday dismissal time.
Teachers throughout the building cheered loudly, and when Tucker followed up with a question for them -- "Whenever you dismissed this past year at 2:30, did the easy work start or did the hard work start?" --, they yelled in unison that it was the hard work.
"Whenever I see you standing up and clapping about 1:30, it makes me feel good knowing that, I mean, you're getting two hours to really dedicate to your team," Tucker said. "I appreciate that."