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In the News
Smaller learning communities initiatives at East, West striving to keep kids in school
Courier Press (Iowa)
May 28, 2006
by ANDREW Wind
WATERLOO --- A teacher asks each of the 20 students in her weekly advisory period what's going on in their lives and how they're feeling.
A student struggling in several classes is referred to the learning center, where she works individually with a peer tutor or teacher.
A ninth-grader is assigned to a freshman house, ensuring most classes will be with a smaller group of kids his age.
These examples illustrate how East and West high schools use three new programs to shrink and personalize situations in which students learn. The initiatives are intended to keep students from dropping out.
West's advisory groups --- called Student Personal Advisory but referred to as Spa --- are finishing their second full year. Student advisories started second semester last year at East. The freshman houses and the learning centers began last fall at both schools.
The initiatives are at the heart of Waterloo Community Schools' efforts to create smaller learning communities for students at East --- with about 1,200 students --- and West --- with more than 1,800. Concerns nationally about large urban schools that struggle with safety, achievement, graduation rates and behavioral problems led educators and researchers to look at the benefits of smaller schools.
"Smaller learning communities are a reaction to the factory model of high school that currently exists," said Ash Vesudeva, deputy director of the School Redesign Network at Stanford University. "And the idea underlying small learning communities is that we're losing a high number of students through attrition and dropouts because they're not connected to school."
Waterloo is focusing on connecting students with peers and teachers.
"It's reshaping the way that we think about things and the way that we do things," said Rhonda Tiwari, who oversees East High School's smaller learning communities. "The standards and benchmarks about teaching and learning are still the same, but we're just approaching it different ways."
Some students give high marks to the district's efforts so far:
--- West junior Sam Sturch said activities done during Spa and the teacher's mentoring helped in planning for next year. She also advised freshmen in her group as they signed up for classes. Sturch believes the teacher's approach is key.
"The enthusiasm that they have bounces off and reflects on the other people," she said.
--- East junior Tore'Jalia Sudduth's grade point average had dropped to 1.6 last winter and she was referred to the learning center. With the help of the teacher and tutors, she got her grades up over the course of a month.
Sudduth had been neglecting assignments.
"Coming up here, I have more time to work on my work." She has a 2.8 grade point average and continues attending voluntarily during study hall.
--- West ninth-grader Phillip Shirk likes taking classes with students only his age through the freshman house program.
"You really get to know the kids that are in your house," he said. "When you're with older kids, you get picked on because you're a freshman."
West teacher Jim Young-Kent acknowledged not every student has embraced the initiatives.
Freshmen can have "really negative" perceptions of the house program, which he coordinates at the school. And the advisory period is "not well-received" overall, he said.
"There's plenty of room for improvement."
<b>Building relationships</b>
The district received an $88,000 federal planning grant in 2002 to study smaller learning communities. Two years later, it won a three-year $700,000 implementation grant. Next fall begins the final year of that grant.
Advisories were the first component. The 25-minute periods every Wednesday include groups averaging 15 students who meet throughout the year with the same teacher. They replaced the homeroom concept.
At West, a mixture of students from grades nine to 11 are included in each Spa. Twelfth-graders are assigned to a separate "senior seminar." At East, students are assigned to an advisory within their grade level. The sessions provide a format to discuss a wide range of topics relating to school, careers, college and personal issues.
"Schools that work seem to have common characteristics, and one of those characteristics is a feeling of relationships," said Blair Thielen, West's smaller learning communities coordinator. The primary goal of advisory is students becoming acquainted with their teacher "so every kid would have an adult that knows them well."
Thielen noted it is "a whole lot easier to do that with 15 kids than a counselor who has 400 or 500 kids on their roster."
Sturch, the West junior, likes Spa better than homeroom.
"I didn't feel like I knew my homeroom teacher at all," she said.
West sophomore Pooja Reddy said a "homey" environment developed in her Spa and she has become friends with students she didn't know.
"You basically form a big, new family," she said. "You actually learn more about yourself."
The small group of seniors in advisory with East teachers Judy Dickson and Carolyn Ford didn't know each other at the beginning of the year, but have become friends.
"We all talk together," said Jordan Post. "It's formed a lot closer relationships with each of us."
Mike Wright added that students sometimes share problems they are having at home or school with their classmates or teacher.
"The advisories are supposed to be safe rooms," he said.
Experts warn it requires a lot of effort to sustain advisories.
"Advisory has been a really difficult strategy for all of the reform groups and districts that have tried to do it. It's not an easy thing," said Vesudeva, of the School Redesign Network. "It's complicated because it forces us to think about teachers and students sort of taking on new roles and helping teachers to become comfortable with those roles."
Joe Nathan, director of the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, encourages schools to be clear about goals and assess whether they are accomplishing them.
In advisory groups his organization has helped set up at a St. Paul school, every student is expected to create a six-year plan for high school and beyond.
"The idea is if kids have some very specific goals they are more likely to reach them," Nathan said. "Part of the idea of advisories in St. Paul is to really help the kids explore their options so they make informed choices."
<b>Making the transition</b>
Last August, Superintendent Dewitt Jones set the bar for the freshman houses during a Board of Education meeting. "Our goal is literally to have this freshman class come in and not have any drop out," he said.
The number of dropouts has been declining in recent years, but the district still has a ways to go. It had a 6.4 percent dropout rate during 2004-05 for students in grades nine through 12. The class of 2005 had a 77.1 percent graduation rate, which accounts for graduates and dropouts since freshmen year.
"That's our goal, to make sure these kids are successful all the way through school," said Tiwari. "The transition from eighth grade to ninth grade is typically where kids struggle."
