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December 2007

Welcome to Exemplary Initiatives online!

Exemplars is a community of users dedicated to helping schools become successful in standards-based performance assessment and instruction. Our monthly newsletter features short pieces from Exemplars users, as well as brief reflections on current education issues and trends that impact standards, assessment and instruction.

If you would like to contribute, or have comments you would like to share, please get in touch with us at info@exemplars.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

15th Anniversary: Ross Remembers

Ross Brewer,
President, Exemplars

I can't believe that it has been 15 years. It seems like only yesterday that we published Volume 1 Number 1 of the Exemplars Mathematics Subscription. That first issue had less than a dozen subscribers and contained six mathematics tasks, two at K-2, two at 3-5 and two at 6-8. Today there are Exemplars users in 50 states and 27 countries.

The genesis of Exemplars goes back a bit further than these 15 years. It was the spirit of the Vermont Portfolio Assessment process that we hoped to capture with Exemplars and share with educators around the country. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Vermont developed a portfolio assessment program that was designed to assess student performance in writing and mathematics in the 4th and 8th grades. The goals of the Vermont portfolio process were simple. We hoped that the Vermont assessment would be one to which teachers would want to teach. Our vision was that students would be doing serious mathematics and writing instead of the more traditional test-prep activities common in some districts and states. We hoped, too, that a spirit of collaboration would be fostered between teachers as they assessed student work together and used the results to improve student performance, and that teacher-student collaboration would grow as students gave thought to what pieces they might want included in their portfolios.

The spirit of collaboration began in Vermont well before the assessments were in place. The process was designed by committees of remarkable Vermont teachers working together. Later, teams of Vermont teachers designed and implemented the professional development that helped make portfolios successful. Contrary to what some people might have heard, portfolio assessment is "alive and kicking" in Vermont, as one Exemplars consultant recently put it.

As I travel the country and hear from Exemplars users, I find that collaboration is a critical element in using Exemplars. In some cases it is as informal as conversations in the Teachers' Room about a particular problem or students' varying approaches to a particular problem. In others it is more formal, like the Exemplars Study Group described by Denise Walston in her discussion of the Norfolk Public Schools, or teachers working together in the data/war room at Brewer Elementary in Columbus, Georgia to understand why students are performing at a particular level as pictured by Carol Ann Wood, or "kids learning from other kids" in Sheridan, Wyoming.

These efforts pay off. All of these districts report real success. Brewer Elementary moved from being described as a school on the Needs Improvement List under NCLB to the Distinguished Schools List. Norfolk Schools won the Broad Foundation Award in 2005 as the best Urban District in the Country. Sheridan's math scores are among the highest in Wyoming.

One thing we learned was that the most powerful professional development occurs when teachers examine student work together-with purpose.

Exemplars is proud of its association over the years with the following:

Co-nect
CA Leadership Academy
CeeMaST
Charles A. Dana Center
Council of Basic Ed.
EDC
Education Trust
El Paso Ed. Collaborative

Everyday Mathematics

First in the World Consortium

Hampshire Ed. Collaborative

Maryland Assessment Consortium

McRel

NCREL

Pearson Learning

WestEd

From the Field: Norfolk Public Schools

Norfolk Public Schools Wins Broad Foundation Award as the Best Urban District in the Country

Norfolk Public Schools in Virginia was the recipient of the 2005 Broad Foundation Award as the top urban school district in the country. The award, "honors large urban school districts that demonstrate the greatest overall performance and improvement in student achievement while reducing achievement gaps among poor and minority students."

In the Broad Foundation's words, "It is clear that they (Norfolk Public Schools) have made education a priority for all students, and that commitment is evident in their academic results." According to Eli Broad, the Foundation's founder, Norfolk Public Schools have made remarkable progress in the past four years, demonstrating not only high achievement by all student groups but also greater improvement than similar districts in the state."

Norfolk Public Schools began using Exemplars in 2001. Denise Walston, Senior Coordinator of Mathematics, describes how Exemplars has been implemented in Norfolk. Exemplars is proud to have been part of this effort, and we feel privileged to work with an outstanding, committed educator like Denise.

Describing the District plan, Denise says, "Norfolk is an urban district that is experiencing success because we've been focused on not only improving student achievement but doing it for the long haul. We see the benefits of writing in mathematics and of using performance assessments in mathematics rather than simply relying on a multiple-choice assessment."

How are you using Exemplars for Assessment? Instruction? Professional Development?

We are using Exemplars as a professional development tool to TRAIN our teachers to look critically at what students know and CAN illustrate for us. We are also using them at the K-5 level specifically as an in-building assessment tool. Since we stress having students illustrate their thinking in words, pictures and numbers, Exemplars is a wonderful tool because it's written for and by teachers. Our teachers understand what they are looking for as a result of the assessments. In addition to assisting teachers in using performance assessment, we've encouraged and modeled an Exemplars task. We stress having the group investigate one or more problems together, followed by having students work through a task in a small group, and finally transitioning to those that students do periodically on their own.

