Comprehensive School Reform Models

AIM at Middle-Grades Results • Different Ways of Knowing
Making Middle Grades Work • Making Schools Work • Middle Start
Success for All Middle School Program • Turning Points

Model Design

Key Features
The Model promotes academic excellence, developmental responsiveness, and social equity by helping schools engage students with rigorous curriculum and instruction, provide teachers with the support they need to develop deep content knowledge, and develop safe, nuturing, and challenging learning environments.

Key elements of the design include:

• Research-Based Instructional Programs in Each Major Subject Area
  
• Focused and Sustained Subject and Grade-Specific Professional Development
  
• In-Classroom Implementation Assistance from Curriculum Coaches
  
• Extra-Help Elective Replacement Courses in Math and Reading
  
• Innovative Approaches to School Organization (Small Learning Communities, Looping, Extended Periods for Core Subjects, Semi-Departmentalization)
  
• High-Five Climate Program which creates orderly and supportive learning environments

TDMS instructional programs combine pedagogies designed to facilitate active learning with research based curriculums, detailed teacher's guides, supplemental materials for students with skill and knowledge gaps, and multiple tiers of teacher support and professional development. The emphasis in all the instructional programs is the development of the foundational knowledge and advanced reasoning and comprehension skills and strategies required for success in standards-based secondary courses. More specific detail on each instructional program is given below.

Talent Development Middle School Instructional Programs

TDMS Reading/English/Language Arts
The TDMS model's core Reading/English/Language Arts (RELA) curriculum includes Student Team Literature, Talent Development Writing, plus an extra help program called Computer- and Team- Assisted Reading Acceleration that provides additional instruction and reading opportunities for struggling students. Student Team Literature and Talent Development Writing are adaptations and elaborations of the Student Team Reading and Writing developed by Robert Stevens. The TDMS RELA program represents a coherent research- and standards-based approach to developing the literacy of older students. The program teaches effective reading strategies and operations, extends reading comprehension skills, develops fluency in reading and writing, systematically adds important words to students' working vocabulary, and builds both basic language skills and higher-order thinking, literary analysis, and writing skills. One of the distinctives of this approach is its integrated nature. Skills are not taught in isolation. All objectives in RELA are taught through reading, studying, discussing, and responding to high-quality, high-interest books.

The TDMS RELA program includes a wide variety of curricular materials that support teachers' use of effective instructional practices, engaging and varied learning activities and assessments, and students' use of effective peer assistance processes. A primary tool in the TDMS RELA program is the Partner Discussion Guide which structure the teachers' and students' teaching and learning activities. A Partner Discussion Guide is available for almost 200 books (fiction and nonfiction books from every genre, biographies, and collections of short stories or poems). The purpose of the Partner Discussion Guide is to organize the students' learning activities as they progress through a book, to ensure that they comprehend each part of the book before going on to the next part, to develop the knowledge and strategies that will help them in future reading activities of the same kind, and to use the book as a jumping off point for mini-lessons on the writers' craft and other learning objectives in language arts that naturally connect to the book. The teacher's edition of a Partner Discussion Guide contains all the necessary content for each day's lesson. These include pre-reading exercises to engage students in and prepare students for the days' reading and develop and practice strategic reading skills; teaching activities to model the day's lesson and teach specific reading, writing and critical thinking skills, silent reading with a purpose; cooperative learning activities including partner reading and discussion to provide the opportunity for guided practice of skills, interpretation, and understanding of the chapters being read that day; and prompts for reflection, review, and pre-assessment activities. The guides contain a variety of mutually-reinforcing written, spoken, and listening activities to ensure even a struggling readers' ability to successfully complete, understand, and apply award-winning books for young adolescents. The teachers' Partner Discussion Guide also contains sufficient background material about the author, the book, the literary devices and key concepts it contains, and other relevant information so that even a teacher previously unfamiliar with a particular book or one teaching out of his or her content area can obtain the expertise necessary to support deep student learning.

The National Staff Development Council has identified the TDMS RELA program as one seven effective middle grades programs in Language Arts that increases student achievement through teacher learning.

TDMS Mathematics
TDMS takes an "Algebra for All" approach based on the premise that all middle school students should receive an ambitious, coherent, and increasingly complex mathematics program that culminates with either an algebra course or the integrated study of algebra, geometry, and data in 8th grade.

