Raising the Educational Achievement of Secondary School Students - Volume 2 Profiles of Promising Practices - 1995

A r c h i v e d I n f o r m a t i o n

Clusters and Team Teaching
Building Connections Between Students and Teachers

Thurgood Marshall Middle School
Lynn, Massachusetts

Key Characteristics

Students work in clusters to allow more individualized instruction and flexible scheduling

Daily common planning time and team teaching enables teachers to design complementary and collaborative curricula

Extensive staff development and monthly support groups bolster teacher innovation
Number of Students:776
Grades Served: 6-8

Racial/Ethnic Breakdown:

47% White,

26% Hispanic,

15% African American,

10% Asian

Eligible for Free/Reduced-Price Lunch: 68%
Major Sources of Outside Funding: Chapter 1, Chapter 636 (desegregation funding), Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, Carnegie Foundation

Overview

Mr. Peters, a history teacher at Thurgood Marshall Middle School, used to spend more time keeping order in the classroom than teaching. Rather than sending students in droves to the principal's office, he often simply called in sick--too frustrated and worn out to deal with the stress. Today, Mr. Peters team teaches with five colleagues, scheduling his days as the team sees fit and teaching interdisciplinary units that integrate English and social studies. He hasn't missed a day of school in three years.

In 1987, Thurgood Marshall began a restructuring effort that improved student performance and behavior as well as teacher morale. Instead of attendance problems and low success rates, the school today is characterized by innovative groupings that function as schools-within-schools, flexible scheduling, cross-disciplinary classes, extensive staff development, and rising student test scores.

School Context

Located in the heart of an industrial downtown business district in disrepair, Thurgood Marshall is surrounded by low-income tenements and government-subsidized housing complexes. Almost 80 percent of Thurgood Marshall students live in the surrounding neighborhoods. Most of the limited English proficient students speak Spanish as their first language, but a growing population of immigrant students from former Soviet bloc countries speak Russian; 25 percent of the students have a limited English proficiency.

In the 1980s, Thurgood Marshall's poor reputation was no secret. When the school district established several magnet schools in 1987 to build racial balance to its schools, few families were tempted by Thurgood Marshall, where disciplinary problems had reached crisis levels. In the 1987-88 school year, the school handed out 593 suspensions--an average of more than three a day. Increasing numbers of students failed courses and were retained; morale plummeted among both students and teachers; and the average daily attendance rate was 67 percent for students, while faculty took an average of eight sick days a year.

Major Program Features

When Thurgood Marshall became a magnet in 1987, using state funds for "minority isolated" schools, the school's principal convened a planning committee of teachers and administrators from every department to lead a massive restructuring effort. After reviewing literature on successful schools and visiting Boston area schools, the committee reorganized Thurgood Marshall in 1988-89 into cluster groups of 100 to 150 students linked with a team of teachers. All teachers received staff development introducing them to the proposed program and to teaching strategies and the issues surrounding school restructuring. Teachers received training in block scheduling, team grouping, cooperative learning, writing across the curriculum, and subject integration. Training opportunities allowed teachers to react and offer input before the plan was implemented.

Clusters

Thurgood Marshall has seven clusters, at least one in each grade. Each cluster of students has a team of teachers, one from each of the following six departments: English, mathematics, science, social studies, special education, and bilingual education. This arrangement enables about 80 percent of the school's bilingual and special education students to attend regular classrooms. Students are assigned to a cluster at random and stay with the group throughout the school year; clusters change annually.

