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Literacy is the focus of Ganado's child-centered curriculum. Programs are structured to take advantage of children's natural ability to make sense of the world and to model an integrated approach to language arts. They are based on the following four premises: (1) children should be immersed in a literature-rich environment; (2) reading, writing, and vocabulary are interrelated processes; (3) basic skills should be taught while children are actively engaged in reading, writing, and vocabulary learning, rather than through isolated practice; and (4) higher-order thinking and reasoning skills should be integrated within reading, writing, and vocabulary lessons.
An uninterrupted block of time, scheduled every morning, allows students to work individually or in groups with teachers and assistants or to participate in a newspaper club or fine arts program (television production club). First- and second-graders also attend special classes in the Navajo language twice a week. Using meaning-based activities such as plays, writing, and arts activities, children learn to converse, read, and write in Navajo. Approximately half the teachers are Navajo, as are most assistants and support staff.
Beginning in 1992, Ganado adopted the Collaborative Literacy Intervention Project (CLIP), a reading intervention program that targets the lowest 20 percent of first-grader readers. After one year in the program, most students advanced to the level of top- achieving readers. Adjunct activities, such as the Learning Enrichment Acceleration Program (LEAP), provide fine arts activities for second graders, including drama, music, visual arts, and dance. Through a literacy program sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service known as "Wee Deliver," students manage a mini-postal system within the school that distributes an average of 85 letters per day written by students to friends, teachers, or the principal. In the school's publications laboratory, students have created, typed, formatted, and bound almost 700 books. Programs sponsored by Pizza Hut and Reading is Fundamental, Inc. also promote literacy. All students have daily access to classroom computers and computer laboratories. Since beginning the schoolwide project, Ganado has purchased 137 new computers and plans to add at least 20 more during the 1993-94 school year.
With Chapter 1 and district funds, Ganado also provides counseling programs for students and families that address topics such as drug prevention, addiction, co-dependency, parenting, marriage, and family issues.
Organizational/management structure. Ganado adopted a school-within-a-school organization in 1988 to increase collaborative planning and cooperation among teachers. There are three school units--the South School, the East School, and the West School--each of which operates as a family composed of 130-140 students and nine teachers. Students are assigned randomly to one of the three schools when they begin at Ganado, and unless parents request a change they remain with the same teachers for all three years.
The South School, emphasizing team-planning, began in 1988-89 with nine teachers who volunteered to pilot an experiment in team-implemented curriculum and instruction. The collaborative planning and cooperation among South teachers met with such success that another group of teachers established the East School in 1990. East School has two types of nontraditional classes: six multi-age classes (K-2) and three "Project Success" classes, one for each grade. In Project Success, special education students are matched with an equal or larger group of accelerated students. A team with one regular and one special education teacher teaches the heterogenous group of special needs students. The West school, more traditionally organized, was staffed by the remaining nine teachers who gradually have begun to incorporate into their program some of the innovations used by their colleagues in the South and East Schools.
In the three school units, Chapter 1 teachers and aides serve all children, and Chapter 1 funds have enabled smaller classes and individual attention to children schoolwide. All regular teachers are certified to teach ESL or bilingual classes.
Staff development and parent involvement. Many other changes encourage collaboration and communication at Ganado. Teachers meet monthly to discuss schoolwide and subschool issues, and representatives of the three schools meet monthly to address concerns and issues. A special committee including teachers, assistants, and key staff meets monthly with the principal to offer feedback and contribute to educational decisions. Staff are encouraged to attend classes at area colleges, attend workshops, and visit other schools. Within the school, teachers have time to visit colleagues' classrooms and discuss curriculum issues, and they attend workshops and weekend seminars to explore selected topics in depth. Every six weeks, teachers hold "curriculum conversations" with colleagues that focus on specific areas of curriculum and instruction.
A full-time instructional resource teacher at the school serves as a mentor and coordinates staff development, curricula, schoolwide activities, and two resource rooms. Staff development supports instructional priorities identified by the principal and teachers. For example, when the CLIP reading intervention program was implemented in 1992, Ganado arranged for a consultant to train teachers, and, by the end of the 1993-94 school year, 20 of 25 classroom teachers are expected to be certified in the program.
Through Ganado's volunteer program, 16 parents assist in classrooms and may attend weekly parent education classes taught by the school counselor. The parent leader of the teacher assistant group also contributes to a schoolwide advisory committee.
Ganado has received numerous state and national awards for its initiatives. It has regularly been given the Arizona Quality Programs Award for excellence in academics and administration. In 1990, the school was selected as a National Lead School by the National Council of Teachers of English in their "Centers of Excellence for Students at Risk" program. In 1990, two of its programs, Project Success and Taking Turns, won Exemplary Curriculum Program Awards from the Arizona Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, and in 1993 Ganado was named Arizona's Exemplary Reading Program by the Arizona Reading Association.
Ganado Primary School
P.O. Box 1757
Ganado, AZ 86505
(602) 755-6210
FAX: (602) 755-3721
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[Building on What Students Know]