English Enrichment Program Allows Students the Opportunity to Experience in Depth Exploration of Class Standards
At Northside Middle School, we knew a key component to achieving success in the mastery of language arts would be to encourage growth from all of our students. While many intervention programs are aimed at only the bottom or top quartile of students,we needed a program that would meet every student where they were and raise them to their best performance level. This lead us to create and implement a brand new program in our district – English Enrichment.
We envisioned a rich, data driven program that would allow students the opportunity to experience project based learning opportunities, in depth exploration of standards, flexible student groupings, and individualized attention. In order to achieve this goal, we restructured staffing and student schedules to provide a second hour of English instruction for students. This second hour, called English Enrichment, allows teachers the opportunity to respond to data collected in the students’ main English class. These classes have immense flexibility that allows them to easily spiral back to skills that need revisited, preview upcoming topics, and differentiate assignments, while teaching the current standards in tandem with the students’ English classes.
Challenges or Obstacles:
- Challenges to this best practice would be the need to restructure student schedules and staffing to allow a second hour dedicated to English instruction for all students.
Benefits and Successes:
- The benefits of English Enrichment are increased student performance in the English classroom and on related assessments.
- Students will also show increased skills in tackling complex texts, non-fiction, and cross-curricular reading and writing.
Submitted by: Jamie Qualls and Jackie Samuels, Northside Middle School