Chelsea Singlehurst

Vision and Goals

6th Grade ELA/SS Wheeler Middle School

2015-2016 School Year

Who are my students?

The students at Wheeler Middle School are primarily (97%) the children of service-members in the United States Armed Forces and live in the areas surrounding Wheeler Middle School, and on base. Due to the transient nature of the armed forces, my students come to Wheeler Middle School with a diversity of histories and experiences from across the country, and even the world. This will be an asset to my classroom culture and the other students that I work with because of the overlying questions about the class has to do with cultures and customs, and why do we need to learn about other cultures. This transiency in the student population is noted in the 2013-2014 school year data where 74.5% of students were enrolled in the school for the whole year. On the transition office’s front door there is a poster that says “We have _____ new students today”. This presence shows that this transiency is something that will affect the classroom throughout the whole year, allowing for an influx of cultures and information from transfer students coming in, but can also pose a difficulty with investment and classroom culture consistency. I have seen the effects of this on my classroom throughout last year and this year as well. Often when the students are PCSing (permanent change of station) they emotionally and academically “check out”. Knowing that they aren’t going to be around, and that their grades are frozen, they feel the need to not try. In harnessing that energy and working with them to realize that they are going to take their study skills and attitudes to their next school, and they are the ones who can make it positive, it is possible to work with this set back.

The School Status and Improvement Report shows that 44% of students who attend Wheeler Middle School receive free or reduced-cost lunch, the median household income of the community is $50,592 where the State of Hawaii median household income is $66, 420. It is important to note that the educational attainment of students in the Wheeler community is higher than the State average in “High School” and in “Some College”, it is lower in “College Graduate” by about 11%. This is important to not because though there is an above average trend of students in the Wheeler community graduating from High School and continuing on to pursue education, a below average number of these students are finishing their college education and graduating from college. For my classroom this is important because a lot of my 6th graders haven’t even begun to think about going to college, if I can, as their 6th grade teacher, start the ball rolling to get them on that path, they may be able to break the norms of what is expected of students their age and in their situations.

Another factor for me to consider when coming into my English Language Arts and Social Studies class next year is the demographics of the students that I will be teaching. Comparing the student ethnicities for the school year 2013 – 2014 at Wheeler Middle School with 44% White students, 17% Hispanic, and 22.2% Black students, to the demographics at neighboring Wahiawa Middle School where the highest percentages of student population are 38.7% Filipino, 20.6% Part Hawaiian, and 14.8% Other, which is a trend seen similarly throughout the central Oahu schools, gives insight into the population I am working with. Where students with a more local demographic may have a more difficult time relating to the content area of early civilizations and ancient civilizations, I believe that this group of students who are predominantly military dependents, will be able to find themselves a lot more invested in the history of the development of structured civilizations and warfare, as they will be able to readily make connections to modern day occurrences and they will be able to more readily empathize with the people who lived in the eras that we will be studying.

Knowledge and Skill Growth

As incoming sixth graders, my students are transitioning into a world where they need to develop the skills to be independent and increase their academic and scholastic abilities so that they can have consistent success and growth throughout the rest of their career in an academic setting. Ideally, my students have come in with the appropriate levels of skills for the grade level that I am teaching them in, but regardless of the level that my students are at, I am still aiming for 1.9 years or more of growth in reading for every one of my students. In order to do this, my students need to have the ability and the skills to take ownership of what they are doing and what they are working on. In addition to fostering an appreciation of reading and the skills necessary to be a successful reader in school, my students also need to grow and develop their writing skills. As writing isn’t as heavily weighted as reading is in terms of standardized testing and requirements, this is an area in which I will have to develop.

Social, Political, Cultural Consciousness

Many of my students will be in very transient situations for the better part of their young lives.. They come mostly from military families that are PCSing on a regular basis often with very little advance warning. That being said I need to make sure that my students are as prepared as possible for the rigor of academics that they will be facing in their next school. These students have often gone to multiple schools in a year, and have had to adjust to different teaching styles and different expectations many times per school year. I will prepare them during my classes to be ready for this transition if they are moving during the year, or to be prepared for the transition out of elementary school, into middle school, and into seventh grade where I believe they will be challenged even more in terms of adjustments.

