“How do I do CLASS in my program?”—that's a common question we get while talking to others about the CLASS tool. And while we always say, “You don’t do CLASS. You are CLASS!” we also want to answer that big question. So, to help explain the nuances to implementing CLASS, we are introducing a blog series—stories and interviews from school administrators who have successfully and effectively implemented CLASS.
Our first success story paints a picture of how the CLASS tool can be implemented in ways that fit unique settings. Lisa Luceno is the Director of Early Childhood at Briya Public Charter School in Washington DC. She is a passionate leader and had a lot to share about choosing CLASS, supporting teachers, and using CLASS in culturally diverse classrooms.
Tell me a little bit about Briya:
I’ve been working for Briya for 11 years, and I love it! Briya offers a really interesting model. We provide both adult education and early childhood education (infant-pre-K). Parents come to school to learn English, digital literacy, and child development. We provide career options for the parents, everything from a child development associate certificate, to a high school diploma, to a medical assistant degree. And the parents participate in educational activities with their children. It’s inspiring and fun—the parents are here because they want to be here. And children are naturally curious and have amazing teachers at Briya so they want to be here too. We really offer programming for the whole family.
In addition to offering our core education program we partner with Mary’s Center. The model offers wraparound services: health care, mental health, social services, dental care, a teen program, and more. We believe our education program participants will have better outcomes if we address their families’ needs comprehensively. We partner with Mary’s Center so families can get all these essential services in one place.
Our early childhood program is bilingual (teaching in both English and Spanish), but there are students that speak a variety of other languages as well.
What do you do at Briya?
Before I came to Briya I was a pre-K teacher in a Spanish immersion program. While I was getting my Master’s degree, I started teaching adult education classes at Briya. I loved the ability to combine both adult and child learning principles. And I loved the school’s mission of providing culturally sensitive education for the whole family. I think it’s so important to focus on family engagement, but it happens in a unique and powerful way here at Briya. I’m now the director of Briya’s early childhood program. I oversee the pre-K program where we work continuously to provide the best program possible for our families.
Why did you start using CLASS?
Interactions have always been such a big part of our philosophy even before we began to use CLASS. We focus on the whole child—every aspect of their development, including language and literacy, cognitive development, and social-emotional. But we really see social emotional as the core. And CLASS has that focus too, so it made sense for us to incorporate it into our program.
We started using the CLASS tool in 2011 or 2012. It was totally new for us and there was a steep learning curve at first. We did a lot of professional development around the tool to get our school leaders reliable and appreciated how it provided a common lens for us to look at practice. At that point, we were just using the tool in our pre-K programs. When Teachstone introduced the Infant and Toddler tools, we adopted the tool in all of our classes. Last year we needed to integrate more DLL strategies because, given our population, that is an important focus for us. So Briya embarked on an independent project to supplement the CLASS tool with focused DLL strategies.
How are you using CLASS?
The DC Public School Board uses CLASS for quality monitoring, so we use the tool both for this external monitoring as well as our own internal monitoring. We began using it before it was a requirement mostly for professional development and in our coaching.
We have conducted a lot of formal observations. We generally use external observers, so they provide a non-biased observation. But we also do informal observations regularly—taking running records of what is seen and heard in the classroom (without assigning codes). We share observations with teachers and we choose an area to focus on based on both the observations and the teacher’s instructional goals. A lot of our professional development is in a group setting, but it’s important to provide a personalized follow up too.
What are some of the challenges you have faced in your CLASS implementation?
Time and resources can often be scarce. CLASS takes a significant investment—even before you start using it and are just evaluating which tool(s) to use.
Adopting CLASS takes time. We provided time out of class and training for teachers, including requiring all Briya teachers to complete the Looking at CLASSrooms online program. Teachers always have so much to do, so that can be challenging. Plus, when we hire new staff they have to play catch up. It takes time and energy. Teachers have been very challenged by certain aspects of the CLASS tool, but have also done a fantastic job implementing the dimensions into their planning and instruction. Some of the dimensions can be really challenging given our classroom diversity. For example, feedback loops can be tricky given language differences and limited language, even when the teachers are bilingual. Each teacher or child might have different challenges so it’s important to individualize interactions based on their needs. We are multicultural, so we consider culture, language, and so much more.
You mentioned that the tool was being used to rate program quality by your school board. How are you going above and beyond your school board’s standards of CLASS use?
Because the tool is used as an external monitoring tool, it would be easy to focus on just “getting the grade.” We feel like it’s really important to focus on the CLASS dimensions and the areas that are important to us even where we might not be getting credit. One example is that including families in classroom learning is an important focus in our dual generation program and there isn’t a dimension or grade for that when using CLASS. Realizing that CLASS is only one of the tools we use to improve instruction has been helpful.
Another example: we do a lot of peer-pairing in our pre-K classrooms because it is an important DLL strategy. These interactions between two students might not be scored, but in these interactions you see children taking the lead with their learning there’s a lot of language happening in these exchanges that may correspond with Language Modeling.
What advice would you have for other administrators in the field?
There are many priorities when you’re running a school—so many things you have to get done in a day, a month, a year. A team approach is so helpful. I recommend planning ahead and doing the best you can to fit CLASS in in a way that isn’t burdensome to teachers—in a way that meets what they want to learn about. It’s important to consider your teachers’, parents’, and children’s needs before you implement CLASS (or any tool). Think about what makes sense for them and their time. You might have to find other tools or ways to help bring together your program goals and your program needs in a way that works for you. It’s important that programs look to a wide variety of resources to define success.
Another thing to remember is that change doesn’t happen quickly; it takes time. Leaders need to recognize that. CLASS isn’t something you implement and within six months have really high scores.
