THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, April 27, 1996 TAG: 9604270366
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY PERRY PARKS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ELIZABETH CITY LENGTH: Long : 170 lines
The blood, sweat and tears of North Carolina's elementary schools have been running toward a single date this year.
On May 21, students in grades three through eight will begin two days of testing on their reading and math skills. The tests, which have been administered for years, are now the cornerstone of state education reform.
For Elizabeth City-Pasquotank and nine other districts that are trying out the ``New ABC's of Public Education'' this year, May 21 marks not just another round of standardized tests.
It's Judgment Day.
The results of these multiple-choice exams will determine whether groups of students know what they are supposed to know. The scores will indicate whether teachers and administrators have done their jobs.
Raleigh officials will use these scores to reward, assist and punish local educators. End-of-grade numbers will be the defining measure of a school.
So it's understandable that the tests this year have been a source of fear and dread. Elizabeth City-Pasquotank has not improved its end-of-grade scores since 1993. And improvement is the name of the game in what Superintendent Joe Peel calls a ``high-stakes testing situation.''
But as the testing date approaches, and as students across the district learn more and more of what they need to do well, the attitude toward the tests is changing.
Doubts and concerns remain. But teachers in several schools are also demonstrating a growing anticipation and confidence.
Central Elementary School Principal Shel Davis and others have good reason to be ``cautiously optimistic,'' mostly because of months of hard work by teachers and pupils.
But one key reason for the change, and one of the forces that has helped turn a nervous and anxious district into a nervous and hopeful one, is a consultant named Connie Prevatte.
``I love end-of-grade testing,'' says Prevatte, 48, who might be in a minority on the point. ``The teachers and the students work hard all year. They practice all year, like a basketball player and a basketball team.
``The test is their time to shine.''
Prevatte is spending about 40 days in the district this year, between other consulting trips to such places as Richmond, Va., parts of North and South Carolina, and chunks of Indiana.
At $850 a day, her cost to the district will total roughly $34,000. But Prevatte's work has probably changed the way almost every child in Pasquotank County has learned this year - and district officials believe she's changed it for the better.
``This year,'' Peel says of Prevatte, ``she's had more impact on classroom instruction than anybody in the last four years.''
Prevatte has offered the district a system for teaching reading, writing and math that addresses the different ways students learn and uses organizing skills to help them think.
Prevatte has helped fourth-, sixth- and seventh-graders prepare for open-ended writing tests. She has helped teachers teach reading. She gives five-minute math lessons that she says will improve students' test scores by several points each.
The most tangible proof of her influence, though, are the eight legal-sized posters - red diagrams and blue block labels on white backgrounds - that hang in every elementary classroom in Pasquotank County.
These posters are the tools through which Prevatte, teachers and students do their work. They're called thinking maps.
The double-bubble thinking map helps students compare and contrast. The flow map helps them think through a narrative or sequence. The tree map helps them organize things into categories.
On first glance, these diagrams of lines and circles look pointless. But thousands of children have used them this year to learn reading, writing and math. And pupils in kindergarten through sixth grade can talk about thinking maps.
The diagrams, which were invented about five years ago and formally introduced at Sheep-Harney Elementary last year, are based on eight commonly used thinking processes. The maps are used to help students visually think through, or ``map out,'' concepts.
Prevatte was hired last year to help spread thinking maps throughout the district. It was at an administrators' meeting last spring that she also won converts to her research-based methods of teaching reading and writing.
``She just lit a fire under everybody, and got everybody excited about communications skills,'' says Elizabeth Anne Neal, the district's director of federal programs.
Prevatte's methods for teaching reading are not innovative or original, she says. But they are based on research. They have been shown to work - and to work for all children.
The keys are using instructional time to its fullest, which includes lots of read-aloud time in class and a ``four-block'' instructional system that imparts the range of reading and writing skills:
Teacher-directed reading, when children are taught strategies for reading novels, poems, nonfiction and other materials.
