The West Windsor-Plainsboro school board spent more than an hour and a half during its April 22 meeting discussing recommendations from a review committee for enriching the programs for the district’s exceptionally-able learners, focusing on the middle school level.##M:[more]##
The recommendations were a follow-up to an external consultant, who appeared before the board last year, and the committee was tasked with taking those recommendations and expanding them – looking past just the PRISM program offered in the district’s middle schools, explained Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction Steve Mayer. He said the first task was to evaluate which types of students the district should target.
In a power point presentation, he showed various characteristics associated with bright learners, compared with exceptionally-able learners. For example, a bright learner knows all the answers, but an exceptionally-able student asks the questions. A bright learner learns with ease, while an exceptionally able learner already knows. “You can see the contrast between a child being in the top group and one beyond the top group,” Mayer said.
The committee, which was formed two years ago, consists of teachers, two parents, administrators, and subject supervisors from around the district who considered various questions, including whether PRISM and other “enrichment” experiences fully meet the academic needs of these learners, and what must change to adequately address these needs, he explained.
The PRISM program (Performance, Revealing, Individual Student Magic) offered at the district’s middle schools was developed by Marilyn Roessler, the gifted and talented coordinator in the district at the time when there was only one middle school, who is now retired. Under the program, there are various “paths” which students can choose to partake in, including ROGATE, Cognetics, National History Day, Future Problem Sovling, and Scenario Writing Contest. According to Joan Ruddiman, the PRISM coordinator at Grover, the program is designed to “meet the needs of a wide range of kids,” and provide a safe place to nuture their excellence and teaches them research, problem-solving, and communication skills they can apply in various areas.
The consultant had made a few recommendations to the board last year, including maintaining PRISM’s focus on independent research that is driven by student interest, adopting a district philosophy for exceptionality, codifying the identification process to maintain consistency and continuity, and to cluster groups, which would accelerate and enrich all of the core subject areas.
It is the last recommendation that was discussed during the meeting. Mayer said that clustering ensures students are in classes with “like-minded peers,” but it also maintains heterogenous grouping, which means the classes would not be tracked. Some possibilities for expanding the program include developing an Accelerated &Enriched science course for 7 to 9 percent of eighth grade students, creating an enriched parallel curriculum in science, language arts, and social studies for grades six through eight in order to leverage cluster grouping, and providing opportunities for exceptionally able middle school students to “revolve” into a lab setting in the PRISM classroom for “compacted learning experience in social studies and language arts.”
Theresa Maone, an eighth grade science teacher at Grover, explained the specific recommendations for the A&E science course the committee suggested the district develop. The exceptionally able learners “want to move faster; they want to go deeper,” she explained. The course would involve a combination of chemistry and physics, and integrate this work with the math the students are learning. “It’s not just about acceleration, although acceleration in math an science is very important,” she said.
She says the committee hopes to see the course come to begin in the 2009-10 school year.
In order to identify candidates for the A&E science course, the committee suggested students also be enrolled in A&E math, demonstrate a passion and aptitude in science, receive a teacher recommendation, and take an advanced, practical, problem-based science exam, which they would have to pass.
With regard to language arts, Catherine McGuinnes, an Itegrated Reading and Lanuage Arts teacher with the district who is also part of the committee, said that the committee wants to create a lab setting in PRISM for like-minded peers to interact. Another suggestion would be to create a parallel curriculum within the current IRLA classroom to provide students with access to choice novels, challenging materials, and enriched instruction in reading and writing. The parallel curriculum would work in conjunction with the Able Reader curriculum, would create opportunities to read and write with like-minded peers, and require deliberate clustering.
She said the approach in the language arts would be different from that used in science. The suggestions for the language arts lab setting would target a smaller percentage of students, probably about 3 to 5 percent of students, she said. The suggestions would include having students leave the traditional classroom to go to a PRISM classroom and extend their learning experience. The lab setting would take place in a PRISM room, and it would offer students the opportunity to enrich themselves at a faster and deeper level. “At times they might be there for a one-week period, at others they might be there for six weeks,” she said.
Identifying students who are exceptionally able learners in language arts would involve analyzing their writing scores and writing portfolios, and students would have to receive recommendations from their teachers, she explained.
She said the committee hopes the students could be identified this spring, so that professional development and development of a parallel curriculum could take place over the summer, in time for the program to beginning in September, 2008.
Mark Wise, the social studies supervisor in the district, told the board that the process for the social studies program is similar to that of the language arts. A lab setting would be created for guided research, and a parallel curriculum within the current social studies classroom would provide students with access to a greater depth of content, sophistication of materials, and an opportunity for critical and abstract thinking. It would also involve clustering students.
As part of the parallel curriculum, work for exceptionally able students could include reading college texts and deepening their questioning. For example, he said, all students might be studying Islam, and would be asked to examine how it was a globalizing force in the medieval world. “Everyone would be answering this question, but the exceptionally able learner might ask how it’s different and similar today?” Wise said, adding that the questions would be broader. “It might be at a level where they can get their hands dirty, their minds dirty, so to speak.”
The identification would be the same as it is for language arts, in addition to requiring a review of the students’ past research efforts. And, like language arts, the committee hopes students would be identified this spring, and a parallel curriculum could be developed over the summer in time for September, 2008.
“As a board, we would seek (approval) as early as May,” Mayer said. “We do believe we can implement that course without a change in staffing.”
Board members expressed some reservations after the presentation. Stan Katz said he loved the work the committee did, but “I don’t know whether I should be thrilled or furious,” he said.
He said he was afraid the recommendations would “make things better for a very small group” of students. He said if these recommendations were limited, it would be “very elitist.” Creating special programs for exceptional students and saying, “we’ll go homogeneous for everybody else” just “doesn’t work.”
Committee members said this wasn’t the case, but that they appreciated the concern. “You haven’t said anything we haven’t said back and forth to each other over the last year,” said Maone.
Committee members explained that “it’s not that we’re giving up on all of the other students,” and that the parallel curriculum would be fluid. Referring back to Wise’s social studies example, committee members explained that some students might be exceptional when it comes to the Civil War, and they would be moved into deeper study for that particular topic, and then when it comes to the Industrial Revolution, they could be put back into the classroom to learn what they don’t already know. Mayer explained that the “same isn’t right for everybody.”
Board member Richard Kaye explained the conundrum district officials face, which is that it can either stop the process before it begins to move any further, or move along with it, and face criticism from some members of the community because “it won’t be for everyone, and they won’t support it,” he said. He also pointed out that there is a critical mass of young people who are achievement-oriented, which is a conversation many districts in the state don’t have to have. “If we don’t allow this group to move forward, we hold this group back for more years, and everyone will suffer.”
Robert Johnson said he didn’t “feel like we’re quite ready to be talking about this for 2008.”
Committee members also pointed out that there are a very small number of students who are so far ahead that teachers come to administrators and say that they have nothing left to teach those students. They said they didn’t want these students to slip through the cracks because they are focused on struggling learners.
“We do not want to fail in any way with this,” Mayer explained. “We’re convinced as a group that their needs aren’t met.”
Maone emphasized that there is a small percentage of students who needs more than a challenging eighth grade curriculum in science, even though that curriculum is already tough as it is. “As classroom teachers, we focus hard on struggling students,” she said. “The students that do so well, we say, ‘Thank God for them — let them do their thing.’
“They have great potential. They will solve big problems in the future if we don’t keep clipping their wings,” she added.
