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

Implementing Schoolwide Projects - May 1994

Key Features of Successful Schoolwide Projects

Academic Focus

Schoolwide projects focus on teaching advanced and basic skills by providing all children with a curriculum that challenges them in every subject. Teachers offer both advanced and basic content so that children learn to use their knowledge in practical ways to accomplish personal goals. Students tackle projects that are useful to the school, such as proposing designs for new play yards or helping to conduct fundraising events. Walls and hallways are covered with student work and enrichment materials, often in many languages, and students use art, writing, reading, and experiments to learn social studies and science through projects. In the art program at Lingelbach Elementary School in Philadelphia, for example, fourth-and fifth-graders learn Latin, kindergartners and first-graders study violin, and fourth-graders participate in an architecture study. Florida's Snively Elementary School organizes its language and mathematics instruction around thematic units in which children study culture, civilization, history, and geography by researching the contributions of their own cultures. A two-way bilingual program at year-round Hollinger Elementary School in Tucson, Arizona provides instruction in Spanish and English throughout the school day. Students who are not fluent in both languages study English or Spanish as a Second Language, in addition to regular language arts in their primary language. In this way, the whole school becomes bilingual and bicultural.

Schoolwide projects often use summer academies and enhancement programs to involve students in year-round explorations that develop reading and mathematics. At McNair Elementary School in North Charleston, South Carolina, 200 students who scored poorly on district-based tests studied energy, space, marine life, and conservation during the summer. At Hollinger, bilingual students participate in full-day, theme-based "academies" during the three- week intersessions between trimesters.

Many schoolwide projects build on an established, research- based model such as Success for All, Reading Recovery, or Accelerated Learning. But in the most successful projects, teachers devise appropriate modifications of the standard models to accommodate their students' strengths and weaknesses. The faculty's adaptation of Success for All at Francis Scott Key Elementary School is one example:


Faculty at Philadelphia's Francis Scott Key Elementary school adapted Johns Hopkins University's highly structured Success for All (SFA) program to offer a rich array of whole language approaches to teaching. Preschoolers and kindergartners discuss topics related to each of the books they become familiar with after frequent rereading. Imaginative lesson plans and cooperative learning strategies facilitate peer coaching, so that students can help classmates with limited reading skills catch up. Certified teachers and part-time aides tutor the lowest-achieving primary students individually in 20-minute sessions designed to promote mastery of regular reading class objectives.

SFA's basal reader-based methods were converted to literature-based units that both teachers and students find more enjoyable; teachers have written their own SFA-style guides to young readers' favorite stories and developed student materials that support team learning. One fifth-grade teacher created an interdisciplinary unit based on From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a mystery about a child-sleuth set in the Metropolitan Museum of New York. Her students studied tour guides and maps of New York to follow the hero's exploits, and used vocabulary activities that teach words in context and engage students in peer coaching.

In math, primary teachers use a hands-on, highly interactive curriculum to build a strong foundation for computation and problem-solving skills introduced later. Intermediate teachers use the SFA cooperative-learning Team Accelerated Instruction (TAI) curriculum to teach computation, integrating lessons in problem solving and other topics to achieve district objectives at each grade level. ESL teachers work in small groups with children who have limited English proficiency, and teachers from the district's adult literacy program work on oral language skills twice a week with limited-English-proficient parents and native language translators.

Schoolwide projects increasingly use technology to create an electronic infrastructure that allows computers, CD-ROM readers, laser disc players, fax machines, and video adapters to become learning tools rather than electronic workbooks or static tutors. In technology-rich environments, computers complement the instructional program. Technology consultants, often funded by schoolwide projects, install research and reference databases, sophisticated writing and desktop publishing programs, and basic-skills software that enable students to use the full capacity of the new equipment. Students conduct research, communicate with peers in other regions through electronic mail, and share what they learn through live video. At Cypress Creek Elementary School in Ruskin, Florida, for example, students produce a daily morning news show that they broadcast live to classrooms, and the faculty conducts a weekly show in which students comment on school issues and events. By connecting technology to the core curriculum, teachers build continuity across instructional components.

Many Chapter 1 schoolwides have adopted IBM's Writing to Read and Writing to Write programs, which start children writing in kindergarten and first grade. These early computer-based writing experiences stimulate children's interest in learning to read while developing their awareness of how verbal language translates into written text. When several computers are available in each classroom and at least one technology center is fully equipped with computer networks and software, teachers recognize the range of instructional opportunities technology offers--and even initial skeptics become enthusiastic about the benefits.
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