Passports to success for Edgewood students
At Edgewood Highland Elementary School, the secret to student success is not really a secret.
It’s a well-known fact: When looking at student success, one must look at the whole child and their needs, strengths and weaknesses.
“Everything works together,” said Principal Marlene Gamba recently. “If the kids are happy, if the school is orderly, everything else will follow.”
Edgewood Highland was recently recognized for some impressive gains in their PARCC test scores from last spring, gone up in the area of English Language Arts (ELA) from 35.2 from 2016 to 64 in 2017.
Gamba attributes those gains to multiple things, including a new Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (PBIS) initiative implemented at the start of the new school year. With the new program, each student is given a passport, which breaks down the behavior expectations for every place in the building, from the lunchroom to the classroom and even outdoors for recess. The students earn stamps in their passports for learning and carrying out the behaviors. If a student is experiencing an issue in any area, the passports are brought out and the behavior expectations are reviewed again. The program was spearheaded by two of her staff members, Michelle Collette and Caroline Geaber, who have helped to lead the rest of the faculty and staff in utilizing the program schoolwide.
Additionally, Gamba and her team of faculty and staff have used other data and information to help their students succeed, such as the statewide Surveyworks data released last spring for each school and school district across the state.
“I had two areas that I chose to have our school work on,” said Gamba, who studied the data herself before passing it on to her staff. “I didn’t want to just present it all at once. I wanted to go through the data first and start the planning, to give them a roadmap. The two areas I chose were student anxiety and how organized the students felt.”
Gamba felt that those two areas were important to deal with, and focused on the students’ social-emotional well-being, which affects their whole day.
“When I added up all the sections with the various questions about anxiety, 79 percent of students responded that they had experienced anxiety,” she said. “It is important to deal with that stress. We all have it, even me some days. I decided we should work on that and we thought that the PBIS program would also help to relieve some of that anxiety if the expectations for behavior were made more clear.”
When Gamba further explored her Surveyworks data, she found that 40 percent of students wished they were more organized, so that became her next goal, and it is the hope that the PBIS program will also help in that area.
Technology is also infused into daily learning at Edgewood, with students learning that technology is part of their daily lives, even in the area of standardized testing, which is now largely computerized.
“We don’t teach to the test here, we teach these types of things daily, so the students were learning in the way that they would be assessed later on, using the Google Chromebooks regularly,” she said. “They had been doing it all along, interacting with them and I could just tell that they were going to do well on the ELA portion of the test.”
A positive attitude is fostered schoolwide as well.
“We wanted them to relax and take the test, to be excited, but relaxed during the test,” she said. “We don’t want to scare the kids and we don’t even emphasize that it is a test. We knew that if the kids were happy coming in, they would do well.”
As a former teacher herself and a reading specialist, Gamba also feels that it is important to emphasize the strong connection between reading and writing when teaching literacy.
“We sat as a team and talked about the goal of making sure that children realize that reading is not just summarizing a story every time,” Gamba said. “It is understanding things like voice and writing styles. Reading is interacting with the text, making judgements and being critical thinkers, knowing voice, point of view, recognizing figures of speech and seeing how those things make a difference. It’s being able to use those things as writers themselves.”
The school uses ACES in their instruction toolbox, which stands for Answering the question, Citing evidence, Expanding on that evidence and making a Summary statement.
“Testing is not a competition, but we are so proud of our gains in the area of ELA this year,” Gamba said. “Now the goal is to maintain that progress. We may see a drop in scores as we transition to a new test, the RICAS, but our attitude is still positive. We are also using a new math program, Eureka Math and implementing a new reading program.”
Gamba and her staff also realize that the old adage about Rome not being built in a day rings true in all areas of life, including at school.
“Change takes years and we know we can’t improve all at once,” she said. “It is a process. Our mindset has to be positive and we have to remember that for many kids, coming to school is the best part of their day. Kids come to school with so many issues. We need to keep them enthused, not overwhelmed and keep adapting to change as it comes. Things are changing daily and we need to adapt to those changes.”
Gamba credits her staff for their team efforts and for keeping things positive at Edgewood. From her classroom teachers to the various specialists and interventionists at Edgewood, Gamba is proud of her staff for being strong role models and good motivators for staff and students alike.
“Everyone works together, everyone pitches in and helps each other and this is passed on to our kids,” she said. “My staff is so supportive, it makes me want to come to school every day.”
