TPS uses Teacher Empowerment Program to gear up for state testing

But they are hopeful.

“It’s exciting, but I do feel the pressure,” Hargrave said.

The examination window for the Oklahoma State Testing Program opens Monday for students in grades 3-8 across the state.

Among the demands placed on Tulsa Public Schools to retain its accreditation is that at least half of its students score at least at a basic level on the English language arts portion of state tests this spring or increase the number of students meeting that threshold by at least 5%.

With the district’s own projections earlier this semester indicating a need to accelerate academic progress for 700 students to reach the latter goal, Hargrave, Miller and Brewer are among the 45 TPS teachers who opted to participate in the Oklahoma Teacher Empowerment Program and work with about 1,100 additional students in small groups after Spring Break to review and prepare for the English Language Arts portion of the Oklahoma State Testing Program.

Packed learning sessions

Hargrave normally teaches fourth grade at Skelly. Since Spring Break, she has had six sessions each with groups of five to six fifth-grade students at a time who are pulled out of class for review time.

“Each session is kind of packed,” she said Tuesday after working with a group of multilingual learners on point of view and reviewing synonyms and antonyms. “And I really hope to go over Greek and Latin root words with them. And I hope to be able to do it, but I don’t know if they’re going to allow us to continue meeting with them or not.

“We really need to. I would like to cover more with them.”

Some of Hargrave’s charges are her former students, which helped her determine groupings a little faster and forge connections. However, she acknowledged that not every OTEP teacher had that luxury, including the pair of teachers working in the next room over with groups of third- and fourth-graders.

Additional challenges

Miller and Brewer are partner Montessori teachers at Eugene Field. Their classes are too young to sit for the Oklahoma State Testing Program and they initially applied for the program thinking that they would be able to work with older students at the westside school.

Instead, in order for the pair to stay together, they wound up across town at Skelly. Although they both enjoyed working with new students and appreciated getting to meet colleagues from another school, the location shift brought additional challenges that had to be addressed first, including figuring out sight unseen where their new charges were academically and how to connect with them.

“For me, those first two days, there was no instruction,” Brewer said. “I had to maximize, especially that first meeting, just getting to know them. A child is not going to learn from you if they don’t have a relationship with you.”

Once they were able to build some semblance of rapport, Brewer and Miller said they did their best to go over some of the state standards, but without more time to properly dig in to the students’ needs and academic backgrounds beyond a handful of test scores, it was difficult to gauge how much ground they really covered.

“Honestly, it felt like a big cram session to me,” Miller said.

Handing off classes

In addition to coming up with lesson plans for their small groups, participating teachers also had to be prepared to hand their classes off to substitute teachers.

As part of the district’s participation in the program, the Oklahoma State Department of Education pledged to send employees with teaching certificates to cover participating teachers’ classes while they were working with those small groups.

According to documents obtained via an open records request, 16 OSDE employees are substitute teaching in OTEP teachers’ classrooms around the district, including Hargrave’s.

Among the certification areas represented by those employees are early childhood education, grades 5-8 English language arts, elementary education and business education. Four have a special education certificate, and one has a speech language pathology certificate.

However, Miller and Brewer said their students had an OSDE substitute only one day while they were at Skelly. With coverage help from two teacher assistants, that substitute floated between their classes, they said.

The remaining classrooms across TPS were covered by long-term substitutes through Kelly Services, the staffing agency used by TPS to coordinate substitute teacher placements. Those substitutes, said TPS Chief Learning Officer Erin Armstrong, have been based at specific campuses all year and were moved over to cover the same classes each time they filled in for an OTEP teacher.

Armstrong also said that the district initially expected more substitutes to come over from OSDE and that number remained in flux after the program started, with one OSDE employee dropping out after the first week.

“I had someone from my team step up and come in to cover at Central High School so those two teachers could continue to participate,” Armstrong said, noting that another position was covered for a week through a staffing agency contracted by OSDE.

OSDE spokesman Dan Isett said via email Tuesday that the agency is not paying for substitute teachers to cover TPS teachers’ participation in OTEP. Isett did not respond to follow-up inquiries about why the agency did not cover the cost of the needed substitute teachers or send enough staff to cover all OTEP teachers’ classrooms as initially touted.

A TPS spokesman confirmed Friday night that the expenses associated with those substitute teachers are covered by the district’s contract with Kelly Services, which is paid for with COVID-19 relief funds.

Evaluating program

In the interim, Armstrong said the district will be reviewing students’ test scores later this spring as part of its efforts to gauge whether TPS will participate in OTEP again or make modifications in the future.

With the testing window about to open, Hargrave said she does acknowledge that the exams are coming and that although she’s feeling a little pressure, she does not want her students — either in her regular classroom or any of her small groups — to feel it.

“What I tell them is that they’re ready for this,” Hargrave said. “That’s just kind of the way I approach it. I do bring it up. ‘Hey, you got this test coming up and guess what? You’re going to be ready and this is why. This is why you’re already going to be ready for it.’”

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