KSBA eNews Service, Frankfort, April 24, 2015
More districts want to join state’s non-traditional instruction program; official: first full year a success
By Brad Hughes
The 13 school systems that participated in the first full year of the Kentucky Department of Education’s snow days learning pilot have earned full credit for every day submitted to count as an actual class day. And officials at the department expect that the number of districts signing up for the program in the 2015-16 school year could double.
“The first year was as good as you could expect,” said David Cook, director of KDE’s Division of Innovation and Partner Engagement. “All 13 original districts have indicated a desire to participate next year, and we’ve probably gotten at least that many more applications or word from districts wanting to participate.”
Under legislation passed by the 2014 General Assembly, the program is no longer limited to districts having previously missed a specified minimum number of days.
Districts in the program must document a variety of things, such as teacher lesson plans, student work products, participation rates for students and teachers and how time for nonteaching classified staff will be made up (when buses aren't running and meals aren’t being cooked). The documentation is reviewed by KDE staff who make a recommendation to Education Commissioner Terry Holliday.
“Some districts asked for the maximum 10 days; others nine, or eight or less. We recommended that all of the requests be approved, and Commissioner Holliday has done so,” Cook said.
With the harsh winter of 2014-15 barely still on people’s minds, Cook isn’t surprised at the interest by more districts to join the program. Applications are due by next Friday, May 1.
“Every time you have a winter like we had, you’re going to have people thinking about something like this, “he said. “Of course, if we have a winter next year with little snow, people won’t be thinking about it.”
Exciting first reviews
A second step in the state review process is a site visit to each participating district, where interviews are conducted with teachers, students, administrators and parents.
“That was probably the most rewarding part of this, to see the work the kids worked on during snow days," Cook said. “What we’re finding is that, especially at the high school, they are really using the project-based approach. Teachers are creating things that would take kids more than one day to complete. They start the project on the first snow day and they work on them the second and then the third snow day.
“What we found was that the thing we wanted this program to do more than anything else – to avoid learning loss, particularly in districts that miss weeks at a time – took place,” he said. “Is it the same as classroom instruction? Obviously it’s not. But the comment that comes back more frequently than others from teachers is, ‘When I come back to school after being out for a week, I don’t have to in essence start over. I can start right back where I was supposed to start. The kids have had time to do the work.’ In districts that miss several days due to snow, you not only lose that instructional time, you lose two days because you have to back up and say, ‘Let’s review all of this.’ They come back from being out five days from having learning go on all five days.”
Student and teacher participation data – a key tracking measure of the pilot – was good as well.
“I think in most cases, the rate of participation was on par with the average, and surprisingly in a couple of districts it was higher than their average daily attendance,” Cook said. “I think that was because, in most cases, that sense of engagement was there. It’s been real interesting to see how the kids acted. We had one message from a parent to a superintendent with a picture of their kids sitting around the kitchen table at 6:30 in the morning, saying, ‘What have you done to my kids? They are awake and wanting to work on their school work!’”
Next yardstick: 2015 K-PREP results
The final – and for some, most important – measurement of the use of non-traditional instruction is the benefit – or lack thereof – that shows up when state accountability tests measure how those students who were working from home scored on this spring’s K-PREP exams.
“Obviously, one thing is to see if this has at least not harmed their scores, or at least show the amount of growth they’ve had in previous years, and hopefully a little more growth because they’ve had 10 days of instruction before the tests that they wouldn’t have had before. People are going to ask, ‘Does this benefit kids to do this?,’ Cook said.
But Cook also has seen another potential benefit that he expects to show up in future years in classrooms of participating districts.
“The other thing I see happening is that teachers in these districts are realizing that maybe they should do some of their in-classroom instruction the same way they’ve been doing these nontraditional days. In other words, they do more blended learning activities so kids are used to doing stuff on the computer, doing projects that do a little different thought process that will be used on snow days,” he said. “In the districts that have done this in the current year, it will be interesting to watch them next fall, because I think a lot of teachers are going to implement these ideas that they do on nontraditional days as soon as school starts, so they get these kids acclimated, so as soon as the first snow days happens, the kids are going to be like, ‘Yeah, we’ve already done this. This makes sense to me.’”