HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — The recent six-year district-level accreditation of the Guam Department of Education doesn’t mean improvements cease, in fact, the accreditation team found as many strengths as areas where improvements are needed in its assessment of the public school system.
After its visit, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation team told GDOE to direct its attention to strengthening a number of areas.
“One of the recommendations is tightening up our implementation timelines, so, active monitoring. They liked our Strategic Plan, they saw the work that was going into it, but one of the recommendations is, ‘make sure your implementation plans with all of your divisions is solid and clear with tighter timelines,’” GDOE Deputy Superintendent Joseph Sanchez said regarding the WASC recommendations.
Another recommendation was to “develop and implement the framework necessary to assess student achievement of the graduate learner outcomes and monitor their achievement at all levels to determine progress.”
“It talked about Smarter Balance, a summative assessment, making sure we take advantage of not only giving the assessment, but when the data comes back, how are we using those assessment to improve instruction?” Sanchez said.
The findings also highlighted GDOE’s current health and safety challenges in passing sanitary inspections.
The WASC team recommended GDOE “move forward with efforts to bring schools into compliance with new health regulations and ensure that there is a plan to systematically address the daily needs of the schools.”
Meanwhile, a lot of the recommendations reaffirmed for the department that some of the things already in effect relative to student assessment and professional development are moving the school system in the right direction.
“Like the professional learning communities, that’s where we collaborate and bring teachers together to talk about the instruction they are utilizing, the data they have and, more importantly, interventions that they are utilizing,” Sanchez said.
Sanchez said the WASC team wants to see GDOE extend that model of collaboration to other operations in the department.
“They think that strengthening collaboration districtwide would help in those other areas of the department as well,” Sanchez said.
The findings also share areas where GDOE showed strength to include, “a collaborative school culture focused on relationships, student and organizational success, collective accountability, camaraderie, and support for all students and staff and everyone sees themselves as a leader and problem solver.”
Joe Sanchez
