Elizabethtown Independent Schools Board of Education met Monday for their regular school board meeting.
The three elementary school principals presented their current plans and progress in closing the achievement gaps within their schools.
Aaron Howell, principal at Helmwood Elementary School, discussed and broke down the Kagan Cooperative Learning the schools have been trying to implement the past few years.
He said Kagan is learning strategies designed to promote cooperation and communication in the classroom.
“In my 18 years in education, I’ve been through several professional developments,” Howell said. “This is probably the top one that I’ve ever gone through.”
To promote this cooperation, schools are instituting more station learning and co-teaching, which Tim Mudd, principal at Morningside Elementary School, also discussed.
He said station learning helps increase engagement and participation among students and creates more immediate feedback. He also said this method of teaching helps to effectively use all staff members and create a consistent learning environment in the district.
While the schools’ administrations have been instituting these strategies here and there, Mudd said it has been difficult to get station teaching completely off the ground because of the pandemic.
Carla Kuhn, principal at Panther Academy, discussed the balanced literacy aspect with the focus being phonic awareness, phonic instruction and fluency for this school year.
She also spoke about vocabulary instruction, which will be addressed more in the upcoming years.
Jessica Turner, director of student learning for the school district, said they are continually looking at the data of all the district’s students, checking progress as these new teaching strategies are implemented.
