{"id":1131,"date":"2019-10-18T11:42:30","date_gmt":"2019-10-18T18:42:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hillbrook.us\/voices\/?p=1131"},"modified":"2019-10-18T11:42:32","modified_gmt":"2019-10-18T18:42:32","slug":"how-does-hillbrook-evaluate-evolve-its-program","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hillbrook.us\/voices\/2019\/10\/how-does-hillbrook-evaluate-evolve-its-program\/","title":{"rendered":"How Does Hillbrook Evaluate & Evolve Its Program?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Ilsa Dohmen, Director of Teaching & Learning and Colleen Schilly, Associate Head of School<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cI\u2019ve always tried to do my best academically. And that definitely came from Hillbrook\u201d (Richard, Hillbrook Class of 2014). Each time our graduates return to campus\u2014whether to volunteer as 9th graders, or as seniors poised to enter college\u2014we ask them about their time at Hillbrook<\/a>. They tell us about relationships and memories, projects and trips, and the myriad skills and mindsets cultivated at Hillbrook that have helped them in life beyond our campus. \u201c[Teachers at Hillbrook] really cared about the learning. They cared about meeting diverse people. They cared about making a difference in the community\u201d (Lilah, Class of 2015). Our graduates tell a rich story about their takeaways from the Hillbrook experience, and we see how their accounts are matched by their performance in high school classes and\u00a0choices for college matriculation<\/a>. We are dedicated to a\u00a0Core<\/a>\u00a0that prioritizes student choice and engagement, relationships, lifelong learning, curiosity, and the knowledge, skills, and confidence to reach one\u2019s highest individual potential. Visits to campus and conversations with students, teachers, and school leaders center around these shared values. And, feedback from our Winter 2019 survey showed that families are eager to see more quantitative data that complements these stories of student experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


On Monday October 14, our parent learning event presented a few sets of standardized, norm-referenced data that speak to how Hillbrook\u2019s program prepares students for lifelong learning. The morning featured ERB Consultant Sarah Savage, Secondary School Counselor Eden Maisel, Director of Teaching & Learning Ilsa Dohmen, and Associate Head of School Colleen Schilly, who shared some data Hillbrook uses to evaluate and evolve its program. Specifically, we looked at the 2019 Median Percentile Reports for all seven CTP subtest areas in each grade level, from 3rd-8th. These data show how our median score for each subtest (meaning the Hillbrook student score which half of our students taking the subtest scored higher than, and which half of our students taking the subtest scored lower than) compares to the median score from a representative mix of public and private schools nationwide (National Norm) as well as to the median score from independent schools nationwide (Independent Norm). These reports allow us one window into how a \u201cmiddle of the road\u201d student in our program performs compared to middle students at other schools, in the skills that the ERB CTP test measures. Sarah Savage, whose role at ERB includes reviewing data with schools around the country and especially in the Bay Area,\u00a0shared ERB\u2019s analysis<\/a>\u00a0of the data with families. She highlighted the strong performance of all Hillbrook grade levels on nearly every subtest relative to our Independent School peers.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Median Percentile Reports are one measure of relative program performance, helping answer parent questions like \u201cHow does Hillbrook learning compare to other schools?\u201d But they also share a story about school values. As a school, we are committed to being a\u00a0diverse and inclusive community<\/a>\u00a0because we know it makes the learning experience for students richer intellectually, socially, and emotionally. Particularly because Hillbrook chooses to serve a wide range of learners\u2014not only in terms of neurodiverse abilities, and learning preferences, but also in terms of prior educational experience and family values\u2014we care about\u00a0progress\u00a0as well as\u00a0performance. We joyfully admit students across the standardized stanines, and we continue to serve students across the stanines throughout their time here. Every class has its own personality, its own mix of strengths and weaknesses, its own habits and styles. And ERB data can help us answer some questions about a cohort\u2019s learning progress. After the Median Percentile Reports, attendees on Monday looked at their choice of three classes\u2019 (Class of 2019, 2020, or 2021) Group History Reports, which show each subtest\u2019s mean and range of grade-level student performance on each subtest of the CTP over 4-5 years. This data allows us to see what learning progress looks like for the specific groups of children enrolled here over time, according to what the CTP can measure. Again, Sarah closed this data activity by presenting ERB\u2019s analysis.