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 …
For decades, decisions about education policy in New York have been filtered through state and local conflicts. Indeed, politics often dominates, divides, and obscures the conversation, causing many to lose sight of the most fundamental question for anyone who cares about education reform: how do students learn? In looking for an answer, we found a …
A program to aid troubled city high school students helped more kids get on track to graduate, Columbia University researchers found. A study to be published by Columbia’s Teachers College Tuesday shows that students in schools that adopted the Strategic Inquiry program – which helped educators to target struggling kids and get them help – …
In 2014 newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that instead of closing “troubled schools” and simply reshuffling the deck, New York City would invest in a “Renewal” program to turn the schools around and benefit their students. Ninety-four schools were enlisted based on low four-year graduation rates and poor test scores for middle and elementary schools. Renewal …
The following study of Strategic Inquiry (SI) in New York City’s Renewal High Schools offers a new answer to the perennial question that often dominates and divides reformers: How do students learn? Our analysis also challenges conventional wisdom about New York City’s Renewal program by suggesting there are successful components worth pursuing and adopting elsewhere. …
Teaching grade-level content to students who have just arrived in the United States and whose English skills are limited is a difficult task. High school-level content specialists especially have little training on how to integrate language acquisition into their content. Often teachers deal with that by either dumbing down the curriculum to make it linguistically simpler …
On a recent morning at Flushing HS, Demetra Fasolakis’ 10th- and 11th-grade English students — all English language learners with rudimentary English — are discussing the relationship between the poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke and a military officer, Franz Kappus, who wrote him letters asking for advice. They read aloud and annotate a paragraph …
