Dear Colleagues:

Welcome to Thurgood Marshall Middle School...Where EDUCATION is POWER-R-R-R-R!

We hope you enjoy our web site and find the sample performance tasks developed and taught by our teachers to be beneficial in your instructional activities. Please be sure to send us your comments for improving our work. And your ideas for new performance tasks would be greatly appreciated as we strive to meet our challenging school improvement goals. By working together I believe we can build a collection of school-based performance tasks that will increase the quality of teaching and student achievement in our school and yours.

Sincerely,

George Rutherford, Ph. D.
Principal

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We support the mission of the Baltimore City Public School System (BCPSS). In concert with students, families, and the broader community, we prepare all students to be responsible citizens and afford them the opportunity to acquire the skills, knowledge, and abilities necessary to make informed decisions that lead to meaningful and prouctive lives. Thurgood Marshall Middle School #171 is dedicated to carrying out the BCPSS mission at the school level.

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Action

Our action plan for school improvement includes the following major initiaitives:

• Staff development will focus on lesson plan writing that aligns with Maryland learning outcomes and indicators;
• Our teaching-learning process will reflect cooperative learning, Dimensions of Learning, MSPAP words and icons, and the use of manipulatives;
• Our curriculum will be integrated across content areas;
• Instructional time will be maximized and interruptions minimized;
• Instruction will be supported by technology;
• Low student scores and attendance will receive more intensive attention.

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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, check, 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 performance to our vision of high performance on basic skills, rigorous content, and higher order thinking skills. As the quality of our performance tasks improves, so will the quality of our students' learning. 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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