At North View Middle School we believe that teaching and learning approaches should accommodate the diverse skills, abilities, and prior knowledge of young adolescents, cultivate multiple intelligences, draw upon students’ individual learning styles, and utilize digital tools. When learning experiences capitalize on students’ cultural, experiential, and personal backgrounds, new concepts are built on knowledge students already possess. To ensure this happens, we use the nature of young adolescents to guide our instructional decision making.
Because of this belief, our teachers spend a considerable amount of time creating engaging learning opportunities. These opportunities occur in all classes and today I would like to use this post to highlight the Social Studies and EL departments.
Our Social Studies students and English Language Learners (ELLs) are focusing on identifying and citing text evidence. In Social Studies classrooms students are analyzing primary and secondary source documents, and are citing evidence from those sources to demonstrate their learning in a multitude of ways. In ELL classrooms the skills of reading, analyzing, and citing evidence are being taught and reinforced to promote academic success for ELLs in their content classes. In each classroom students are working to connect the events from the past to our lives today, while teachers are also providing them with the academic skills they will need to be successful in their futures.
Social Studies and EL teachers work collaboratively to support students by planning and differentiating instruction, using classroom management strategies that support a variety of language and learning needs, and making thinking visual to support intentional vocabulary and conceptual development. North View has committed to purposeful co-teaching in these classrooms by ensuring that successful partnerships continue learning and growing together, for the benefit of students.
I hope you enjoyed this spotlight. If you have any questions about this or anything else related to North View Middle School please connect with me here or follow me at @NVMSPrincipal.
