Dive Brief:
- At Leadership Preparatory Charter School in Memphis, almost 44% of students reached proficiency in math skills on the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program last year — up more than 20% since 2021 and more than double the average across Memphis-Shelby County Public Schools, according to school leaders.
- The improvements come as nearly a quarter of charter school students in the system have reached proficiency, up from 2% in 2021.
- Leaders at the K-8 school — which serves a high population of low-income students — attribute the school’s success to acknowledging the challenges students faced, adopting high-quality curricula and adapting it to students’ needs, and making tweaks where needed rather than throwing everything out and starting anew
Dive Insight:
When it set out to improve student math performance, Leadership Prep identified that it had an underlying problem — and that it went beyond simply needed to adopt a new, high-quality curriculum, said Valissia Allen, Leadership Preparatory Charter School’s founder and chief strategy and innovation officer.
“We understood that curriculum couldn’t be the beginning and ending point,” she said. “We thought about “What are kids missing?” And we created our own lesson plan template to add those things on.”
The school joined the Teach Like A Champion math cohort, in which several Memphis schools learn from one another, said Corliss James, elementary principal at Leadership Prep.
“We went to other schools, studied their work, and looked at how teachers were planning and how they were delivering instruction,” she said. “We studied their artifacts, looked at their best practices." Sometimes, she added, you have to reach outside your school to find what's working well.
Allen said Leadership Prep realized it couldn’t take a “one-size-fits-all” approach to what had succeeded at other schools. “But we could still borrow things from other schools to fit our students,” she said.
“You have to get really granular about what your students need,” Allen said. “Teachers need to be really clear about the thinking steps to solve equations and make sure students understand them."
For instance, she said school leaders "thought through, ‘What do I need to see on a kid’s paper to make sure they’ve actually got this skill?’ We did professional development around that.”
The school also didn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to adopting high-quality curricula, deciding that it needed to adapt lessons using a “gradual release model — I do, we do, you do,” in which the teacher solves an equation, the whole class works on a similar problem, and then students are assigned to work on problems individually, Allen said.
Even during the “you do” stage, James said, teachers are circling the classroom and, if they notice common errors, they rewind to the “we do” stage to talk about what students are not understanding and why.
Leadership Prep has embraced these strategies while still providing autonomy for teachers to tailor their lessons, James said. “That lesson delivery model has grounded us. It is consistent across the board,” she said.
“We give our teachers autonomy, with guardrails,"James said. "They know best. They work with the students every day.”
Another key factor to students’ math improvement has been examining day-to-day results, rather than waiting for formal assessments, and adjusting the pace as needed, James added.
Educators at the school don’t believe in moving on to the next lesson "because we have to move on,” she said. “We want to make sure kids are understanding what is being put in front of them.”
And when pieces of curriculum and instruction do not seem to be working, Leadership Prep has iterated thoughtfully rather than starting over, Allen said.
From those performing above grade level to those less strong in math, “what does each set of kids need?” she asked. “We’re too quick to change curricula if something is not working. We need to learn how to double down but tweak things.”
The numbers are now showing the success of these efforts.
“We beat the state last year, and the year before that, we were neck-and-neck in terms of state average. Our below-proficiency-level has continuously decreased,” Allen said. “A lot of students are ‘approaching ‘meeting or exceeding [standards],’ but we want to bring them out of ‘approaching.’”
