Intensive instruction puts students back on track
Spring Grove School may not look different from the other
schools in San Benito County. The playground is the same. The gym
is the same. The structure of the classes is the same. However,
inside classrooms 25 and 26 there is something very different
happening. Class sizes are smaller and teacher-student ratios are
greater.
Those two classrooms are the school’s designated math/English
academies for fourth-thru-eighth-graders and the students are truly
succeeding.
Intensive instruction puts students back on track
Spring Grove School may not look different from the other schools in San Benito County. The playground is the same. The gym is the same. The structure of the classes is the same. However, inside classrooms 25 and 26 there is something very different happening. Class sizes are smaller and teacher-student ratios are greater.
Those two classrooms are the school’s designated math/English academies for fourth-thru-eighth-graders and the students are truly succeeding.
The academies program was started this year by North County Superintendent Howard Chase, but he says the program is a collaboration of the school board, teachers, parents and the students.
The program could not be successful without everyone playing his or her part.
The concept is simple. Students in these academies receive three to three-and-a-half hours of reading instruction and at least two hours of math instruction per day.
“The idea was that we recognize that some students are struggling and cannot just pick right up with their peers. They need extra help. If we concentrated direct instruction on the problem, the students are able to get right back on track,” Chase explained.
The academies are fully self-contained. Ideally, students stay in the academies until their academic goals are met and then matriculate back into regular classrooms. However, in order to be accepted into one of the academies a student has to be recommended by a teacher; their parents have to agree and the student has to agree as well. Likewise, in order to remain in the program, students must maintain passing grades, have no discipline problems and have a good attendance rate.
The biggest goal of the program is dealing with the student’s self-esteem. “It’s about making the kids see that they can excel,” Chase said. “And so far the program has exceeded all my expectations. The students want to be there.”
School is about being successful and believing in yourself and the academies are the vehicles that make that possible for the students who are not otherwise succeeding, Chase explained.
The concept isn’t such a foreign one. In fact, Chase had this idea several years back. He has been an administrator for 17 years and saw kids struggling. He knew it wasn’t the teachers or the students. “If the students were struggling in reading, all their other subjects were affected too,” he said.
Previously he hadn’t been in a position where he could do anything about the problem. However, when he took over as superintendent of North County School District he was finally in a position where he could do something.
“The results we’re seeing in those classes. I can’t tell you how proud I am of the students … how hard the teachers work,” Chase said.
Classrooms are broken down according to grade level. Fourth- and fifth-graders are in Classroom 26 with Lucia Bonnaud. Sixth- eighth-graders are in Susan Stoner’s classroom, 27. Each academy has three adults and the students are broken into small groups.
An average day in Stoner’s classroom might start with some reading comprehension. From there, Stoner says she works with different math groups. The mornings are packaged programs, so while the students are working on their reading, they’re also getting science and social studies skills.
During the afternoon, students work on individual reading skills. Some of the students also go out of the classroom for science.
Stoner says that many of the students need individual attention and all the reading is individualized work so 20 students may all be working at different levels.
For example, on a recent morning there were eight kids in Stoner’s main math group working on three different levels of math and two students are working independently.
One of the groups she’s teaching is doing so well that they will likely soon graduate into the regular math class – each of the students is currently getting A’s – and the group will actually be beyond their grade in math. Though Stoner is reluctant to see them go, her students are further along than their counterparts.
“With some of the kids, it’s like night and day. Before starting at this level, [at math] many of the students would guess just to finish their work. It took a long time to get them to understand that they had to get the answers right,” Stoner said. From there, they just took off. Much of that is just being in a class so long without understanding what’s going on. When they have an opportunity to succeed, they jump on it.”
Fourth- and fifth-graders likewise have seen significant progress, according to Bonnaud. At the beginning of the year some of her students could barely read at a first-grade level, but now some have made tremendous progress and already read at a third- grade level and Bonnaud suspects that by the end of the year with this intensive program, they’ll be reading at a fifth-grade level.
“The kids get excited when they start getting it. One of the kids was at a parent-teacher conference at the beginning of the year and said that since kindergarten she’s felt like she was in the dark. She said ‘This is the first time I get what’s going on.’ This is a reflection of the kids as a whole, because the teachers can’t spend extra time with them. This is the first time these students are getting A’s in spelling and math. They see that they can succeed. The most important element is that this increases their confidence and self-esteem.”
The kids in Bonnaud’s class are excited about giving answers. They want to be involved and she says that they probably didn’t feel like they could speak up in their previous classrooms because they didn’t have confidence that they had the right answer.
