Believing in Ourselves: Urban Middle School Reform

Believing in Ourselves

Part I - Chapter 1

REAL TEACHER EMPOWERMENT

Teacher empowerment is a catchy phrase, writ large into many school district strategic plans with little understanding of what it means other than giving teachers decisionmaking over copy equipment or field trip sites. However, as Stanford University researcher Milbrey McLaughlin and others point out, true teacher empowerment is not structural. Power comes from what teachers know and how that changes their practice. It is their dedication to professional knowledge.

The most successful schools and teachers in the Clark network significantly changed their attitudes and skills because deep professional knowledge and opportunities to share insights and experiences empowered them to do so.

It's Wednesday afternoon at Mann Middle School in San Diego. We're in one of the spacious classrooms of the eighth-grade Orion team, organized like the rest of the school to include core subject areas for groups of 120-160 students and to personalize a sprawling campus of some 2,000 students. Ordinarily, the room would be abuzz with youngsters working on projects together in groups. However, on Wednesdays students go home after lunch and teachers stay to eat lunch together as a total faculty, about 100 full-time staffers, and then meet as departments or teams. This day it is the Orion team that is buzzing, planning their presentation for a state meeting and refining content for a unit on bridges.

The phone rings (all classrooms at Mann have telephones, a necessary addition for a school spread among six mostly multi-level buildings). The call is from a teacher in a Clark school across country who is working on one of the units developed by the Orion team. "She's got some really great ideas," says English teacher Barbara Quinlan after hanging up the phone. "We should talk about them."

This brief exchange illustrates several facets of teacher empowerment at Mann. It is teachers who decided how to use the early-release time, opting to meet alternately in team meetings and subject-matter sessions. It is teachers who decided to form teams and work on interdisciplinary units in which each of the four team members relates his/her activities to the unit but always in a discipline-specific way. Bland and fun-but-irrelevant tasks are not allowed.

All the teams are not as well integrated as Orion is, but five years ago there was little cooperation among Mann teachers at all. Because of its leadership, the Orion team has shared its ideas at meetings and conferences all over the country with other teachers. So thoughtful are their ideas and so enthusiastic their presentations that a national publisher will use some of their units in an upcoming book. This is a recognition for classroom teachers that rarely comes their way.

The Orion team was the first to organize at Mann, now totally working in teams, and was put together, says math teacher Nancy Crouse, because of the research teachers conducted as they developed the plans for the Clark grant in 1988. Their four-person MESH (teachers of math, English, science, and history) has been on a learning curve ever since, developing, modifying, or dropping interdisciplinary units according to what their evaluations indicated.

Mann's students present a special challenge to the team, says Tom Carnes, the team's history teacher. About equally divided among Asian, Hispanic, African-American and white populations, the students not only bring diverse opinions-a plus-but also the potential for misunderstandings. Thus, the teachers always stress cooperation and teamwork in both the way students relate to each other and in content, such as the teamwork required for the Lewis and Clark expedition. The team understands that this is an essential part of teaching in a school like Mann.

Because of their teams, teachers can offer
personal attention, meet regularly with a counselor
to discuss certain students' needs, and have closer parental contacts than before.

The next step for the Orion team's teachers is to align their units with district content standards and assessments. Again, middle grades teachers are shaping this agenda. A committee of two teachers from each middle school in the district is working on developing standards and refining assessments for the middle grades. The standards, for example, will point out that it is not appropriate to teach math without also teaching problem solving, or to teach language arts without teaching students how to communicate their ideas. "This effort," explains Crouse, "is going to be wonderful accountability for our team work."

Mann's teachers, who could have been overwhelmed by the constantly growing enrollment, are more like "family," says Crouse. Because of their teams, teachers can offer personal attention, meet regularly with a counselor to discuss certain students' needs, and have closer parental contacts than before. For the Orion team, the most well-organized at Mann, interdisciplinary teaching has been the spark for their renewed professionalism. "We have to create new approaches or themes or we will go stale," says Crouse. They not only develop ideas together, she adds, but they also know what each member of the team is trying to accomplish; they swap ideas and discuss together the successes and the problems with their instruction.

WESTERN MIDDLE SCHOOL:
GOOD IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH

Faculty retreats are common vision-building strategies, but the agenda for a day-and-a-half meeting for Western Middle School teachers and parents illustrates the intellectual depth that they can now explore together. Rather than talk about housekeeping matters or curriculum planning, they focused on the ideas in the book Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain, not exactly a snap assignment for the retreat.

In asking teachers and parents to discuss the book, Principal Mary Grace Jaeger was laying the groundwork for the next school year's emphasis on professional development-understanding and carrying out interdisciplinary learning. Selected by the teachers in 1993 as Western's new principal, Jaeger had taught at Western 10 years earlier. At that time, "we had changed to a middle school, but our classes were tracked," she says. "We were not sophisticated enough to know about such things as learning styles or multiple intelligences, and both students and teachers were separated into those who were going somewhere and those who weren't."

Western was in the fourth year of the Clark initiative when Jaeger returned. It was a different school from the one she left a decade before. "There was an atmosphere for risk taking, for wanting to be successful at heterogeneous grouping," she says. Furthermore, teachers who had been isolated in categorical programs were now collaborating with each other. The upshot was that "there is not a teacher here who would ever say to a child, 'You can't do it' or communicate that in any way," says Jaeger.

