Context for Learning

 

Middle school

ü      500 students, 31 teachers

ü      In the Spokane Valley

ü      It is an urban middle school

ü       has 50% students on free lunch, and 14% on reduced lunch

Special features

The school has a program called “success academy. Success Academy is a study program that takes place after school.

(here is a brief explanation of success academy,

  http://www.cvsd.org/northpines/success_academy_2.asp)

District requirements:

Like most schools, This ones scheduling is impacted by the MSP.  Also, High School registration and career research units happen in the spring during English class time (for 8^th graders).

The curriculum is influenced by the school district. There are required texts the districts decide upon and they have to be used by the end of the year. But there is no set daily curriculum.

My classroom

Currently, I am only in one classroom. Hopefully within the next two weeks, I will be in two separate classes.

Right now I am observing 8^th grade English Language Arts with my cooperating teacher. I usually observe second and third period, but I have worked with and observed all of the classes since I started there. There is a large range of abilities in the classes, and you can tell the students don’t necessarily have a homogenous set of backgrounds. My cooperating teacher tells me that some of her students have a third grade reading level, and some are at a twelfth grade reading level. When working with students while writing, I observed a variety of writers. Some students struggled just to get words on the page or understand the prompt; other students could put my own writing to shame. There is a large span of abilities in every class. To help students at every level, my cooperating teacher has put students into cooperative learning groups and has the groups set up with mixed abilities. A couple of groups in second period and third period are students with similar abilities because those particular students work very well together.

There are limited resources in the classroom. There is a projector, white boards, and a computer for the teacher. There are five desktop computers in the classroom, which take at least fifteen minutes to boot up(if they do turn on). In the library there are roughly twenty working computers, and these also take a lot of time just to turn on, let alone to be used for research.

North Pines is on a trimester system. It also has six 50 minute periods a day, with no block classrooms.

3^rd period

Third period probably has about half of the students on free or reduced lunch. It is an 8^th grade class. There are twenty males, and females; it is a very lively group. There are no ELL students or gifted students, although there are some students with strong abilities. There are two students with IEP’s; one for ADHD, and one for behavioral and medical issues.