Teachers speculate about freshmen, academy

Lorain High School teachers talk changes for incoming students

From a television sitcom in the 1980s and 1990s, a “Cheers” theme song proposed, “Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.”

And several teachers assigned to freshmen hope students and parents feel the same way this year at Lorain High School at 2600 Ashland Ave. in Lorain.

“For starters, everybody is going to be on a team,” said English language arts Stephanie Siefert, 37, of Avon Lake, who has been teaching for 14 years.

The freshman class was broken up into four sections. Three of the sections will include four

teachers each: English, math, science and social studies, she said.

The other section adds four intervention specialists to four regular education teachers for inclusion of special needs students, she said.

“For instance, If I have a student I know exactly what his or her schedule is going to look like, and all of his teachers,” Siefert said. “It’s definitely going to open up communication. It’s going to provide us an opportunity to do things collaboratively. I think that’s the biggest most glaring change of teaming, that sense of community, and growth.”

Teaming means teachers no longer will tackle alone myriad challenges brought to the classroom, she said.

“I think the community thing is definitely what they’re going for,” said world history teacher Chris White, 25, who was raised in Grafton. White begins his third year of teaching in August.

White said he was placed on the fourth team of eight teachers for inclusion classes.

“When the freshmen come over to the high school they’re overwhelmed. I mean it’s a big school; it’s huge, it’s giant. So just coming in and getting kind of like a hug from your teachers from people who are there, it builds a sense of community,” White said. “You have some buy in, I guess is what they’re going for. So beyond just the teachers teaming, they’re going to have their rooms right next to each other. Those kids are going to share the exact same teachers. We will have two designated principals up on the third floor where all the freshmen will be. So it’s going to be a small school feel in a big school.”

Before the end of the school year teachers were told what the teams would look like, Siefert said.

Some teams have worked together in the past, White said. Others chose new partners.

“You fit the puzzle together however it will work,” White said.

The education model is not: These are my kids and these are yours and the class is split down the middle, White said. Rather, the students are shared by the content teacher and the inclusion teacher to include all kids in all instruction, to build into the gap among all students, he said.

White attended a conference this summer in Texas for AVID, Advancement Via Individual Determination, to build strategies for the freshmen teaming, he said. He gleaned ideas for teaching skills to help students be successful in high school, such as taking notes, preparing for tests, and organizing.

Craig Wood, 30, of Lorain, also begins his third year of teaching physical science after a previous career of aquaponics, a blend of aquaculture and hydroponics in a greenhouse environment. He sold mortgages for Quicken Loans, too, he said.

“I wanted to be able to give back to the community and something I was personally passionate about which was science,” Wood said, “and communicating with people.”

With the district in academic distress, teachers of freshmen shoulder a heavy, pivotal responsibility.

“I was already teaching freshmen. Most of us were, really,” Wood said, “so I was already comfortable in the position. It was a comfortable transition for us to do, and it just made sense.”

He said the team teaching is going to benefit students.

“It’s going to help create better not only teacher-student, but teacher-studentparent communications,” Wood said.

Siefert says a “point teacher” would reach out to a parent of a particular student to build a relationship, then other teachers could come alongside, so teachers are supporting each other.

“It’s so there can be a unified front,” Siefert said.

An underlying motivation needs to be caring for students and their families, and helping them thrive, they said.

Like the others, White says he teaches because he loves teaching.

“I think it’s pretty hard as a kid coming out of high school or growing up in general to know what to think or what to believe,” White said. “I wanted to become a sort of sign post to guide them, just to help out the future generations, really.”

Though he grew up in a rural community, and reported to a school in Westerville for student teaching after college coursework, White said he chose Lorain because he wanted to work in a place where he could make the most difference for youth.

But one of the toughest parts of teaching is creating strong relationships with parents, White said.

If a parent relationship is not working for one teacher in the team, the other teachers can come alongside to avoid a shutout from the family, Siefert said.

White also meets youth where they are, to build into them.

“These kids have a lot of social capital,” White said. “They know how to speak to each other. They lack academic capital. They’re socially advanced as teenagers. A lot of them don’t have a lot of social acceptance out in the community. So if you can bring that into the school, a community inside the school where they feel like they are identified, where they no longer feel alone, and give them that sense of belonging, a community of freshmen within the school, the academy on the third floor with two principals, it’s giving them a little bit of buy in so they can’t just get lost in the mix. I think giving them that sense of identity can bridge that gap with the academics, and give them some of the things they haven’t been getting in the past.”

Along with a sense of belonging and of family, the teaming will help improve teacher collaboration since they will be close in proximity, working together often, Siefert said.

This should encourage a smoother transition to high school, she said.

The teachers already work closely with social workers in the school to help teenagers sort through issues, she said.

Extra activities for fun with students will build relationships within the team, White said.

And during the first week of school, a freshman team meeting will set expectations and rules for the academy and how it works, he said.

One idea is to host an Olympics, but add elements of academics, such as calculating the trajectory of a shot put, White said.

As Wood teaches physical science — physics and chemistry — he likes to incorporate as many labs as possible.

The most important aspect of the changes is building a freshmen culture, Wood said.

“You’re not getting thrown into the mix,” Wood said, “such as, here’s your class on the second floor and here’s your class on the third floor and you’re one little person in this giant thing.”

