Students Pay Attention In Class

Hannah Tanguay was on a mission to teach her Fair Haven School first-graders two different definitions of the class’s newest vocabulary word: ​“store.”

She had a trick up her sleeve to keep her students engaged — and the school district administrators at the side of the room took note as they observed a classroom model for how to focus young learners’ attentions and ward off distractions.

That was the scene last Friday as a dozen members of the New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) district’s central office team gathered with Fair Haven School administrators for their first in-person School Quality Review (SQR) session since the start of the pandemic three years ago.

The SQR session at the 164 Grand Ave. elementary and middle school was led by NHPS Director of Professional Learning and Leadership Development Edith Johnson and Assistant Superintendent Keisha Redd-Hannans. 

One of its primary purposes was to better understand how teachers like Tanguay are currently succeeding in keeping students engaged in the classroom, where educators need help keeping classes on track, and what the central office can do to support that on-the-ground learning work.

The admins in attendance saw first-hand in Tanguay’s classroom how students remain focused if they have a chance to talk to one another and work together in small groups to find the answer to a question like the definition(s) of a new vocab word. See more on that below.

Also in attendance to offer input during Friday’s reviews were Conte Principal Kenneasha Sloley, Chief of Staff Michael Finley, Bishop Woods Principal Florence Crisci, English Language Learner Programs Director Pedro Mendia-Landa, Athletics Assistant Director Eric Barbarito, Director of Human Resources Lisa Flegler, and Family Academy of Multilingual Exploration (FAME) Principal Marisol Rodríguez. 

During the three-hour session, district administrators were given an up-to-date overview of the school’s PreK‑8 programming by Fair Haven School’s admin team, conducted classroom walk-throughs to see educators and students at work, and concluded with a debriefing session where staff shared what they saw in classrooms and offered help with school-wide improvements. 

60% Multilingual Learners

During the session’s introductory presentation, Fair Haven School staff shared that the district’s third largest school has had some declines in enrollment but still serves 726 students as of Friday. 

Out of that total, 589 students are Hispanic or Latino, 52 are Black or African American, 28 are white, and 47 are Asian; additionally, 414 students are multilingual learners. 

The presentation was given by Principal Monica Morales, Assistant Principals Nellie Martinez and Cynthia Clark, literacy coach Jenna Holmberg, and math coach Kathy Blodgett. 

The Fair Haven team shared students’ most recent academic improvement data and highlighted that the school’s chronic absenteeism rates have declined from last year’s 38.1 percent to now 30 percent. 

Admins also shared that because of the school’s size and because 60 percent of all its students are multilingual, it offers learning models that are dual language, monolingual, transitional bilingual, sheltered instruction, newcomer instruction, English as a Second Language (ESL), and self-contained learning. The school’s K‑6 dual language program serves 81 percent of the school’s multilingual learners. 

Click here to view Friday’s presentation in full.

Learning Vocab? Time To Turn & Talk

At the end of the presentation Fair Haven’s administrators tasked the group with visiting classrooms and focusing in on the ​“problem of practice” of student engagement. 

School leaders split into three groups and headed off for classroom walk-throughs to identify classroom practices that ​“engage students in substantive conversation with purposeful questions to promote inquiry and learning.” 

Each group of about six NHPS staff was tasked with paying attention to whether three key classroom practices were happening: teachers posing questions that promote inquiry, students engaging in activities that make their learning visible, and students participating in meaningful discussions and constructively responding to one another. 

A group made up of Monica Morales, Keisha Redd-Hannans, Kanneasha Sloley, Michael Finley, and Cynthia Clark made a first stop to the school’s third floor.

When visiting Tanguay’s first-grade class, the observing group took seats off to the side as Tanguay began a reading lesson on the classroom rug. 

Tanguay began the lesson by informing her students of their goal, which was to learn two new vocabulary words while reading the book Big Blue Whale by Nicola Davies. 

“It takes an awful lot of tiny krill to feed a great big blue whale. But the whale doesn’t catch them one at a time. It has a special way of swallowing whole swarms of them at one,” Tanguay read aloud from the book. ​“First, it takes a huge gulp of krill and salty seawater.” 

Tanguay tasked the students with guessing which word from the excerpt was the class’s new vocabulary word. 

“Turn and talk with a partner to guess the word it is,” Tanguay next tasked the class before taking answers from the many hands raised. 

Tanguay used the turn-and-talk method dozens of times throughout the lesson to encourage the students to bounce ideas off their neighbors and engage with the lesson’s discussion. 

The students then guessed the correct new vocabulary word, which was ​“gulp.”

“Do you think when you gulp something you do it fast or slow?” Tanguay followed up. 

Several students’ hands shot up, but before Tanguay called on anyone, she again asked her students to turn and talk to a neighbor. ​“Talk your thoughts out and hear what your friends are thinking,” Tanguay advised. 

After students discussed the first new vocabulary word and confidently told Tanguay its definition, they moved on the second vocab word with two definitions, which was ​“store.”

Tanguay read from the book which used the word to describe a whale storing away food for the winter. 

“Can you raise a quiet hand and think about what we store away in our classroom?” Tanguay asked. 

After talking with their partners, students listed off spaces used for storing things like a pencil case, closets for toys, plastic bins for folders and books, and a refrigerator for juice. 

When asked what else the word ​“store” could mean the students guessed correctly without needing Tanguay’s help. 

In small groups they talked with their neighbors about shopping at stores like Walmart, Target, the mall, Key Foods, and Build-A-Bear. 

Tanguay then tested the students understanding of the vocabulary words by saying several sentences aloud using the word ​“store” differently. The students answered each one correctly. 

Someone To Love Me

The same group also visited an ELA classroom for a group of five 7th and 8th graders, taught by special education teacher Melissa Mansi. 

In Mansi’s classroom students re-read parts of the book Someone to Love Me by Paul Langan to identify character traits and searched for textual evidence to prove their work.

Students worked in pairs or alone in corners of the classroom while charting traits and examples on poster papers. 

Mansi made rounds to each group as they worked. While working with one pair of students Mansi asked the students if the character Ms. Davis was a welcoming and caring character or not. ​“Did she invite Cindy in her house?” Mansi asked. The students nodded in agreement. ​“Show me where she was nice to Cindy?” Mansi followed up. 

The two students each pointed to the same sentence in the book. Mansi approved and helped them to form the sentence for their worksheet. ​“Good, so you can write on page 45: Ms. Davis invites Cindy into her home and ask if she needs anything,” Mansi said. 

Throughout the Friday lesson Mansi gave her students periodic reminders of how much time they had left to work on the characteristics assignment. 

The observing groups stayed in each classroom for about 15 minutes and spent time watching the teachers’ instruction, asking students how they feel about the lesson, and looking over the format of the actual classroom and how well it supported daily instruction. 

The school leaders also left the educators notes of encouragement and what they observed. 

While heading to the next classroom the group briefly discussed their observations with one another and expressed appreciation for Mansi’s intentional lesson planning and frequent use of the student workbooks. 

Finding The Right Words

Next the group headed to teacher Josie Ricardo’s third-grade dual language classroom. Ricardo led a literacy lesson in English with her class. On Friday the students worked in small groups on different literacy-focused tasks. 

Ricardo worked with a group of three third graders who practiced putting together sentences in English using a word bank. After piecing together sentences like ​“I have brown hair” with the index cards from the word bank the students then wrote the sentences they created on their worksheets. 

“What words could you use next that makes sense?” Ricardo asked one student in the group. 

The third-grader who was piecing together a second sentence starting with ​“some” grabbed another card from the word bank reading ​“of” and added it to her sentence. 

Next Morales’ group made a quick detour to the Spanish dual language classroom of third-grade teacher Lesly Lopez, to get a glimpse of both sides of the dual language program. 

In Lopez’s classroom, students also worked in small groups on a literacy lesson. Five small groups worked on women’s history month projects that researched the stories of Hispanic trailblazers Frida Kahlo, Sonia Sotomayor, Ellen Ochoa, and Delores Huerta. 

In another small group Lopez worked with students on a reading lesson. The students sharped up on their vocabulary words as Lopez showed them index cards with vocabulary words like ​“pararrayo,” meaning lightning. 

The group took a few short pauses along the way to each classroom to admire the school’s hallway art and bulletin boards tracking student success and improvements. 

In third-grade teacher Kathleen Carter’s classroom, students worked in small groups practicing with fractions in the form of math games. During the visit Carter worked with a group of three at the front of the classroom with math blocks and their workbooks. 

Those visiting the classroom stopped to talk with the students who were able to quickly and efficiently explain the Friday lesson. 

"It Takes All Of Us To Fix School Issues"

After the classroom visits the groups returned to the school’s library to debrief about their visits. Each group also filled out a ​“look fors” sheet that required them to grade the classrooms on their student engagement.

Redd-Hannans added that the SQR’s are done from a ​“supportive lens” because ​“it takes all of us to fix school issues.”

After the Friday session Redd-Hannans said the Fair Haven School admin team would present on the feedback to the entire school staff. 

In their walk-through groups, the school leaders convened for a final time to discuss and each write down what they noticed about student engagement in the classrooms, follow-up questions, and offered suggestions based on what they saw. 

In one group Johnson recalled that ​“there wasn’t one classroom that I went into where the kids didn’t know what they were doing.” 

Morales’ group recalled a classroom with a student drawing a character from a book and questioned whether the student was learning about the character by drawing them or if instead they were only learning to draw. 

“If you asked them what did you learn today, would they just say drawing, or would it be the actual lesson?” Finley said. 

Another group said they noticed that the classrooms they visited were not overly using technology and only brought it out when necessary. This same group also noticed that several classrooms had useful decorations, like anchor charts that the students would get up and refer to throughout class. 

“It’s good that they don’t have them just hanging up for looks,” Crisci said. 

Crisci added that she would love to have whiteboard desks at her school after seeing Friday’s students use them. 

Redd-Hannans added to the group’s post a question about what kind of professional development educators get around student engagement methods. 

In Mendia-Landa’s group, staff discussed whether all classrooms had students engaging in meaningful discussions as opposed to quick turn-and-just-answer type of conversations. 

The group ultimately decided that although classes were tasked with having discussions, those discussions weren’t all meaningful. 

The group suggested educators model what meaningful conversations look and sound like to students before asking them to engage with peers. 

Additionally a group suggested educators be given the chance to observe their colleagues and have teacher-led professional development to share classroom tips for engagement. Morales said she would love to get educators in other classrooms to observe, but due to shortage concerns the school has struggled to offer coverage to educators seeking to do this.

The session concluded with the district team members making commitments to the Fair Haven School team to help it to improve student engagement.

Johnson promised she would share a model she used as principal of Wilbur Cross that allowed for staff to do internal walk-throughs. 

Flegler asked that Morales gather a list of current part-time or non-certified teachers to share with her and promised to reach out to those current educators to offer support in accessing the district’s teacher prep program partnerships as a way to help address the school’s lack of staffing. 

Morales added that the school needs support with improving its multilingual learner programming. Mendia-Landa promised to work with the school as he also worked to increase the district’s number of multilingual learner coaches. 

See below for other recent Independent articles about teaching, reading, and working inside New Haven Public Schools classrooms.

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