GLISI Impact at Our School

About two years ago my school participated in GLISI which all of us know stands for the Georgia Leadership Institute for School Improvement. We met the GLISI staff along with many other school teachers, principals and superintendents from all over the state of Georgia at what we called, “The Mountain.” We spent three days at the mountain not only getting to know our principal and co-workers better but we also shared ideas with other schools and got to know the other school representatives so well that many of us still keep in contact with them.

For us, GLISI was to help us take a step toward the direction of moving from a targeted school in Gwinnett to a more effective school for student learning. There were many protocols that we went through while we were on the mountain but the ones in which we took back to our school to implement thus far, were the Fishbone strategy and the 5 Whys strategy. Both strategies have seemed to work at our school based on data from this past school year. As a school we meet and determined the root cause to our literacy problem and with the suggested changes associated with the root-cause we began to make school-wide changes towards literacy, such as increasing the expectations for our readers in the primary grades. In response to many suggestions, our primary grades increased their reading levels tremendously including over 80 percent of our first graders reading on a mid-year or end of year second grade reading level.

Our school is eager to see how this growth in expectations and reading levels increases as these groups of students enter the upper grades of elementary school in the next few years to come. It makes me proud to say that I helped contribute to this growth by sharing the learning from GLISI!