Our corps members
Teaching
Corps and Alumni
Effective Teaching in Action
Read about how corps members teaching different grade levels and subject areas achieve success with their students:
Kristin Backman, New York City Corps '04
Fifth Grade Literacy and Social Studies
In her first year, Kristin taught two fourth grade classes in a dual-language setting. Kristin only met with each class every
other day, but despite having half of the instructional time, still pushed her students to 1.7 years of reading growth and 80
percent content mastery in math... (link below
)
Josh Biber, Phoenix Corps '04
Fifth Grade
Whether it is at his weekend Starbucks office hours, his after-school tutorials, or students' baseball games, birthday
parties, and family dinners, Josh demonstrates his love and respect for his students with meaningful involvement in their
lives... (link below)
Cameron Duffy, Charlotte Corps '04
Middle School French
When middle school French teacher Cameron Duffy realized that her school's French curriculum was not rigorous enough to
produce fluent French speakers, she (and another corps member in her region) rewrote it to match the pacing of instruction at
the local International Baccalaureate foreign language high school... (link below)
Mariel Elguero, New York City Corps '04
Eighth Grade Language Arts
An English major from Smith College, Mariel was assigned to teach language arts to an "academy" of eighth graders
who were notoriously disinvested from, resistant to, and unfamiliar with academic success ... (link
below)
Helen McClaugherty, Rio Grande Valley Corps '04
Sixth Grade English
In her first week, Helen McClaugherty was told that her at-home reading program for her sixth graders was too ambitious...
(link below)
Claire Robertson-Kraft, Houston Corps '04
Third Grade
When Claire performed beginning-of-year diagnostic assessments with her third graders, she was confronted with the reality
that their reading levels ranged from kindergarten to fourth grade... (link below)
Kristin Backman, New York City Corps '04
Fifth Grade Literacy and Social Studies
In her first year, Kristin taught two fourth grade classes in a dual-language setting. Kristin only met with each class every other day, but despite having half of the instructional time, still pushed her students to 1.7 years of reading growth and 80 percent content mastery in math. In her second year, Kristin taught reading, writing, and social studies to two fifth grade classes that began the year reading at a fourth grade level; halfway through the year, they had already improved an average of 1.2 grade levels and reached 82 percent mastery in social studies. Kristin's big classroom goal was an average of two years' growth and 85 percent mastery.
A key lever in Kristin's success has been her focus on data-driven instruction and creating a culture of results and achievement. She uses reading-level data to ensure students are reading "just right" books, plans effective mini-lessons, and identifies objectives for reteaching. Kristin also consistently extends each student's learning beyond the walls of her classroom. Her fifth grade students have written letters to The New York Times, President Bush, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as organized an assembly to recognize Martin Luther King, Jr.
Her outstanding leadership also extends beyond the classroom. In her first year, Kristin ran a Friday math club, organized a peer tutoring program, taught Saturday school for at-risk students, and served as the fourth grade science coordinator—even though Kristin did not teach science, she wanted to ensure that her school's students had access to the same content and resources as students at higher performing schools. In her second year, Kristin taught an after-school intervention program, served as the literacy liaison for the Bronx Literacy Fair, and joined a new parent/teacher group designed to foster community.
Josh Biber, Phoenix Corps '04
Fifth Grade
Whether it is at his weekend Starbucks office hours, his after-school tutorials, or students' baseball games, birthday parties, and family dinners, Josh demonstrates his love and respect for his students with meaningful involvement in their lives. Each night, on average, Josh has five to seven phone conversations with students and two or three conversations with parents, and most of those calls are about academics, not discipline. All that investment yields invaluable returns as Josh's students develop a genuine love of learning and vigorously pursue the learning experiences he creates for them. This intense collaboration among teacher, students, and families is the foundation for the two and three-years' worth of academic progress made by each student and the fact that Josh's students have the highest standardized achievement scores in the school.
Josh starts his planning and instruction with the highest of expectations for his students. His students explore thought-provoking novels like The Giver and The Little Prince, and Josh sparks weekly, structured political debates with age-appropriate news articles. Instead of book reports, his students write critical essays. Instead of science quizzes, Josh designs discovery labs in which students must apply their knowledge in new ways. All of these strategies put a high demand on his students, fostering their proactive critical thought. At the same time, without losing sight of his students' academic needs, Josh works hard to make learning enjoyable. His students often work in collaborative groups—groups named for prestigious universities. Some lessons include objective-driven games like college Jeopardy, the "white board game," and math memory match. As Josh explains, "Any day in my class should feature at least one learning game, multiple wacky state changes, iPod dance parties, and probably some weird song, chant, pantomime, or rap to help us memorize something."
Josh is proud that his students also "come to embrace the fact that silent, structured, hard work is fun too." He drives home the sense of urgency they need to accomplish their goals, and his students recognize that there is not a second of learning time to waste. Josh's students know, for example, that the morning song gives them 2 minutes and 23 seconds to get in their seats, get ready for the day, and work on their morning "Do Now." This focused efficiency—in Josh's instruction, transitions, and procedures—buys additional learning time for his students.
