Aurora Hills Middle School in Colorado has radically rethought its use of teaching time.
The pandemic-induced academic declines of American elementary school students are without precedent.
As millions of elementary school students move on to middle school in the coming years, their ability to successfully transition academically will be seriously challenged. The stakes couldn’t be higher for these children. This phase of their education is when students must move from learning to read to reading to learn. It’s also the point where they build from simple to more complex mathematics concepts. As a consequence, the need to identify and replicate the practices of successful schools in the middle grades has taken on new urgency. Fortunately, there are peaks of excellence from which we can learn.
One such school is Aurora Hills Middle School, in Colorado. Aurora Hills MS offers proof that organizing a school to provide a rich and robust curriculum for all learners, especially those who face additional barriers to academic success, is eminently possible.
In 2017, Marcella Garcia took over as principal of Aurora Hills MS. Of the 800 some students who attend Aurora Hills, 62 percent are Hispanic, 18 percent Black, and 8 percent are white. More than half are English language learners, 15 percent receive special education services, and 90 percent qualify for free and reduced meals–a commonly used measure of poverty. For two years, the school had been on “turnaround” status in the state’s accountability system for failing to make sufficient academic progress for its students. The clock was ticking and Garcia needed to jump right in to address the school’s challenges.
In her first year, Garcia performed a comprehensive needs assessment. What Garcia found was troubling. None of the school’s English language learners who received special education services were enrolled in even a single elective class. Their entire days were spent in intensive core academic support in order to make sufficient academic progress as mandated by the state. As a result, these learners showed low levels of engagement and even worse academic growth. Garcia also found that her teachers lacked meaningful time to collaborate to create high-quality lessons, plan for their own classroom instruction, and build the joyful learning opportunities that would enable their students to flourish.
“I knew I had to do something very drastic to change our trajectory, to get us out of turnaround and also do something great for kids,” explained Garcia.
In order to create more time for engaging learning experiences, ensure students still had the robust core academics they needed, and provide more opportunities for teachers to develop high-quality lessons, Garcia decided that a radical rethinking of how the school made use of time was needed. She would have to do it without any additional resources, budget, or staffing from the district. It would be an adjustment for the school, its students, and its educators.
“That first year, we started to think really differently about time,” Garcia said. “It was a look at the schedule, but also a look at how we used instructional time.”
Garcia, her assistant principal John Buch, and education consultant Marilyn Crawford designed a school schedule that has core educators teach four days a week, with some planning each day, and then have a full day away from teaching for planning and collaboration. Students receive core academic instruction, tailored learning supports, and some electives during the four days of the “standard” schedule. On the fifth day, the “Plus Team” of teachers pushes in for the full day with more electives, project based learning experiences and longer chunks of time with their students. Electives include various STEM classes, digital technology classes where students learn to code, arts education and more. In the end, the total amount of time students spend in core and elective courses remains the same. But the scheduled delivery varies dramatically.
In the old school schedule, teachers were teaching five periods per day with one planning period and one collaboration period daily—a total of 10 non-teaching periods spread across the week. Now, elective teachers continue the original schedule while core teachers adopt the new 4-1 schedule. With the new schedule, core teachers teach six periods out of seven for four days with one period of planning. Their collaboration time is all re-allocated to the fifth day. The piecemeal nature of the old schedule made planning and professional collaboration less effective. Garcia and her teachers found that this weekly full day of collaboration time allows for greater focus and a higher quality professional experience.
“Creating a bucket of time doesn’t make change,” said Assistant Principal John Buch. “We make change by using that time to drive improvements in instruction, teaching and learning.”
Garcia, Buch, and the teachers at Aurora Hills have done just that. The fifth day for educators, the planning day, has been dubbed “Mustang U” in reference to the school’s mascot. Garcia and Buch worked with teachers to create a structured, but flexible schedule for Mustang U days.
The day starts with a full team meeting focused on high-priority issues. While still fresh in the morning, teachers then transition to deep dives into data such as formative assessment results, attendance figures and more. Following that deep dive, they move to a “student study” session that makes use of a multi-tiered system of support in which specific academic and social interventions are identified for students. The educators also work together in professional learning communities, differentiated by content area and by grade-level to ensure that effective teaching practices are not siloed, but instead shared across the school.
The results have been promising.
Students of all backgrounds are showing real improvements in both math and literacy, Garcia and Buch noted. Students receiving special education services saw specific growth improvements and the school’s English language learners are now outgrowing native speakers academically.
“If you give kids more reason to want to come to school, they’ll thrive,” Buch observed. “We saw improvements because a kid that actually wants to be at school will learn more.”
The improvements are felt among the school’s educators too. Teachers are saying they feel valued, that they feel their time is valued and they now have enough time to actually do their jobs. The state-mandated staff surveys are now overwhelmingly positive, despite initial dips during the early phases of the changes. That positive energy has served the school well as it builds back from the pandemic interruptions.
“This was a huge change,” said Garcia. “Changing everything is never easy. But even with that, we got off of “turnaround” status that first year. Now our district leadership says that we’re kind of the model and they’re watching.”
“It really does take someone willing to embrace change management,” she noted. “You have to be willing to start to figure out something really different.”
