40
The average number of interactions between an Uncommon family and its Uncommon school per year – parent-teacher conferences, family nights, celebrations, and teacher-initiated phone calls to confer about how students are doing in class

Prepster's Paradise: Stacey Shells and Rochester Prep

It is almost 5 pm on a Tuesday at True North Rochester Preparatory Charter School and the buses are waiting downstairs, but a handful of students just won’t leave the principal’s office.

“Where do you guys have to be right now?” asks Principal Stacey Shells, one beige cable-knit sock-clad foot tucked under her. (Her socks match her sweater.)

“Aww, we’re coming home with you, Miss Shells!” says sixth-grader Anthony, grinning.

“Yeah!” the other four sixth-graders shout, waiting for Shells to laugh. And she does. A loud, genuine laugh that sets off her students. Then she looks at the time and shoos them out of her office and down to their buses.

After a beat of silence, she calls out to the front room, which she can see from her desk when her door is open (almost all of the time). “Hey, Deck-meister? You want to come to a sushi dinner tonight?”

“Ahh, Shells-meister, I have plans!” Director of Operations Dan Deckman says, turning to help Amari Lesesne look up the answer to a bonus problem on his homework (“Who was the first African American female astronaut on a NASA mission?”), as a reward for being “so inquisitive.” Shells then makes her way to the staff room to ask her teachers if they want to join her for dinner.  

Though hall transitions are tight and students stay on task throughout their nine hour day, the feel of Rochester Prep can be seen, in microcosm, in these ten minutes: students who’d rather hang out with their principal than go home, and staffers who want to spend even more time together, after a day that starts, for many of them, before the sun has risen. Deckman slipped out on Super Tuesday to vote, but found even that difficult: “It’s not that I’m guilty, even though it’s pretty much non-stop running  each day, from cleaning up vomit, to calling board members, to trying to figure out how to get the power back on to doing finances. It’s just that whenever” ...

Click here to read more...

A New Sound in School: The Click

The sixth graders in Eric Green’s afternoon math class at Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School sit quietly doing their independent practice, punching numbers into a small white device and periodically looking up at the projection screen to their left. After a glance to see a green bar stretching out beside his name, Nathanial Wyatte III pumps his fist and wiggles, in a kind of desk-bound victory dance, before turning to the next section of his work packet.  

Williamsburg Collegiate is the first school in the Uncommon network to introduce "eInstruction" Classroom Performance System (CPS) clickers to the classroom. Excellence Charter School will use the clickers in their fourth grade classes after the New York State math test in early May.

Melissa Chotiner, spokesperson for eInstruction, says the tool benefits both students and teachers: “First, so many different types of students get more actively involved in their education, whether it’s somebody who’s too shy to speak up, or whether a student is zoned out. The other obvious benefit is to the teachers: the CPS clicker gives them real-time feedback.” (Click here to read the recent New York Times article on clickers.)

Here’s how it works: As students complete a problem from a worksheet, they “key” their answers, or enter them into their clickers, which look like small remote controls...
Click here to read more...