In today’s climate of school improvement, school accountability, and student performance, it is more important than ever to assist under-performing schools in raising student achievement. There often exists a significant achievement gap between more affluent and less affluent schools. To address this achievement gap, many districts choose adopt structured, consistent, and proven strategies that are impervious to students’ socioeconomic or cultural barriers.
The Eight-Step Instructional Process, developed by the Brazosport Independent School District in Brazoria County, Texas, provides such a strategy. Using the Eight-Step Instructional Process over a seven-year period, the Brazosport Independent School District eliminated the achievement gap between racial groups and between affluent and disadvantaged students in its schools.
What are the Eight Steps?
- Test Score Disaggregation
School test data is broken down into individual student and classroom reports. The test scores are used to identify instructional groups and weak and strong objective areas. Teachers receive training in data interpretation. - Instructional Focus CalendarThe instructional team develops a campus timeline that encompasses all Sunshine State Standards, benchmarks, and time allocations based on the needs of the instructional groups. The team decides how much time to spend on each standard/benchmark based on student needs determined by the data.
- Instructional Focus Activities
Using the calendar, a schedule stating the standards/benchmarks, instructional dates, and assessment dates is developed and disseminated to all teachers. For a designated amount of time each day, teachers instruct students focusing on the standard/benchmark. - Assessment
After the instructional focus standards/benchmarks have been taught, an assessment to identify mastery and non-mastery students is administered. The assessments are modeled on the FCAT. Assessment dates are listed on the instructional focus calendar. - Tutorials
Tutorial time to re-teach non-mastered benchmarks is scheduled. After concepts have been re-taught, students are assessed again. - Enrichment
Enrichment sessions are provided for students who have mastered the standard/benchmark assessed. Related activities that extend the learning of the concept are provided during enrichment. - Maintenance
Quick refresher lessons are given periodically in order to provide ongoing maintenance and re-teaching of benchmarks/standards. Through these quick activities, teachers can identify topics that need to be revisited. - Monitoring
Instructional leaders visit classrooms and meet regularly with departments and teams to monitor the instructional progress of students.
The Eight Step Process requires teachers to closely examine student work and use data to guide decisions about staff learning and student instruction. The power of the Eight Step Process is that it requires educators to collect accurate information on students so they can make adjustments to teaching styles or curricula to gain measurable improvements. Students experiencing difficulty are identified and helped early to keep them on pace and ensure forward progress.
Teachers are provided with professional development based on identified needs that are aligned to the learning objectives to be taught. Through these efforts, all students receive instruction appropriate to their level of performance.
By emphasizing the individual needs of each student, the Eight-Step process provides teachers with a systematic method for delivering instruction and assessing progress so that all students achieve to their highest potential. Benefits of the Eight-Step process include:
- giving flexibility to teachers in how to teach by focusing on what to teach
- emphasizing key skills for every student
- enabling students to retain previously learned skills in order to build higher skills
- replacing subjectivity with a focus on results
- aligning planning, instruction, assessment, and support to student performance
- establishing a climate of achievement and success