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You
are here: King Middle School:
A Composite of Successful Multicultural Schools
Committed to Diminishing the Achievement Gap through
Comprehensive, Motivationally-Anchored School Renewal
King Middle School is located in a rural agricultural community 50 miles from a large city. Its students are from diverse backgrounds. Approximately 50% speak English as a second language and 45% are members of migratory families. Approximately 85% of the student population qualify for free or reduced lunch.
For some time, King Middle School educators, parents, and community members have been working together as an adult learning community to study, develop, and apply highly motivating, cultural responsive pedagogy to support the academic accomplishment of all students. It has eliminated pullout programs that require teachers to label students and limit their regular classroom instruction. Teachers throughout the building have agreed to share responsibility for all students through pedagogy that allows students to be motivated learners and valued community members. In fact, motivation to learn and serve is the "signature" of the King Middle School community.
To contribute to this, King Middle School maintains a large literacy center that is staffed on a rotating basis by faculty, parents, and members of local organizations. The center is a haven in many ways for students, families, community members, and staff. Students and families who are in the process of acquiring English visit the center, which remains open in the evening, to develop reading, writing, and oral language skills. However, a broad range of students frequently stop by for one-on-one assistance with assignments or to work together in the tea house area. In the tea house, where there is always hot water for tea and hot chocolate, it is not uncommon to see students meeting with their "advocate." An advocate is an adult friend who knows a few students well and provides personal support for success throughout a student's stay at King.
Students also drop by the literacy center to join in ongoing book discussions, plan community-based projects with local artists and other service-learning volunteers, observe demonstrations, contribute to technology-based projects that are routinely facilitated by visiting scientists, engage in independent research, or read silently on the comfortable pillows in the fiction-loft. The center is particularly proud of its ability to stimulate student interest and consciousness by offering a broad range of literature by ethnically and culturally diverse authors.
Not only does the literacy center respond to student and community interests, it also provides a context for teachers to learn new ways to support literacy across the curriculum. At least once a month each teacher can be released from regular duty to serve as a volunteer coach in the writing center. This helps to fine tune faculty's ability to teach literacy skills and encourages strong, consistent expectations for high quality writing across the curriculum. In fact, King Middle School has created a literacy rubric that guides skill development in the center and defines expectations for high-quality writing in all courses.
Adult members of the school community are especially committed to learning that builds confidence and motivation through teamwork, creativity, problem-solving, and community action. Its vision statement reflects this. A banner hang over the front door reads, "King Middle School is a school and neighborhood center where youth and adults respectfully and successfully work together, involved in experiences that support motivation to learn and strengthen our school and community."
King Middle School has developed a model for supporting adult learning toward this vision. It uses its financial resources to fund permanent substitutes who free up teacher teams to follow the work of a historically low-performing student throughout a quarter. These adult learning teams listen to whomever is presenting a piece of work to understand student characteristics as well as influences on the student such as the environment, instructions, and support, that they may have contributed to the final product. Together, they brainstorm ideas that could strengthen student motivation, knowledge, and skill. The emphasis is on strengthening the motivational conditions that influence success rather than "fixing the student." Using the "motivational framework for culturally responsive teaching"(Ginsberg & Wlodkowski, 2000) that informs the instructional design of lessons, they consider:
1) What might be done to create a stronger sense of respect and connectedness - or emotional safety - among all students?
2) How might the choices offered and the personal relevance of the content be strengthened?
3) How might the learning experience more effectively challenge and engage this student to the extent that the student might actually lose track of time?
4) How might the assessment process create authentic evidence of emerging skills to encourage a sense of hope and help a student see the ways in which strong learning really matters?
