By NEIL PIERSON
Staff Reporter
Editor's Note: This is the sixth report of a nine-part series that will run throughout the 2006-2007 school year exploring individual school improvement plans in the Cheney School District.
The reports will run following the monthly board of directors meeting at each school. This week's report is on Betz Elementary.
Differentiated instruction—teaching to an individual child's strengths and weaknesses—is a model that Betz Elementary principal Kent Martin and his staff are leaning on.
Cheney School District officials have been pushing differentiated instruction as the wave of the future for some time now. Betz is implementing it into all facets of learning, focusing especially hard on math in its school improvement plan.
“Math naturally covers a pretty wide spectrum, and we're expected to go pretty deep with that too,” said Martin, who is in his first year at Betz after working with the Battle Ground School District.
Martin and fourth-grade teacher Audra Shaw say that expectations with math have evolved. When Martin was a high school math teacher many years ago, he said instruction focused on concepts but rarely made connections to the real world.
Due to the advent of Essential Academic Learning Requirements (EALRs) and tests like the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL); both say that standards are going up—and will continue to.
“I think that's really the goal of differentiation,” Martin added. “We're really trying to do twice as much in the same amount of time, so that's where the struggles come in for most of us.”
Shaw, who has taught at Betz since 1994, also likes the school's renewed focus on team-teaching. She partners twice a week with fellow fourth-grade teachers Susan Chamberlin and Michelle Hennessy to spot trends and successful strategies.
“Between us we can usually zero in on some really important parts,” Shaw said. “It makes a huge difference just in that individual instruction. And we've seen the results of that.”
Betz's short-term goal for math is modest improvement—a 1-4 percent rise in WASL passage rates for grades 3-5—attained through a variety of strategies.
Kindergarten and first-grade students are working with calendars and storybooks to improve number sense and basic addition and subtraction skills. The Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test begins in second grade, and strategies that gradually increase the difficulty level of concepts and procedures continue through third grade.
The WASL becomes a bigger focus in fourth and fifth grades, along with more differentiated instruction on number sense.
The district has introduced new science kits at the elementary level this year. Martin and his staff are trying to adjust to them as quickly as possible and keep science scores rising in fifth grade—they've done so in each of the last two years.
“It's a big key to determine how the kits meet the science EALRs,” Martin said.
As for reading and writing, the school's past work in those areas has paid off. Shaw has seen fourth-grade writing scores go up over the past four years—last year's group passed at a 72 percent clip—something she attributes to the school's addition of two full-time literary specialists and a reading/writing workshop.
“It allows for every child to have one-on-one conferencing with an adult,” Shaw said. “Just that individualized instruction is a big piece.”
Kindergarten teachers are focusing on oral language skills, with sight vocabulary and decoding strategies coming into play in first grade. From second grade on, students gradually integrate comprehension strategies, guided reading conversations using fiction and non-fiction, and advanced vocabulary development.
Martin said Betz has a few kindergarteners who already read and write well, and he thinks that number may increase as more parents opt for the school's full-time program.
Even the school's music, physical education and library specialists are getting in on the act. At the district's Feb. 28 board of directors meeting, music teacher Julie Zimmerman and students demonstrated a marimba exercise designed for “sequential brain development.”
Every fifth-grader at Betz learned the African-flavored rhythm, which forces them to work on their eye-hand coordination through alternating and crossover patterns.
“Working their brains in a sequential pattern is really what we have to do in literacy training,” Martin explained.
Neil Pierson can be reached at npierson@cheneyfreepress.com
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