Seven weeks ago, an event took place that we call “The Switch”. It has shaken up this school year for better or worse. I briefly mentioned this in my Christmas Day “Catching Up” post, but here is the full story:
Essentially what happened is that we rearranged students and changed nearly every student’s schedule. The reason? Until now, our school has been scheduling students in low, median, and high classes based on testing and academic performance. For math and language arts, you were either in a Standard, Standard Plus, or Honors level class. This is what is called “tracking” in education. Students are put on a “track” and never come off of it unless their scores drastically improve or decline. This sounds great from a teaching perspective because you don’t have to worry about having high-flyers and low-acheivers in one class and how to enrich the fast learners while remediating for the slower learners. However, for the student, this means that they never get to experience a learning environment with peers who are maybe more motivated or function at a higher level that them (if they are on the lower end). What the causes is a lack of movement for the lower kids. Stagnation. You can’t have a higher-level student “peer tutoring” a lower-level student if they are all on about the same level.
So this is the problem that my principal came into and decided needed to change. At first, I was very frustrated and upset because I had grown to know and love the students that I had and the vibe in each block. What this “switch” meant was that our blocks were going to be shuffled and some kids were going to have to actually move from teacher to teacher. I was assigned the task of picking up more students who technically “failed” the EOG last year, but were close enough to making enough improvement to pass this year. In the education world, this is how you want to use your most effective teachers, so I took this as a compliment from my principal. However, this meant I had to get rid of some of my students who might have “passed” last year, but who are still not where they need to be and need a good, quality math teacher. Sparing all the dirty, long and drawn-out details, by the end of the 6 weeks it took us to figure all this out, I was losing about 12 students and picking up 18 new students, putting my numbers at 90 students.
What this meant is almost a new “start of the year” situation. I had to do for these new students what I had done with my students in the first week of school: invest in them, get them invested in me and my class, teach them our classes expectations for behavior and academics, and of course, convince them to reach the Big Goal. It has been a challenge, but I can honestly say that things are going well 7 weeks later. I can see students who I knew to be struggling big time in another teachers class doing well, maybe because they are in my class or maybe because they are around some more motivated and higher-achieving peers who can help me in bringing them up to speed.
I truly believe that my principal is looking to see dramatic changes happen at Northridge, and he wasn’t willing to wait until next school year to start these changes. I was initially frustrated because of the extra work he was asking from us teachers, and the sadness of losing students and my co-teaching situation, but I think that this really was the best for the most. Some are suffering due to being switched into a less-effective teachers classrooms, and for those students I am genuinely concerned about. However, the new mix-up has positively impacted as many students as possible.
[...] that my principal did a major schedule/class roster shake up mid-year which I wrote about here and here. Therefore, I might have ended the year with 90 students, and had taught an addition 15 at some [...]