Context for Learning 

Dodge Renaissance Academy

The resident teacher teaches middle school at Dodge Renaissance Academy. Dodge Academy was the first Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL) in-building turnaround and remains a strong part of the AUSL network. Dodge Academy is often held up as flagship model school community because the AUSL turnaround framework is reflected in all parts of the school. The AUSL Turnaround Framework focuses on establishing a positive school culture; proactive social supports that meet student needs; aggressive and transparent goals for schools, teams, and individuals; shared responsibility for achievement; delivering a guaranteed and viable curriculum; and engaging and personalized instruction and is the lynch-pin of instruction and culture at Dodge Academy. All classroom, grade-band, and school-wide expectations, including those for Resident Teachers are established with the framework in mind. Instruction is expected to meet AUSL-network-wide expectations (including being research and data driven, and requiring active participation from all students) and visitors to the building are frequent.

Many, but not all students, come from the surrounding neighborhood (East Garfield Park). Some students come from other West Side neighborhoods (e.g. Austin, Lawndale) and others from as far south as South Shore. There are approximately 430 students enrolled at Dodge Academy. 95.8% students are low-income and 99.3% of students are African-American.  There is a fairly strong sense of the “Dodge community,” amongst students that effect trickles up to parents. Some parents are actively involved in the school culture, but not many.

Interactions between families and teachers are generally positive, with a few exceptions. The interactions that are strained are generally with families of students who have had repeated behavior or academic challenges. Parents are mainly involved through phone contact (calls and text messages) with the teachers and other staff, concerning both negative and positive behavior. Families are generally receptive to this type of communication. Some family members visit classrooms on rare occasions during the school day. A small, but not insignificant number of family members come to the school for teacher- and family-initiated conferences. The majority of parents, about 75 percent, come to the school on report card pick-up day and are eager to talk about their students performance and behavior in that context.

Throughout this school year, the mentor teacher and resident teacher have used AUSL assembled documents, including the 7^th and 8^th grade Unpacked Benchmarks and Pacing Guides to make decisions about the content and pacing of lessons. The resident teacher aligns all her lessons with specific 7^th and 8^th grade Illinois State Learning Standards. In part because of AUSL mandates, the mentor and resident teacher’s instruction relies heavily on the “I do/We do/You do” instructional format in which the teacher models the skill or activity being taught and then gradually releases responsibility and cognitive work to the students. Also due in part to AUSL expectations, majority of the resident teacher’s lessons involve a “Do Now” activity at the beginning of class that is tied to instruction and an “Exit Ticket” at the end of class that serves a formative assessment for the day’s skills or content. Although the resident teacher is required to use many of these resources and instructional strategies as part of the expectations for the Residency, they have proven to be effective throughout the school year and the resident teacher will continue to use them in her practice. 

The resident teacher’s instruction, professional reflection, and formal evaluation by others is informed by the Danielson Framework for Teaching as part of the Chicago Teaching Residency cyclical calendar. The resident teacher’s gradual inclusion into instruction at the beginning of the school year was informed by the official residency cycles, but as the sole resident in the classroom, she has had the opportunity to lead instruction, or “lead teach,” throughout the academic year. She has left the Dodge Academy building for three short (one week or less) visits to other AUSL schools, but otherwise has been actively teaching in her classroom for the entirety of the school year.

The mentor teacher, mentor-resident coach, and the resident teacher informally discuss instruction (previous and present) throughout the week. As part of the Residency expectations, the mentor teacher and the resident teacher meet for a longer, more formal period time once a week to make plans for the following week. The mentor-resident coach and the resident teacher meet one-on-one to discuss development about every two weeks and meet once a week with the other resident teachers at Dodge to discuss professional development and instructional strategies. The mentor-resident coach also observes the resident-teacher often, and provides written feedback after observations. Throughout the year the mentor teacher has directed the resident teacher towards certain content and resources for her teaching, but the resident teacher determined instructional design and execution, with some feedback beforehand from the mentor and mentor-resident coach. As the school year has progressed, the resident teacher took on more responsibility for content decisions as well.

Data Use & Assessment

Students are assessed through several means throughout the school year. All the students referenced in this work take the Northwest Evaluation Association Measure of Academic Progress (NWEA MAP) three times during the school year (fall, winter, spring). The resident teacher is able to access this data within two weeks of the assessment and uses it often to inform whole-group instruction and to create groups that are used for literature circles and some small-group instruction.  All students at Dodge also take the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) once a year (spring), but the data from this test is not available until the late spring, or the beginning of the next school year. 2010-2011 ISAT data was used to create initial groupings at the beginning of this school year. 8^th grade students take the Chicago Public School’s district-wide writing assessment and 7^th graders often follow along in the writing process as an instructional opportunity, but the resident teacher has never had access to the data that results from this assessment. Exit ticket and other formative assessment data is used to inform future instruction in a day-to-day context, especially re-teaching.

