What Would it Look Like if All Students Felt Included 3

Part Three: What Would It Look Like If All Students Felt Included?

This is the third of three articles about the formation of a small school within a larger school.

by Carol Frodge and Lori Armstrong Lynass

Part 1 http://www.newhorizons.org/spneeds/inclusion/systems/frodge.htm

Part 2 http://www.newhorizons.org/spneeds/inclusion/systems/frodge 2.htm

In the spring of 2004, Carol Frodge proposed the formation of a small school at College Place Middle School as part of her administrative internship. College Place is a comprehensive middle school and has about 700 7th and 8th grade students. Carol was interested in using Appreciative Inquiry as an organizational strategy to bring teachers together with a common focus on increasing student engagement. Andy Rogers, then Principal, supported the formation of the Small School with 240 7th and 8th grade students and 9 staff members. It is roughly one third of the school.

The original plan was to spend three years developing a model small school that could then be replicated in the rest of the school or elsewhere. The first year was intended to be a planning year, just getting organized to make changes. The second year would then be implementation of the changes and the third year, maturation. From the beginning the changes began to happen well before the intended timeline.

In May, 2004, using appreciative inquiry we developed our fundamental question: What would it look like if all students felt included? We chose this question because we believed that if we made systemic changes that allowed more students to be included, then the number of students who would need intervention on an individual basis would be reduced. Starting in September we met once a week and quickly became excited to implement our ideas. Therefore year one changed from solely planning to planning and implementing.

There were several major changes made during the first year. We changed a traditional 25-minute silent reading class into an advisory period where regular student- teacher conferencing about academics, goal setting, and social issues occurred. We conducted community-building activities to increase students' abilities to work together. We met with individual struggling students as a Small School staff to help the student become aware that he/she was a member of a team whose purpose was to help them succeed. Finally, we conducted an interdisciplinary study on homelessness that led to engaging students through service learning projects.

From feedback from students, parents, and our own self-assessment, we concluded that year one was a great success. Therefore, we believed year two held many promises. However, several staff changes have made year two more challenging. The Principal who supported the initiation of the project left to take a district-level position and Carol Frodge left to become an Assistant Principal at another middle school in the district. For a variety of professional and personal reasons, only four of the nine teachers from year one returned for year two. This large turnover in staff and leadership has presented significant challenges.

Year two began with a mixture of enthusiasm, excitement, confusion and resistance. During the late spring and summer, new staff members were hired to replace those leaving. A few of these newcomers were unaware that they would be part of the Small School project and did not understand how this would be different from other teaching assignments. In August, Carol Frodge's late departure set up a quick hand-off of the director role to Lori Lynass. This shift in staffing and leadership created a sense of starting from scratch. We on the Small School staff again started the process of asking ourselves what our goals would be and how we would reach those goals.

We kept our guiding question and theme of seeking to make all students feel included and increasing student engagement. We also used the tools that had been successful in the first year. The new teachers brought with them refreshing ideas and energy. We had established student and parent recognition of the Small School program from our success in year one and students were excited to be a part of the Small School. The teachers who had been a part of the Small School the previous year knew half of the students in the program already and could provide valuable information to the others about them. We were also successful at identifying students with special needs who would benefit most from being in the Small School. It seemed as if the year was off to a great start. Then, the challenges came.

Robert Evans (1996) claims that, "In order to change schools, we have to change our paradigms." While change can be positive, we must also understand that change can mean loss, confusion and conflict. Change can be directly affected by the culture of the school. This became apparent quickly at College Place Middle. With a large school-wide turnover of staff and administration, the climate of the school also shifted. Not only were we challenged by still being a new program with new staff of our own, we also began to realize that our school culture did not support us as it had the year before.

A few of the staff members both inside and outside the Small School seemed resistant to the change we were trying to implement. Grumblings began from some who may not have wanted to see us succeed, because to do so might mean they too might have to change. Our new principal, while a proponent of the idea of Small Schools, gave less support to our democratic style of leadership and our goal of increasing engagement to increase academics. She advocated for the need to focus first on increasing academics and expected more principal control than our previous principal, who had supported teacher leadership.

Just two months into the school year, we were asked as Small School staff to begin assessing whether or not the Small School was a success and if it should be continued. This felt like an arrow through the heart after completing only our initial planning year and being nowhere near making a decision of that magnitude. The staff that had begun the Small Schools knew that effective change took at least 3-5 years to implement and were aware of what Stan Karp (2003) had said: "Schools can be set up to fail by the imposition of absurd time lines (p. 260)." He calls these efforts "drive-by reforms."

The lessons learned from this experience have been many. Perhaps one of our greatest faults was trying to fix a part without dealing with the whole. Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski & Betty Sue Flowers (2004) wrote, "Teams can usually implement quick fixes on their own, whereas more fundamental solutions often require the collaboration amongst everyone. (p. 43)" We have to become aware of the dynamic whole. After just a year and a half, we now realize the following:

All the Small School staff members involved must value our philosophy.

Administrative support for our process is crucial for success.

Buy-in is needed from the entire school staff to support or at the very least not sabotage our efforts.

Change can be a long and difficult process.

We will always have to deal with unpredictable forces in the larger system.

The outlook for the sustainability of the Small School is shaky at best, but we would still say so far it has been a success. If nothing else, a group of teachers took the risk of trying to create positive school change, and this will, no doubt, have an effect on their teaching/administrative careers and on the lives of the students they touch.

References

Christensen, L., & Karp, S. (2003). Rethinking school reform: Views from the classroom. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools Ltd.

Evans, R. (1996). The human side of school change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Senge, P., Scharmer, C. O., Jaworski, J., Flowers, B. S., (2003). Presence. New York, NY: Doubleday.

About the author

Carol Frodge is currently Assistant Principal of Alderwood Middle School in Lynwood, WA. Carol is an active participant in Leadership for Learning, http://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/lfl/ a Carpe Vitam project though Cambridge University, England. Her main interest is in implementing Appreciative Inquiry in a small school setting. Carol may be contacted at cfrodge@msn.com.

Lori Lynass has taught special education for the past eight years. She is currently employed in the Edmonds School District in Lynnwood, Washington. Lori is also in her last year of doctoral studies at Seattle University. Her dissertation is focused on service-learning and teacher preparation. phun4me@hotmail.com. You can read another article by Ms. Lynass on this site: http://www.newhorizons.org/strategies/service_learning/lynass.htm

©September 2005 New Horizons for Learning

This information is provided by:
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Special Education
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Olympia, WA 98504-7200
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