Schools

Kindergarten Scores Soar at Lakeview Elementary

Robbinsdale school officials say a collaborative effort was the reason for the 49% growth since the fall.

Lakeview Elementary School is proof that it does, indeed, take a village.  The school of 413 students, with 62 kindergartners, is reaping the benefits of collaborative teaching and carefully planned interventions with those kindergarten students, as was evidenced
by winter growth assessments in both math and reading.

The fully authorized International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme school (IB PYP) embraces a very collaborative team approach to meet the needs of students, something that is
engrained in the philosophy of the IB program.

“We implemented purposefully scheduled intervention time in Response to Intervention [RtI] this year,” explained Principal Nichole Rens, “but it was a natural fit because of the existing collaborative approach.”

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Using standard kindergarten assessments, including rote counting to 50, recognizing numerals and upper and lower case letters, and high frequency word recognition, this year’s kindergartners enjoyed enormous growth halfway through the year – in some areas of math, such as rote counting, the students grew 49% from the fall, and in reading, such as recognizing high frequency words, students grew an impressive 81%.


“We understand that if we can eliminate the achievement gap early, we have students who are more likely to excel as they get older,” stated Rens.

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At Lakeview, every grade level has at least three people that push in to the classroom throughout the day. A push-in model is more beneficial to students, because they aren’t leaving the
classroom for instruction in isolation. They are still part of a community of learners, something that IB embraces as a cornerstone of its philosophy.

Because of this model, all students, no matter where they fall on the learning continuum, receive intervention time every day. For
students who need scaffolding in an area such as reading, intervention time is used for that.

For students who are on or above grade level in that area, the intervention time is used for taking the learning to a deeper level or an accelerated level. “Every student is getting what he or she needs,”
said Rens. And because there is no new instruction during intervention time, no student is missing anything.

Teachers as well build community among themselves. Grade levels meet weekly to discuss students’ growth and plan for instruction. Two weeks a month, the grade level teachers meet with the IB coordinator, to plan lessons and units that focus on the development of the whole child as an inquirer. At grade level meetings the other two weeks, teams immerse themselves in data analysis, aligning instruction with what the data is telling them, and work with an instructional
coach during that time.


As a result of the structure of both the students’ day and the teachers’ time, the interventions are much more effective. The winners? The students.

Editor's Note: Assessment and data was provided by Robbinsdale Area Schools' communications director, Tia Clasen.


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