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Connecting the Dots
The school. D. R. Gaul Middle School is in Union, Maine, a blueberry-farming town where the summer fair finds kids competing in pig scrambles and pie-eating contests.
Gaul, with about 170 seventh- and eighth-graders, has its own history of sub-par academic achievement. One likely reason: Education beyond the basics hasn't always been a top priority for families who've worked the same land for generations. Here, few adults have college degrees, and outsiders (teachers included) are often kept at a respectful distance.
The strategy. Since 2000, Gaul's students have been divided into four classes, each of them taught almost every subject by two teachers. The goal: To find common threads across disciplines to help students create a big picture that gives fresh meaning and context to their classwork -- and sparks excitement for learning.
Working within state guidelines, each team crafts its own schedules and lesson plans, incorporating non-textbook literature, hands-on lab work and field trips. If students are covering the Civil War in social studies, they're reading The Red Badge of Courage or some other period literature in English class. In science, they study the viruses and bacteria that accounted for many of the war dead.
Team teaching isn't unusual. About 77 percent of middle schools now employ some form of it, says John Lounsbury, consulting editor for the National Middle School Association. But most schools use four- or five-person teams, which Gaul tried before deeming two-person teams more effective. Gaul bolsters the team concept by "looping" classes so that the same two teachers stick with the same teens through seventh and eighth grades. Combining teams and looping creates an extremely strong bond between teacher and student. It also, says teacher Beth Ahlholm, "allows us to build a fabulous relationship with parents."
Signs of success. Ahlholm and teammate Madelon Kelly tend to gauge success by how many glazed looks they see in the classroom, but they know 72 percent of their eighth-graders met Maine's reading standard last year -- double the statewide average. Only 31 percent met the math standard, still better than the state average (21 percent). Their students also beat the state average in writing and science. And in 2004, Gaul was one of 47 schools in the state to see testing gains of at least 20 percent in four of the previous five years, coinciding roughly with team teaching's arrival.
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