SEVEN EXTRAORDINARY COMMITMENTS

At Carroll our teachers have extraordinary skills, capacity and commitment. Our teachers express belief in the ability of their students to succeed and promote the notion that students’ successes are the direct result of effective effort.

Extraordinary Commitment #1
At the core of the Carroll School is a commitment to teaching children the wonders of the English Language according to guiding principles that are evidence-based, tried and true for decades with thousands of bright children with dyslexia. These essential principles are:

1. unlock the underlying logic in the English Language, so that our children are almost linguists with profound understanding of the sound-symbol system of English,
2. teach the most reliable patterns first, then move towards more complex patterns,
3. utilize all our senses and movement to reinforce these patterns,
4. begin with the concrete and move towards the abstract,
5. expect smart children to use their cognitive skills to make sense of the tasks of reading, vocabulary, and comprehension, and
6. once decoding is emerging then move to reading fluency and higher order thinking tasks.

Our commitment to Orton-Gillingham is our backbone. With a firm foundation from which to judge, we will know what other interventions are most likely to work for our children.

Extraordinary Commitment #2
All successful education transfers control and responsibility from the teacher to the learner, gradually and effectively. At Carroll, the Strategic Learners Initiative is a school-wide program that constantly reinforces six fundamental behaviors of strategic learners. That is, we expect our children to be able to explain and to act on six explicit habits of highly effective learners. With the guidance of Dr. Lynn Meltzer's team at ResearchILD in Lexington, the faculty has been engaged in defining and describing these strategies:

1. Memory- "I know how my brain works and I know how to memorize important information."
2. Comprehension- "I know several different maps that help me put information in logical order."
3. Organization- "I can tell you exactly how I like to organize information and my things."
4. Attention- "I have techniques for staying tuned into the important things."
5. Checking- "I follow a plan for making sure I have done things right."
6. Shifting- "I know how to move from one task to another."

To promote this initiative, every classroom at Carroll has the same Strategies Poster to remind all of us to use our strategies. Click here to view the PDF version of the Carroll School Strategies Poster.

Extraordinary Commitment #3
Two years ago Tufts University‘s Dr. Maryanne Wolf walked into a Carroll faculty workshop and said, "You people are the best at teaching decoding, the heart of learning to read. Bless you. You have helped countless children. And it is not enough!" What she meant was that we now know enough about how the brain learns to read that our curriculum must address a fuller range of language-based issues related to reading. Over the past five years or so, Carroll‘s language arts curriculum has responded to the recommendations of the National Reading Panel which examined over 100,000 research studies on reading. Our fundamental response has been to evolve our program to include more phonemic awareness work (phonology), more meaning (semantics and syntax), more visual-spatial (orthography), more word play (morphology), more technological support for language tasks, and continued dedication to Orton-Gillingham. In parts of our lower school, Wolf‘s RAVE-O program works along side of OG. Middle School children take a third language arts class (LFA- Language Focus Area) that is designed specifically for an individual‘s greatest language need (such as, fluency, comprehension, written expression, organization, technology tools). The teachers‘ dedication to acquiring the training, and the curriculum development, necessary to accomplish all this has been impressive.

Extraordinary Commitment #4
"The single most powerful tool we have to improve the function of the brain is exercise," states Dr. John Ratey of the Harvard Medical School. Ratey and Carroll School have joined forces to examine the effect of exercise on our student population. Ratey‘s book, "Spark," was read widely by the faculty this summer, and we all returned to faculty meetings in August with an hour of exercise before listening to Ratey describe how exercise opens up the brain for learning. In concert with the Harvard School of Public Health, we are collecting evidence of the impact of early morning exercise on student progress. The faculty is also adding movement and exercise components to their educational programs in fascinating ways. Over the course of the school year, Dr. Ratey will return several times to help us analyze our progress. Questions abound: Should we change the whole school schedule to place exercise as the first period for all students? How much exercise makes how much difference? Does the length of time between exercise and the learning task matter? How can we combine exercise with traditional, essential learning objectives?

Extraordinary Commitment #5
On Friday afternoons, our school transforms into the Carroll Graduate School of Education. Although we are not technically a graduate school, our faculty engage in advanced professional development in a program we call "Everyone at One." Last year the faculty worked with Dr. Isabel Phillips from Massachusetts General Hospital on the topic of "Data Informed Instruction." Students come to Carroll with an enormous amount of psycho-educational testing, Carroll performs annual assessments of each child, and teachers ask children to take tests, write papers, and present information. What is a teacher supposed to do with all this information? "Data Informed Instruction" teaches us that all of these assessments should help us design instruction more effectively. The faculty worked with Dr. Phillips on several topics including: meaningful student file reading, test score analysis, student record reviews, designing teaching based on data, intelligence testing, and conducting case conferences on students.

Extraordinary Commitment #6
Traditional math with rote memorization of facts focused on computation does not harness the strengths within the typical child with language-based learning difficulties. Carroll math teachers have been developing a very different approach to math education, working along side Dr. David Stevens of the Cognitive Development Center in Lexington. A Carroll math class begins with cognitive warm ups that challenge a student's thinking skills related to quantity, grouping, and sequence. Carroll students then utilize their evolving thinking and problem solving skills to solve more traditional arithmetic, geometric, and algebraic problems. For a group of OG trained teachers, much of their OG knowledge is valuable. One essential change, though, has significantly improved the conceptual, application, and computation skills of our children: whereas in the sound-symbol association of letters and sounds have no intrinsic meaning, there is a fundamental quantity-symbol association in math that is ripe with meaning. We harness the conceptual and visual-spatial essence of math to develop students who understand how to compute numbers (not just operate from rote memory). Problem solving is a crucial part of the Carroll math program, as well as software programs that develop both computational and conceptual skills. Carroll math now accentuates the strengths within a dyslexic profile, as we create students who succeed in traditional math testing.

Extraordinary Commitment #7
Carroll's educational technology use is well beyond that of many of America's finest liberal arts colleges. Technology offers powerful tools for students whose ideas flow rapidly even if their reading and writing skills do not. Technology gives access to rich networks of people and information to our students and technology can offer the multisensory inputs that benefit our children enormously. We refuse to by-pass fundamental literacy skills, but technology has much to offer. For example, every classroom has an interactive white board (SMART Board), the entire campus is wireless, every middle school student is issued a laptop, and homework assignments are provided on-line by many teachers. In addition Carroll employs an educational technology specialist whose job is to work in the classrooms with teachers, research is being conducted at Carroll comparing three software programs designed to teach middle school level reading, math fluency and problem solving is accomplished through software applications, and the Carroll School server hosts many schoolwide technology functions. Winter '09 Everyone at One sessions will focus on educational technology, and Thursday afternoons are set aside for teacher training in technology.