Tempe district using new method for education

Cher Cooper phonetically sounds out each word in the sentence “Look at the rainbow” as her kindergarten class follows along.

“Let’s sweep back to the left and read what we wrote,” Cooper says to the Evans Elementary group gathered on a small patch of carpet around her.

The students all raise one finger in the air and in unison point to each word in the sentence, reciting it together. The successful completion of the exercise is met with lots of clapping and cheering by the mostly 5-year-olds.

Words are everywhere in this classroom. The backs of the pint-sized blue chairs are labeled “you,” “what” and “have.”

Construction paper hearts and stars that hang from the ceiling read “look,” “my” and “the.”

Cooper knows the students won’t sit still and pay attention long, so every few minutes they move to a different table where they’ll practice hands-on activities that ask them to say words and sounds aloud, write them down in sentences, sometimes even spell them out using their bodies as letters.

The students are asked to think about reading every moment that they are in the classroom and when they’re not doing it, Cooper knows.

“That’s not one of our words,” she tells a student who has written the wrong vocabulary word. “Go back to your desk and read it again.”

About four years ago, the Tempe Elementary School District adopted the idea that 100 percent of its elementary students should be “100 percent engaged, 100 percent of the time.”

Two years ago, they expanded that idea to middle schools.

“The premise is that we no longer can let an individual child zone out or not be engaged in the learning,” said Lois Whisiker-Williams, language arts, social studies and Reading First coordinator. “No longer is the day when you can say ‘I taught it, but they didn’t learn.’ ”

Teachers are being trained to use a variety of strategies to make sure that all boys and girls are benefiting from classroom instruction.

“They walk the room, they talk around the room. They give people time to reflect and have them summarize,” Whisiker-Williams said. “They are always checking understanding and giving feedback.”

It’s not easy.

Cooper says there’s rarely a day when she’s not completely exhausted when she comes home from school.

Connolly Middle School teacher Gretchen Larsen says she spends about twice as much time planning lessons this way than she would if she wasn’t including engagement activities.

“It’s hard. They really don’t want to be engaged at all,” Larsen said. “They all have more exciting things to talk about. It’s hard to plan that many activities, but it makes such a difference. When I don’t do it, I can see them tune out.”

Now that the idea of constant student engagement has been in place for a couple of years, the district is starting to see results.

At first, the practices didn’t seem natural to teachers, Whisiker-Williams said.

“It was very stilted,” she said. “Teachers would try to fit it in through an activity. They would put names on Popsicle sticks and put the sticks in a can. They’d pull one out and call on that student. The level of anticipation is what helped students stay aware.

“But then we realized, it’s not in the teacher’s edition – it doesn’t say insert student engagement here.”

They started integrating engagement into the entire class experience, the way Larsen and Cooper do, and are seeing more students develop the critical thinking skills they are after, as evidenced in test results.

“It’s a barometer about whether the teaching takes. We’re making sure they did get it,” Whisiker-Williams said. “And now teachers can use it to be even better.”