The Baldrige Quality Academy at Sherwood Elementary School
Why are we using Baldrige?
Since 2002, Montgomery County Public Schools has adopted the Malcolm Baldrige model for continuous improvement as a roadmap for school planning. Baldrige in education is about helping educators improve the quality of student learning and the effectiveness of the classrooms, schools, and district.
At Sherwood we use this process at several levels. For the whole school program, there is a leadership team comprised of parents, teachers, and other staff. This team reviews data, ensures that all stakeholder groups are involved, determines overriding goals for the whole school, and monitors the implementation of the goals. Each grade level team uses the same process to determine specific areas that they need to address. They use Linkages Charts to outline the steps in designing action plans. They set goals and monitor progress towards those goals. In the individual classroom teachers are now guiding students in monitoring their own personal progress through data notebooks and classroom data walls.
How long will we be using Baldrige at Sherwood this year?
Last year, we began a school-wide effort to use some of the quality tools associated with organizational management. Students used Plus/Deltas to evaluate their learning, flow charts were created to help students understand the classroom processes and routines, issue bins were posted to provide an improved communication system between the teachers and the students, and many teachers began collecting and posting data on classroom climate issues such as "transition time" and the "number of students who routinely turned in homework."
This year we will be including additional management strategies that will increase student ownership in their learning as well as support the new grading and reporting system. Students will be learning how to set clear goals, how to manage their performance results through the use of data collection, how to analyze their work, and how to write action plans when there is a need for improvement. In addition children will be writing class mission statements and they will learn process thinking skills that they may use to aid them in meeting their mission.
What is the Baldrige Academy?
The Baldrige Academy is an on-site training center for classroom teachers throughout Montgomery County. Sherwood is one of two sites providing training for all of the MCPS schools. The Academy will provide teachers with the tools needed to begin implementing Baldrige in their classrooms. As a part of this program, MCPS teachers and principals will be able to visit classrooms at Sherwood to see Baldrige in action. It is an honor that our school has been recognized as a training site for others.
Using the Baldrige tools, we have developed Ground Rules for our visitors, and Flow Charts for the process of visiting. The Academy will provide an "Issue Bin" environment outside of the classroom for discussion of what is observed. The input from our visitors will provide our staff with a Plus/Delta reflection on how we are doing with our implementation.
We expect to begin providing training sessions to parents later in the school year. We hope that you will take time to visit the Academy and learn more about these exciting processes.
More About Baldrige
Find out more about Baldrige in Montgomery County Public Schools