HAGERSTOWN, Md. (AP) — For the past two school years, eighth-grade English Language Arts teacher Elizabeth Lewis sometimes spent her planning period helping out in a seventh-grade class at Northern Middle School.
During the last school year, “If you were to come in the building, it would not be strange to see a couple extra adults in a room,” Principal Mike Chilcutt said.
That extra adult, whether a teacher or administrator, might work one-on-one with a student or work with a small group of students who need help in a specific area, Chilcutt said.
Success requires more than just an extra adult, he said.
“We make it very clear. You can’t just throw another human being in there and think the results are going to change,” Chilcutt said.
The co-teaching effort works because it fosters a collaborative culture and helps educators evaluate students’ academic data to determine in what areas students need help, Chilcutt said.
One group of data that educators use includes results of the Maryland School Assessment tests, results that improved for Northern Middle this past school year in part because of collaborative teaching and other initiatives at the school, Chilcutt said.
A year ago, Northern Middle was deemed to be in “school improvement” because it missed proficiency standards for two consecutive years, 2010 and 2011.
The state of Maryland received a waiver from the more stringent No Child Left Behind standards, meaning the targets that public schools had to meet for the 2012 assessment test results were more realistic, Washington County Public Schools officials said.
Northern Middle exceeded the new targets for math and reading, and improved its percentages of students who were at least at the “proficient” level in math and reading from 2011 to 2012.
The percentage of students who scored at least “proficient” in math improved from 74.7 percent in 2011 to 83.5 percent in 2012, while the percentage of students who scored at least “proficient” in reading went up from 79.6 percent to 83.6 percent, according to Maryland State Department of Education’s website at www.mdreportcard.org.
The 83.5 percent of students who tested at “proficient” in math marked the highest measure of success the school has had for math, “so I feel really good about that,” Chilcutt said.
Northern Middle is one of five county schools participating in a pilot teacher-evaluation program that takes into account student achievement in evaluating participating teachers and administrators. Financial bonuses are tied to good evaluations.
The other schools in the pilot program are Western Heights Middle School, and Fountaindale, Salem Avenue, and Winter Street elementary schools. Those schools were chosen because of their high free and reduced-price meal rates, a measure of poverty.
Part of the pilot program is a teaching model that promotes more hands-on lessons for students, which leads to deeper engagement for students, Chilcutt said.
The school also used federal grant money to provide three instructional assistants to help classroom teachers at Northern Middle, Chilcutt said. One of them helps in English classes, one helps with math, and the third helps with students whose primary language is not English, he said.
Lead teachers and administrators, including Chilcutt, also help co-teach students, he said.
“I teach eighth grade, so now I know so many seventh-graders already because I worked with them last year,” Lewis said. “It’s pretty neat the things that we’ve done.”
The collaborative spirit was buoyed four years ago when teachers started planning together, Lewis said.
Another initiative that started in recent years at Northern, and some other middle schools, was carving out some time during the school day to provide students with focused attention. That time was mostly used to help students who were struggling in a certain area or to give some more advanced lessons.
Educators also occasionally took students out of art or music class to prepare for an upcoming lesson, Chilcutt said.
A student struggling in a class would be given a heads-up about the lesson, with an educator teaching him or her skills ahead of time to improve the student’s readiness for the lesson, he said.
Chilcutt said he believes the extra, or more focused, time with students helped many of them improve their learning and assessment test results.
It’s not just about improving assessment test results, but helping students learn, he said. The most important skill is reading, which increases a child’s likelihood of success in life, he said.
“We’re just getting started … The worst thing we can do is let up,” Chilcutt said.
The school’s Citizens Advisory Council participants decided in the last school year that they wanted to focus on improving literacy, Chilcutt said.
To that end, the school is promoting a reading challenge for its students, including its incoming sixth-graders, that began this summer. For every book they read, they complete a form that requires them to reflect on what they read.
For each form submitted, the student gets a chance at winning a Kindle, Chilcutt said. To pay for the Kindles, students raised $5,600 by selling magazines and cookie dough, he said.
After school starts, a Kindle will be awarded to one student in each grade every month. If a student’s name is drawn again, that student will get a gift card to Amazon to encourage him or her to buy reading materials for the Kindle, Chilcutt said.
The school also is starting a book exchange, to which people can make donations. Students can select books to take home and — when they finish reading a book — return it, keep it or share it with someone else, social studies teacher Donna Almany said.
