Franklin teachers report large gains after redesigning sixth-grade ELA instruction

Kurt Krueger, principal at Franklin Middle School, told the Janesville School Board on April 7 that a teaching team’s changes to sixth-grade English language arts instruction produced measurable gains for students.

The presentation described a process teachers used after an initial common summative assessment (CSA) showed only 19% of sixth graders scored at A, B or C. The team used a backwards-design review of the CSA, drilled into priority standards, taught skills explicitly, mined supplemental materials in the HMH curriculum, and gave a mid-unit check to track progress.

"We broke down the standards, we broke down lesson objectives, the skills, vocabulary," said Stephanie Schley, the academic learning coach. She described regular PLC meetings and the team approach that included sixth-grade ELA teachers Adam Launick and Jesse Ramirez and special education teacher Amanda Yurmansky.

Adam Launick said the team’s item-level analysis showed students could often identify evidence but struggled to select the best claim. "The backward-design process and really digging into the assessments allowed us to understand what things students were struggling with and how we could use what they already knew to help support those things," he said. Based on that analysis, teachers taught evidence and claim-making with more emphasis on selecting the best answer and used supplemental HMH resources to close gaps.

After the changes, teachers reported a marked improvement on in-class and externally normed measures. Launick reported that the proportion of students scoring A, B or C on the second CSA tripled compared with the first CSA. Krueger and other presenters said STAR assessment results also improved: 58% of students showed an increase in percentile rank from fall to winter; the average percentile rank rose from 39.2 to 43.6, a 4.4-point gain. Presenters said 92 students increased their percentile rank and that students with disabilities showed larger gains in some measures (reported as a rise from 3.1 to 6.7 for that subgroup on a cited metric).

Presenters said those gains were not limited to the CSA items aligned directly to the HMH curriculum. Krueger noted the team examined whether the skills "generalize" to other measures and reported positive transfer to STAR results. He described a school celebration of student growth that included posters, parent communications and classroom recognition to build a culture of achievement.

Board members asked whether the Franklin PLCs share their approach elsewhere in the district. Krueger and Schley said the work is being shared with other grade-level teams and across middle schools; Kurt Krueger and others described Franklin’s PLC practice as an example of broader middle-school improvement across Marshall and Edison as well.

The presenters framed the changes as process-driven: they kept the same assessments and priority standards, did not lower expectations, and adjusted instructional routines and supplemental resource use. No district policy changes or formal board actions were requested during the presentation. Board members praised the team and asked that the PLC methods and data be shared more broadly.

As described to the board, the steps that produced the reported gains were: examining CSA item-level data, isolating skills for explicit instruction, using supplemental HMH resources rather than only the teacher edition, administering mid-unit checks, and celebrating measured growth with students and families.