Allan Appel Photo
Khan and dome-buildiers at Booker T. Washington, which the state just named a “school of distinction.”
Science teacher Intisar Khan challenged her first-graders to build a dome, the way Roman engineers combined the arch and the circle and the way Bucky Fuller built his geodesic version two millennia later.
First the kids had fun making a human dome topped with a purple beach ball and jiggled around each other to discover, in their bones, how to make a dome stronger.
Then Khan gave each kid a hunk of clay and told them to muck around. eventually dividing the hunk into precisely 11 pieces.
Why 11?
Khan wouldn’t tell them until the end of the lesson; she wanted them to figure it out. The kids were used to that, part of the school’s learning-by-doing and discovering culture.
(You too will need to read to the end of the story to find the answer.)
Such hands-on learning by doing — discovery, visualizing for one’s self, and avoiding straightforward linear approaches, especially in science and math — was on full display one recent morning at Booker T. Washington Academy (BTWA), which occupies a former parochial school space at the old St. Stanislaus Church School on State Street.
Finished product, end of lesson.
It’s one of the reasons the four-year-old state-chartered public K‑to‑4 school the state Department of Education this month designated Booker T “a school of distinction.” The school, originally launched by leaders at Varick AME Zion Church in response to frustrations in the black community over public-school choices, is now the top performing school in math statewide. It also lands in the top 20 percent in reading. Booker doesn’t outperform schools just in its city, but statewide.
How have they done it?
A combination of the ambitious, multi-disciplinary approach found in Khan’s classroom, an emphasis on basics combined with critical thinking, close attention to individual students’ progress, and a mixture of love with reliable standards.
Numbers In Sentences
Dean of Academics and third-grade parent Raynetta Ford-Thames greeted kids and parents alike as they arrived for the day, setting the tone of the school, which is homey combined with consistently reinforced high expectations.
“The secret is consistency. The consistency of the rigor of our program, the consistency of the support we give to students and teachers individually and our consistently high expectations,” Ford-Thames said as she greeted kindergartner Zurie Crawford.
Zurie’s dad, Heath Crawford, was dropping her off. He praised the school for remaining in constant touch with parents. He also praised the regular success of his daughter’s academics, even in the tender little early grades.
“When she first came in, she was just learning her numbers. Now she’s adding and subtracting and understands numbers in sentences,” he said.
Principal Main with Problem of the Week.
That math culture announces itself in the main hall as you enter the building. There’s a school-wide Problem of the Week. Each kid who figures it out deposits his or her answer in a folder. The winner — and there are many of them per grade — gets a sticker or pencil.
All too often when kids do math, said Principal Laura Main, what’s taught is “all scales, no music.”
“That is a rote way. We don’t do that. Math is always integrated into the real world,” she said.
For example, in teaching addition, the teacher might say, “What if there were three people in a room and two more came in?”
“The kids might either act it out or draw a picture,” Main said. “That’s the music.”
When they’ve experienced it, “then we show them the plus sign,” she added.
Anthony Huepa and Syncere Streater-Scott learning how scientists muck around too.
As the kids progress in grades, they learn more efficient ways to solve problems. Problems are always being broken down and experienced as much as possible through pictorial or other experiential means. Adding 13 and 24, a kid will learn to add the 10s of 24 and then the 4, and he or she may do that with what teachers call “manipulables.”
The teacher/student ratio helps make that kind of instruction possible: two teachers for 24 kids or one to 12 (if my math is right).
A teacher and an academic assistant are in each classroom. Kids are always learning in small groups appropriate to their needs; the levels in a single first grade can vary greatly. When individual attention is required, the kid sits down with teacher or assistant for a “conference.”
“Balanced Literacy”
This was evident in Marisa Palermo’s second-grade class. Quiet music played in the background as an assistant teacher, Mark Morrison, had a conference with a boy who seemed to be lit up with an instant of comprehension.
In the opposite corner of the room, Jayla Pollard and three friends were sitting with Palermo sussing out the problem in a story they had just read. The first question posed to the kids was whether the text in front of them was narrative, informational, or persuasive.
Main said the school has assembled an array of known “best practices,” that is curricula and behavior procedures that work.
In reading, the approach is “balanced literacy.” That means at any given time in the same classroom, some kids may be working with Palermo and Morrison on phonics, others on vocabulary, others on comprehension. At all times, the kids are “annotating” — writing down under “P,” as Jayla was doing on a piece of paper next to her book, her thoughts on the problem the story presented.
In this case the heroine of our story seems to have been forced by her mom to attend a party. Under the letter “c” in her notes, Jayla jotted down traits of the individuals’ characters. There’s also “s” for solution; Jayla hadn’t gotten that far yet. The notes then become the basis for the writing what the teachers call a culminating “synthesis” based on the story.
As to best behavioral practices, the school is noticeably quiet. In Palermo’s classroom, low, serene mood music was was playing. The kids wear uniforms of purple tops and khaki pants or skirts. Behaviors appropriate to walking in the hallways and sitting in classrooms (“criss-cross apple sauce”) are also enforced, but gently, with earnest suggestion.
It all creates what Main calls a safe atmosphere where kids feel comfortable taking chances, where they can “muck around” as scientists and mathematicians do in the real world.
Bulletin board in the BTWA lobby.
BTWA hopes to add a fifth grade next year. That would be capacity for its current building. School Executive Director John Taylor was optimistic about finding a larger space so the school can ultimately expand to eighth grade.
As a state-sponsored charter school, BTWA has a line item in the state budget. It receives $11,000 per kid, whereas $15,000 is what is budgeted for each kid in the public school system. That means Taylor every year must raise the difference.
He’s been able to do that. The fact that his kids are performing, with scores that landed BTWA the “school of distinction” honor, makes that always-challening job a little easier.
Why 11 pieces for the geodesic dome? That’s the number you need for the “glue” in which the frame — in this case, the long toothpicks — will stick to make the structure secure.