Organization makes literacy suggestions to Methuen schools … – Eagle-Tribune

METHUEN — A national nonprofit educational organization has suggested improvements throughout the Methuen Public Schools to better support students’ learning engagement.

Superintendent Brandi Kwong and the district are working with The New Teacher Project, through the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) growing literacy equity across Massachusetts (GLEAM) grant for consulting in grades growth.

“They collect student work while they’re here and they review it,” said Lisa Golobski Twomey, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning. “While they’re in the classrooms, they’re typing away, taking notes, filling out rubrics.”

The school district was presented with a report that focuses on growth areas, which Golobski Twomey called “very helpful.”

The New Teacher Project, which works throughout the country, has been to 55 classrooms in the Methuen School District since the beginning of the year. These include grades three through five as well as high school classes. The group will look at grades six through eight next.

The education counselors found that 63% of Methuen High School students are engaged in their school work from start to finish. The remaining 38% of the time, students were found to be mostly engaged.

For grades three through five, 29% of the time students were engaged, 60% were mostly and 11% somewhat engaged from start to finish during observation.

“I don’t think these findings were surprising,” Golobski Twomey said. “TNTP has often commented that we’re unique as a district because they always find that the students have such a strong report with their teachers and are almost hanging on for every word.”

Golobski Twomey said significant growth at the high school is due to previous work with The New Teacher Project. Grades three through five “are just starting their work” with the consultants, according to Golobski Twomey.

The organization found almost 90% of texts in both the high school and grades three through five are rated as high-quality.

“We were very pleased with that and showing that students are engaged with the high-quality texts for the vast majority of the lesson,” Golobski Twomey said, adding that the texts considered “not yet” by The New Teachers Project were intervention tools being used as supplements to the curriculum and not “randomly selected” texts.

The New Teachers Project suggested Methuen schools need to better employ questions and tasks to build students’ comprehension.

Scores for the initial literacy benchmark were provided in early fall. The numbers ranged between 34% of students in grade four and 50% in grade seven reading at or above grade level. The district’s goal is to have 80% of students in grades three through eight at those levels.

The next look into literacy rates will be in January and the final test will be given in May, according to Golobski Twomey.

In the interim, teachers are monitoring students to learn about students’ needs and the direction they are headed.

“We have seen many classrooms since the beginning of the year,” Golobski Twomey. “Dr. (Brandi) Kwong and I really like getting into the classrooms and have been able to do so for a variety of groups.”

Golobski Twomey said it is important for students to “take the responsibility for doing the thinking.”

“We want students to bear the load of what’s going on in the classroom, in terms of doing most of the reading, writing, listening and speaking,” Golobski Twomey said, adding teachers will look for students to be “advocates for their own learning” by asking questions, supporting their ideas with evidence and persevering through difficult grade-appropriate work.

English Language Arts teachers in grades three through 12 have completed professional development sessions through The New Teacher Project this fall which offered a variety of student-driven topics, including research-based literacy instruction, academic monitoring, alignment to standards and text-centered instruction.

“The plans will be to continue with our benchmarks, to continue with our walk-throughs and to continue with our progress monitoring,” Golobski Twomey said.

“The humanities supervisors report that teachers have had great success with this already and talk about the data often.”

Follow Monica on Twitter at @MonicaSager3

Follow Monica on Twitter at @MonicaSager3