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0Finally, we shared some alumni data. Hillbrook is committed to lifelong learning and preparation for our graduates to achieve whatever they choose. Eden Maisel, Secondary School Counselor, began by sharing with families the incredible diversity in high school choices our families make each year. For example, last year\u2019s class of 41 graduates attended 14 high schools. In addition, our graduates ultimately attend a\u00a0wide range of prestigious and high-quality colleges<\/a>\u00a0and universities. We consider it a great measure of success that not only do Hillbrook graduates go on to a wide range of secondary and post-secondary school experiences, they also feel well-prepared to be successful in these schools. This illustrates Hillbrook\u2019s commitment to matching students and families to their high school experience in a way that is guided by family values, student learning preferences, geography, and more. You can hear more about the experience of our graduates in their own words on our\u00a0Alumni video interviews<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Attendees on Monday asked great questions, including how to compare their child\u2019s individual performance to this group-level data, how to understand the various norm groups, how ERB\u2019s CTP test compares to the public school testing instruments, and why ERB sometimes uses median and sometimes uses mean as the best measure of center. Hillbrook knows that the CTP\u2019s benchmarked performance measures provide insight on our programmatic successes and challenges. We also, in our long practice of meeting with families about their individual child\u2019s reports, know the paradox of standardized testing well: group-level data gives much more accurate assessment of program performance than individual data gives of individual ability. We know that these snapshots of performance, taken on a specific set of grade-level skills (anchored in NCTE, NCTM, and ILA standards), in specific half-hour increments in May each year, include all sorts of statistical \u201cnoise.\u201d This fact, and our guiding values, mean that most conversations about student learning at Hillbrook center around many pieces of evidence\u2014student work, teacher observation, self-reflection, formative and summative in-class assessments, children\u2019s own stories of their learning, and more\u2014none of which tells a whole story but which, combined, can help us see progress for the individual child and ask questions about areas where growth is not evident.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n


All good schools have ongoing processes for reviewing their group-level standardized data. Hillbrook also has a process for cyclic review of our programs, bringing large groups of teachers & leaders together (JK-8) to collect and evaluate program data, visit peer schools, use peer school data, and make data-driven recommendations back to the whole school community. These\u00a0Program Audits<\/a>\u00a0provide a systematic, participatory process that helps us put our core values to Be Our Best in action.
Test data, and comparison around a median child, are measures that we have used for years to answer one, limited, set of questions. These scores are not the focus for our program, nor do they represent what we believe to be our greatest value for the children and families who choose us. The conversation about how Hillbrook evaluates its program is complex. We shared the CTP data in response to particular needs and questions we heard from families, and recognize it will take time for the conversation to unfold about how ERB group-level data complements and informs larger cycles of program evaluation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We encourage you to take a look at\u00a0the slide deck<\/a> that was shared at Monday\u2019s event. To continue the conversation, please join us on campus at 8 AM on Wednesday, December 11, to learn more about our math program during our \u201cMath Education at Hillbrook\u201d parent learning event. Future dates and topics can be found on our Parent\/Guardian Education Map<\/a>\u00a0and the calendar on the Bear\u2019s Lair. We look forward to connecting with you in person at these events!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ilsa Dohmen, Director of Teaching & Learning and Colleen Schilly, Associate Head of School \u201cI\u2019ve always tried to do my best academically. And that …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","content-type":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hillbrook.us\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hillbrook.us\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hillbrook.us\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hillbrook.us\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hillbrook.us\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1131"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.hillbrook.us\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1135,"href":"http:\/\/www.hillbrook.us\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131\/revisions\/1135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hillbrook.us\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hillbrook.us\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hillbrook.us\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}