King Middle School also has an "instructional leadership cadre" comprised of two people from each interdisciplinary planning team, the principal, parents, and representatives of the site-based decision-making team. They are building their capacity in highly motivating and culturally responsive pedagogical practice in concert with a district-level instructional leadership cadre comprised of parents, community members, the assistant superintendent and district-level curriculum representatives. Their primary goals, as reflected in the school's vision statement and school improvement plan, are to support teacher performance throughout the entire school so that pedagogy consistently encourages student motivation, to enhance student performance so that all students experience high quality academic success, and to help students experience their value to the community and world.
As earlier described teacher performance is developed by examining student work on a regular basis. It is also developed through two-hour bimonthly interdisciplinary professional learning teams led, on a rotating basis, by team members. Each learning team has two members that are part of the instructional leadership cadre. Although everyone is encouraged to share resources and practices that can influence student learning, routinely, instructional cadre members identify new books, materials, and demonstration sites that may be of interest. Study groups have agreed to apply their learning to collaboratively designed, interdisciplinary lessons.
In addition, every other week teachers visit each other's classrooms to observe classroom practice for one-half hour, identify effective approaches to reaching all students, and share ideas for heightened success. Once a month, a team of teachers visits another school to engage in dialogue about school improvement efforts and to learn from classrooms and community programs that are a part of the host school. All teachers are encouraged to present what they are learning and doing at professional conferences and school-sponsored community forums with parents, service learning partners, business partners, and other members of the community.
Teachers refer to classroom visits that occur within their building as "partnership observation and dialogue." The goals that teachers set for partnership observations and dialogue are consistent with the goals they have identified at professional performance meetings with colleagues and school administrators. For example, one goal might be to find ways to help their lowest performing students experience intellectual stature within the classroom. A second goal might be to share ideas on how to make the "real-life" experiences and values of all students a regular and highly visible part of curriculum. Insights from partnership observation dialogue influence lessons plans that professional learning teams develop.
The two-hour block of time for professional learning teams is provided by students' participation in community service. Twice a month on Tuesday afternoons students work in pairs or small groups to maintain a community garden and prepare meals for the community food share program, develop a school-based day care center with parents and community representatives, work with local visual artists on public displays and maintain exhibits of student art throughout the building, create with a local video artist films about important social and community issues, share computer skills through the teaching of ESL at the learning center of a nearby migrant housing complex, assist in the school-based community health clinic, adopt a grandparent at the local nursing home, and read to and play with children at the community homeless shelter. Students are always welcome to develop their own projects.
Community service is an important part of the family and community involvement in the school. Parent and community volunteers coordinate the program. For this reason, the community service coordination center is located in the community room. The community room, a colorful room that invites comfort with comfortable furniture, a soft drink machine, and the work of students, staff, and parents on the wall, also has a washing machine and drier.
Parent and community volunteers work with students to create a community service newsletter that keeps the public informed of important outcomes and opportunities. At the end of every quarter, students display something they have created as a consequence of their community work. It might be a piece of literature, original art, or a photographic journey. Each display offers a one-page summary of the student's experience. The summaries are included in a King Middle School Community Service Process-folio that parent volunteers also organize.
Parents serve many other roles, as well. For example, they work with older students to coordinate an initiative that helps students who are new to the school to feel respected and connected right away. Approximately 100 older students serve as friends and advisors to small groups of new students who meet regularly throughout a student's first year at school. To further contribute to a family atmosphere at King, all homeroom classes are comprised of 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. When students across grade levels have a chance to become familiar, they tend to look out for one another. Because parent participation is essential in creating and sustaining these kinds of school-based innovations, several parents have become interested in full-time work at the school. As a consequence of receiving finding from a grant submitted by parents and teachers, five parents are assistants-in-training, participating in a paraprofessional training program that benefits parents and the school.
As reflected in its vision statement, King Middle requires that students respectfully work together, engage in motivating learning experiences that have personal, cultural, and community relevance, and experience success. In all classrooms, teachers use four questions to guide lesson development and to refine learning experiences. Like the questions used to examine student work, teachers ask themselves:
1) How does this learning experience contribute to developing as a community of learners who feel respected and connected to one another?
