Many thanks to Ros Cooper, Bob Davies and the team at The Leadership and Community Service Academy (CIS 303) in the Bronx, NY for granting us permission to share their amazing song, Sophisticate It, written to teach students about improving writing through sentence strategies (Combinations). Lyrics by Ros. Music & production by Bob. Enjoy!
Existing literature points to skilled facilitation as a key factor in enabling a team’s success in the context of inquiry-based reform. There is little understanding, however, of how precisely facilitators make the needed difference. This study analyzes the moves of expert facilitators in a team-based reform found to be successful previously. It identifies and explicates five distinct categories of needed …
Persistently low-achieving schools often work with external partners to receive support in improving culture and academics. Strategic Inquiry is a school turnaround model that has been implemented in poor performing high schools in New York City. The goal of this study was to learn lessons from school-based facilitators as they implemented Strategic Inquiry in three …
Patterns of performance in schools are often quite constant; teachers and schools do the best of what they know, and typically get consistent results. There is much agreement among educational researchers that what’s needed is to move schools toward continuous improvement (e.g., Bryk et al. 2015; DuFour et al. 2005; Elmore 2007; Lieberman and Miller …
What will going back to school look like for the country’s 4.8 million English learners, many of whom are currently unable to access remote learning during school closure? Many families of ELs may have lost jobs or suffered from the virus itself, unable to send remittances to loved ones living in other countries, and many …
When Nell Scharff Panero walked into the high school math classroom, she couldn’t believe how bad it was. The teacher was at the board teaching his math, barely looking at the kids, while they ignored him and threw things across the room. She thought to herself: This guy shouldn’t be a teacher. So she was …
Improving high schools entails challenges that are “far easier to catalogue than to surmount” (Mazzeo, Fleischman, Heppen & Jahangir, 2016, p. 2). High schools have been the most difficult to reform because the challenges teachers face are arguably the hardest: skill gaps present since elementary school have widened; the demand to graduate all students college …
It’s widely accepted that there is a crisis in reading in this country, but there is also a writing crisis that requires our attention. Regardless of where one stands on the education reform spectrum, we all must do everything possible to find the best, most comprehensive solutions to address this crisis. According to the National Assessment …
Andy Lee thought he was helping some of his struggling students learn how to write an argumentative essay by breaking the task into smaller pieces, such as focusing first on the skill of paraphrasing. After all, Strategic Inquiry — the method the English department chair and lesson design coach at Savanna High School in Anaheim, California, is …
