Joeshannon Kimble saw struggling students. And she wanted to help.

In 2022, Kimble had taught various grades in the district for 25 years. She knew, though, that local middle school students were struggling academically. And she wanted to change that trajectory.

That May, Kimble had just finished working with a fifth grade class. She wanted to stick with those students for another year, and accelerate their progress.

“I told the teachers I really need to get hold of that sixth grade,” she said.

Her intervention — and her commitment to target individual students for advanced support and get them on track — worked.

By the end of that year, Repton Junior High was the only one of the Conecuh County’s seven schools to earn 100 points in the academic growth category on Alabama’s school report card.

In 2024, AL.com Education Lab reporters found schools with the most improved grades from the Alabama school report card for the 2022-23 school year, and identified local educators whose stellar work contributed to the school’s overall academic growth.

These “Teachers of Alabama,” demonstrate the effectiveness of evidence-based best practices in the classroom — and opportunities for other schools to learn from.

Identifying students’ needs

Kimble had the sixth grade. Then she had to figure out what her 10 new sixth grade students needed.

“I went back as far as third grade,” she said, “and there were skills they were missing.”

In August 2022, she began classes. One of her first moves was to drop homeroom. And she took on all four core subjects, keeping her students in her classroom all day to work with them.

“I took that time and did my interventions,” she said of the previous homeroom period. “I pulled those students who were struggling in a skill.”

While she knew which skills students were missing, she didn’t lower academic expectations.

Repton is a small town, and the junior high enrolls just about 100 students, according to state data.

But even when educators are working with a relatively small group of students, intensive support still takes plenty of work.

Acceleration is a specific technique, advised by experts, that pushes students to quickly work through missing skills. Rather than lengthy remediation, which can become demoralizing, acceleration aims to identify what specific students need and fill in gaps.

“Students who are behind would be taught ‘just-in-time’ skills and knowledge that would enable them to access the grade-level material — material that would otherwise be cognitively out of reach,” according to Johns Hopkins Institute researcher David Steiner.

In order to accelerate successfully, though, teachers need to really dig in and backfill specific gaps.

Kimble was methodical. She wanted to break down math, reading and vocabulary standards and skills, and make sure students were up to par on each one. She studied Alabama’s sixth grade standards and pushed her students to improve.

“They had vocabulary of five words to 10 words each day,” she said. “If they miss a vocabulary word, we repeat that word. So by the end of the week, a student will have been exposed to an additional 50 words of vocabulary.”

Pushing for progress

Kimble kept track of student progress, so both she and the students could see where things stood.

Students took ownership of their data and their progress, she said, eager to look at the previous day’s results to figure out what they’d learn next. “They got more excited than I did.”

“For the deeper knowledge content,” she said, “I gave the students time to answer questions. I had a lot of student-led discussion in class.”

“I said, ‘Talk, you‘re welcome to talk here. Let me hear you.’” And they did. She encouraged them to share their thought process, show their work, and told them she would help them if they didn’t have the right answer.

“Once I did that,” she said, “and I showed them the right way, they‘d say, ‘Oh, wow. Gracious. This is how you do it.’”

Throughout the year, she had learning activities for parents to help their children with. “Parents were a big help,” she said, “and I thanked them on graduation day.”

And the school would leap from a score of 63 – a low ‘D’ – to a score of 77 – a high ‘C’ – earning it a spot on the state’s 25 most improved schools list.

In 2023, Kimble served as a fourth and fifth grade math interventionist and taught computer science at the magnet school, Southside Preparatory.

And she’s completed her doctorate in education, and was honored as Teacher of the Year for her school.

But this year, she is back to teaching sixth grade at Repton Junior High School.

The success her students had has re-energized her, she said.

“I kept saying I want y‘all to be successful,” she said. “They said, ’We‘re gonna be successful because you’re gonna help us.’”