West Chester Area School District's Approach to Mastery and Expectations

Overview

Between January 2022 and June 2023, the district featured below was one of 20 participants in The Learning Accelerator (TLA)’s Strategy Lab: Virtual & Hybrid program to address a problem of practice related to virtual and hybrid learning environments. Through their participation in Strategy Lab, this team was guided through a multi-step process to identify their unique goals and gaps before determining and designing measurable solutions to their challenge. The Strategy Lab program was based on the Real-Time Redesign (RTR) toolkit, which takes participants through a rapid, research-based, and field-tested process for making targeted improvement toward more equitable, effective, and engaging virtual/hybrid learning and included:

• Conducting a needs assessment, which included self- and team-assessments as well as empathy interviews

• Researching potential strategies to address the root cause(s) of their problem and achieve desired student outcomes

• Designing a measurable solution

• Conducting and measuring a pilot

• Planning for continuous improvements

For approximately 18 months, this district worked in Strategy Lab’s cohort model to identify and address a problem of practice specific to their virtual program – in this case, establishing norms and expectations. The district team gathered data, explored potential solutions, and then designed, implemented, measured, and reflected on a pilot program created to address norms and expectations.

To learn more about TLA's research on effective instruction as it relates to establishing norms and expectations, please visit our Insight: Norms and Expectations in Virtual and Hybrid Learning.

West Chester Area School District's Cyber Program

West Chester Area School District’s (WC) Cyber Program, a virtual and hybrid school based in Pennsylvania, serves 230 students in grades 6-12. Their instructional model offers a combination of synchronous and asynchronous courses. WC joined Strategy Lab to understand how to build a robust and sustainable program.

Understanding the Challenge

The team identified two challenges:

1. The need to develop multiple ways for students to demonstrate mastery of standards; and

2. The need to establish common understandings of rigor and expectations for cyber courses.

According to their team assessment, district leaders believed that they consistently articulated clear expectations for virtual learning to teachers through their cyber course teacher handbook. However, they shared that teachers were only in the beginning stages of using common norms for organizing content and materials after finding inconsistencies across classes and teachers. The team further acknowledged that there was room for improvement across the program as they did not have a concrete vision for engaging, effective, and equitable learning in the virtual/hybrid classroom.

Empathy interview data with teachers offered additional insights, revealing that clear directions, guidance, and routines were not necessarily present in virtual courses, despite the availability of guidance around these topics for educators. One teacher mentioned that the organizational structure of a cyber course could be contributing to confusion and stress for students. This was confirmed by a student who shared that at times, their assignments could not be located in their designated folders. In an empathy interview with a parent, one voiced their concern about the organization of the course, stating they found it to be disorganized – a sentiment shared by their child. Of note, the district team indicated in the needs assessment that they were conducting learning walks to better understand what was occurring in cyber courses. Finally, feedback from families was collected by the district and reflected frustrations with divergent expectations across classes in the program.

Continued conversations around policies and practices pointed to a problem of practice: the challenge of providing clear expectations and guidelines for learning. To address this issue, the team decided to design and pilot a program to help teachers better design effective virtual instruction.

Designing and Piloting a Measurable Solution

The team piloted a redesign of their cyber health and physical education course to include flexibility for learning tasks as well as clearly defined expectations and guidelines for learning and assessment. The team created a set of expectations and directions for learning that were shared with the pilot teacher, students, and families. The pilot teacher then redesigned and delivered several modules that replaced performance-based tasks with a personalized, mastery-based approach.

By redesigning the lessons to focus on standards and including rubrics for assessment, the district team and pilot teacher felt as though they provided clearer expectations to the students. The team sent an email to students and their families two weeks prior to the start of the new course structure in order to provide an overview of the changes around the cyber health and physical education courses. In addition, the pilot teacher shared the new changes on the course’s Schoology (learning management system [LMS]) page.

Surprisingly, the completion rate for assignments declined by 17% during the pilot. The team wondered whether this could be attributed to the timing of the pilot (end of the year) or its short duration (just a few weeks). Meeting notes from TLA coaching sessions revealed that the team questioned whether the new changes to the course could have been communicated even more clearly. Moving forward, the team hopes to expand this redesign to the entire cyber health and physical education curriculum as they now have a common rubric for all physical education activities. In addition, they are working to develop common expectations for missing or incomplete work.

Strategy Lab coaching notes also revealed that the team believed the pilot encouraged discussion on the importance of creating common grading policies and communicating course expectations to all stakeholders (i.e., administrators, counselors, teachers, students, and families). The district team intends to create common course templates and norms that will be posted in Schoology in the upcoming year. They also plan to include their one-pager around learning guidelines in their course catalog and provide it to students and families when they request enrollment in the cyber program.

The district leadership team is planning to use the lessons they learned from this pilot to design a new pilot focusing on other courses and procedures within their cyber program. While they continue to formulate their next course of action, the team will also work with administrators to create a consistent grading policy. This iterative and thoughtful approach to making improvements aligns with why WC Cyber Program joined Strategy Lab: to understand how to build a robust and sustainable program.