Ch 8 Organizing for Success: From Inequality to Quality

This entry may seem a little disjointed at times, but I just tried to take down my thoughts and feelings as I read through each section so that I wouldn't forget anything!

The anecdote about Eduardo Rodriguez stuck with me because in one of my classes this semester, I will be tutoring a second grade girl in reading. She will probably have similar problems in reading to Eduardo and it is comforting to see that the strategy of saying "You can do it and you're going to do it" rather than "We'll see if you can do it" has worked so well. That is something I was already planning to do, but it is nice to see my classes connect like this!

I think it is really interesting that so many of the classes at these schools were interdisciplinary. When I was in high school, I would have hated 70-75 minutes classes, but had they been as interesting as these sounded, I think it would have made a big difference! It's always useful to see how several of your subjects can connect to one another.

I went to a small school of about 200 women. It was a private Catholic school, but many of the students were there on substantial scholarships or had parents willing to work a substantially harder to ensure that their daughters got a great education in a small school where she would certainly be known. My school has a 100% graduation rate and a 100% college attendance rate. From what I have seen and experienced, small schools help a lot as far as graduation and college goes.

Reduced pupil loads are the best. When I was in Australia, we were only allowed to take four courses at a time and it helped so much. I was able to put a lot more time and energy into each specific class rather than taking six or seven, like we do here, and only being able to put a little bit of time into each class. They even follow this approach in high school where as seniors, students are allowed to pick and choose what courses they want to continue in that would be most relevant to them as go out into the real world and college.

I worked at KIPP U-Prep for a semester. They have Saturday school there about once a month. One day, I made a comment to one of the students about how I would not have enjoyed going to school on a Saturday, but he responded with how helpful it was and how it really wasn't so bad. As the chapter says, it seems this kid viewed the school as a privilege, not a punishment and so he was able to enjoy it and make full use of it.

I love all of the real world applications that this chapter discusses. There are so many times when students ask about how whatever they're learning actually applies to them, and to know that someone put in all this time to figure out these things! It's really cool and I would have loved it in high school.

I appreciate that in this chapter they talk not only about improving student success, but also helping the teachers out. The teachers are given many opportunities to improve the quality of their instruction, including time to collaborate with each other and to design curriculum. It is important to keep the teachers happy and learning in order to keep the students interested and excited to learn. I also feel like one of the best ways to learn is through collaboration and discussion, which is exactly what these schools are doing for these teachers. I think it's great!

I love the idea of intentionality. It's one that we always use at camp and it's something that I think should spread to more and more schools. Having deep and interconnected reasons for doing certain things or teaching in a certain way and making sure your students know that there is a reason behind everything keeps them much more interested. Every night, our girls share their "deltas," or what could have gone better in their day, as well as how they could have changed it, and their "pluses," or what the highlight of their day was. The girls love this because they know they're going to be able to help offer up solutions for other girls' "deltas" while also receiving support from their cabin mates for their own. There are a lot of things from camp that I'd like to bring to my classroom and this is definitely one of them.