A School Looking For International Validation
St. Theresa Bilingual School was looking to secure international accreditation with Cognia, which is a non-profit that accredits primary and secondary schools worldwide.
As part of the accreditation process, Cognia laid out specific recommendations to St. Theresa’s leadership team for school improvement.
The leadership, under Donna Dixon, took these recommendations and got to work.
With recommendations in hand, Dixon and her team began dreaming up strategies for continuous school improvement.
The areas they needed to focus on were:
- Developing a system of job-embedded professional development
- Fostering more collaborative learning opportunities
- Deepening educators’ understanding of Common Core standards, relevant benchmarks, and the school’s curriculum
- Building community involvement in the school
It was a tall order.
Especially considering their very limited experience in the area of professional development…
The Blind Leading The Blind
Up to this point, Dixon and her team had been in charge of professional development at St. Theresa.
Unfortunately for them, professional development (PD) options were limited within Honduras – to say the least.
Their process mainly consisted of purchasing relevant books and having teachers read them and create presentations for the school.
As one can imagine, the teachers were not engaged.
Because of this, Dixon didn’t see the shifts in instructional practices that they needed to improve the school.
The Introduction That Changed Everything
St. Theresa’s path to Cognia accreditation looked bleak. But just as their goal seemed out of reach, a simple introduction changed everything.
Cognia had introduced Dixon and her team to LINCspring.
After learning about the program, they were excited about its model. They saw the opportunity to vastly expand the professional development content they could offer to their teachers.
Embracing Innovation with LINCspring
Being a trailblazer, Dixon took the brave initiative to create an innovative strategy of aligning their potential work in LINCspring with the recommendations in Cognia’s Accreditation Report.
Specifically, Dixon created a schoolwide playlist from the LINCspring Roadmaps: Learning, Capacity, Technology, and Culture. All of the cycles Dixon selected aligned with the “Insights from the Review” section of Cognia’s report.
In addition, Dixon set up protocols and guidelines for her leadership team to track and supervise the LINCspring playlists in accordance with the Cognia Leadership Capacity Standard.
From there, Dixon leveraged the school’s professional learning communities (PLCs).
She asked each PLC to choose 3-4 cycles they were interested in working on together as a team and she assigned each team certain cycles from her curated list of cycles aligned to Cognia’s recommendations.
These areas included:
- Grouping students for differentiated instruction
- Fostering student agency over learning in classrooms through self-reflection and goal setting
- Supporting student collaboration and developing more student-led instruction and less teacher-guided instruction
- Developing Google classrooms for teachers to provide feedback to students
- Creating community in digital environments
A Newfound Love for Learning
St. Theresa’s new systems helped build teacher buy-in into using LINCspring because it was simple.
Establishing a dedicated, regular time to work in LINCspring is a critical factor in St. Theresa’s successful PD implementation plan.
On school-wide PD days, teachers worked on their assigned cycles, and during their weekly PLC meetings, they worked on the self-selected cycles.
Cleverly Maximizing Teacher Buy-In
Dixon and her co-administrator, Annie, learned they could earn even more buy-in by digging in deep with one grade band and then showing the evidence of progress to the others.
For example, the preschool teachers engaged deeply in LINCspring’s cycle on SeeSaw and started effectively using the tool with students and families.
Once the 1st- and 2nd-grade teachers saw this in action, they saw the benefits of using SeeSaw and were excited to complete the cycle and begin using the tool to build collaboration and community.
Receiving the Validation They Deserve
On March 31, 2020, Cognia awarded St. Theresa its formal accreditation from the Global Commission.
This highly coveted distinction made all of the hard work worthwhile.
In the end, what has made this a success, “is that it allows teachers to take control and ownership of their own professional development in the same way we want it to happen for students over their learning,” said Dixon.
Dixon and her team are encouraged by the improvements taking place across the school.
St. Theresa continues to use LINCspring as part of its strong commitment to continuous improvement and to creating a student-led, personalized learning experience for all of its students in the years to come.