Materials Used

There is no required or anchor text for this course, but the main texts that will be used in for instruction in this learning sequence are The Bear That Wasn’t by Frank Tashlin (New York Review Children’s Collection, 1946) and “The Sneetches,” by Dr. Seuss from The Sneetches and Other Stories (Random House, 1961). General inspirations, several instructional ideas, and lesson plans were derived and resources (short stories, analysis guides) were drawn from Facing History and Ourselves “Decision Making in times of Injustice: Holocaust and Human Behavior.”

An ELMO document reader will be used extensively throughout this lesson series, as well as an LCD projector and a laptop computer. These materials are located at what can best be described as the front of the classroom. In the classroom, students are seated at five tables of four to six people, based on personality and recent assessment data. The classroom also contains a teacher work area at a kidney table at the back of the room that also serves as a meeting place for literature circle groups. The classroom contains a relatively large library of age and reading-level appropriate fiction and non-fiction texts, as well as a variety of high-level picture books often used for read alouds.

Students Featured  

The resident teacher teaches in a class most often referred to as “Literacy,” but would be recognized by many as Language Arts. The resident teacher and mentor teacher assign students their Reading and Writing grade on their report card and sometimes their Social Studies grade. Social Studies instruction is also folded into this class. Up until this point in the school year Social Studies instruction has mostly been addressed through instruction on non-fiction reading strategies.  Students attend this class for the entire school year. 

All 7^th and 8^th grade students come to the resident teacher’s class on 4 days throughout the week. The 7^th and 8^th grade students are divided into three sections – an all 7^th grade class, a 7^th/8^th split class (approximately an even ratio of each grade), and an 8^th grade class. Students are generally placed in each class according to the previous year’s test scores, so the 7^th grade class generally contains the lowest performing (in Reading and Math) 7^th graders, the 7^th/8^th split class contains the higher performing 7^th graders and lower performing 8^th graders, and the all 8^th grade class contains the highest performing 8^th graders. There are a few exceptions to this arrangement to account for personalities, gender ratios, etc. This arrangement allows for the large majority of differentiation done in the classroom to be done through these sections based on performance ability and social maturity.

Periods are an hour and ten minutes long. Twice a week each section comes to the classroom for two back-to-back periods as block. As a result, each section comes to the classroom for a total of 5 hour and ten minutes periods over 4 instructional days. Two of the sections’ block days fall on Monday or Friday, the most common non-attendance days for students, and as a result, these two classes are most likely to fall behind in the scope and sequence.

The 7^th and 8^th grade students enrolled in this class range from age 11 to 15. On the 2010 - 11 ISAT 82% of the current 7th graders met or exceeded state standards in Reading. In the same school year 83% of the current 8th graders met or exceed state standards in Reading. Each section contains approximately 28 students, with an almost equal proportion of males and females. None of the students are identified as English Language Learners. Overall, 8% of students at Dodge receive Special Education services. In the group of students featured here, seven students, all in the all-7th grade section of students, have Individualized Education Plans (IEP). These plans mostly instruct teachers to provide additional examples during instruction, additional time on assessments and other assignments, and some attention monitoring.

Earlier in the school year the resident teacher briefly covered persuasion techniques with these students, using written works and visual media (advertisements). The students were very engaged by this material, probably because the instances of persuasion used were extremely relevant to their lives. After a short series of lessons on persuasion, as part of larger unit on author’s purpose, the majority of students were able to successfully identify the use of persuasive techniques and generate a sentence that used one of five persuasion techniques.

There are several students who seem to be engaged particularly by projects that involve art or alternative expression and several students who are significantly more engaged when they are given an opportunity to express a personal opinion. Several of these students are students with IEPs and several others are chronically frustrated or unengaged. Previous data shows that the all-7^th grade section had less success with content of persuasion than the 7^th/8^th grade section or 8^th grade section, and so it is anticipated that they will be the most challenged by this series of lessons and project-based assessment.

Surrounding Community - East Garfield Park

The area around Dodge is generally low income and shows many signs of poverty. However, just below the surface are several indications of gentrification. Both the surrounding residential neighborhood and the Dodge community have a great deal of pride, especially for their African-American identity. Christian values are an undercurrent of the culture/cultural conversations in and around Dodge.

Below is a VoiceThread presentation, created with other residents, on Dodge Renaissance Academy and East Garfield Park.