Oregon seventh-grade social studies classes usually cover a wide range of topics, from early civilizations’ systems of government to the history of political revolutions from ancient Athens to Haiti today.
However, on a recent rainy morning at Mountain View Middle School, pupils were more preoccupied with a more straightforward subject: learning to recognize frequent prefixes, in the classroom of social studies teacher Erik Grant.
For instance, a mix of seventh and eighth graders, Grant explained to the class. When you put the word “again” in front of a verb like “wind” or “play,” the meaning changes. He said, “We’re doing this to help us understand why we’re doing it.”
Staff this year determined that the urgent need to catch middle school pupils up following the pandemic’s numerous disruptions during their critical elementary school years required a systemwide redesign, and similar situations are played out every day in all of the Beaverton School District’s middle schools.
Much of Oregon’s public-facing efforts have been directed toward elementary schools, where the state invested $90 million to improve the reading instruction of the state’s youngest students, and high schools, where a voter-backed initiative has invested nearly $1 billion over the past eight years in a promising expansion of career-technical education. These efforts are part of the state’s efforts to help a generation of students who have been affected by the pandemic.
There are increasingly few middle school-only statewide initiatives of this kind. This is true even though data indicates that disciplinary problems are most common in this age group and only 41% of middle school students received proficient scores on statewide reading examinations last spring.
School districts are now left to develop their own middle school programs. When so many students, like those at Mountain View, require assistance to attain grade level, one-on-one or small-group tutoring is the gold standard, but as Oregon Department of Education commissioner Charlene Williams has noted, it’s also an unfeasible and costly intervention.
Furthermore, Grant and his fellow educators are unable to ethically or legally stop teaching their middle school students, who were in first, second, and third grade when COVID originally forced the state’s schools to go into lockdown, the core, grade-level curriculum.
They also have no desire to do so.
After all, they have experience preparing their pupils for the critical thinking required in high school courses, not covering topics like Grant’s prefix lesson, which is considerably more commonly taught in primary school.
However, they are well aware that a large number of their pupils had severe academic deficiencies when they started middle school, which needed to be filled.
Brian Peerenboom, the principal at Mountain View, expressed concern about the post-pandemic data, which revealed that a large number of pupils were performing below grade level. He said something had to change.
Beginning this year, the district changed the schedules of all middle schools to include an 88-minute period for What I Need every other day. This period is referred to as a “WIN block” throughout the school community.
In order to accommodate that, most kids still take elective courses that last 42 minutes each day. However, they may have WIN block, 88 minutes of math, English, and PE/health one day, followed by 88 minutes of social studies and science the next. Compared to the prior timetable, which had classes every day for roughly 45 minutes, this is a significant difference.
Students spend a significant portion of the WIN period switching between their main academic teachers for academically appropriate math and reading instruction, even if that means reviewing elementary school-level material.
Students can switch between groups as needed since they are grouped based on how well they perform on the district’s online math and literacy platforms, which provide data that can be continuously assessed.
According to Peerenboom, this equates to offering accelerated activities to a large number of children who are already functioning at a high school level or even beyond at some of the district’s higher-income schools.
“It’s more likely to mean a reinforcement of foundational concepts that might have gone unlearned during the pandemic years at Mountain View, where roughly 40% of students come from families experiencing poverty and nearly half are Latino,” Peerenboom said. During the pandemic, few of the school’s pupils participated in homework pods or received private tutoring; some even lost parents or grandparents to COVID.
When they finally go back to school, the first year or so was a jumble of readjusting to life together after the pandemic’s collective trauma, a flurry of fights in the hallways and side-eye in the cafeteria, and TikTok trends that were playing havoc on restrooms.
With the support of a crackdown on cell phone use during school hours, Peerenboom claimed that behaviors have mostly reverted to the silly, funny nature of middle school hijinks over time.
However, there are still scholarly rifts.
In order to address this, Beaverton is including fundamentals into the WIN period. For example, language arts teacher Lindsey Turman is leading a practice on matching subjects and predicates, which are the fundamental building blocks of sentence structure. Although teachers modify it for their kids, the district uses online tools to give the curriculum.
As she and a group of her classmates went through the stack of cut-out subjects and predicates Turman had prepared for them to create their own Mad Libs-style poster, one girl, Sunaina, remarked, “This is a fun activity.” We still learn things from it, though. It’s beneficial.
In actuality, the change means that Grant can now teach the previously mentioned grammar lessons, science teacher Toni Hanson must explain how to simplify fractions to middle school students who are still baffled by how to reduce 9/15ths using its lowest common denominator, and math teacher Jacqueline Shin must adapt to leading book groups.
In a recent class time, that resulted in these glaringly absurd asides: Students responded with the word condiment when asked to name words that started with the prefix con, which means with. This sparked a debate on the differences between ranch and barbecue sauce, and Grant shared his fry sauce recipe before gently guiding his students back on course.
According to Peerenboom, the reasoning was that they were all our children. Whether it’s social studies, science, or anything else, we must step outside of our comfort zones and provide them the education they require.
This year, groups of core teachers—one from each of the following subjects—share a caseload of students and meet frequently to discuss tactics and assess each other’s progress.
Toni Hanson (back to camera), Erik Grant, Jacqueline Shin, principal Brian Peerenboom, and language arts teacher Lindsey Turman are among the staff members at Mountain View Middle School who convene to discuss their shared caseload of pupils.Beaverton School District courtesy
It sounded a lot like siblings planning a family reunion when Shin, Hanson, Grant, and Tuman got together recently for one of these meetings. They discussed the rewards for children who never arrived late to class (Star Wars pencils and lunch vouchers), the necessity to intervene right away if a student’s handwriting is unreadable, and the rule that two more students should never sit next to each other.
After noticing that the same five pupils continued getting placed in detention, that one of the classmates had gone to Mexico and wouldn’t return until January, and that a third had been acting gloomy, Hanson sent an email to the school counselor asking them to get in touch.
Grant acknowledged that the initial deployment of the WIN timetable at the beginning of the school year was chaotic and that he was very doubtful. However, he admitted that the middle school’s prior timetable, which had much shorter class periods, hadn’t worked either. More corridor transitions resulted from the shortened class periods, giving Mountain View’s more than 800 children more time to act out as they moved from one class to the next.
Additionally, he claimed that there was a definite lack of participation in advisory/homeroom, which was dominated by school announcements and other material bites.
Grant and his other educators said that they and their kids are getting used to the new schedule after almost four months of the school year. According to Hanson, they are discovering that it has given their days greater structure and flow.
Students report that they enjoy switching between different instructor setups. Thanks to the school’s commitment to provide families with the same detailed, uncompromising information on reading levels that the teachers examine every week during conferences, many parents are also more aware of exactly how their children are doing and what they need to do to improve.
The teachers stated that it was difficult to face the family of an eighth grader and inform them that their child was reading at a second-grade level. However, it was at least open, and students claimed that knowing exactly where they stand had inspired them to do better.
Later this year, when pupils are formally assessed against their September performance, the evidence will be revealed. However, Mountain View staff and instructors say they are allowing themselves to have hope that their combined efforts will be successful.
According to Peerenboom, parents are telling me that their child is finally learning a skill they are proficient in. They claim that it is reviving the pleasure of education.
Julia Silverman writes for The Oregonian/OregonLive about K–12 education. You can contact her at [email protected].
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