The relationship among parents, teachers, students, and administrators is one of the most visible features of BCMS. Many adults in the school talk about themselves as part of a team whose goal is to educate the students. This sense of teamwork permeates attitudes about responsibility and respect. One teacher said, there is a "combined effort of leadership and teachers, moving everyone toward working together, with high expectations of teachers." Kids need to know "that I care whether they learn, how things are going at home and with friends. They need me to set a tone of demanding expectations and caring."

While building relationships is an important part of what makes BCMS developmentally responsive, the principal strengthens this by creating structures that facilitate caring. In 1993-94, four local junior high schools merged into one building to become Barren County Middle School. With such a large number of students to manage, Principal Michelle Pedigo immediately set up a school structure that would serve the developmental needs of her students.

The first thing she did was to create four small teams of students and teachers:

• two seventh grade teams each consist of approximately 135 students and six teachers. Each team has five content teachers - math, social studies, science, and two language arts.

• two eighth grade teams each consist of approximately 150 students and six teachers. Each team, instead of two language arts teachers, has one language arts teacher and one interdisciplinary teacher.

All teams have an exceptional education teacher who collaborates with the science and social studies teachers. Students spend a majority of their day with the same teachers and in their teams. Each team also occupies one section of the school building so that when students move between classes and to their lockers, they remain within their area. Students move out of their team structures for related arts classes.

The teaming structure creates an environment in which small groups of adults are responsible for particular students, and one in which students learn to take responsibility for each other. For example, one day, during the changing of classes, one student bumped into another student causing her to drop all of her books and supplies on the floor. There were about eight or ten other students in the immediate area who, spontaneously, helped the student gather her books and supplies. Students did not need to be told what to do, and every student in the hall quickly took the initiative to help this girl with her books.

Teamwork in Classes

In almost all the classrooms at BCMS, students work in small teams and on group projects. In the 8th grade, two of the math classes were gathered in the school's atrium for a probability and statistics fair. Groups of five or six students rotated from one table to another in which they had to solve various theoretical and probability statistics problems. In a social studies class, students worked in small teams as part of a stock market activity. Groups of students were responsible for different jobs, but everyone worked together as part of a single team. In an integrated curriculum class students were grouped according to their particular intelligence from Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligence theory. Each group selected a topic from the recent unit on empathy and was asked to design and develop a presentation on their chosen topic for the rest of the class, using that group's particular intelligence.

Teachers in the school are seeing a higher rate of student involvement and learning by incorporating group projects into the curriculum. Students say they like working with their classmates in small groups because it makes learning fun. They are up on their feet, involved in hands-on learning activities, collaborating with one another, sharing ideas, working together to solve problems. When asked what kind of learning goes on in the classroom, one student replied, "We don't just read books to learn things, we work together to explore a topic." Another said, "We get to do a lot of hands-on activities. If you went into Mr. Hammer's class, you might see us doing a book report, but we're acting it out, instead of just reading it."

Since moving to a more cooperative approach to teaching and learning, BCMS moved up in rank to 35 on the Commonwealth Accountability Testing System (CATS). Grouping students together and giving them hands-on projects to complete is appropriate to middle-grades students, but it also contributes to academic improvement.

Dev. Responsiveness - NEXT

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