IMPLEMENTATION PLAN
Creating a culture of achievement is a task that takes many years to master, a strong administrative team, collaboration with teachers and input from students. Understanding students helps to guide lesson planning, unit development and the unique cultural needs of students to help them succeed. A competency based learning experience will give students at City High School the best opportunity to succeed in the classroom and beyond.
Research
A description of collaborative learning models for City High School will be discussed in the following paragraphs. This will include descriptions of student engagement, key educational polices and conducive learning environment.
Competency Based Learning
A collaborative learning model that coincides with the vision statement for City High School is a focus on Competency Based Learning (CBL). CBL is an opportunity for students to master content of a class to move to the next level of learning, giving students an opportunity to work at their own pace to complete course work (Brodersen, Yanoski, Mason, Apthorp, Piscatelli, 2017). Competences are explicit, measurable, transferable skills that empower students and proved them a conducive learning environment. Assessments are meaningful, challenging, positive learning experiences for students. Proper feedback throughout the learning process is one of the most effective ways for students to understand accountability and how it applies to their personal lives (Wormeli, 2006).
Opportunities for student engagement are provided by teachers in the form of specific and regular feedback. Fleenor, Lamb, Anton, Stinson, & Donen, (2011) describe students completing work is similar to sports teams practicing for games, students need multiple opportunities to fail and succeed, receive feedback and correct their mistakes. Student developmental competencies represent skills and dispositions that support success within and beyond the classroom. Key educational policies include school wide competencies of self-awareness, self-management, perseverance, relationship skills and social awareness. These competencies empower learning because they are specifically developed for the student body of City High School and their specific academic, social and cultural needs.
Deduce
A CBL learning environment gives students the opportunity to work collaboratively with one another and provides opportunities to empower students. This plan will be implemented in City High School utilizing distributed leadership with teachers in the school sharing the leadership functions in their lesson preparation. By using this leadership model students are exposed to cross-curricular collaboration connecting multiple subjects to the same competency. A key performance indicator will be collaborative assessment when grading student work. The data will be used to continue to create culturally aware lessons and assessments. This process assures all students are assessed equally based on competencies taught in the unit.
Conclusion
Opportunities for regular teacher collaboration are the heart of the CBL process. Teachers have opportunities to collect student data, share with others in their department and use that information to drive their lesson plans, assessments and units. Regular and useful feedback is given to students by utilizing rubrics for grading and details of assignments. When students can collaborate in small groups, teachers collaborate with one another to create culturally aware lessons and administrative leaders can guide teachers a school wide culture of achievement can be accomplished.