#5 - School Improvement Committee

Over the past two semesters, I have had the opportunity to become actively involved in both the writing and reading committee at Detroit Premier Academy.    We were able to make some improvements to our school through involving staff and students in school-wide initiatives and staff must do’s. 

            Starting with the Writing Committee, which is an area that most of our school struggles with to make improvements.  A survey was initiated to find what teachers feel is lacking in our writing instruction and to find ways that we can help.  This survey prompted an initiative to have a writing professional development to help encourage teachers with ideas to improve their writing instruction.  On February 22, 2012, a group of teachers and I conducted a writing professional development in which we taught our grade levels a lesson in which the teachers could incorporate cross-curricular approaches to writing.  This was a wonderful experience for myself as well as the other staff that was involved. 

            The Reading Committee was a slow start to the school year, but we were able to end strong with Reading Month.  The committee met monthly to come up with ideas to improve reading comprehension, participation and to get everyone more excited to read.  One of the great ideas was to hire an author to come talk to our students, but this was unaffordable.  Another idea was to publish authors from our school and sell this book to our students.  We all had ideas of what the problem was and a plethora of ideas to help solve the problem but we never really settled on a few.  This took a few months to finally start to become more organized into a plan of action and with March, being National Reading Month only a month away, our committee moved into high gear with trying to prepare a plan for teachers and students.  We decided upon a different activity each day of the week for the reading month.  Monday’s would be Buddy Reading which was designed to give students at least 10 minutes a day to read with a buddy.  Tuesday’s would be Family Reading in which we invite our family or the students’ family into the classroom to read a book to the class.  Wednesday’s would be Staff Guest Readers in which non-teaching staff would have an opportunity to come into the classroom and read a book to the class.  Thursday’s would be Reading Spirit Days in which each week would be a different fun thing to wear, crazy hat day, crazy sock day, Step Into a Good Book gym shoe day, and Cozy up to a good book day in which students would be able to wear pajamas and bring a pillow with their book.  Friday’s would be D.E.A.R. (drop everything and read) day.  With the end of March is Reading Month, these activities were a success! The guest readers were very happy with the opportunity to go into the classrooms and the students had fun as well.