a day at a severly normal school

Report from a day at a severely normal school.

I subbed at a BVSD school on Friday Oct 3. It’s my first sub day this year. I make a few bucks on a Friday and also get to expand my knowledge of how schools other than NAS work.

I LIKE working at my school. The more I do it, the more I like our kinds of kids and the rewards for reaching a student are huge. HOWEVER I do feel like there needs to be some regular update above me about just how different our students and the school environment are. Our ability to teach kids and to show academic progress WHEN COMPARED to a severely normal school depends not on just teachers and pedagogy but also students and environment.

I DO think that because of our special obstacles we have to innovate. I didn’t see one word wall in a BVSD math class, and the school reports only 3% ELLs. It makes sense for us to have word walls and ELL strategies. I got no problems with that – I just got observations about what I saw.

ONE They get almost a whole quarter more learning each year.

a. I had an attendance list from 8/19 that that the office gave me. I also had an attendance list from 10/1 that the teacher left me to record grades on. There was one, exactly one, difference between the two lists out of 5 periods with ~30 students in each class. This means that from the first day of school these students have been able to move through their learning goals as a group.

b. The 2nd week of school, my schools D block had 24 students in it. D block is Algebra 1 and is, for 9th graders, the keystone class for CSAPs. At the end of the 8th week my D block has 28 students in it, of which, 16 were ones that were there during the 2nd week of school. In other words, I have 4 more students then I did the 2nd week and about half of the students now present were not there the 2nd week. We add new students daily from the opening of school till Oct 1, and several ON Oct 1.

TWO - planning time.

The teacher I subbed for had the following schedule. She taught 3 different classes (3 preps) to 5 groups of students. MWF the day has 8 periods and she teaches 5 of them (1,3,4,6,7). T/TH the day has 4 blocks. On T she teaches periods 1,3,and 7 so she teaches 3 blocks and has 1 off. On Thursday she teaches periods 4 and 6 so she teaches 2 blocks and has two off. The master schedule for math showed this to be similar for 8 of the 9 math teachers. One of the math teachers taught an additional section of PE. Planning time is useful for improving teaching methods.

On average the teacher then has 3/8 of her day for planning. Lunch is taken out of these periods as desired by the teacher. The shortest period is 55 minutes, twice our lunch, so one could say that she only has 2.5/8 periods for planning. Also students can come and visit during office hours. One period is considered office hours and students do come.

So let’s say she has 2/8 planning periods a day.
This is 1/4 of a day for planning vs our 1/6 of a day. She does, however, get time during the day for working with students. If we make time like that it is outside of our normal hours.

I’ve gone back and forth with administration on this with their claim that we get more planning time at my school then is the norm. I can tell you that at Monarch, Broomfield, and Arapahoe Ridge they get 2/7 of a day for planning. At Fairview (a well regarded IB school) they get ¼ of a day – or so. However you want to wave your hands at the numbers – these are the facts as I myself have seen and worked them.

3) Students get a period off during the day. I had 3 free blocks to walk about and observe classes and the campus. I observed groups of students talking – and usually working – and when I asked them they said it was their study period. Don’t know that this would work for us, but with students and teachers having time off during the day it allows for learning to take place.

4) I walked around and looked in classes. Every class was teacher centered with direct instruction and guided practice. I mean each and every class (math classes). We can argue about the validity and reliability of learning measures – but – every school in the country would kill for the following results:

Overall Academic Performance on State Assessments
Excellent


Academic Growth of Students
Stable
Winner of a John Irwin School of Excellence Award for the 2006 -


The teacher I subbed for has a website that talks about a quarterly project. I talked to the students – these are projects done outside of class and would seem to compare to the “webquests” in our glencoe text books. Daily class activities are lectures and problems.

5) Students were used to working together in pairs or threes on their homework. I observed mix results. Since it wasn’t my class I was more relaxed about just watching. Sometimes I wonder about co-operative learning.

a) when I tried to help a student the student lost patience with me trying to help him ‘discover’ the answer. The student dismissed me and sought help from a group behind and to his left. The help he received was “oh, just use this formula”. I dunno….does that sound like peer to peer beats teacher to student? Probably I’m just clumsy when I try to help.

b) I heard two girls that could have been an advertisement for co-operative learning. They got to the end of the problem, “ok, let’s check our answer (in the back of the book). Oh boy, our answer is nothing like theirs. Let’s see where we went wrong….(a few minutes)….there it is!”

c) LL, a pleasant young girl with a head covering had finished all her work and asked for an ok to do her geography work. She was on call to a group of 3 girls in front of her. When asked, she delivered direct instruction on how to solve the given problem. Good for LLs learning for sure. She didn’t do a terrible job, but she was more direct about just giving an answer than a teacher would have been.