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Literacy: The Key to Achievement

Literacy is taught in English, so why are Math and Science departments getting involved? The Newton High Schools know that if a student struggles with reading comprehension then they will struggle with understanding the material they must read for their other classes. For this reason Newton School Foundation is proud to support ‘Literacy: The Key to Achievement’, an initiative in the Newton High Schools.

Last summer the initiative was launched with a four day workshop attended by 15 teachers and department heads from both Newton high schools. The teachers met with consultants from Boston College to learn about topics including “lexical density”, a phenomena where students are confounded by the number of difficult words in math and science. They then discussed literacy strategies to help students become more successful in their math and science classes.

The resulting workshop strategies were implemented over the past school year. Three department heads and six teachers met on a regular basis in Critical Friends Group (CFG) to exchange ideas, experiences and readings on literacy. Math and Science are now aligned. MaSS (math and science support) instructional sessions are available for 9th grade students on a twice weekly basis and have been so successful that students are begging for it to continue.

Literacy is now a key topic of conversation at all levels in the two high schools from teacher-teacher conversations to budget and faculty meetings.  With further refinement and assessment, students’ literacy skills will continue to be addressed in years to come.

BrainPOP – Video clips as a tool for teaching

The Newton Schools Foundation is pleased to support BrainPOP, an exciting initiative in Newton’s public elementary schools.

Children learn in all different ways. Some learn best by doing, some by hearing and others by seeing. One visual method of teaching an idea is through the use of videos. BrainPOP is a subscription-based website of over 500 curriculum-related animated video clips. The idea is to use the video clips to support current curriculum lessons by introducing or reinforcing concepts.

Though the incorporation of the clips into the curriculum sounds simple, preparatory work needed to be done to ensure that the clips were actually used by teachers in the classroom. The BrainPOP initiative put together a team of classroom, library and instructional technology teachers that developed sets of BrainPOP material to be handed off ready to use to the library teachers at each elementary school.

The next hurdle to overcome was how to get the library teachers and classroom teachers to collaborate together to draw up lesson plans using the clips. Preparation for co-teaching and co-teaching itself has a reputation for taking more time than planning a normal lesson. Due to reduced library coverage and the busy schedules of teachers, most teachers feel this is extra time that they do not have to give.  This was addressed by supplying library teachers with project planning sheets to be used to plan collaborative lessons with classroom teachers and by emphasizing the benefits these lessons have for students. As a result, teachers started to come around and incorporate BrainPOP into their lesson plans.

The initiative was a huge success. First, the elementary school curriculum was enriched by the use of the video clips from BrainPOP. In addition, as a result of co-taught classes, library teachers had more opportunity to present to students skills needed to locate, access and use information as well as good note taking strategies. In addition they could instruct students on how to properly use the internet to find valid sources.

The future looks bright for this initiative. This year it was so popular that due to BrainPOP access constraints teachers who wanted to join midyear could not always be accommodated. Therefore, next year it will continue to expand with increased access to the BrainPOP website and the creation of more teaching guides to be shared between the schools.