How to Engage Underperforming Students (Transcript)

Shana Oliver: For about eight or nine years, we were considered a failing school and we knew that we had to restructure in order to keep our school open.

My name is Shana Oliver and I’m the academic facilitator here at Cochrane Collegiate Academy.

Joshua Bishop: The big part of what we do here is the professional development piece.

You know, the way we do professional development and training is very specific on enhancing their skill set.

Shana Oliver: — the key learning and the unit essential question. The concepts are going to change because we’re going to look at so many different components of professional development as we go.

My job here is to provide our teachers with professional development strategies that they can learn in here, through modeling, through experience, and take those out to our students to help our students to be successful in the classroom.

We have to have them say and do from beginning to end. And that’s why we call it interactive learning. It’s just not interactive when it’s time to work on the independent practice.

The non negotiables are, I guess, like the rules that govern our classroom practices. Every day, every teacher in every classroom must adhere to the non negotiables. These are the things that we learn that we have to do in order for our students to be successful. The essential question is the big question that the students have to be able to answer at the end of the lesson. That’s the first of our main non negotiables. That’s how we know whether our students got it or didn’t get it.

Angela Johnson: It says, how do character motivations and character traits work together to help readers better understand a character?

Why does a character behave in a particular way? Why does a character say the things that they say?

Shana Oliver: An activating strategy is the thing that gets the students motivated about the lesson. What are you going to do, as the teacher in the classroom, to whet their appetite to want to learn whatever you’re teaching them?

Angela Johnson: All right, so this is what we’re gonna do. We’re going to look at some characters that you may be familiar with, or you may not be familiar with, and gonna look at some of their attributes.

So for my classroom, you may see a movie clip, or you may see a clip of the ‘Fresh Prince of Bel Air.’ I want them to interact and see things that are relevant to them.

Gimme some basic characteristics of Urkel.

Shana Oliver: One of our non negotiables is limited lecture. Research says that students can only maintain their attention span for their age plus two or three minutes. So when that time has elapsed, teachers must stop at that point and have students do something.

Angela Johnson: I know my attention span is pretty short, so I definitely know my students’ attention span is short. So I probably talk for maybe three or four minutes, and then I let them have a conversation.

I’ll tell your group the character type and then you guys have to draw your representation and your scenario. Any questions? Everybody understand what they’re doing? Okay, I’m gonna allow you to choose your own groups, groups of three. Let’s move.

Shana Oliver: One of our most important non negotiables is the use of graphic organizers.

Rosalyn Alston: I want us to go and walk through the graphic organizer that you’re gonna make. It’s gonna be in the form of a Frayer diagram.

Shana Oliver: We know that it’s important for our students to be able to conceptualize whatever information we’re giving them, and that doesn’t happen with pages and pages and lines of notes and copying.

Rosalyn Alston: In the middle, you’re gonna put FOIL.

That graphic organizing frees them up from taking notes, allows them to plug and play and still be involved with the lesson.

Shana Oliver: When I do the professional development sessions with teachers, I set it up exactly the way that it should look in a classroom.

It should look similar to this in your classroom, whether you’re working it down or across. So for our classroom in here, this is going to stay the same, the key learning and the unit essential question.

Rosalyn Alston: The modeling that is done in our profession development interactive learning has the teacher have to flip in their mind from teacher to student, which is a very interesting mindset–

Angela Johnson: Learning focus and those non negotiables has been phenomenal for our school, because it allows the students to collaborate and the teachers to not only involve the students, but to engage them. I think that was the piece that was missing before.

Joshua Bishop: In the 2006, 2007 school year, we were listed as one of the 30 worst performing schools in the state of North Carolina. We have more than doubled what our percent on grade level is since that point in time. This is the success. This is what’s making a difference in our students’ lives.

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Schools That Work

Cochrane Collegiate Academy