Throughout his career, Dr. Ehsan Kattoula, Assistant Superintendent for Accountability in Cobb County, has asked the tough questions. For example, in the state of Georgia, there was the Georgia high school graduation test and the science part was one of the most difficult to pass. As a Physics teacher at Wheeler, Kattoula and others decided that we’re going to support the EL population and ensure the test portion was successful. But then, the question that had to be asked, “How do you support a population of students,” said Kattoula, “that tend to have the highest failing rate in a Georgia high school graduation test? And so, you start developing plan, you start immersing yourself in the data, start analyzing that data, you dig deeper and deeper and deeper, and then you start creating plans. But because you don’t teach all these students at Wheeler High School, we predominantly had students that were from South America, predominantly kids that spoke Portuguese.”

“It was critical for us to move their learning,” said Kattoula. “How do you increase their learning? How do you get their ability to move to the next phase? It wasn’t about how are we going to teach to the access test. It wasn’t about how we would teach to the geological graduation test. We wanted to develop a plan…”

This presentation is a fascinating look into the career of a very successful administrator who lives and breathes success for the students, and always asks the tough questions. And in his case, tough questions lead to smart solutions for his district in the Atlanta metro, and for your district as well.

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