Moanalua High School models effective student engagement
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Innovative leadership and a sustained commitment to student and teacher development have kept the spotlight on Moanalua High School for demonstrating best practices in education.
Over the summer, Moanalua was one of 15 schools selected as a national “Model School” by the International Center for Leadership in Education. A team of administrators, teachers and students traveled to Nashville in June to speak at the conference.
The decision to include two students on the presentation team reflects Moanalua’s student-centered learning environment. Small learning communities – formal and informal – and a comprehensive college and career advisory program help keep students engaged and empower them to make informed decisions about their educational pathways.
“We’re trying to personalize a large high school” with 2,100 students, explained Principal Darrel Galera. “How do you get to the individual student? How do we have an advisory program so the student doesn’t fall through the cracks? How do we look at learning student-by-student?"
Since 1997, Moanalua has offered comprehensive guidance and mentoring through its College and Academic Program (CAP), which connects students with a consistent adult advocate from freshman year through graduation. “The foundation for it is to have students be college- and career-ready,” said Vice Principal Vangie Casinas.
A few years ago, the high school began administering the entire battery of ACT achievement tests to all freshmen, sophomores and juniors. The results from the national standardized tests include academic scores, and provide students and their parents with rich information on how students can meet their academic and career goals.
Throughout high school, CAP and the ACT help students discover their career interests, set personal goals and receive detailed feedback on how to meet them – including what classes to take, what decisions they need to make and what career and higher education opportunities are available. Students can see where their strengths lie and what weaknesses they should address to achieve their goals.
The objective is to provide students with an education that is both rigorous and relevant. “When we help students understand where they’re going, hopefully school will make sense to them,” Casinas said.
Surveys show 81 percent of students find the CAP program useful – and Moanalua's college acceptance rates consistently range between 80 and 90 percent, Galera said.
Galera tells students he’d like all of them to go to college. To prepare for competitive admissions, students are encouraged to participate in school activities, which include 51 competitive athletic teams, a highly-respected music education program, as well as leadership and extracurricular opportunities.
For the past decade, Moanalua has recognized that professional development for all faculty improves student performance. Its 10-year-old in-house teacher training program has received national recognition as a model for all high schools. Recent in-depth training led to the establishment of 29 data teams focused on individual student progress in language arts and mathematics. The first year of full implementation produced measurable results.
Moanalua students have consistently met or exceeded Hawaii’s proficiency benchmarks in language arts, but math has been a challenge for all high schools. During the last school year, cut scores to determine proficiency on the Hawaii State Assessment ratcheted even higher. “It was an unbelievable increase in math, but we did it because we had data teams,” Galera said.
Judy Tateyama, math department chairwoman, said Moanalua took advantage of the opportunity to administer the new online HSA three times – and data teams used the results each time to follow students' progress. Then she described how data team members worked with teachers in each subject area to identify deficiencies and decide, “What are (we) going to do to bring up the scores?”
Strategic data use helped raise student math proficiency 13 percentage points by the end of the HSA testing window, allowing Moanalua to meet adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind Act.
Moanalua Academic Officer Richard Taylor added that prior to the final HSA testing session, the school offered intensive interventions for struggling students – providing assistance over spring break, before and after school. The real-time results from the online HSA motivated students to try to beat their scores, and helped teachers adjust instruction, he said.
“If we didn’t have that instant feedback, we wouldn’t be able to make immediate interventions,” he noted. Until last year, schools received results months after students took the test and had already moved to the next grade.
Language Arts Department Chairwoman Liane Voss said the real-time data allows analysis of more than just percentages and statistics. Data teams now have access to individual student information that shows whether a student is meeting or approaching proficiency, or performing well-below the benchmarks.
“The data now has a face,” she said. “We know who we’re targeting. We know what we have to do and we can agree on a strategy and a timeline, and we agree on a goal.”
Data teams offer teachers focus, but don’t restrict individual teaching practice, she clarified. The teams can increase efficiency and effectiveness, however, by providing teachers with information they can use to approach students who might benefit from thoughtful intervention.
“Really, what all people here at Moanalua want – what all the staff wants – is for the students to experience a powerful education so that they can be college- and career-ready and learn skills that make them able to contribute in the 21st century,” Taylor said. “That’s really the focus.”
