Phillip and Sala Burton High School
CAPI Coordinator: Claudia Wilson
Teachers:
School Year: 2001–2002
Coordinator Report
Demographics
- Number of students served: 290
- Grade level: 9th through 12th
- Number of teachers participating: 3
- Subjects CAPI was implemented through:
- Advanced Composition
- Community Service Leadership
- Cultural America
- Ethnic U.S. History
- Modern World History
- Number of ESL students served: not stated
Overview
During the 2001–2002 academic year, continuing work at Phillip and Sala Burton High School was in the following areas:
- Developing and revising curriculum
- Facilitating teacher planning meetings
- Working with students in class
- Coordinating and presenting at monthly workshops
These activities occurred in the context of two courses: Advanced Composition and Cultural America.
Advanced Composition
Impacting approximately 250 students, our second year of implementing curriculum for this class focused around a number of areas: ongoing revision of materials, weekly teacher meetings, and in-class work helping students. As a team, we analyzed student work together and normed ourselves standards. Together we developed a new unit for this course, adding an additional theme with corresponding materials.
During weekly meetings, we shared ideas about the curriculum including collaborating around materials for specific lessons, sharing student work, and norming ourselves around standards, and planning for future units. This involved a collaborative effort in which we created original materials for a new unit on cultural diversity. Each of us took on an aspect of the curriculum such as reading support, language exercises, schema activation and the like.
A specific outcome of this work was the development of a project in which students researched a culture of their choice, wrote a brief paper about it, and presented material to the class. Students were supported in class by the teacher as well as the SFSU coordinator, and the result was a very successful sharing of student work through oral reports and student essays.
The SFSU coordinator also attended class meetings, giving feedback and support to teachers during curriculum implementation as well as working with students both individually and in small groups.
Cultural America
In Cultural America, a social studies class, we worked with approximately 40 students over the course of the year. The curriculum in this course contains a lot of reading and writing assignments, and the collaboration focused on how best to support these students in completing these assignments successfully. We developed specific lesson plans and co-facilitated student activities in class such as group reading projects and presentations.
For example, utilizing many different types of readings, the curriculum challenges students to synthesize difficult material and use it to write reports and make presentations. Following the pedagogical principles set out in monthly workshops as San Francisco State, we developed lesson plans around ‘Into, Through, and Beyond Activities’ using a direct instruction, guided practice and independent practice approach. With this model, students were supported in building schema, annotating documents, taking notes, synthesizing material, and sharing their work with their peers.
With the writing process, students were instructed in how to organize their thoughts, develop controlling ideas, support their ideas with specific examples and details from the readings, and analyze material they had read and discussed. The SFSU coordinator participated in reading and responding to student work, conferencing students, and preparing students for upcoming assignments.
The general focus in this class was supporting existing curriculum with the intent to scaffold assignments and make them more accessible to students. As a result, by the end of the year, students were able to independently read and analyze material, and then write about what they had read.
Monthly Workshops
The coordinator also planned and facilitated monthly teacher workshops with colleagues from the English department who also participated in this grant. The teachers from Burton twice shared their work at these workshops, bringing student work such as annotated readings, original poster boards from student presentations, drafts of essays, and examples of contextualized language work.
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