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 …
The Scaffolded Apprenticeship Model (SAM) is a team-based school improvement and leadership development program in which participants earn graduate-level credits and school leadership certification[1]. One key component of the SAM program is peer coaching, where SAM participants, or “coaches,” partner with colleagues, or “peers,” in their schools to examine the peers’ instructional practice. In SAM, the term “peer coaching” is used …
Developing school capacity to continuously improve student achievement is essential to the success of New York City’s strategy to empower schools and hold them accountable for results. The Inquiry initiative is the New York City Department of Education (DOE’s) approach to developing this capacity. Its goal is to develop school administrators’ and teachers’ skills in …
Last week I was looking all over the house for a book called Strategic Inquiry: Starting Small for Big Results in Education by Nell Scharff Panero and Joan E. Talbert. I’ve been a fan of their work for quite a long time, and Nell gave me a call a few weeks ago to catch up and talk …