He knew the feeling when he attended Admiral King High School.

“It’s intimidating when you’re just thrown in,” Wood said. “We’re going to build a sense of self worth in our students by building the culture. You’re going to get so much more of a buy in with your students, and positive things can only come from that.”

If it weren’t for the state standards requiring physical science for freshmen, Wood could create an aquaponics ecosystem in the classroom using fish tanks and miniature rain gutters, he said.

“It’s a lot of fun,” Wood said. “It’s a very cool applied form of science.”

Siefert says over the summer teachers collaborated with each other to put together curriculum and to brainstorm ways to engage students.

“I really like to apply realworld strategies and connect the students to things that are hot topics in society and apply English language arts standards to them,” Siefert said, “such as inferring, and grabbing textural evidence out of real world articles. So when the EpiPen prices skyrocketed to $500, we delved into articles and hot topics like that and generated discussion. ‘Who here has an allergy?’ ”

She compared raising a drug price 500 percent to how a student would feel if that happened to them.

“I was like, how are they going to get their hook here, their buy in? They really love their snacks,” Siefert said. “I was like, ‘Hey guys, how much does that bag of chips cost from the store?’ They were like, ‘A dollar.’ How would you feel if you went into the store the next day and they were $1.50?’ That was the buy in. An analogy to illustrate it to them, make it relevant to them.”

When students write a response to the topic, she hones grammar skills.

Raising academic performance is doable.

“It is going to take getting student buy in,” Wood said, “getting students to want to respond. The buy in gets back door results.”

White said during the time teachers wrote curriculum in the summer, they spoke with colleagues on the same grade level, but also incorporated vertical conversations with teachers above and below their grade levels.

“You can create this continuity in instruction,” White said. “What should overlap, what shouldn’t overlap. Once you get that smooth transition down a little bit more, that is going to show up on the state tests. It’s just kind of efficiency of instruction.”

Siefert said teaching to improve state test results is huge and very new.

“The familiarity of the testing styles, it’s changed so much,” Siefert said. “Just trying to get them acclimated with the questions and what the expectation is there. It’s a big challenge. That is another thing we were able to do over the summer is to reconstruct these tests with higher tiered questioning, to get them acclimated to the state tests, because those are very rigorous with challenging questions.”

Titan Academy provides new opportunities for achievement.

“With us building a culture, we can raise expectations,” White said. “If we put that forth as the introductory culture of the high school, then I think we’re going to see reverberations of that as they leave the freshman level to the rest of the school.”

Physical science and world history are not state tested at this time, the teachers said.

The physical science department talked with the biology department to possibly provide a boot camp for biology at the end of the year, Wood said.

“But these things are not set in stone yet,” Wood said. “Those are ideas that are getting thrown around. We’ve looked beyond what is directly in front of us. We’re developing strategies for what will be best for our students.”

Reading and understanding historical documents reflect back on English, Siefert said, or at least it has in practice tests.

“There’s some overlap,” White said.

“There’s a gap in science where in seventh and eighth grade they learn some biology,” Wood said. “Then in ninth grade they learn physical science. Then they go back to biology again. So we talk about strategies to help transition that gap. It’s hard.”

Another big change is a transition from semesterlong classes to year-long classes for freshmen and sophomores, Siefert said.

In middle school students attend from 45-to-50-minute classes, Wood said.

Last year the freshmen sat in block classes for 1 ½ hours.

“That’s a lot of class for a freshman to sit through and to absorb and to be responsible for all of that content,” Wood said. “So going back to the schedule they’re most used to is going to make a huge difference. And we’re going to be able to cover more content throughout the year.”

Students can get burned out if class time is too long, Wood said.

More details of the new program will be hammered out as administrators return to school. Principal Robin Hopkins will offer ways for parents, grandparents and others to volunteer or help with events.

White said to engage students quickly at the beginning of the year, he assigns something that seems obvious on the surface, but encourages critical thought the deeper students dig into information.

He assigns an anthropological story about an Asu culture, because they have a problem with racs.

“You can’t do anything with them but ride them,” White said, “but they seem to be a social status in this culture. The more you have the better off you are. But they kill over 100,000 people a year; they stampede all the time; they poop all over the place. What should this society do to help this culture thrive?”

When he assigns students to draw racs, he doesn’t tell them what a rac looks like. Usually they take out their phones, Google “rac,” and draw something resembling a ram, he said.

“After we go through all of the possible solutions, I say, ‘Okay, do you want to know what my rac looks like?’” White said. “I’m a very good artist. I will draw this horrible version of this car, because rac spelled backwards is car. And the Asu tribe is the USA tribe. And all of those horrible things we were talking about were referring to a car. So should you change a culture, or should you just accept a culture or can you even judge it because of your perspective? A lot of them say, ‘I never really thought of it like that before.’”

As they unpack boxes and launch Titan Academy in about a month, the teachers hope for an amazing transformation.

“I don’t know if we have the entire scope of what this transition is from a teacher perspective,” White said.

CAROL HARPER — THE MORNING JOURNAL Lorain High School teachers volunteered to participate in a new program for freshmen creating a small school feeling in a huge school. From left, Chris White, 25, teaches world history; Stephanie Siefert, 37, English language arts; and Craig Wood, 30,...