One of the things that our elementary schools are doing is to chart the percent of students scoring at the different levels periodically so that as a grade level you can determine/describe student success (overall).

How was Exemplars introduced to teachers?

We started using Exemplars with a small group of interested teachers. These teachers became our ambassadors and have worked to infuse Exemplars within our program. We've identified specific Exemplars tasks for use in our curriculum. Last year we even had an Exemplars Study Group that met quarterly. Teachers were grouped by grade levels, worked on a task to discuss the mathematics, the curriculum objectives embedded within the lesson, and consider the rubric that would be used. The task was given to their students and the teachers returned the next time to discuss results. They shared samples of student work and talked about strategies for improving all of their students' performance. This was a K-6 professional development session.

Have other areas of your curriculum been affected by using Exemplars?

Science.

A Summary of Standards of Learning Math Test Pass Rates for the Norfolk Public School System: 2001-02 through 2005-06

Grade	Year					5-Year Change
	01-02	02-03	03-04	04-05	05-06
3rd	73%	79%	81%	83%	87%	14%
5th	62%	67%	74%	80%	85%	23%

From the Research Desk: Georgia

Ben Hartman, a teacher at Cedar Elementary in Gwinnett County, Georgia was concerned about performance in problem solving at his school. As part of his Education Leadership Program at Georgia State University, he studied the following question: Does using Exemplars on an almost weekly basis between October and March improve student performance on Exemplars problems and the CRCT (Georgia Criterion Referenced Competency Test). He found that it did make a difference in both cases.

Before using Exemplars only 6% of students met the standards and one-half of students performed at the Novice (lowest) level. After regular problem solving only one student (06%) was still at the Novice level, 55% met the standard and 11% exceeded the standard.

Progress was also made on CRCT performance. Prior to using Exemplars in the fourth grade, nearly one in five students did not meet the Georgia standard and only 6% of students exceeded the standard. After implementing Exemplars problem solving in the fifth grade, all students met the standard and nearly 40% of students exceeded the standard.

Performance on Exemplars Problems

Level	Before Using Exemplars	After Using Exemplars
Novice	50%	6%
Apprentice	44%	28%
Practitioner	6%	55%
Expert	0%	11%
Total	100%	100%

Performance on CRCT

Level	Before Using Exemplars in 2005	After Using Exemplars in 2006
Did Not Meet Standards	19%	0%
Met Standard	75%	62%
Exceed Standard	6%	38%
Total	100%	100%

N = 16

Extended versions of this and other studies will be found in future issues of Exemplary Initiatives and on the Exemplars Web site. Be sure to visit us at www.exemplars.com/research.html for the latest studies.

Change Is Never Easy...

Special Thanks to Carol Ann Wood, Brewer Elementary Academic Coach, for her contribution

And, sustained change is particularly difficult. So says the staff at the Brewer Elementary School. The Columbus, Georgia school has been in the process of change for several years. Brewer is a school-wide Title I site with approximately 96% of students on free and/or reduced lunch. The mobility rate is 20% but has fluctuated to as high as 40% in the past. The children live in low-rent housing, subsidized apartments, trailer parks, and small single-family homes. Parents, for the most part, are single, and they are employed in unskilled labor or unemployed.

Since its opening, Brewer Elementary has struggled with low test scores and student underachievement. The school had failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind and had been on the Needs Improvement list for the past several years primarily because of its performance on the Georgia Criterion Referenced Math Test.

It's not that teachers weren't trying. When a new program dealing with reading and math achievement was introduced, teachers implemented it. But, success remained illusive and frustration grew with successive programs. Morale was low for teachers, parents and students. What was at the root of the problem? Essentially teachers were "independent contractors," working in isolation using a number of different approaches and strategies.

This pattern continued until 2000-2001 when Brewer Elementary embarked on a School Reform Design. Among other things, this reform model gave the faculty a common direction for aligning teaching strategies and efforts into a united approach. They established a data/war room. Teachers met and reflected on areas of concern that they identified using the data. Then they acted.

Exemplars Math emerged as a resource teachers used to bridge the gap in learning that the data had uncovered. It provided opportunities to talk together, examine problems and student work and support math instruction. Holleigh Davis, a second-grade teacher, reported, "It is easy to use, teacher friendly, age appropriate and presents material in a varied and interesting way." Allowing for differentiated instruction to meet the needs of all the students in her class, Mrs. Longstreet, a second-grade teacher, uses Exemplars for her Problem of the Week. Two first-grade teachers, Ann Marie Wiley and Karen Grohman, appreciate Exemplars differing versions of the same problem or concept from simple to more complex, as well as its everyday situations and a "kid friendly" approach students can identify with.

The bottom line is that teachers are on the same page, often on the same problem, talking and analyzing student work together. Exemplars is a tool for teachers to use to teach mathematical concepts. "As a school, we can't claim that Exemplars was the only thing that made a difference in test scores, but it was definitely a benefit for our students and our longitudinal data shows it," reports Jan Grogan, Principal.

Test scores have improved. Brewer Elementary has moved from being a school on the Needs Improvement List to a school named to the Distinguished Schools List.