2) How does this learning experience offer meaningful choices and focus on personal/cultural relevance? 3) How does this learning experience engage all students in challenging learning that has social merit? 4) How does this learning experience support each student in knowing that he or she is becoming more effective in learning they value and can use in authentic ways?
A focus group of students helped reword the four questions so that they could be clear from a student's perspective. Using these questions, students self-assess their overall performance and set personal goals at least once a month, in every discipline. This also provides feedback to teachers on the effectiveness of classroom pedagogy. The questions that guide self-assessment are:
1) What have I done to demonstrate respect and support for other people in our classroom and in the community?
2) What kinds of choices have I made this month that have helped me to feel some control over what I am learning?
3a) When was I so involved in learning that time seemed to fly?
3b) What are at least 2 things I can do to have this feeling more often?
4a) What are some of the things I have been doing in school that allow me to feel successful?
4b)How are they important to other people as well as to me?
These questions help students to think deeply about their learning. They also inspire teachers to organize student learning around complex problems and issues that students care about and to support students as decision makers who are becoming their own best teachers.
To support learning, computers are integrated into all subjects. For example, a science teacher and math teacher collaborated to help students design original research on student generated environmental questions. One "research team" investigated the influence of pesticides on the health of people who live in rural communities. They designed surveys on the internet and sent them to county health officials, medical clinics, migrant labor centers across the country, and professors at colleges and universities. (They developed a separate questionnaire to personally interview people in their neighborhoods). Students used technology to compute and report their findings and to write and send an article to the local newspaper. They also developed charts and graphs for presentations to the local health board and to an environmental health class at a nearby college.
Students are currently exploring ways to solve the problems they identified as a part of their research. As people who are becoming expert in some aspect of solving an environmental problem, students will eventually host an exhibition of their recommendations for their families and other community members.
The King Middle School governance council, co-facilitated by the principal and a parent, is comprised of teachers (including an instructional leader,) parents, the assistant principal, a counselor, a district office liaison, students, and community members from several organizations. It meets once a month to assess the progress of the school toward its vision, to propose solutions to complex issues that will eventually be considered by the broader school community, to guide the implementation of a policy to attract and retain staff members from ethnically and culturally diverse backgrounds, to garner community resources to provide support for improving the curriculum for ethnic and cultural plurality, and to serve as the school's disciplinary board. The school principal is a co-learner who helps maintain a school culture that respects multiple perspectives.
King Middle School is proud that its students score above the national norms and that it has been recognized for the numbers of students from all backgrounds that score well above the required competency levels of state tests. However, it is understated about this because it believes that test scores are a consequence of that which it most values-- a stimulating place of learning where all students feel respected and supported as people, students, and world citizens.
With a background as a teacher on two Indian reservations, university professor, and Texas Title I technical assistance contact for the United States Department of Education, Margery Ginsberg is an independent researcher and consultant in Boulder, Colorado. She works nationally and internationally to provide support for instructionally-focused, comprehensive school renewal. Her work has been the foundation for several comprehensive school reform demonstration designs, including one of two high schools to receive the 1999-2000 United States Department of Education "Model National Professional Development Award."
Dr. Ginsberg's most recent publications include Creating Highly Motivating Classrooms for All Students: A Schoolwide Approach to Powerful Teaching with Diverse Learners (Jossey-Bass, 2000), Diversity and Motivation: Culturally Responsive Teaching (Jossey-Bass, 1995), and Educators Supporting Educators: A Guide to Organizing School Support Teams (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1997).
In addition, Dr. Ginsberg's work provides the foundational material for the video, Encouraging Motivation Among All Students (Video Journal of Education, Volume VI, 1996). She has a Ph.D. in Bilingual/Multicultural/Social Foundations of Education from the University of Colorado-Boulder. margery@edlink.com
© February 2003 Margery Ginsberg
Posted with permission by New Horizons for Learning
http://www.newhorizons.orgFor permission to redistribute, please contact the author.