Despite all his students' success, Josh is the first to acknowledge how much he still has to learn as a teacher and leader in his classroom. Josh can recite a long list of his own deficits, but he never loses sight of his own ability, and responsibility, to continuously improve his teaching. If something is wrong, Josh says, "I have all the power to fix it."
Cameron Duffy, Charlotte Corps '04
Middle School French
When middle school French teacher Cameron Duffy realized that her school's French curriculum was not rigorous enough to produce fluent French speakers, she (and another corps member in her region) rewrote it to match the pacing of instruction at the local International Baccalaureate foreign language high school. When Cameron realized that some of her students were attending a math class without a teacher, she told the principal she would give up her planning period to teach it. When Cameron realized the great challenge of investing her students in learning French, she raised more than $15,000 to send them to Paris—if they mastered the language. This whatever-it-takes approach has been the key to her students' dramatic advancements in both French and math.
Determined to make her room a mecca of achievement tracking, Cameron builds each of her classes on demanding objectives and clear illustrations of students' progress and mastery. Her walls are blanketed with lists of individual, class, and grade goals, as well as daily tracking sheets and data. Against that backdrop, her students know exactly what it means to master 80 percent of the class objectives, and under her system every student has the opportunity to relearn and retest every objective until they reach mastery. Cameron's charts and graphs not only lead students to take ownership of their progress but also (with Cameron's help) foster friendly competition among classes that led to even greater motivation and effort.
With the same strategic focus, Cameron targets her instructional methods to meet the unique needs of her middle school students. She capitalizes on their fascination with pop culture, she harnesses their need to socialize and repurposes it for learning, and she infuses visual, auditory, and kinesthetic experiences in all of her lessons. As a form of assessment, she has taken her students to a French restaurant, requiring them to order and carry on a short conversation with the waiters in French.
All of Cameron's accomplishments with her students are built on her incessant determination and effort. Like most successful teachers, she spends long hours getting to know parents, attending students' sporting events, and picking up students for tutorials before school. And Cameron's results, illustrated clearly on her walls, speak for themselves. In fact, when the regional superintendent discovered that an uncertified French teacher was teaching math to a group of eighth graders (who had not previously mastered the basic concepts of fractions, decimals, and percents), Cameron was asked to give up that class. When every one of her students met grade-level standards by the end of the year, she was allowed to stay.
Mariel Elguero, New York City Corps '04
Eighth Grade Language Arts
An English major from Smith College, Mariel was assigned to teach language arts to an "academy" of eighth graders who were notoriously disinvested from, resistant to, and unfamiliar with academic success. Only three of her 60 students had passed the state's reading and writing test the year before, and most of them were reading two or more years below grade level. After nine months under Mariel's leadership, all but one of her students met state standards, and her students left her classroom as confident, self-motivated achievers.
When she began teaching, Mariel declared that each of her students would achieve two years of academic growth and mastery of state content standards and would be able to write a clear five-paragraph response to a work of literature. A key to Mariel's success is her multifaceted strategy to convince students that they can in fact achieve these ambitious goals. Not only does she use a barrage of messages, marketing, reinforcements, and role models to make that point, but she also employs transparent progress-tracking systems to show her students their weekly academic growth. In her own words: "I immediately noticed that my students were excited to check off the objectives they had learned and get their names on the 'Super Scholars' list [a list of students who had mastered all of their objectives for a particular unit]." Her students have grown to be true advocates for their own education, eagerly comparing their diagnostic test scores to later scores, following their own progress, and signing up for training as "teacher aids" to help their classmates meet individual and collective academic goals.
To reach her ambitious goals, not only does Mariel have to plan and replan her lessons to meet dozens of individual learners' needs, but she has to reach well beyond the resources and constraints of her classroom to best serve her students. For Mariel, that means visiting excellent schools to learn investment and instructional strategies; writing grants and sending requests to Donors Choose for books, school supplies, binders, and folders; and cajoling friends and family to offer time and resources to her classroom. This constant advocacy earns her students opportunities to visit museums, "teach" kindergartners to read, and see a Shakespeare play performed at Lincoln Center (after meeting some of the actors in their own classroom). Meanwhile, Mariel squeezes learning out of every moment of the day: "I use all of my prep periods and lunch periods to tutor kids, pull out small groups, conduct running records, eat lunch with students as a reward, and train kids to become teacher aids so they can help others."
Helen McClaugherty, Rio Grande Valley Corps '04
Sixth Grade English
In her first week, Helen McClaugherty was told that her at-home reading program for her sixth graders was too ambitious. She was told that she should not expect parents in her low-income community (where many families lacked electricity) to embrace a plan to read with their children for 30 minutes three nights a week. Armed with statistics showing the strong correlation between at-home reading and academic success, Helen called every one of her 120 students' parents to explain her vision and encourage their involvement. The response was overwhelming. Throughout the year, between 80 and 90 percent of Helen's students brought signed weekly book logs from home that chronicled the family's reading progress. The school library came alive. As Helen's students began to achieve at unprecedented academic levels, the principal of her school adopted the program schoolwide and mandated that every child take a book home every night.
