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Michelle Vruwink shares her experience of meeting the challenges facing educators in a brand-new, diverse school

The Franklin School of Innovation is a charter middle and high school that opened last August with 280 students in grades 6–9. We are adding a grade each year until we serve grades 6–12, with about 100 students and five or six new faculty positions each year. Part of our mission is to be a community school, truly reflective of the community we serve. Our students come to us with a broad range of prior educational experience and success, including those who have had strong academic success as well as students who have educational disabilities or have not been successful in prior schools. We do not use a traditional tracking system with students, so in some of our classes the achievement levels are highly differentiated. We also have a large population of students who have been homeschooled with little experience in traditional, formal education settings. While we embrace this diversity of learners, it does present challenges for our teachers and students.

Embedded Professional Learning
As we hit the ground last year, we faced a number of big questions. How do we create a consistent educational experience and a strong culture within a brand-new school? How do we successfully onboard new students and new faculty members each year in a way that strengthens that culture? We are an EL Education (ELE) school, yet none of our faculty had taught in an ELE school previously—EL Education, formerly known as Expeditionary Learning, is a nonprofit collaboration between Outward Bound and the Harvard School of Education. How do we provide meaningful professional-learning opportunities within the fiscal constraints of a start-up charter school in North Carolina? We had to be creative with our professional-learning opportunities.

Before we opened, our director of curriculum and I worked closely with our incoming teachers to prepare our school curriculum. For English language arts (ELA), our ELE school designer suggested taking a look at the EngageNY ELA modules, created by ELE with Public Consulting Group (PCG), a management-consulting firm that primarily serves public-sector education, health, human services, and other state, county, and municipal government clients. Since the middle school modules were created by ELE, they serve as an embedded professional-learning tool as well as a strong Common Core-aligned curriculum resource. The modules incorporate instructional strategies, such as ELE protocols, as well as recommendations for differentiation to meet the needs of all learners. They are a powerful way to extend what we were doing in our professional-learning and coaching sessions into the classroom on a daily basis.

We have a wide range of experience among the teachers using the modules, from a veteran teacher who taught for more than 20 years, to a teacher entering her third year but transitioning from high school to middle and returning to the classroom after a multiyear sabbatical, to a first-year teacher. Each teacher uses the modules effectively to meet his or her own learning needs. Here’s how one teacher returning to the classroom approached the modules:

“I spent much of the summer before my first day back in the classroom in a panic, because I hadn’t taught middle school before and had no idea where to start, especially with regards to this elusive Expeditionary Learning model. The modules gave me a good starting point with regard to suggested anchor texts, supplemental materials, learning targets, and even protocols with which to pursue the targets. After using the modules fairly closely, I was eventually able to make the units my own, with the modules as my scaffolding.”

Franklin School of Innovation is using the Expeditionary Learning model because it “has demonstrated success in closing the achievement gap… for English language learners… and those with IEPs.”

This year, we’ve continued use of the modules throughout all grades. Our high school ELA teacher is an experienced teacher new to ELE and to us, and she is teaching at a lower grade level than her most recent experience. She has drawn on the EngageNY high school modules to support this transition.
“I’ve been using the EngageNY curriculum with our ninth and tenth graders… The curriculum has been helpful in choosing anchor texts for each unit, pulling comprehension questions to help with scaffolding, and pacing different standards. It’s also been helpful in aligning assessments to the standards.
“I like to think of the curriculum as a jumping-off point for my planning, and it’s really nice to have a starting place, especially since this is my first time teaching ninth grade in five years. As I continue to use the curriculum, I anticipate that I’ll have a better sense of what to take and what to leave. But I am so appreciative of having a starting place that holds me to the standards and that aligns rigorous assessments for the kids.”

Impact on Teaching and Learning
We were pleased with our students’ performance on the state standardized reading tests. Our school had the highest reading-performance grade of any school in Buncombe County. For a first-year school, that’s pretty remarkable. We had growth across all achievement levels. As students returned to our school this year, it has been rewarding to see and hear them applying the skills they practiced in ELA last year—especially close reading, using evidence from the text, and capturing key ideas effectively in graphic organizers—in other courses.

The modules place a strong emphasis on having students do revisions and high-quality work. They model a structured approach that takes students through a thoughtful process of breaking down a text, putting in their own analysis, and thinking at a high level. As a parent, I enjoy watching my own daughter grapple with questions that challenge her to think at a high level. I love going into classrooms and hearing our students make connections between the texts they are reading and things that are going on in our world. I’m really pleased with how our teachers have used this resource to deepen our implementation of EL Education.

Because we develop most of our own curriculum, resources such as the modules designed by PCG save our teachers from doing everything from scratch, making sure that our content is strong and that our assessments are standards aligned and are preparing students for end-of-year assessments. We’ll continue to look to them as a foundational resource for our teachers.

Michelle Vruwink is a founder and the director of the Franklin School of Innovation, in Asheville, North Carolina.