I was telling a friend about the school where I am currently teaching and he suggested to me that I should post a lot of details and information about it because it is remarkable. At the risk of repeating myself, I'll start to give a rundown here.
This middle school is comprised of sixth, seventh and eighth graders, currently about 300 of them. About 81% of them -- according to posted statistics -- are Hispanic. I sense that Spanish is the home language of almost every pupil. The parents who visit the school -- and there are a lot -- often don't speak any English. Most of the staff speaks Spanish, though instruction is always in English and although great efforts are made to teach the students proper English, including vocabulary and composition. Eight or nine percent of the students, according to those same statistics, are supposed to be African-American, but in visiting every class in the school I haven't noted more than a dozen there presently who are. A few students are Asian. A few are whites. And as I look around the school with these statistics in mind, I think the current percentage of students who are Hispanic is really higher than the official figures.
Classes consist of anywhere from 24 to 32 students. The classroom shelves all have textbooks, but one of the things I noted early on is that textbooks are almost never used. Everything seems to be based on Xeroxed sheets put together by the teachers or possibly gleaned from the Internet. I know that the teachers meet weekly or bi-weekly to plan their teaching together. Obviously they are working to meet State standards at a minimum, but I think they are exceeding these considerably.
One of the features of the school is the morning "boost" session. Not all students attend these -- only the ones whose test scores have indicated serious deficiencies or who have been identified as having learning disabilities. In the morning boost I attend each day, students spend a half hour working on booklets of graduated math problem,s. They start with a pretest to see how they do on a particular type of problem. Then they have about ten pages of problems that slowly get more and more complicated. Then they finish with a "post test" to make certain they have learned the skills their booklet emphasized. While they are doing their booklet exercises, they are paired off, sometimes with an instructor between them, but more often not. They take turns solving a problem, explaining it out loud to the other student as they go. The teacher in charge of boost, whom I work with, grades their work each day -- not based on how many problems they solved correctly, but on their interaction with the other student in their pair. The grading system is called "BAME." This stands for "beginning," "approaching," "meeting," and "exceeding." The teach in charge goes around the table, announcing which one of these levels each student reached during that session, AND GRADING TOTALLY ON THE QUALITY OF THE INTERACTION BETWEEN THE STUDENTS, and not on how many problems each student finished or how correct his or her answers were.
Students are assigned this "boost" session based on their having done very poorly on normal test scores. Only a small percentage of the student body attends them.
This middle school is comprised of sixth, seventh and eighth graders, currently about 300 of them. About 81% of them -- according to posted statistics -- are Hispanic. I sense that Spanish is the home language of almost every pupil. The parents who visit the school -- and there are a lot -- often don't speak any English. Most of the staff speaks Spanish, though instruction is always in English and although great efforts are made to teach the students proper English, including vocabulary and composition. Eight or nine percent of the students, according to those same statistics, are supposed to be African-American, but in visiting every class in the school I haven't noted more than a dozen there presently who are. A few students are Asian. A few are whites. And as I look around the school with these statistics in mind, I think the current percentage of students who are Hispanic is really higher than the official figures.
Classes consist of anywhere from 24 to 32 students. The classroom shelves all have textbooks, but one of the things I noted early on is that textbooks are almost never used. Everything seems to be based on Xeroxed sheets put together by the teachers or possibly gleaned from the Internet. I know that the teachers meet weekly or bi-weekly to plan their teaching together. Obviously they are working to meet State standards at a minimum, but I think they are exceeding these considerably.
One of the features of the school is the morning "boost" session. Not all students attend these -- only the ones whose test scores have indicated serious deficiencies or who have been identified as having learning disabilities. In the morning boost I attend each day, students spend a half hour working on booklets of graduated math problem,s. They start with a pretest to see how they do on a particular type of problem. Then they have about ten pages of problems that slowly get more and more complicated. Then they finish with a "post test" to make certain they have learned the skills their booklet emphasized. While they are doing their booklet exercises, they are paired off, sometimes with an instructor between them, but more often not. They take turns solving a problem, explaining it out loud to the other student as they go. The teacher in charge of boost, whom I work with, grades their work each day -- not based on how many problems they solved correctly, but on their interaction with the other student in their pair. The grading system is called "BAME." This stands for "beginning," "approaching," "meeting," and "exceeding." The teach in charge goes around the table, announcing which one of these levels each student reached during that session, AND GRADING TOTALLY ON THE QUALITY OF THE INTERACTION BETWEEN THE STUDENTS, and not on how many problems each student finished or how correct his or her answers were.
Students are assigned this "boost" session based on their having done very poorly on normal test scores. Only a small percentage of the student body attends them.
