Welcome to our instructional web site. Our teachers have been striving to increase the quality and number of performance-based instruction tasks taught in their classrooms. This web site contains a sample of their efforts to increase student achievement through this approach. I trust that you will benefit from our work and we encourage you to provide comments about our performance tasks. Thank you for visiting our web site.

Sincerely,

Geraldine H. Hill
Principal

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The mission of School #170 at Thurgood Marshall is to:

• Provide a safe and orderly environment conducive to learning
  
  
• Raise the level of self esteem of our students so they will become academic risk takers and persistent when meeting challenges
  
  
• Provide learning experiences for our students that encourage and stimulate our students to grow intellectually, socially, morally, and emotionally

This mission will be accomplished through the joint efforts of:

• A staff committed to meeting the needs of early adolescents and to using innovative and creative techniques to deliver the instructional program to our unique population
  
  
• Students willing to take responsibility for their own learning and behavior
  
  
• Parents and community groups committed to becoming involved in the education of our students

Who do we serve and where? We serve approximately 619 students in grades six through eight. Ninety-nine percent are African American. Four hundred eighty-eight students qualify for free and reduced lunches, and 117 students are receiving special education services. We are located at 5001 Sinclair Lane, in the northeast section of Baltimore City known as Parkside.

Who delivers our services? We have a total staff of 65 people, including 41 classroom teachers, one principal, two assistant prioncipals, 2.5 counselors, one consulting teacher, one middle school liaison, one parent liaison, one secretary, three educational assistants, and custodial and cafeteria staff.

What do we deliver to our students? We use the Baltimore City Public School System Curriculum. Program offerings for regular students include daily 100-minute language arts periods and one 50-minute period of mathematics, science, and social studies. Following the model of the middle school philosophy, all students are assigned to the following exploratory subjects during their three years in our school: art, career and technology, home and family, health, and business. Students whose IEPs prescribe smaller group settings use the same curriculum as regular students with modifications recommended in the curriculum. Other students who require special education services are placed in regular classrooms with a special educator and regular teacher who plan and teach together.

Seventh and eighth grade classrooms are divided into two classes for smaller group instruction for mathematics and language arts. These classrooms of approximately 20 students enable teachers to provide more individualized student support, which should result in improved achievement in mathematics and language arts. All regular students receive an additional 5-minutes of reading instruction beyond the regular 100-minute language arts period.

What are our school improvement priorities? Our priorities are to support the BCPSS Master Plan Objective #1 - increase student achievement and Objective #2 - provide students with teachers and principals who are qualified and competent. We will implement a number of major initiatives to achieve our school improvement priorities.

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We are part of the Baltimore City Public School System, Northeast Area, 1999-2000 Staff Development Program entitled "Better Teaching, Better Learning." The program offers our teachers monthly opportunities to plan, teach, assess, and act on the results of performance-based lessons and assessments to help improve student performance on classroom and MSPAP performance assessments. The performance-based lessons are developed with the help of TaskBuilder™-- an interactive software program to help teachers improve their productivity and student achievement.

The program is delivered through a team approach involving our principal, one Teacher Leader, and classroom teachers from grades 6, 7, and 8. Our monthly meetings are supported by a WORKFORCE 2000, INC. consultant.

The program consists of a month-by-month, site-specific implementation strategy through training, practice, and coaching sessions. After a monthly coaching session our teachers teach their performance-based lessons to their students and discuss the results during the next month's meeting. Samples of the performance tasks and results are provided below for your review. Each task represents growth from our current levels of school performance to our vision of high performance on basic skills, rigorous content, and higher order thinking skills. Please consider them as "works in progress" and adopt or adapt them to your classroom. And please send us your comments for making our tasks better.

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Comments:

Please enter your comments or questions about our approach and sample performance tasks in the text block below. We appreciate your feedback.

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Links:

Link to other schools in the TaskBuilder Network

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