About the author: Julie Tollefson is editor of the Strategram and Stratenotes publications of the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning. This article originally appeared in the September 1997 issue of Strategram, a newsletter for SIM teachers.
A strategic collaboration in Kentucky has carved a new path to helping students succeed in school.
Bonnie Kitchens, teacher of exceptional children and certified SIM Trainer, and Laura McGrail, school psychologist in Henderson County Schools, worked together to develop a Model Learning Lab in conjunction with the South Junior High School Youth Services Center. They received support from a state of Kentucky grant designed to allow schools to take chances and try new ideas.
The Model Learning Lab project began during the 1993-1994 school year, when the school received an Extended School Services Innovative Grant from the Kentucky Department of Education. Laura wrote the grant proposal and served as the program evaluator. Bonnie served as program coordinator. Of the 1,100 students attending the junior high school, 200 to 300 participated in the Model Learning Lab during each of the three years it operated.
The lab offered learning and study skills instruction to students during after-school hours. It met with such success that this year, when grant funding ended, the school incorporated the lab's services into regular after-school offerings, and Bonnie now has turned her efforts to a wider audience.
Although the Office of Exceptional Children at the Kentucky DOE has endorsed the Learning Strategies Curriculum and provided training to teachers for several years, the focus of the state effort has been on students with disabilities. The Model Learning Lab shifted this focus slightly by delivering learning strategies instruction to students with and without disabilities. The lab specifically targeted general education students who were experiencing academic difficulty.
Bonnie and Laura recognized that the overriding instructional goal of secondary general education teachers is to deliver content and that many teachers do not have the time or training to provide instruction to students who have not mastered study skills. They designed the Model Learning Lab to address this need and to provide classes to help even high-achieving students to better prepare for college-preparatory high school classes.
Including high-achieving students in their plan also enhanced the image of the lab. Bonnie said they took care to avoid projecting an image of the lab as remedial. For example, they provided support for geometry class, one of the highest-level classes offered at the school. This contributed to a more inviting environment for lower-achieving students.
In addition to Bonnie and Laura, 16 South Junior High School teachers participated in the lab as instructors. Each instructor received a full day of training in the learning strategies he or she was to teach. Several teachers also requested additional training associated with strategies they could teach in their own classrooms.
Initially, the Model Learning Lab offered classes in 15 different learning strategies for one hour after school four days a week. The lab conducted three sessions; each session was six to eight weeks long. During that time, 31 lab classes served 223 students. During each class, staff members provided instruction to six to ten students on a specific element of the Learning Strategies Curriculum. Students, who were referred to the lab by teachers or parents or who elected on their own to take lab classes, attended one session per week per strategy. Students could elect to attend one or more strategy classes at a time.
Additionally, all of the teachers taught learning strategies to their own classes, and strategies instruction was provided to classes of students whose teachers were not lab instructors. Once teachers saw the success others had teaching learning strategies, they sought training, too. The resulting widespread generalization of the curriculum to students who did not participate in the Model Learning Lab has become an integral part of the instructional curriculum at South Junior High School.
"So many teachers at school teach strategies now," Bonnie said. "They're teaching them all over the place."
Generalization was a planned component of the project. Grant funds were allocated for substitute teachers to free Bonnie to help teachers introduce the curriculum to general education classes in all grades and subject areas.
The school even offered a parents' night, in which parents learned about the strategies the lab taught. Bonnie said this generated a lot of interest from parents and gave them another tool for helping their children at home.
During the initial phase of the project, Laura developed questionnaires for students, parents, and teachers and reviewed the results after each of the three sessions of learning strategy instruction. She also collected grades for each student before he or she participated in any Model Learning Lab classes and again for the grading period after the student's involvement in the project.
Her findings indicated that although there was no significant increase in grade-point average (GPA) from pre-test to post-test overall, dramatic gains were seen in some students. One student who participated in an organizational skills class increased his mean pre-test GPA from 1.1 to a post-test GPA of 2.5 over the course of one nine-week period. The overall findings reflect all student grades in all classes. Many of the students took classes that covered specific content areas, and the skills they acquired in these classes could not be expected to generalize to their other classes.
However, when Laura looked at grade-point averages for specific classes, her findings indicated improved performance. Students who participated in math strategy classes, for example, increased their mean pre-test GPA from 2.25 to a mean post-test GPA of 2.43.
Comments from students, teachers, and parents were consistently positive and indicated that the students found the Model Learning lab classes to be both enjoyable and academically beneficial, as reflected in the following evaluation from a student: "It helped me on my grades and it brought some of them up from D's and C's to B's."
Reading and writing strategies were the most popular classes offered. The lab also offered instruction in test-taking strategies to help students cope with state-mandated testing, as well as instruction in study skills and math strategies.
Bonnie said the students liked learning in a brand new way. As a teacher, she too enjoyed the lab, in part because it gave her the opportunity to work with a larger student population than usual.
Word of the Learning Strategies Curriculum continues to spread in the Henderson County school system. Almost all of the English teachers at both junior high schools are trained in Sentence Writing, Paragraph Writing, and RAP. Bonnie now is taking the learning strategies message to younger students in many more schools. She trained the teachers at one elementary school last year, and she's working with another elementary school this year. She hopes to work with all of the elementary schools in the Henderson County system eventually.
Bonnie's goal in working with elementary teachers is to introduce the Sentence Writing Strategy to all fifth-grade students and continue with more writing strategies in sixth grade so students will be ready to complete state-graded writing portfolios in the seventh grade.
"That's how much we believe in learning strategies," she said. "We're branching out."
Details of the Model Learning Lab project can be found in the following articles by Laura McGrail and Bonnie Kitchens:
