Schools for Tomorrow Blog

This coming August Mapleton is adopting the reading program “Every Child A Reader” put out by the National Literacy Coalition (who has also designed a writing program called “Every Child A Writer,” but we’re not implementing that one this year). Since I’m a humanities teacher, I took the required training last week.

I’m not the friendliest person to cookie-cutter educational programs making their way into our classrooms, but I must say… I like this one so far and am curious to see how students will engage with it.

The program model creates a differentiated classroom. Students are grouped by their reading level (a grouping that is not set in stone – groups can change throughout the year), and spend most of their time in class working at (rotating) stations. I’ll be at one station, working with one group of students at a time.

It’s a program based in structure, not in content: instead of telling me (and students) what articles or stories we need to study in our classroom, I’m learning how to group students according to their reading abilities, and I’m learning text comprehension strategies to use with students in small groups. Since it’s not a content-based program, I choose texts and create the stations. Thornton Middle School implemented this program last year, and my comrades there tell me it’s quite the success.

In my training as a Boettcher teacher, we talk a lot about differentiating instruction. Last year was my fellowship year, and the 15 of us fellows spent hours and hours (and papers and papers!) discussing what it means to build relationships with our kids. The program challenges us to deeply know each student as a learner, and a person. I think relationships are emphasized so strongly in Boettcher because the better I know my kids, the better I can help them learn. I’m more astute at differentiating for them.

Are differentiated classrooms the classrooms of the future? Students can meet standards and benchmarks in many different ways… maybe offering them multiple ways to learn just makes sense. Kids are different. As I know that Xavier is interested in the election, and that he likes learning independently, I can create opportunities for him. To meet the 8th grade civics standard of understanding the importance of citizenship maybe he would keep an ‘election’ scrapbook of articles from newspapers and magazines that he has responded to. Sheila, on the other hand, might help organize a school-wide mock election on Super Tuesday. She’s meeting the same standard, yet doing it in ways that engage with her interests.

Differentiated classrooms may need to be the wave of the (urban?) future. We have classrooms with students coming from the U.S., Asia, Africa, and South America (and from all the different countries in these regions). Students’ literacy levels range from advanced to unsatisfactory. Culture and language differences abound. Our classrooms are overflowing in richness and diversity, yet how do we tap into it?

Our conversations about ProComp and school structure (K-8 schools, or 6-12 schools) need to include conversations about what goes on inside our very diverse classrooms. The effectiveness of our classrooms will influence the effectiveness of our structures (and v.v.) Do you think differentiated learning will help all of our kids meet standards, and become vibrant members of society? Will effectively differentiated classrooms help ensure that ProComp and our larger school structures are effective?

Our discussions on education need to be wide open because the future is wide open in our rapidly changing world. What are your thoughts and ideas about differentiated classrooms, and differentiated literacy programs that districts like Mapleton are beginning to adopt?

Rachel very eloquently beat me to the punch,  but despite the risk of posting too many of these, I would like to introduce myself as well.

I’m Ben. I just finished my fifth year teaching English, and my fourth in my current school in Boulder County. I’ve had a slightly more traditional early career than Rachel — one year in a private school, two years of grad school/licensure, including student teaching at an alternative public school, then the last four years in my current position in a large public high school. 

At my school (as with many, unfortunately), there’s no time for reflection at the end of the year. The last four to six weeks are a sprint. Students, teachers, administrators — everyone is pushing towards summer and the break in the routine it brings. At the finish line there’s finals, yearbook signing, graduation, and then … nothing. We get one work day, really a half day, to finish up grades and get books put away. Then a mediocre barbecue where the principal recognizes all of the teachers leaving. And then we leave and most never come back for almost three months.

I’m at that point in my career everyone talks about — the fabled five-year mark. And I’m not sure I like it here. As a reflective person, I’m not able to find time in my teaching day (and my home-with-my family day, and my part-time job day — how many days in a week again?) to actually reflect on my professional life. I have other work experience besides teaching, and carving out time for reflection and collaboration seems to be much harder in teaching than anywhere else. Why is that? Why is it not just part of the norm? So now that the school year has ended, I’m hoping to do some reflection here on the Schools for Tomorrow Blog.

How do once young, enthusiastic teachers really excited about trying new things recapture that energy several years later? How do they not fall into the trap of getting bitter and jaded like so many of their colleagues around them? How do they make the decision to try and stick it out or to move on to something else? Just some of the questions I’ll be considering, and I welcome your thoughts as well.

A recent study finds that small class sizes help students.  USA Today reports:

Breaking up large classes into several smaller ones helps students, but the improvements in many cases come in spite of what teachers do, new research suggests.

New findings from four nations, including the USA, tell a curious story. Small classes work for children, but that’s less because of how teachers teach than because of what students feel they can do: Get more face time with their teacher, for instance, or work in small groups with classmates.

"Small classes are more engaging places for students because they’re able to have a more personal connection with teachers, simply by virtue of the fact that there are fewer kids in the classroom competing for that teacher’s attention," says Adam Gamoran of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who analyzed the findings.

The study is reminiscent of the famous Tennessee class size study, which yielded similar findings:  smaller classes are better for kids.  What made that study remarkable was that it was one of largest “true experiments” ever conducted in the field of education.  7,000 students were randomly assigned to one of three types of “treatments”, based on the student-teacher ratio in the class.

The Tennessee study is unusual, indeed.  What makes education research so confounding is that it simply does not conform to the typical experimental methods available in other fields like medicine of physics.  For a variety of logistical, financial, political, or ethical reasons, we usually cannot create the “gold standard” scientific experiment, in which children are randomly assigned to treatments and their results are precisely tracked over time. 

In the absence of the type of experimental control available in other disciplines, we’re often forced to conjecture, hypothesize, or just plain guess more often than we’d like.  In the world of school choice research, for example, there have been few, if any, studies in which children have truly been randomly assigned to one type of school or another. 

Instead, we must draw conclusions from the limited information available, which is problematic because kids who choose different school choice options may be different:  their motivations may be different; their parents may be different; their skin color or religion or language may be different.

In the rare case in which a true experiment is possible – as in the Tennessee study – educators gobble up the results.  But until we’re all allowed to randomly assign kids into courses or schools or districts like so many laboratory mice, we’ll have to acknowledge that our passionately held policy positions are based on a little more conjecture and guesswork than we’d like.

There’s an interesting new item on USA Today’s website:

“The idea that more time in school produces better results could get a small boost today with the release of international data from the Brookings Institution. The study finds adding 10 minutes of math instruction to an eighth-grader’s day translates into a jump in math skills. The findings come as a handful of states and school districts experiment with packing more minutes into the school day and, in a few cases, more days into the year.”

Click here for the full story, and here for the report.