Monitoring Student Progress at Seaside Elementary

In her office at Seaside Elementary, Principal Peggy Deschambault fills her bookcases with binders, each one packed with valuable information about how students are doing in every classroom throughout her school. The office walls are papered with bar graphs that illustrate student progress in reading and mathematics, and the words, “Believe it and we can achieve it.”

It’s a sentiment that teachers share at this Eastern Passage School, home to 13 classes of students in grades four, five and six. To know how students are doing, teachers at Seaside turn to a variety of data sources, from regular monitoring of classroom work to more formal assessments in specific subject areas.

If, for example, Deschambault wants to know how students are progressing in their understanding of decimal points, she need only look to one of the graphs on her wall to see they have made impressive gains. “That’s the difference with data, otherwise it was opinion,” Deschambault says. “Data tells the story.”

The story of Seaside Elementary is an inspiring one in which many people come together to help students reach their potential. But, don’t look for the ending: Seaside has no intention of declaring its work done while there are still successes to build upon.

Every week teachers at Seaside schedule time to come together, to share what’s working and troubleshoot what’s not. Together, they find new ways to take the benefit of their combined expertise back to their classrooms to improve student learning. Their team approach to teaching – which also includes assistance from a math coach and literacy coach - is evident throughout the building.

In Beth MacDonald’s Grade 5 classroom, a traffic light approach helps her gauge how her students are doing in their efforts to improve math communications skills. She opens a binder that shows the majority of her students have a green light, indicating they are where they should be, while a few have a yellow and a couple more have a red light. The red light students will require more one-on-one attention to move them to through yellow to green.

MacDonald flips back just a few pages to show the traffic lights that indicate how her students fared in their understanding of the water cycle. The green lights are a minority. For MacDonald it didn’t mean the water cycle was too difficult for her students, but that she needed to find a more effective way to teach them.

“It’s not about doing it slower and louder, it’s about actually doing something different,” she says.

Her strategies are the strategies teachers use throughout the school. 

A few doors down in another Grade 5 class, teacher Janice Ross is working toward the school’s goal to increase comprehension in reading. In pairs, the students take turns re-telling a story they have read while their classmate checks off whether their peer has told them enough about the main characters, the plot, and other details that effectively convey the story.

In Angela Doyle’s classroom, students are writing in journals they’ve covered with stickers, drawings and other imagery that makes them uniquely their own. Before they set pencil to paper they have a chat with someone beside them, as a way of fleshing out their ideas. Doyle’s efforts to monitor their work can be seen in the sticky notes tacked to pages throughout their journals.

To bring about improved student achievement, Deschambault and her team continually ask themselves what should students be learning, how will teachers know they’ve learned it, and how should they respond where gaps are evident in teaching and learning.

And to that there is one more question that Deschambault adds at the end of each day:  “How are we going to do better tomorrow?”