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Another Way: The Montlake Project
This article first appeared in On the Beam, Vol VIII, No. 1, Fall, 1987. On the Beam was a newsletter published by New Horizons for Learning and distributed to its membership. It continues as New Horizons' Online Journal and is now distributed over the Internet.
In an experiment with genius rats scientists created a maze with nine various runs. At the end of run #7 they placed the best imported cheese. The rats quickly solved the maze and gobbled up the cheese.
Once the rats were well trained to dash down run #7 to gobble up the cheese. No cheese! The rats were placed at the beginning of the maze again. Without hesitation, they took off for run #7. No cheese! Day after day they repeated what they had learned -- the right answer. But there was no longer cheese in run #7.
We are often like the scientists' rats, dashing down run #7 as we once learned. There is, however, an important difference between us and the rats. Eventually, the rats give it up. They no longer head down run #7. We, on the other hand, can reason, so we make up wonderful reasons to continue in the same old patterns. "This is the way it has always been done." "This is the way the last principal in this school did it, and it worked for her." "Research says this should work." "When we did it this way for Matthew, it worked." "I get extra funding for doing it this way, so it must be the right way." We can justify going down run #7 forever.
Two years ago Montlake Elementary decided to try another way. We had a real commitment to making a difference for all kids, yet we saw some disturbing patterns. Our poor and our African American students were disproportionately less successful as measured by CAT (California Achievement Test) scores. Once students were labeled for Special Education, they seldom left the program -- getting further behind in middle school and high school and taking the labels with them beyond their school experience. We were working very hard doing it the way we had always done it, but that just wasn't enough.
The program we presently call the Montlake Project is a collaboratively developed model that is making the difference we wanted. There are three important strands in the model:
- Improved staff development
- Smaller class sizes
- Basic restructuring of the day
We believe good teaching is still the key to school success. Staff had previously taken classes on their own to improve their skills. Sometimes we brought in an expert to train the entire staff in some concept. Now we have made a commitment to a minimum of four hours of staff development each month. We use staff meetings for much of the training but periodically plan extra sessions in the evening and on weekends. Staff members help identify the concepts we want to work on and, in some cases, conduct the training themselves. We add as much peer coaching as we can schedule. Now everyone shares a common language, focuses on clearly identified goals, and supports one another in a new, more effective way. The increased time together and intense conversations we often share also creates a new sense of trust and caring that is just as important as the concepts we learn.
At Montlake we had one Special Education teacher, one Remedial Assistance teacher, and one Special Needs teacher -- all pulling kids out of the classroom using the Resource Room model. We decided to put all of those resources in the classroom with a full class of students instead. That dropped our class ratio from 28:1 to 21:1 without adding a single new staff person to the building. It also meant teachers were responsible for the success of every child in their room without the aid of "specialists." The improvement in students and teachers alike, was dramatic.
The third strand was restructuring the school day. We moved out of self-contained classrooms into an uninterrupted multi-age grouped Basic Skills block in the morning. Specialists such as the librarian, PE teacher, and science teacher teach Basic Skills in the morning and their specialty in the afternoon. That reduces the size of the morning classes still further. Students are tested and grouped according to the concepts they are working on -- common objectives. In the afternoon students return to grade level "core" classes where they cover the rest of the subject areas.
Does it work? Yes! Not only have test scores gone up throughout the school, but our poor and African American students' scores improved even more. These students are still more often found in the bottom three stanines on the CAT, but if they keep improving at this rate, they won't be for long. We no longer label students as learning disabled so quickly. Our Special Education numbers have dropped from an average of 18-22 students a year to 6 for the 87-88 school year. The needs of the students haven't suddenly disappeared, but using the present structure we can meet those needs more effectively than ever before without telling students there is something inherently wrong with them -- that they will never be able to learn and function as other people do. This does not mean that we do not have extreme need of special classes and teachers with special skills for many of our students with extreme needs, but many of the students often labeled as Learning Disabled can function in classes like those at Montlake without being pulled out and facing all of the attending problems in self esteem that go with labeling.
In addition, discipline referrals to the office dropped dramatically and the school climate improved just as dramatically. Just as students felt more successful, teachers felt more successful. They began to take on more and more of a leadership role in the school, often coming to me with ideas and solutions to make the program even stronger. We have only begun to make the changes we want at Montlake to make it a place where everyone there can truly be all that they choose to be.
The structure we created at Montlake works for us, but is important for another reason. We finally stopped running down run #7. We took time to look at the vision of what we wanted to do for all kids; we looked at our students' needs; we looked at what was working and at what wasn't; we looked at our resources; then we did something different.
When this article was written in 1987, LaVaun Dennett was Principal of Montlake Elementary School in Seattle, Washington, and Director of the Excellence and Equlty Committee for the Puget Sound Education Consortium. She was invited to do her doctorate at Harvard's Graduate School of Education and went on to work for the U.S. Department of Education.
For more about the Montlake Project, go to The Montlake Project: An Interview with LaVaun Dennett, by Robert Gilman, an article that first appeared in IN CONTEXT #18, Winter 1988.
© 1987 New Horizons for Learning
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