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Portfolio > Focus On Results > Areas of Focus: Develop Professional...
Develop Professional Collaboration Teams
Using a team-based approach to solving the challenges a school or district faces means that not just principals and high-level staff are involved. Teachers and administrative staff in each school, at every level, should be part of the process of creating and implementing a school's instructional focus.
A team-based approach helps a school by:
- Involving everyone on staff — teachers, principals, and administrators.
- Focusing the teaching staff on their school's instructional focus, and in working to develop academic standards that are aligned with it.
- Ensuring that all students, in every classroom, are challenged with high expectations for learning and performance.
- Changing teaching practices in a coordinated way, in keeping with the goals a school has set for itself.
- Bringing together people of diverse opinions, rather than leaving them isolated in their own "silos," to engage them in the process of making continual improvements in classroom instruction.
Results we've achieved
In several California public school systems, Focus On Results worked with six schools that we titled "Six Schools That Make A Difference."
Nearly 80 percent of the school system's students were on free or reduced-price lunches, and more than 60 percent of them spoke English as a second language. Through using a team-based approach in each of the six schools, Focus On Results was able to help the system:
- Create targeted professional development plans for their teachers.
- Use student test score data and research from their own schools to develop a set of teaching practices implemented by everyone on staff.
- Improve student scores on the California Academic Performance Index by an average of 200 points each year between 1999 and 2003.
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