The Henry County Way for Ensuring Excellence...
At HCPS, we highly prioritize our staff's time, emphasizing evidence-based practices and providing necessary resources for optimal student outcomes. We embrace the Power of Less through three core initiatives: Cultivating a supportive Culture, Implementing a Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum in Literacy and Mathematics, and Ensuring Clarity of Learning. By steadfastly focusing on these pillars, we've witnessed remarkable growth in a brief span. We welcome all to peruse this site as staff, students, parents and community work together to continually improve student learning.
Why we have a Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum in Literacy (K-8) and Math (K-8 & Algebra 1):
It is the variable most strongly related to student success at the school level providing a swift and stunningly powerful effect on achievement
It ensures common content and teacher expectations - reduces the startling variance in topics, rigor and expectations among teachers
It ensures students read and write in adequate amounts with a clear purpose and prevents text quality from drifting down
It discourages the use of inferior materials - worksheets or activities that stray from the standards
It saves teachers tremendous time in lesson planning
It enables students to more easily acquire general knowledge - i.e. social studies and science - this is a key to reading comprehension
It better enables teachers to collaborate - organized schedule of content and skills - not self-selected jumble of topics
Why we have implemented Clarity for Learning through learning intentions and success criteria:
Teacher clarity has an effect size of 0.75 when the learning intention and success criteria is brought "alive" in the classroom through introduction, catch-and-release and reflection. This results in almost twice the effect size on one year of formal schooling
It reduces student's cognitive burden, which consequently allows them to direct mental resources toward cognitive processes associated with learning - in other words, kids know what they need to do to feel successful
It allows students to identify where they are going in their learning, how they are progressing and where they will go next- thus providing student enough clarity to their own learning
It allow teachers to better collaboratively plan and organize instruction
It better enables teachers to show students what success looks like and have a laser-like focus on formative assessment feedback opportunities
It allows for common formative assessment opportunities with specific feedback while allowing for students to self-monitor their own learning. When this happens, students become assessment-capable learner and this has an effective size of 1.33 (triple the rate of learning)
