We have a principal at my school that is convinced that the only decent intervention model involves students rotating to other teachers. She has been pressuring us for the last year plus. I am not convinced that sending my students to a teacher they do not know is going to improve student achievement.
I tried it once last year with another teacher in my department. The other teacher did the intervention with the students who had failed the test and I did the enrichment with students who passed. During the intervention he went back over the content and explained it to students again. When my students retook the test, only a small handful did better. Most did the same or worse. My enrichment lesson involved a reading and discussion on how to increase voter participation while ensuring there was no voter fraud. It was a timely lesson on a current issue since it was right before the election. Some of the students from his class participated while others chose to try to sleep. Another challenge occurred during the last class of the day when I sent my students to his class and waited for his to arrive. When I called him, he told me he had decided to just let his kids that passed go to the computer lab.
What I learned from this was that a simple review of a multiple choice test was not going to improve student achievement. I also learned that there need to be clear guidelines and expectations for what each teacher was going to do. And each teacher needed to communicate expectations to their students.
This year we tried it once again, this time with 4 teachers. We gave students a 6 question quiz. For intervention/enrichment, we did an advanced group which had 59 students, a proficient group with 56 students and an intervention group which had 39 students. I was in charge of the advanced group and chose to do a gallery walk of current quotes on the topic we had discussed, state's rights. While I thought it was a good opportunity for students to go further in depth through current events, having to manage 59 kids, of whom only 17 were my own students, was quite the challenge. Most students were well behaved, but I did have a few from another teacher who chose to be challenging and disregard my instructions. I also found the quality of answers to not be what I had hoped for from other students.
One teacher took the 56 proficient students and also did a gallery walk, but related to the exact topic we had covered in class. I have not yet spoken with him regarding how his group did. Two teachers split the group of 39 and worked with them on vocabulary and some of the things that they had missed on the quiz. They also mentioned challenges with behavior, but seemed to have better feelings about how it went than did I. One solution we came up with was to have an administrator or aide or someone in with the larger groups to help with crowd control.
This week students will write their essay and it will be interesting to see how the students who received the intervention do. I am still not convinced that rotation is a good idea. My other 4 classes of the day had a different lesson. All but a small group of 4-5 students did the enrichment portion I had led in the large group. It went better as they worked in groups of 3-4 and made posters with their reactions to the quotes. The small group I pulled aside due to low quiz grades got my personal attention as we went through the major concepts they needed to know for the essay and reviewed what they missed on the quiz. I still stand by the fact that students perform better when the intervention comes from the teacher they know and have a rapport with, rather than strangers. It is not that the other teachers did not do a great job, because I am sure they did. It is that the assignment the day of the rotation was not graded, so students had no incentive to try.
Sadly some administrators, and even teachers, think that there is only one way to do something. For this situation, there are those who refuse to accept that rotation may not be the best answer for high school. It worked for them in elementary so they assume it is one size fits all. I still believe that intervention needs to be teacher driven, individualized to the students and not a mandate from higher ups. If we are going to improve education, we must allow teachers who are in the classroom to test out all options instead of being told what to do.