My students are coming out of elementary school where they had one teacher, one classroom, one desk, all year. This transition into middle school where you can not set up camp in your desk, you have four or more teachers, and different classrooms at different times, is challenging. My students will learn quickly that there are necessary steps that they need to make in order to facilitate their transition such as asking for help, giving help to peers, and following directions and learning the motions of a new school system. This is a skill that they will need to carry with them throughout their entire academic career especially if they are going to be moving before they graduate High School.

In addition to working with students to ensure their success, parental communication is key as well. Setting up relationships with parents, and with students, and creating the expectation of parent-teacher communication of all things pertaining to the student, be them good or bad, will be very important for creating a strong classroom culture. By calling parents and encouraging meetings with parents, both the students and the parents are aware of my intentions to work as a team to create the best environment possible for each student to ensure the success of each student. By having a family engagement plan, and constant interaction with parents via conferences, remind.com messages, emails, phone calls, my website etc. the students and parents know that both my partner teacher and I are their to ensure the success of all students. Letting all parties involved know that they have a voice, and we are all working together to best support the students in my classroom, will help create the necessary environment for the success of all students in the classroom.

Personal Growth

As incoming sixth graders, I am setting up my students to transition from an elementary school mindset to a middle school mindset. This year is going to see a lot of growth and a lot of transition in my students as they begin to explore independence and the development of themselves as self-directed learners, which is one of the general learner objectives (GLOs) for Wheeler Middle School. The GLOs that Wheeler Middle School aims to develop in their students are the following:

These qualities manifest themselves in academic traits as well as personal traits. One of the goals that I want to stress throughout the year is ownership and development of self-awareness. This ties directly to the GLOs set out by the school. In each of the GLOs, the students need to be able to self-monitor and to be self-aware of their actions so that they can develop their understanding and accountability. By being a self-directed learner, a community contributor, a complex thinker, a quality producer, an effective communicator, and an effective and ethical user of technology, my students will demonstrate that they are developing their self-awareness and ownership of themselves as learners and of the quality and type of education that they are receiving in my class.

In addition to the GLOs that are standard with any Wheeler Middle School student, I want to increase my students’ confidence in themselves as learners and in themselves as readers and writers. By encouraging my students to think and go outside of their bubbles and to push themselves to read and write things that they may not otherwise write, I will be expanding their capacities as members of an academic community who strive to achieve and to want to learn. This confidence is a personal skill that my students will need to aid their transitions into middle school, as well to prepare them for seventh grade. Sixth graders are developmentally at a stage where they are curious to challenge everything and to learn new things. They want to be able to argue, to debate, to fight to prove their beliefs, they are going through the process of self discovery and learning more about themselves as individuals. I want to be able to use these GLOs as well as the students’ developmental mindsets to help the students learn about themselves and how they perform as both a student and a human being.

Access

Wheeler Middle School has a multitude of tools that we can use to facilitate this process of our students becoming confident, able, successful students. As a technology-heavy school, we have access to iPads, MacBook Pros, MacBook Airs, and computer labs that we can use to facilitate learning.  As 21st century learners, the students of Wheeler Middle School are set up to keep up with the changing faces of education and to be successful learners and students. We also take advantage of our access to technology with various google resources, and a wealth of existing curriculum that is centered around creating successful students using the common core standards, our students are going to be on track to be college and career ready. In addition to the strictly academic processes, we will be able to introduce and develop extracurricular educational experiences with our students in the form of excursions to museums and local sites where we can show students material and physical representations of the concepts that we have been studying. For example, showing the students artifacts from the Bishop museum that are relevant to the concepts we are learning, or teaching them about the historical context of the books we are reading before we read them. These students have so many opportunities available to them and they don’t even know it yet!