Self-selected reading, when kids pick out books at their level and discuss their reading progress in one-on-one conferences with their teacher.
Writing block, when kids learn and practice writing.
Word block, focusing on phonics, forming letters and spelling.
``The thing is that we do all of these things, not part, and that we do them consistently every day, and that we move at a brisk pace,'' Prevatte says. ``This addresses the learning styles of all children.
``Thinking maps are the glue that ties all instruction together.''
Prevatte, who represents a Cary, N.C.-based company called Innovative Learning Group that makes the thinking maps, is relentless in getting people to use them.
On a visit to P.W. Moore Elementary Thursday, Prevatte asked everyone she saw if they had been using the maps.
They had.
Every child had a testimonial, as if scripted in an infomercial, about how thinking maps have helped.
``Double-bubble maps help me compare and contrast,'' says one. ``I learned multiplication faster,'' says another. Or, ``The circle map has helped me define things.''
The most compelling recommendation for thinking maps, Neal says, came from a Pasquotank Elementary student who said, ``It helps me see it in my brain.''
Using the methods that Prevatte has helped introduce to the district, P.W. Moore has a higher percentage of kindergarteners reading than ever before, Principal Linwood Williams says.
There's not a classroom where the majority of students won't raise their hands high when asked if they like to read.
P.W. Moore is a place where second-graders discuss their favorite authors, where a sixth-grader eagerly copies a study tip from the board, where students in another class scramble for a good view of a math lesson.
Prevatte enters the room like a drill sergeant, sometimes beginning the lesson while passing through the doorway. In some classes, she takes charge immediately, asking students what they're working on, what they know about thinking maps.
She goes to the board and shows them a trick for figuring out greater-than/less-than. Or she reads a story aloud, acting out the dialogue, showing off the pictures, soliciting comment - and then reviewing the story with a thinking map.
Prevatte does not waste a word or a glance or a gesture. She is teaching students a subject, but at the same time, she is teaching teachers how to teach. P.W. Moore's teacher of the year, Lindsey James, joins one class to take notes on a geometry lesson. All eyes in the classroom are fixed on her.
By 11 a.m., Prevatte has visited a dozen classrooms and talked to most of the school's 500 students. By the end of the day, she will have seen them all.
P.W. Moore instructional specialist Sandra Hooker calls Prevatte's visits ``four-vitamin days,'' because the activity is nonstop from the moment she walks in the door.
``The energy is just so hard to keep up with,'' Hooker says. ``They feel the energy in her presence.
``We can walk into any classroom. We can be teaching any subject, any book, and she can teach an effective lesson around whatever they're studying.''
Prevatte leaves each class by asking the children if they're going to do well on the end-of-grade tests. In most rooms, most hands go up.
``Everybody has to do well,'' she tells one class. ``It's not a choice.''
Many of the district's faculty were skeptical when Prevatte began visiting in the fall. But officials say that the more teachers have tried her methods and seen results, the more they have welcomed her.
Prevatte has taught for 23 years in elementary and middle schools, in subjects ranging from reading to English to journalism. She served as a curriculum coordinator for a school in Winston-Salem, helping to turn around a struggling group of students.
``Connie has a lot of credibility, in that she has taken a school with low-achieving kids and shown that they all can learn,'' Peel says. ``We've had those kinds of discussions: Who is Connie? Where does she come from? Why is she somebody who has to be listened to?''
The answers, according to Peel, are: ``What she's doing has worked, does work and will work.''
Hooker said teachers warmed to Prevatte when they discovered how well she understood classroom problems.
``When they implemented, then they saw the difference in their children,'' Hooker says. ``And they were sold.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by DREW WILSON, The Virginian-Pilot
Connie Prevatte, high-energy drill sergeant of a teaching method,
has helped turn Elizabeth City-Pasquotank from a nervous and anxious
district into a nervous and hopeful one.
by CNB