The school board passed the initiative 7 votes to 0 after seeing that there was a 15% increase in students test scores in the 4 months that Eisenhower had adopted the new teaching system.
The new system will focus on delivering a more in depth teaching style that will focus on teaching students engaged.
Director of special programs at DPS-61 Bobbi Williams says it is a different style of teaching, but it is proven, not just at Eisenhower, but also on a larger scale in the city of Chicago.
She says they expect the Focus Instructional Practice to be fully immersed in the high schools by the 2014-2015 school year.
At the beginning of the school year DPS-61 adopted PBIS, a research based school wide management technique aimed at curbing negative student behavior, and after one quarter, the program has a huge success.
All 22 schools in the district have adopted PBIS and as Dr. Rochelle Clark says, serious student behavior has been eliminated almost entirely from the school district…
"We are exceeding our expectations, right now all of our schools are looking at 98.5% of their students doing what they are asked to do."
Clark says that now that all the schools have opted in their next step will be to continue promoting good behavior as well as collecting data in order to see extended results.
Only 1.4% of students district wide have received a suspension or serious disciplinary action, a rate that will have those types of referrals cut in half by the end of the year.
