Did some looking into the public elementary school across the street from me and Greg here in Boston, and it has some great programs & approaches. The William W. Henderson Inclusion Elementary School: http://boston.k12.ma.us/Henderson/curriculum.htm
Bill Henderson, Principal, has written up some really helpful documentation on the school's efforts to engage non-reader students and their parents: http://boston.k12.ma.us/Henderson/images/How%20a%20Boston%20School%20Boosted%20Home%20Reading.pdf
I'll be reaching out in early January to see if we can chat with Bill H. or some of the Henderson school staff.
Wow, those parents who did the house calls to new students! What a great effort to make!
ReplyDeleteAnd a pizza party singling out those who had the most challenge...I can't imagine how they were able to market that without coming across as being offensive in some way, but that seemed to work. Probably, I imagine, because they anticipated some of the difficulties these parents would face against attending. By providing free food and child care, they were able to get the parents there to push them to consider this worthy goal.
What the school's efforts really show, however, is that it takes more than one tactic to achieve such an important goal. Some parents just needed reminding. Some were already easily in the mode of reading to their children. But for those who needed it most, the people who had the most challenges to overcome to help their kids get reading, the most effort needed to be made to help them surmount those problems.
What I get out of this is the idea that we can't look at a school based on the numbers. Sure, a school may have a great success rate, percentage-wise, but that may have NOTHING to do with the school and everything to do with the population. This comes back to the idea of tailoring education to the individual student or subpopulations of students.
I loved the concept of the "workshop approach". It's a difficult concept to do as far as getting started, but I've heard of many similar programs where the teachers find it works very well. And really, just because it's difficult (as with getting low-income families to a point where they can regularly read with their children), it doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.
Thanks for sharing this, Rachel! It would be great to hear more ideas that this school has to share. Maybe, at the very least, we could come up with a list of questions to send to Bill Henderson as an interview that we could post, with his responses, on the blog here.