By Staff
The opening of the new Dowagiac Middle School in the fall of 2005 represented a huge commitment by the schools and community to the growth and future of the students of Dowagiac and to providing the best for our children.
The building has been operational for a year and has been a tremendous asset to the educational process, but it is, after all, a building.
And no edifice ever conferred an education on a child by itself.
The most important event is the daily learning interaction between the adults and children in the building, and as we look to new facilities to improve our instruction, it is even more important to look at new programs to help us be better at our jobs.
Two significant programs launched in our school district over the last three years are the Collins Writing Program and Differentiated Instruction.
Collins Writing has been implemented over the last three years.
Differentiated Instruction was presented to the entire school district teaching staff this fall.
The Collins Writing program is a uniform process of writing and standards that progress from list-making and brainstorming at Level 1 to creating term and research-quality documents at Level 5.
During the process, students concentrate on three to five "FCAs" (Focal Content Areas) to concentrate on mastery of specific writing areas, such as punctuation, spelling, organization, content, structure and coming up with conclusions.
Differentiated Instruction was introduced by Dr. Pat Williams-Boyd this fall during a district-wide inservice and again during the fall inservice by teams of consultants from the NWEA (Northwest Evaluation Association), who spoke on the connection between using the NWEA student test scores from our bi-annual assessments and addressing student improvement in the classroom.
Concepts such as cubing, grouping and curriculum ladders were covered in detail over two days.
Each teacher was given a copy of the book, The Differentiated Classroom, by Carol Anne Tomlinson to use as a resource.
I recently sat down with the 8th Grade Black core academic team, to get their impressions of the two programs.
The team is composed of veteran teachers Kelly Cromer, English; Pat Maxey, science; Bernard Thomas, social studies; and Andy Hackett, our new eighth grade mathematics teacher.
All of the team members use Collins Writing and are starting to implement Differentiated Instruction and were glad to share their experiences.
Each of the teachers uses some level of the Collins program on an average of once a week.
Probably no one is more familiar with Collins than Cromer.
When asked how long she had implemented Collins Writing, Cromer paused and replied, "Three … gosh no, eight years now. I have been using it not only in Dowagiac, but when I started teaching in another district.
"Like everything, success with Collins depends a lot on initial skill level and attitude, but we have noticed significant gains in our MEAP writing scores since adopting Collins. And they learn to write in every class, not just English."
Thomas echoed these sentiments.
"This framework works well into my specific curriculum. I am really pleased to have a program that shows exactly what the expectations are for the teacher and the students. It is a really effective way to get information from kids."
Maxey pointed out, "I use all levels of the writing. And when the preparation and grading are concise and understood, you are frankly more likely to do more and more writing in the classroom."
Hackett has already started daily journaling Level 1 and 2 responses with his students and is looking forward to moving on to the higher levels of expression.
All four were equally positive about their early Differentiated Instruction experience.
Hackett had a major project recently where he used task cards for students at different levels of instruction.
"The kids who were struggling were given task cards with more detailed instructions and the kids who had mastered the concept were able to go forward and a little beyond what we were doing in the class."
Maxey agreed that Differentiated Instruction definitely was a way to approach kids who learn slower, but help them master the concepts the same as the other students.
Thomas related that the entire team was planning a cross- curricular differentiated unit and that he liked the way that all children at all levels of instruction were challenged.
Cromer added that Differentiated Instruction did not always have to address a large unit or major theme.
By differentiating a recent vocabulary quiz by providing students with different cues and study strategies, she felt the results were promising.
Each profession and pastime we encounter on a daily basis has seen tremendous changes and advancements in our lifetimes.
I am old enough to remember black-and-white TVs, which even with antennas only pulled two stations in Cass County.
Transistor radios were a wonder. The first pocket calculator I bought for my wife cost half a week's salary.
Cars had mostly manual transmissions and no seat belts.
The Internet? Who could have imagined? In the same way technology changes to meet changes in life, education changes dynamically to meet changing needs of students and improve their experience.
The teachers of Dowagiac are willing to make those changes.
And when they ask students to grow and learn, it is something they model themselves.