Teacher empowerment. Teachers have considerable authority over the instructional program within their clusters. For example, an English and science teacher on one team decided that the 45- to 50-minute English period was too brief to cover the lesson plans. The teachers devised a schedule for their cluster in which students would have a double period of English three days a week in lieu of the regular period five days a week. Class periods are fixed only for those classes that are taught out of the cluster--reading, foreign language, art, and music.
Interdisciplinary courses. The cluster structure and teacher planning periods facilitate interdisciplinary lessons and projects. Examples of cross-disciplinary learning include a project in which students traced their ancestral heritages, a week-long interdisciplinary unit on ecology during Earth Week, and a collaborative unit on the Holocaust. In the Holocaust unit, students learned about nutrition, history, and society; calculated the numbers of people involved; interviewed a Holocaust survivor; and wrote papers integrating what they had learned.
In one cluster, an interdisciplinary unit on homelessness grew into a community service project for the entire school. Students read a book about a homeless family and wrote papers; learned about affordable housing and wrote letters to Congress; studied nutrition and health issues related to homelessness; and worked on budgets and studied the financial aspects of being homeless. At the cluster's initiative, the school formed a partnership with a nearby homeless shelter. Students collected school and other supplies for families there and hosted a walk-a-thon to raise $1,000 for the shelter.
Common planning time. Within clusters, teachers share 30 to 45 minutes a day to plan interdisciplinary units, discuss student progress, and meet parents. This planning time reduces teachers' sense of isolation and increases their sense of professionalism. Teachers also meet after school for additional planning.
Group identity. Clusters provide a group identity for students. Each cluster has its own bulletin board filled with students' honor roll lists, upcoming events, and student council elections. Clusters sponsor their own programs, host field trips, and compete with other clusters in community service activities. One cluster set up mailboxes for teachers and students in the hallway so cluster members could leave supportive letters for each other. Teachers agree that clusters foster a sense of school pride for teachers and students.

Professional Development

Guest speakers and workshops have replaced faculty meetings focused on administrative matters as the standard staff development events. Teachers attend monthly workshops on middle school issues and innovative instructional strategies such as cooperative learning, reading and writing across the curriculum, conflict resolution, listening skills, and student learning styles. In addition, the school is a member of the Middle Grades Alliance, a support group for teachers established and funded by the state department of education and the New England League of Middle Schools. Teachers from Thurgood Marshall frequently participate in dinner meetings, study groups, and one-day sessions with colleagues from other middle schools in the area to share ideas. Administrators encourage teachers to use professional days to attend conferences or other staff development activities; the school provides substitute teachers and, when possible, associated fees.

Support for Implementation

Most of the planning and oversight for the restructured program is carried out by Thurgood Marshall faculty. In addition, the school collaborates with parents and other community members through a community advisory board and a parent liaison. Initially, Thurgood Marshall staff negotiated with the state departments of mental health and social services to offer priority referrals and set up support groups for the school's at-risk and disadvantaged students. However, state budget cuts within these agencies eliminated the resources that had been reserved for partnership with the school. Now, partnerships--such as one with Salem State College that provides the school with tutors and teacher aides--offer additional support. Another partnership with Fleet Bank pairs bank employees with Thurgood Marshall students for a full year of mentoring and tutoring activities.

Evidence of Success

Thurgood Marshall Middle School quickly reaped success from restructuring. By the end of the first program year, the average number of teacher absences was 4.7, nearly half the average from the previous year. Student suspensions dropped to 300, about half the total for the year before. At the end of the second year, after the restructuring was complete, teacher sick days dropped below four per teacher and student suspensions declined to 200. Student attendance increased to more than 90 percent, where it remains today.

Students' standardized test scores also improved. Scores on the Massachusetts Educational Assessment of Progress (MEAP) improved steadily after restructuring; now, none of the school's aggregated scores is below the district median. Scores on the California Achievement Test (CAT) also rose. In 1987, the school's average CAT score was below grade average; from 1991 to 1993, CAT scores increased from 7.1 to 7.9 in seventh grade and from 8.2 to 8.8 in eighth grade. Enrollment also is rising. In the 1994-95 school year, the school will add an extra cluster to accommodate 130 additional students.

Thurgood Marshall's cluster and team approach has successfully individualized the learning environment for students and teachers. Teachers point to an atmosphere of trust and companionship foreign to many schools. As one teacher commented, "Kids come before and after school just to talk. It happens all the time." The magnet coordinator attributes the program's success to the effectiveness of the clusters in forging a link between a team of teachers and their students: "The teams are really communities, and school is no longer just a place to spend five hours." She cites the daily team planning period as a critical contributor to teachers' improved understanding of their students:

As part of a team, you [the teacher] sit down with all the other teachers [in your cluster] at 10:30 a.m. every day. The teams provide teachers with the opportunity to share their concerns with the other team members, and you have a lot better handle on dealing with the daily realities of the classroom. Before, if you were having a problem with a student, you either blamed yourself or you blamed the student. Your options were to keep him after school or throw him out of class. Now, [the student] is not just a problem, and you can get to the bottom of what is going on with this kid.

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[Engaging Students in Writing Across the Curriculum]

[Dropout Prevention In The Middle Grades Helping At-Risk Students Make Up Lost Time ]