Measuring up Dist. One’s best practices

Superintendent Sheldahl discusses how the district aligns with the best practices identified by state schools chief tom Horne

During Yuma School District One’s August governing board meeting, Superintendent James Sheldahl presented a requested report on State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne’s visit with Arizona principals from high-performing schools back in May 2023.

Horne identified three practices the 10 schools share in common: focus on student discipline, the use of data to track student progress and aligning instruction with state standards.

Sheldahl noted that half of the schools represented are structurally similar to District One schools and discussed how the district’s practices align with the three best practices.

Student Discipline

“Proactively, our teachers focus on establishing and reinforcing classroom routines, procedures and expectations to protect the academic culture of the classroom,” Sheldahl said. “That’s why we have discipline – we need to make sure that we have a productive culture of learning in the classroom. Now when behavior disrupts the culture of learning in the classroom, then we have to move forward with our discipline practices.”

He explained that the district has an established discipline matrix that’s periodically reviewed and updated to ensure students receive “their due process when they get this phase.”

“From that point, we practice a progressive discipline; in other words, we don’t go right to exclusionary practices or extreme practices on the first offense,” Sheldahl continued. “We try to work with the students and handle things at the lowest level with the lightest touch as possible initially but there are times when either a student has been sent to the office and had multiple infractions or they have committed a serious infraction that results in a campus safety issue.”

In those types of cases, students are suspended. If they’re suspended for nine days at a time, they’re in a long-term suspension but learning continues. An alternative school is in place where students excluded for a long term are transferred to the alternative and provided transportation there where they do school work online in the classroom.

Alternatives to suspension also exist since Arizona statutes now limit suspensions for students in kindergarten through 4th grade. Sheldahl stated that that’s given the district an impetus into looking at alternatives that address student behavior without excluding students.

“So we’ve been working on some restorative practices at the administrative level,” he said. “One thing that restorative practices do is they expand the toolkit for addressing behaviors and kind of in the old-school way. Well, we don’t swat anymore but in the old-school way.

“Here’s the best analogy I’ve heard: if a kid couldn’t read, we taught them how to read. If a kid struggled to do math, we taught them how to do math. If a kid couldn’t behave, we sent them home. We didn’t send them home because they couldn’t read, thinking that they’re going to come back better readers. We didn’t send ‘em home thinking they’d come back better at math. We sent them home thinking they’d come back better with their behavior.”

Sheldahl referred to this as a three-legged stool approach where by the time the school is ready to send the kid home, the parents have been involved, understand what the behaviors are and have been engaged. This way, the school has been working with both parents and students.

“We want negative behaviors to stop and we want to replace them by clustering behaviors that contribute to a positive classroom,” Sheldahl said. “So restorative practices, they protect the academic culture of the classroom and in those practices, the students acknowledge the harm they’ve taken or the action or the damage they’ve done and they take action to repair that damage.”

When a student or parent isn’t on board, however, the school simply resorts back to more traditional consequences but the main priority is to keep kids in school and classes so that discipline is used to teach rather than only punish.

Monitoring Student Progress

The second best practice involves using student data to monitor their progress. Sheldahl shared that the district uses a variety of data sets and data points to track students’ progress with meeting state standards. The list of sets includes:

• Galileo benchmark data (grades 3-8)

• Acadience reading data (grades K-12)

• 95% reading data (phonics instruction and intervention)

• Benchmark (ELA) curriculum assessments

• Zearn math assessments

• Magma Math

• Moby Max (cross-curricular K-8)

• Study Island (ELA, math and science)

• Step Process (continuous improvement cycle)

• “Data Drives” and student profiles

“When we gather that data, our teachers work in collaborative teams,” Sheldahl said. “…and they also will take data dives. They’ll take days – some principals will give a sub for a day or pay people to come in maybe on a Saturday or stay late and review student data in what we call data dives and really see where our kids are standing and how the teachers can address both the kids who are excelling as well as the kids that are struggling.”

Aligning Instruction with State Standards

Sheldahl stated there are two sides to aligning instruction with state standards. The first side involves unpacking those standards, an effort driven by District One’s learning services department and building principals.

By unpacking the standards, the district is putting together curriculum maps to ensure the state standards will be hit throughout the year. Pacing guides are created so that teachers and kids have the best chances of being exposed to and taught the needed information before testing.

“Now if you read anything about the state standards in general, you can’t teach them all effectively during the course of a year,” he said. “So our teachers and our administrators and coaches identify certain power standards – those standards that are either foundational and they teach kids foundational skills that are going to help them across the board or they’re transportable, they apply to more than one subject area.”

On top of that, the district identifies at what levels students need to perform in order to be deemed proficient. With Professional Learning Community collaborative teams, discussions are held focusing on the standards.

The other side of this is actually having curriculum that’s aligned with state standards. Benchmark English Language Arts (ELA) for grades K-6, Into Literature for grades 7-8, Zearn Math and Newsella are all used to help with this goal but Sheldahl noted that instructional coaching is essential.

“Our instructional coaching corps is extremely critical in this process,” he said. “They deliver professional development relative to the standards and the curriculum. They facilitate CTM conversations at the schools. They coach individual teachers. They go into classrooms. They give and they observe and give feedback relative to these instructional strategies and they collaborate with principals so that they are customizing the support for each school.”

He concluded that instructional coaching is critical for both aligning curriculum with state standards and encouraging student progress.

Superintendent Sheldahl closed his presentation by offering an invitation to Superintendent Horne.

“Let’s give him an open invitation to come and see the incredible things happening at each of our schools because I will put these people up against any 10 principals in the state of Arizona any day of the week and twice on Sundays,” Sheldahl exclaimed.