THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 28, 1996 TAG: 9608280421
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY VANEE VINES, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PORTSMOUTH LENGTH: 89 lines
The school district, concerned about low numbers of high school students who take advanced courses or score in the top ranges on standardized exams, is counting on a new push in its middle schools to help change that picture.
The hope is that by teaching more middle schoolers to think critically and by exposing more of them to advanced work, they will be better prepared - and more inclined - to sign up for tough classes in high school.
Administrators say better preparation earlier also will translate into improved districtwide results on college-entrance exams such as the Scholastic Assessment Test.
Earlier this month, nearly 75 percent of the district's middle school English, math, science and social studies teachers participated in a three-day workshop where they studied ways to help students think analytically and master advanced material through hands-on assignments.
They spent hours dealing with inquiry-based learning, which teaches instructors how to question students to encourage deeper understanding.
Teachers trying to help a class grasp the meaning behind a particular poem, for instance, would walk students through a series of questions about its mood, patterns, theme and other aspects - instead of simply letting students give one-liners about how it made them feel.
Math teachers at the workshop also picked up ideas for hands-on experiments to help students grasp higher-level skills - like an exercise where M&M candies and some beakers were used to show how the number of candies decreased at nearly the same rate from beaker to beaker.
Many of the teachers said they would try out some of the strategies soon after school opens next Tuesday.
And school officials said they wanted to see increasing numbers of teachers giving assignments and lectures that required more than perfunctory responses and minimal output from students.
Middle school kids must get a bigger academic challenge day in and day out if they are to acquire sophisticated thinking and communication skills in demand in today's job market, School Board Chairman Byron Kloeppel said.
``We may have to go beyond the middle schools eventually . . . but right now, there's no question that the middle schools are where we need to focus,'' he said.
The evidence of that need is abundant.
For instance:
While the percentage of city sixth-graders who passed all three parts of the state-mandated Literacy Passport Test increased this year, 47.1 percent of sixth-graders still failed at least one part of the LPT - which students must pass to get a high school diploma.
According to the latest state report card, which covered the 1994-95 year, only 29 percent of city eighth-graders had taken some sort of algebra class before ninth grade. That was up from 11 percent in 1990-91.
As a group, city eighth-graders' overall showing on an annual, standardized test this year was worse than that of fourth- or 11th-graders districtwide.
``There are still far too few students getting into classes like algebra and other advanced courses,'' said parent activist Dianna Mills, the mother of a Cradock Middle School seventh-grader.
``As it stands now, some of the students go to high school and they're not at all prepared to enter or go further.''
The School Board, at the chairman's urging, hired The College Board to sponsor the workshop.
The College Board runs the national Advanced Placement Program for high school students and sponsors the SAT.
Many teachers who participated in the workshop said they came away with interesting ideas for classroom lessons; or a better sense of how to reach more students by varying their technique and not relying only on what they were familiar with.
``I think teachers needed to be energized and I think part of the (workshop) was set up to make teachers look at their strategies and consider alternative ways of thinking,'' said Carolyn Smith, a seventh-grade math teacher at Hunt-Mapp Middle and president of the Portsmouth Education Association.
``. . . People get real comfortable doing what they've always done.''
But others privately said that while the ideas sounded good, they doubted whether many of their students could master anything other than low-level work because they already were so far behind academically.
Patricia Fisher, a district director of instructional services, said she hoped teachers would maintain high expectations.
``Overall, the expectations should always be there,'' she said.
``These strategies don't identify expectations. The strategies identify what can be done to get kids along the way.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by MARK MITCHELL, The Virginian-Pilot
There's dull science and then there's fun science - the kind of fun
science teachers Elsie Askew, left, Jo Ella Chappell and Connie
McCook found when they worked with a sonic motion detector to work
out a distance/time graph. by CNB