"We know that's our highest risk group," Thielen added. "If they start failing classes and fall through the cracks they may not drop out right away, but they're in danger of not making it through high school."
Ensuring every freshman graduates on time is "a lofty goal," she said. "Will there be some that probably won't make it, despite our best efforts? Probably."
Each freshman house includes 100 to 120 students who take their core math, English, science and social studies classes from the same teachers. Some students like being in the houses because they can get to know kids better in their smaller grouping while others complain that limits them.
West freshman Tawny Walker said being assigned to a house eased her concerns about making the transition from middle to high school.
"I was very worried because it's so much bigger, and there's so many more people," she said.
Teachers in each house have several joint planning times each week that allow them to discuss struggling students, plan for cross-curricular classroom activities or coordinate what they're teaching.
"They're able to collaborate, and they know their students really well," said Tiwari.
"There's a real advantage to being able to do this; to see what kids are doing in other classes," said Gary Cederlund, a West house teacher.
"I think it's become less of an individualistic approach to teaching, and I like that," said Anna Payne, an East house teacher. "There's more interaction, and I think that helps the kids a lot."
Most freshmen attend learning labs overseen by their house teachers several times a week. They can go directly to any of them for help. Another intervention for struggling students is before- and after-school homework help at East and an after-school "eighth hour" at West.
West freshman Ingrid Folkers appreciates the learning labs.
"It helps us because we get to talk to our teachers about the assignments if we don't understand it," she said.
<b>Intensive support</b>
Teachers refer struggling students to learning centers within the libraries at each school. Students can receive individual help from tutors and the teacher who staffs each center. Plus, they have access to computers or other resources.
One impetus for starting the centers was the addition of academic probation to the district's athletic eligibility rules. Athletes on academic probation are referred to the learning center and must get their grades up within a certain time frame. Teachers are encouraged to refer other students having difficulty in class as well.
"It's a more structured intensive type of support than what we had before," Tiwari said.
"A lot of these kids, they're failing because they're not getting their work turned in," said Charlie Aldrich, East's learning center coordinator. "They can go to study hall and do nothing. But here, I'm right on top of them."
East junior Michael Hogancamp said his problem was laziness when he was referred to the learning center last fall. Between Aldrich's prodding and the help of a peer tutor who is a "math genius," he got his algebra I grade up to a B-plus by the end of first quarter.
"I think the learning center is what study hall should be," he said.
Going to the learning center doesn't solve the problem for everyone, though.
West junior Nick Fairchild said his grades have gone up with learning center coordinator Beth Hunemuller's help and because he has a place to do homework for one period every day. However, his grades are still not as high as they could be because it's not a priority for him.
"I just don't do my homework," he said. "Two seconds after we're done with a class, I don't really think about it."
West junior Michael Jones has embraced the learning center's help more enthusiastically. He is assigned there for one period, but gets permission to come down after finishing his work during other classes.
"I didn't know how to look up stuff before, so I didn't do it," he said.
Hunemuller showed him how find the information he needed in books and online. She also helped him with comprehension problems in reading science textbooks.
<b>Impact uncertain</b>
Thielen and Tiwari say the learning centers have been well-used at their schools. During first semester, 230 West students and 194 East students used the centers. Most were not referred for reasons of athletic eligibility.
Next year, neither school expects to have a full-time learning center coordinator because of budget cuts. But a teacher will be assigned to the center every period.
Vesudeva called the learning centers a "great opportunity" for struggling students. "The fact that they're coming there voluntarily for extra support says something about the condition they've created."
But he warned "you want to monitor these centers to make sure kids are actually making progress."
The schools are seeing progress on a number of academic indicators, although officials stress three years of data is necessary before drawing any conclusions.
At West, the number of freshmen not on track for 10th grade after first semester dropped from 62 in 2004-05 to 54 this year, based on credits completed. Ten of those students were close enough that they could still complete 10 credits by the end of the year and be sophomores next fall. In the same time frame, the number of students transferred to the Waterloo Alternative Program for Attendance dropped from 24 to 11 students.
At East, 86 percent of freshmen were on track for 10th grade after first semester. Another 10 percent were "right on the bubble," said Tiwari. The school also transferred fewer students to Waterloo Alternative Program for Attendance.
In addition, both schools are expecting fewer repeat sections next fall for freshmen who failed classes. For example, at West they will drop from two to one both in English and history. Each section has up to 20 students.
It is not yet known if the initiatives really impact learning.
"A lot of money has been invested, but there's no definite research at this point," said Nathan, of the Center for School Change.
On the other hand, he said the research is "very clear" creating autonomous or semi-autonomous schools with no more than 400 students --- another approach to addressing the problems of large high schools --- has "enormous benefits." In similar groups of students, those enrolled in small schools are less likely to be involved in the juvenile justice system, less likely to use drugs, more likely to enjoy their education and more likely to graduate.
"In general, I'd say the most progress comes when people set up distinctive small schools," Nathan said.
But Vesudeva points out it takes more than physically making schools smaller to impact achievement.
"I think there's a consensus in the field it's not simply going smaller," he said. "It's what you do in those smaller settings and what you teach in those smaller settings."
Schools that use their small size "to provide teacher collaboration, to help kids connect to their community, to create lessons that are interdisciplinary or tied to real-world activities" see greater gains, said Vesudeva. Those may include reduced discipline problems, higher achievement levels and a narrowing achievement gap for groups of low-performing students.
"We know nationally more schools have made structural changes rather than instructional changes," he added. "In Waterloo and everywhere else, it's 'How do you support these instructional changes?'"
Contact Andrew Wind at (319) 291-1507 or andrew.wind@wcfcourier.com.
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