The synergy that produced a changed faculty at Western combined the message of the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 with the support given by the Clark initiative. The former said, in essence, that every teacher can teach at a high level, "if one accepts the premise that every student can learn at a high level," according to Jaeger. Clark then provided opportunities for teachers to learn what they could do through professional development, time to conduct research, and help from a widening network of teachers in schools like theirs.

The single most important impact of all these opportunities became the chance to try out new ideas in classrooms-and see them work. Western adopted the Algebra Project, for example, one of the curriculum resources made available to Western through the Clark grant. The project prepares low-income students to move from basic arithmetic to the more abstract language of algebra, starting in the sixth grade and using real-life situations like public transportation to illustrate math concepts. "One of the strategies we have focused on is to present high content in a variety of ways," says math teacher Tommy Brown. "The Algebra Project allowed me to cover such concepts as substitution and positive and negative numbers in a way that it was easy for the students to understand and to cover them in a shorter period of time." Western's students, adds Jaeger, became comfortable with demonstrating math understanding in graphic form and in using manipulatives every day.

It was the Algebra Project and a variety of other methods, according to Brown, that helped Western's math scores increase each year, moving the school from bottom on the Kentucky assessments in the district's middle schools (24th) to 15th in three years.

The plus of being a Clark school, Brown adds, is the emergence of a can-do attitude by faculty and students because "someone believes in you."

MUIRLANDS: WHERE TEACHERS BELIEVED
ALL STUDENTS WERE ABOVE AVERAGE

At Muirlands Middle School, across town from Mann Middle School in San Diego, teachers took on one of the most formidable challenges-convincing affluent, well-educated parents that detracking classes is good for all students. This is a school where the well-to-do La Jolla neighborhood families possess a strong Lake Wobegon attitude, and, indeed, most of their children qualify for GATE, the gifted and talented education programs. However, almost none of the one-third of the barrio students bused in from across town ever made it into a GATE class.

Muirlands' teachers believed this was wrong. And because it would have been impossible politically to detrack by creating regular classes, they decided to fit the curriculum to each student's needs while moving the barrio students into GATE classes. Slowly, one subject and one grade at a time, the teachers built a school where the same high-content curriculum and instruction is now given to all students. The only separate classes remaining are small groups of very high-IQ students and of students with very limited English skills. But standards are just as high for the latter group (see page 61).

Detracking math became the most difficult barrier because of math's importance to neighborhood families who anticipate their children will try for highly competitive colleges and universities. Math was the last subject in which students were grouped heterogeneously, a move that required tremendous persistence by the teachers and that was constantly evaluated by them.

Realizing some parents of entering students presented the most difficult problem, Principal Cassandra Countryman began to meet with parents individually and urge them to talk to the Muirlands teachers. She knew teachers' understanding of an individualized curriculum and enthusiasm for untracking were the most persuasive tools she had. Moreover, one teacher volunteered to take on an after-school math enrichment program for a small group of high-ability students.

The teachers also relied on a "visual aid." Muirlands' teachers are among the most sophisticated users of student portfolios for assessment in the district because of their participation in a national portfolio demonstration project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation (Performance Assessments Collaboration in Education). Portfolio assessments are much more than collections of student papers; they are deliberately structured to show student growth and involve students in evaluating their own work according to certain criteria.

The Muirlands math portfolios disarmed the most reluctant parents. Presented with the portfolios, which were often explained by their children, parents were asked by the teachers: "Do you believe this is a challenging math assignment? Do you see the growth in understanding and achievement of your child?" The overall message, says Countryman, "was that there is no way you can say this is not good for even the brightest students."

The teachers were successful at detracking because of their professionalism. But what does that really mean? Muirlands' "portrait" of student development in English/language arts, three years in the making, answers that question well.

The document, says sixth grade language arts teacher Carol Barry, represents the cumulative results of five years of reform efforts under the Clark initiative. Becoming a middle school on the eve of the project, the school was open to new ideas. Teachers researched middle school issues, endlessly debated content standards, wrote their own assessment tools, and developed a school-wide portfolio system. They became known for their risks and their standards, speaking and presenting at conferences and writing articles about their experiences.

Taking all they had learned over several years-about content, student learning, and their own abilities to work together-they began to discuss curriculum standards across grades. "Our individual interdisciplinary units were very successful," says Barry, "but we found that we were each working in isolation as part of grade-level teams. We also recognized that it was vitally important for students engaged in interdisciplinary study to be exposed to a range of genres in reading and writing."

So the teachers drew up a portrait of student achievement by grade level. The portrait includes grade level themes reflecting units covered in social studies, and it identifies eight styles of writing.

The teachers took advantage of various staff development experiences and the opportunity to connect with national efforts to set standards. "We've progressed to a point where we, as a staff, feel that we can effect change," Barry says. "We know what a strong program should look like." The portrait, she adds, reflects the conviction of the teachers that a challenging interdisciplinary program can coexist and thrive with an accelerated academic curriculum.

How Muirlands' language arts teachers envision what students should know and be able to do

The next goals of teachers at Muirlands, according to Barry, are to develop three-year plans in all academic areas and to continue discussions about school-wide standards in each area of the curriculum. Ultimately, she says, the teachers want to develop benchmarks with which to assess student achievement. "Our experience and training," she adds, "make us eager" to keep pushing the standards higher.

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from Believing in Ourselves: Progress and Struggle in Middle School Reform. By Anne C. Lewis. Published in 1995 by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.