Ed Watch: At one charter school, the lesson plan gets a makeover
Sunday, October 18, 2009 | JULIA STEINY
On a sweltering summer day, I slipped into the cool of
the Rhode Island Foundation’s conference room,
where the entire staff of the Learning Community
Charter School was planning the coming year. Every
August, the whole school spends two weeks
refurbishing their curricula for writing, reading and
math. If teachers are bored with teaching a certain
book, this is the time to pick a new one. If a strategy
didn’t work last year, now’s the time to rethink it. A
curriculum needs to be fresh and interesting to the
teachers, responsive to what the kids need and enjoy,
and true to the state standards.
As the school sees it, their job is to build a rock-solid
foundation under their students, all of whom come
from the urban core. Eighty-eight percent qualify for
subsidized lunch (a poverty indicator). These kids lose
their academic footing all too easily. So the teachers
can’t afford to plod through a textbook, allowing
some lessons to work better than others. Each lesson,
each day, has to be as perfect as it can be.
For that reason, the LCCS carefully crafts its
curriculum for each subject, “teaching point by
teaching point.” A “teaching point” is the objective
the lesson is trying to get across — a skill, such as
adding double digits, or a body of information, such
as the parts of speech.
The room buzzes like a working hive. Every grade
level, K-6, has three teachers with a table to
themselves and a laptop. One teacher records changes
in the master document from which they’ll work all
year. All teachers have a folder of the notes they
collected over the course of last year about how things
went with each lesson. Some notes are long and typed
up. Others are quick afterthoughts scribbled on a
scrap of construction paper. As the teachers encounter
each teaching point, they review and discuss their
suggestions on how to hone the lesson.
I sit with the first-grade team of Jim Chanonhouse,
Lynn Lotierzo and Rebeca Filomeno-Nason. I thought
I’d visit other tables, but frankly it took a while to
learn exactly what they were doing. Then I got totally
caught up with watching them do it, consumed like a
teenager watching another kid kick butt on a video
game. Oh, so THAT’S how you do that. Wow. Score!
They were busy working on their poetry unit. The
teachers explain that the writing units usually follow a
reading unit on the same subject. The students will
have just finished reading poetry and getting a feel for
its conventions, music and purpose. Once they’re
familiar with poems, the writing unit begins by having
children “look with a poet’s eyes,” collecting images,
feelings, thoughts or scraps of dialogue that they
might weave into a poem. After that, the kids develop,
revise and edit for a few days.
Riffling through his notes, Chanonhouse says, “I think
this was a pretty solid unit, but we could add a
teaching point that it’s a good thing to go back to
poems they’ve already written and work on them
again.” The other two nod, open to suggestions, while
reviewing their notes. Filomeno-Nason recommends
putting that point at the end. Chanonhouse doubts it
would have enough impact. More nods, more
thinking. Filomeno-Nason agrees. Lotierzo suggests
using the point as part of the “revising lesson.”
Perfect. They figure out where exactly that would be,
and Lotierzo records, “Poets re-read their poetry and
use all their smart strategies to make changes.”
They move on to the next teaching point on the
computer screen, “Poets put powerful thoughts into
tiny packages.” The teachers groan. Apparently that
was a beloved, but ultimately terrible idea. Way too
abstract for the kids. It’s deleted. And they go on like
that reaffirming many ideas, revising others, outright
rejecting a few.
The unit after poetry is on nonfiction report writing.
Christine Wiltshire, one of two learning coaches, joins
the group to remind them that henceforth the
kindergarten teachers will no longer introduce the
kids to nonfiction. That will be up to the first grade.
The teachers let loose with a big “oooohhh, right.”
The coaches keep track of the whole huge matrix of
curricula so that each brick is laid at the best time.
Now, while the curriculum is under construction, the
first-grade teachers must figure out how to do the
work of introducing nonfiction to the kids for the first
time.
stories about how to clean up their room or be nice to
their brother.”
Report-writing got shifted out of kindergarten to make
more room in kindergarten for sequencing.
Sequencing? Wiltshire explains, “We needed to allow
procedural thinking to play a bigger part in
kindergarten, to strengthen the sequencing part of the
brain. Some kids tell a story by starting at the end and
then go to the middle. Kids have trouble following
directions, or trouble with math and English. To spell
or read ‘cat,’ I have to start with the ‘C’ and then go
to the ‘A’ and ‘T.’ So we teach them transition words:
first, then, next, finally. We have them tell us how to
make toast, how to line up. They write hysterical
This sort of shifting, refining and reallocating
information goes on every summer. No one expects
the curriculum ever to be finished. It always wants
rejuvenation. Kids’ interests shift, so getting certain
lessons across can harness those interests. During the
year, teachers have two hours of common planning a
week to case-manage specific kids and discuss
curriculum glitches they run into. Each semester they
have all-day retreats to develop day-by-day lesson
plans from the master plan. This supervised planning
is a brilliant way to empower the teachers to create
their own fun, but rigorous curriculum.
As a result, the Learning Community’s low-income
students outperform all of the state’s urban lowincome kids, and do better than 62 percent of the lowincome kids educated in the suburbs.
To my mind, the Learning Community is the most
academically creative school in the state.
Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence
School Board, consults for government agencies and
schools; she is co-director of Information Works!,
Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can
be reached at [email protected].
www.thelearningcommunity.com
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Central Falls, RI 02863
401-722-9998
At The Learning Community, we believe
that literacy empowers each individual to
have a voice, assume community
responsibility and take social action. We
expect leadership at every level. We grow
teacher leaders, student leaders and
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