Uncommon's Third Collegiate School to Open in August 2008

Two weeks before most New York City district schools open, Bedford Stuyvesant Collegiate Charter School (BSC) will welcome 81 fifth graders on August 25, 2008. The school will be housed at IS 267, located at 800 Gates Avenue, between Malcolm X Boulevard and Stuyvesant Avenue.

BSC will be the third school in the Collegiate Network, already comprised of Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School (which opened in 2005) and Kings Collegiate Charter School (which opened in 2007). Williamsburg Collegiate has seen extremely positive results thus far (see the Williamsburg Collegiate Principal's profile, below), and Kings Collegiate is slated to follow in its footsteps of academic excellence. Thus, it was no surprise that at BSC’s April 3rd lottery, 189 students applied for the inaugural 81 spots, placing more than 100 applicants on the waiting list.

The Collegiate Network’s Managing Director, Brett Peiser, is working with Founding Principal Mabel Lajes-Guiteras and Founding Director of Operations Melissa D’Agostino to put the finishing touches on the new school. Lajes-Guiteras was most recently a founding literacy teacher and Chair of the Literacy Department at Boston Preparatory Charter Public School. In 2007, her students were ranked second out of all districts statewide on the 8th grade English Language Arts MCAS exam. D’Agostino received her MBA from Columbia Business School, and previously worked as an Associate in the risk management group at PricewaterhouseCoopers, before joining the NYC Teaching Fellows program to teach math in Washington Heights for three years.

Peiser is the founder and former Principal and Executive Director of Boston Collegiate Charter School, which is one of the highest performing schools in Boston. As the founder of Williamsburg Collegiate and Kings Collegiate, he has helped to generate a proven formula of academic achievement, complete with a school culture that holds up and enforces the highest expectations of both students and teachers. Similarly to its sister schools, BSC will offer a rigorous academic program to ensure that students reach these high standards. 

The program has a strong focus on essential reading and writing skills including:

• More than two hours of daily literacy instruction
• At least 30 minutes of required independent reading each night beginning in 5th grade
• 20 minutes of Read Aloud to start every school day
• Students required to carry a silent reading book at all times to read during down-time and transitions
• Three to four summer reading books along with fall comprehension assessments
• A schoolwide focus on vocabulary mastery across all subjects and grades
• Graded, written work in every class every night, including math.

Look for our fall issue, which will include profiles of Principal Mabel Lajes-Guiteras and Director of Operations Melissa D’Agostino!

— By Sophie Brickman

As Uncommon As They Come: Principal Julie Trott and WCCS

Principal Julie Trott of Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School runs the number one school in the city.

At least that’s what the New York City Department of Education said this past fall, after completing its first ever set of progress reports for 1,200 of the city’s district schools and twenty of its charter schools. Williamsburg Collegiate (WCCS) came out blazing, racking up an overall score of 117.42 points out of a possible 100, based on an assessment of student academic progress, school environment, and school performance.

As any Williamsburg middle-schooler can tell you, that’s plain impossible. But the DOE structured the progress reports such that a school can receive extra credit for demonstrated success in closing the achievement gap. In a school with 83% of the student body qualifying for free or reduced price lunch, and 100% of sixth-graders scoring advanced or proficient on the 2007 New York State Math exam, Williamsburg’s extra credit is duly deserved. (The progress report grading system is so confusing that even navigating its simplified explanatory document takes perseverance. Suffice it to say that, due to the grading structure, it seems unlikely Williamsburg will be able to maintain its number one status next year – but Trott and her team will happily take the honor this time around.)

Julie Trott, the school’s leader, is as Uncommon as they come – in the upper-case sense of the word as well as the lower. She came to North Star Academy in 1999 as a Jesuit Volunteer, fresh out of Willamette University in Oregon, and found herself under the guidance of Founding Principal James Verrilli, a former Jesuit Volunteer. She lived with four other volunteers in Newark and jokes that it was “kind of like The Real World” – but instead of fully stocked fridges, lava lamps, and pool tables galore, Trott received a meager $75 each month for food and $85 for other expenses. She subsisted primarily on a food brand called “No Frills” – simple white packaging with a label – and consumed “very little meat” that year, but appreciated the year’s simplicity. “The great thing about the year is that you know you’re working for the right reasons,” says Trott. “You’re simply not doing it for the compensation. You’re doing it for social justice.”