The at-home reading program was just one of many strategies Helen used to lead her students to more than two years' worth of progress in reading and at least 80 percent mastery of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS).
Helen's classroom is a purposefully designed engine of learning with many moving parts. At any given time, there can be four or five learning experiences happening in the room. In one corner, students might be huddled, books in one hand and active-reading notebooks in the other, discussing discoveries they have made in their novels. In another corner, a group of students might be reading and responding independently to a text. In another area, three students might be constructing a cardboard television for their upcoming presentation. At the front of the room, a small group might be sitting around a kidney-shaped table participating in a guided reading activity with Helen herself. This multifaceted and largely student-driven machine is built on practice and routine. Helen deliberately teaches her students how to learn in each setting and how to transition between the centers. Just as important, she builds familiar routines in her classroom that facilitate a safe, welcoming, busy, and productive learning environment, no matter how instruction is being delivered.
Also central to Helen's success is her attention to her students' mind-sets about learning. After a few weeks under her influence, students come to believe deeply that mistakes are "great" because they represent learning opportunities. Helen implements her "Love and Logic" classroom management system by forming and maintaining meaningful relationships with all her students. She makes a point of interacting individually with every student at least once a week. The trust and relationships she builds with her students fuel their tireless pursuit of academic goals.
Meanwhile, Helen follows her students' academic progress closely using Individual Reading Inventories. In her first year of teaching, every one of Helen's students advanced at least two years in their reading skills. Consistent with her student-centered style, she made sure each student knew and celebrated his or her achievements. In the last week of school, her classroom was decorated with pictures of her beaming students, each one holding a poster like Daisy's: "Hi, my name is Daisy. I began at a third grade level and now I read at a sixth grade level. I'm a Stellar Scholar."
Claire Robertson-Kraft, Houston Corps '04
Third Grade
When Claire performed beginning-of-year diagnostic assessments with her third graders, she was confronted with the reality that their reading levels ranged from kindergarten to fourth grade. The vast majority of her students were more than a year behind in their academic growth. She also learned that a significant number of her students needed ESL services that her school was not able to provide. In light of these challenges, she knew that her goals—for students to grow two years in both reading and math to achieve 90 percent mastery of the objectives tested on the third grade Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) exam—would require relentless, efficient, and collaborative effort by her students, their families, and herself.
She began that effort by meeting with all of her students individually. She gave each student a kind but honest reality check, showing the student where he or she was on the academic progress charts. She also gave each student a clear vision of success, setting individual fluency, reading comprehension, and math goals that the student would strive to reach. Similar meetings to discuss students' progress would happen weekly for the rest of the year.
"Teaching is not about what I say, but about what my students do," Claire says. She keeps her students working hard toward their goals through her simple, cyclical formula for success: invest, plan, instruct, track. To invest her students in the notion that their hard work will lead to academic achievement, she makes the goals meaningful and relevant to their lives outside of school, bringing in materials and guests from her community. Claire maintains parents' involvement through nightly folders reporting students' conduct and effort and through weekly newsletters and progress reports highlighting academic processes and upcoming involvement opportunities. (Claire has a friend translate everything into Spanish as well.)
Claire's planning and instruction focus on meeting individual students where they are and pushing them forward academically with challenging and engaging learning experiences and practice. Each week, she assigns extra individual fluency and reading comprehension opportunities for each student, so that every moment of every day is filled with learning. At the same time, Claire stretches the day and week, holding tutorials every weekday (until 4:30, when her student newspaper responsibilities begin) and on Saturdays. Claire also collaborated with veteran teachers (whom she counts as an "incredible" resource) to establish a Reading Buddies program to support the underserved ESL and bilingual students.
A strong culture of achievement in Claire's classroom is the foundation of all of these many strategies for learning. She depends on her students' leadership, practiced routines, and carefully reinforced values to create a welcoming environment for new students and to indoctrinate newcomers to the class's academic focus. Every day, for example, students are given the opportunity to write encouraging words for classmates on Post-it notes to add to the Wall of Encouragement. Every new student learns classroom procedures from an assigned buddy. Claire's "Scholar Classroom" is built around "Five HERO'S Scholar Values"—Honesty, Effort, Respect, Organization, and Sharing—and under Claire's leadership, even new students quickly adopt those values in their words and actions.
All this effort pays off with dramatic academic success for Claire's students. At the end of her first year, her students' fluency had grown by an average of 49 words per minute (with some improving by as much as 70 wpm) and their reading levels had advanced almost two years since the beginning of the year. Her results were even more dramatic in her second year. By early February, the majority of her students had already surpassed their initial goal to grow two years and were setting new and more challenging goals. Ninety percent of Claire's students passed the TAKS exam that month, and 39 percent achieved commended status (a score of 95 or higher). Almost one-fourth of Claire's students earned a perfect score. As her Program Director notes, Claire has truly changed her students' lives: "In her two years of teaching, Claire has taken students struggling to decode and unable to answer simple comprehension questions and transformed them into confident, smooth, expressive readers of novels, epic poems, and nonfiction text."
