As a follow-up to your presentation to the Leadership Team, you decide to meet with the entire faculty to share your ideas for a more strategic allocation of resources at Chester Middle School. There is general agreement around the need to make organizational changes that address the school’s top priority: improving reading among students who are low performing in that content area while maintaining high levels of learning for every student. After the faculty meeting, you reflect upon concrete ideas to address these priorities.
Your first step is to narrow your scope, so you ask yourself which group of students requires immediate attention. You all agree to target sixth-grade reading students, whose test scores are particularly low. As prescribed by the Guiding Resource Principles, you decide to create more individual attention and personal learning experiences for these students. You are aware that several schools in your district have been successful by dividing regular classrooms into smaller groups during part of the instructional time. These schools demonstrated marked improvement in student performance after adopting this strategy.
Currently, the average sixth-grade reading class size at Chester Middle School is 25. Your plan would create regularly scheduled small-group time (of approximately eight students) for every sixth grader. You are aware that when sharing your plan with the Leadership Team and faculty, you will have to justify your decision making. You recognize that you may face questions around equity, as some students at Chester Middle School will benefit from this reallocation of resources, whereas others will not.
You decide to prepare a proposal to present to the Leadership Team and faculty. In it, you will share your ideas regarding how Chester Middle School can provide the resources—people, time, and money—to successfully implement small-group time in every sixth-grade reading classroom. Before you begin to write the proposal, you reflect upon the following questions:
Why was small-group instruction chosen over other strategies?
How much small-group time will be scheduled each week?
With no new money in the budget, how will this strategy be financed?
What are the consequences of using this strategy?
What problems might arise when proposing and implementing this strategy?
You confer with colleagues and conduct your own research on small-group instruction. You realize there will be ramifications that affect the entire staff (i.e., with no additional funding for this plan, you will have to eliminate one or more non-instructional positions in order to hire teaching staff—e.g., reading experts, part-time reading instruction teachers) to successfully implement the small-group instruction time. You are well aware that there will be resistance to this decision. In preparing your proposal, you must consider how you will address opposition to the plan.
To prepare
Consider the benefits of small-group time.
Consider how you will address opposition to the proposal.
Assess the number of minutes of small-group time to be provided weekly.
Use the “Funding Small-Group Time Worksheet” document, as well as the course media and resources provided in this module to inform your proposal.
Write a 2- to 3-page proposal to the faculty, in which you:
Explain how you will reallocate school resources to provide small-group time in the sixth-grade reading classes.
Identify the number of minutes of small-group time to be provided weekly.
Explain how the proposed plan will be financed and which non-instructional position(s) will be eliminated.
Present a financial breakdown of the reallocation of school resources within a simple spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet should contain at least one formula to total all the values in a column and that updates its result if values change later on.
Explain how you made your choices.
Provide a research-based explanation for the trade-offs and rationale behind these choices.
Address possible concerns or obstacles in response to the plan.
Be sure to support your Assignment with specific references to the resources and other current literature in the Walden Library.
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