While at North Star, she met North Star Academy’s co-founder Norman Atkins (now CEO of Uncommon Schools), who recommended her to Brett Peiser, Founding Principal of Boston Collegiate Charter School (BCCS). Trott moved to Boston and spent three years teaching fifth grade science at BCCS. During a summer between Trott’s two years completing a Master of Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Peiser was drafting the plans for what would be the first school in the Collegiate Network. The two collaborated to create the “Red Book,” a comprehensive resource for teachers – Williamsburg Collegiate’s guidebook, of sorts, complete with everything from overall student expectations to how to conduct bathroom breaks. In August 2005, when Williamsburg Collegiate opened, Trott was proudly at its helm.

Having never taught in a traditional public school – or a charter school outside of the Uncommon network, in fact – Trott, sitting in her office one day in mid-April, smiled broadly when asked how she structured an environment in which the students are polite, eager to learn, joyful, and, to boot, smart as whips, acing their statewide exams. 

“I’ve never taught anywhere else,” she said. “It’s just unfathomable to me that you wouldn’t have this anywhere else.”

This. The “special sauce.” That secret ingredient that makes a school work in every dimension. What is this this?

Well, you can see it even before the school day officially begins.

At 7:15 each morning, Trott and Director of Operations Thackston Lundy greet students at the school’s entrance, shaking hands and touching base. (“Could you move your two bracelets to separate wrists?” Trott asks one girl as she is entering the building. “Yesterday in class when you were moving around it was all ‘click click click click click.’ It’s like putting a bell on a squirrel.”) If the students come upon a new face at the door, they’ll offer a hand and say with a smile, “Good morning! Welcome to Williamsburg Collegiate!” Their smiles and warm are genuine. It is obvious that they aren’t just being polite on command, and they feed off, and reciprocate, the kindness of their principal and teachers.

Soft-spoken, Trott prefers giving out MAPP merits (which stands for Mindful, Achieving, Professional and Prepared) to demerits, which she’ll do, gently, when necessary. She adores the students (when substituting for a teacher who is away at a conference, she looks at her temporary class and whispers happily, “They’re just so sweet!”) and, in her already packed schedule, makes room for an hour of teaching 6th grade math every day, simply because she loves it. Still, as a leader, she finds a way to connect this love directly to her principal duties: “I didn’t teach the first year, and now I realize that it is important for me to be in the classroom. There are so many decisions we make every day that affect the teachers, so it’s good for me to be on the receiving end of them.”

The team Trott has assembled is tireless in its pursuit to educate and to make learning fun in the process. While students repeatedly perform well on state tests, teachers never seem to be teaching to the test, directly. They teach to make their students laugh while learning, and in doing so, create a culture in which performing well academically is fun – a reward in itself.

Former Teach for America Program Director Eric Green uses clickers in his math class, remote control-like devices which hook up to computer software and allow students to punch in their answers so he can maximize checking students’ understanding. In a clever bait ’n’ switch, Green has configured the clicker software to run a Jeopardy-like game, so as his students eagerly complete percentage problems and tally up their scores, they reinforce the basic concepts of the current math unit. When Green gets up to introduce himself to visitors, his students stay on task, scribbling away, fully engrossed in their activity.

Down the hall, Christy Huelskamp, an alum of the New York City Teaching Fellows program, reads aloud from Number the Stars, a book about a young girl growing up in Copenhagen in 1943. A few minutes into class, Huelskamp stops flat. “Mmm, everyone stand up,” she says. “There’s a weird vibe in here. We need to make sure everybody’s brain is on fire.” After a brief shake-out, complete with giggles, the students sit back down and class begins afresh.

The teachers at Williamsburg are happy to be silly – but only if doing so will help their students focus and achieve. A few weeks before the most recent ELA exam, the male teachers challenged each other to grow moustaches until the day of the test, after which the students would get to vote on which teacher remained moustachioed. The students found the game hilarious, but their teachers’ moustaches also served as physical reminders of the upcoming assessment.

Before the Math exam, teachers got together and performed a skit about superheroes “Exponent” and “Denominator,” and their defeat of “Evil Scantron” (the machine that grades bubble tests). Then, each student received a “braniac pack,” a small fanny pack with the Williamsburg logo on it, filled with “tools to defeat ‘Evil Scantron’” on their own – flashcards. In between classes and at lunch, students whipped out their braniac packs to quiz themselves on math problems.

That the students respect their teachers is obvious enough – it would be next to impossible for “braniac packs” to be a hit if they didn’t – and this respect carries over into a respect for guests and visitors.

The day before spring break, the middle-schoolers experience the ultimate test of classroom manners: two Japanese women, speaking only halting English, give a presentation to one class on Japanese culture. The sun is shining, the shrieks of children in the playground below drift through the windows, and the Williamsburg students have but two hours to go before their week-long break. Yet, miraculously, they sit quietly on the floor as their guest teachers fiddle with the television, eager to see what’s in store.

Their hosts show a video on the lives of Japanese children (all mouths drop open when the announcer notes that the average wake-up time for a Japanese child is 7 a.m. – “We’re almost at school then!” one girl whispers) and there is only one eye-roll in the joint. Still, when the clip finishes, even the eye-roller claps politely. The students ask their visitors questions intelligent beyond their years (“Can you dig underneath volcanoes to use their heat to power houses to stop a power outage or energy crisis?”) and when the language barrier creates confusion and their hosts find it difficult to answer questions, the students smile and often reply with a quiet “Thank you.”

The door stays open throughout the lesson (as do all doors at Williamsburg, whenever possible, creating an instant feeling of community), and Trott stops by on her way downstairs to her office. She attends classes daily to observe teachers and to give them feedback, but in the case of visiting teachers, like today, she pops in just for pure enjoyment: “The days when I can get into every classroom are the best days. It’s totally inspiring and exciting to see how much growth happens between fifth and seventh grades.”

This seems to be the key to the school that received the highest grade on the New York City DOE progress reports: the children inspire the adults, and the adults inspire the children.

At that Friday’s Base Camp, Williamsburg’s weekly community meeting, Trott racks up a personal number one before going home for the week-long break. In the MAPP merit auction, where students can spend their merits by bidding on a variety of prizes, including Mets tickets, gift certificates, and "teacher services,” a day with Principal Trott at Coney Island goes for 286 MAPP merits.

It was the highest bid of the day.

— By Sophie Brickman

1% Solution: Strong Voice

One look at Robert Zimmerli, middle-school math teacher at True North Rochester Prep, and it’s clear he means business. His straight back and direct eye-contact are hints that he’s in control.

Now, take Colleen Driggs, an English teacher at the same school. Petite and blond, she wears her hair in a girlish ponytail, and always seems on the brink of a smile.  The two teachers couldn’t be farther away from each other on the appearance spectrum. Yet both employ a specific teaching technique seamlessly: “Strong Voice.”

Managing Director Doug Lemov coined this technique, which encompasses four sub-techniques (economy of language, intolerance of interruptions, refusal to engage, and facing up) in his Taxonomy of Effective Teaching Practices, a document delineating distinct instructional practices.

Leah Shalev, former TFA corps member and now Associate Director of Recruitment at Uncommon, praises Lemov’s articulation of the Strong Voice technique: “He takes something that is really hard to communicate and tells you what specific actions to take to command a classroom. I hadn’t come across anything like that in my experience teaching, and looking at it now, I realize how valuable it would have been to me while in my classroom.”

So, how does it work, in action?

Zimmerli’s default stance is a formal pose, his hands behind his back, feet shoulder length apart, eyes ahead. His students have seen it endless times. Yet when he breaks his clipped pacing around the front of the room and strikes this pose in order to get all eyes on him, the students respond immediately. He faces up and, almost reflexively, his students sit up in their chairs.

Driggs employs this sub-technique slightly differently, though to the same effect. Ironically, when explaining how to use the word “inconsiderate” in a sentence, she notices a handful of students drifting off task – fidgeting, playing with their pencils, looking around the room. She stops, points to her head, and says, “Hands down, track up here.” She holds the pose for a solid two beats, which is all it takes for her students to put focus their attention on their teacher. Then she continues on with her questioning.

When in need of quiet, both teachers ask for quick, simple tasks: “Where’s my SLANT?” (Sit Up, Listen, Ask and Answer Questions, Nod, Track the speaker) or “I need all eyes up here” are clear commands, easy to be followed.

Another way that they command the attention of their charges is, simply, to stop talking. One of the most engaging parts of Zimmerli’s lessons is when he allows his students to chant a number song, singing upwards by multiples of a given number. They love it, and wait for it throughout class time. One day, when the students know the song is coming, Zimmerli begins to countdown.

“Three, two - -“ Zimmerli breaks off. “I don’t have you, Pedro.” By slowing down the momentum, he signifies that he will not tolerate any of his students being off task. When he has everyone’s attention, he counts down again, the students belt out their song happily, and at the moment that they finish this high-energy activity, Zimmerli says, crisply, “Turn your paper over.” Like that, the class has moved onto its next activity.

Show Strong Voice by:

• Using fewer words when managing behavior or transitions. “I need all eyes” is stronger than “Class, I’ve asked for your attention and now I want all of your eyes on me.”
• Not talking over students. Stop until they listen. Or start a sentence and stop it to clarify that your words matter too much to be ignored.
• Facing students with both shoulders; leaning in; standing still when you want to show your words matter, and striking a more formal pose if necessary.

— By Sophie Brickman