The TDMS curriculum is built around instructional materials developed by the University of Chicago School Mathematics Program (UCSMP). Fifth and Sixth graders use the UCSMP Everyday Mathematics series, seventh graders the UCSMP Transition Mathematics text, and eighth graders the UCSMP Algebra text. The UCSMP materials were chosen to form the foundation of the TDMS curriculum for two reasons. First, they are research-based and have a track record of raising the mathematics achievement of students from a wide range of background. Secondly, they are particularly well-suited to achieving "Algebra for All" in the eighth grade. Central algebraic concepts and procedures are introduced in an informal and hands on manner in the fifth grade materials and then revisited each year in increasingly complex and symbolic manners. Thus, by the time students begin more formal study of Algebra in the eighth grade they have been prepared to succeed. The UCSMP Algebra text, in turn, also contains significant amounts of work with geometry and data, leaving students prepared for either a geometry course in high school or the more integrated study of algebra, geometry, and data.

Students who need extra help are provided with at least 10 weeks of additional mathematics instruction per year. In lieu of an elective, these students attend a Computer and Team Assisted Mathematics Acceleration (CATAMA) class that combines the skill of a classroom teacher, with the individualized pacing of computer software, and the support and cognitive elaboration engendered by working in partnerships and teams. The CATAMA lab not only provides support to students but also enables the students' regular mathematics teachers to cover more grade level material because they know that students who have had poor prior preparations can build their basic skills and receive extra assistance in CATAMA.

TDMS Science
The overall goal of the TDMS science program is to provide students with an academic education in science that is useful to their daily life while also preparing them for further study. To reach this goal, TDMS focuses on the provision of high quality lessons provided every day to every student. This day-to-day approach is based on a detailed curriculum built upon research-based materials and ongoing teacher professional development based on findings from the literature. Together these ensure that all teachers in a school have the day-to-day materials and the background to provide a solid science education to all students.

The curriculum is built around content-specific science modules developed with NSF funding by the Lawrence Hall of Science (FOSS and SEPUP) and the National Science Resources Center (STC) and linked to the national science standards and benchmarks. These modules are built around hands-on activities that require considerable student effort in planning and interpretation. They cover both content and process skills and offer opportunities for students to pursue independent inquiry. They are teacher friendly and provide the day-to-day lessons, materials and equipment needed to teach the lessons, and direction on how to teach (in some cases, pointing out misconceptions students are likely to hold regarding the content). Through their inclusive nature, they help teachers working with at-risk students to provide hands-on experiences that are more likely to be available for higher SES students. Because of their modular nature they can be arranged in different patterns to meet local curriculum standards, benchmarks, assessments and teacher interest.

Middle schools serving at-risk students also have the compounding problem that most science teachers are not science specialists but are elementary certified and therefore they need extensive support to use middle school science materials. TDMS has both an outside the classroom and inside the classroom professional development components. Outside the classroom, teachers learn the science modules in depth as well as the content knowledge behind them and the pedagogical techniques to teach them. Inside the classroom, teachers receive support all year from skilled ex-science teachers who help them address implementation problems.

TDMS U.S. History
The TDMS American History curriculum is brings together an exciting series of books (A History of Us by Joy Hakim as the central text) with written, visual, and auditory primary source materials in a series of engaging lessons. A Teaching Guide and Resource Book of instructional lesson plans, review lessons, assessments, and student materials accompanies each of the books in the Hakim series.

Comprehensive Middle School TD Model
The TD instructional reforms in the middle grades are nestled among a set of larger whole school reforms that are part of the TD middle school model. A key element of this model, which provides additional support to teachers and their students is a communal organization of schooling. Talent Development Middle Schools use small learning communities, semi-departmentalization, and looping (teachers staying with the same students for two or more years) to create closer bonds between students and teachers. Stronger student-teacher bonds, in turn, lead to fewer discipline problems, higher levels of student engagement, and promote an increase in both teacher caring and daring (Wilson & Corbett, 1999; Mac Iver et al 2000).

Organizational Supports

Coaching
Talent Development Middle Schools are provided multiple layers of sustained professional development, technical assistance, and implementation support. The first layer is on-going subject and grade specific staff development that is explicitly linked to the curriculum. This professional development has three primary foci. First, on a monthly basis, Talent Development professional development sessions model upcoming instructional activities for teachers. Second, these sessions provide both the content knowledge required by these activities and demonstrate effective instructional strategies tied to the activities. Third, they provide the teachers with the opportunity to network and learn from each other.

The second layer of support is non-evaluative in-classroom implementation assistance provided by a curriculum coach who performs a wide range of support functions including modeling, troubleshooting, helping the teacher customize the curriculum to his or her classroom, and making sure the teacher has all the materials he or she needs.

Lead teachers in the school who receive intensive training in the instructional programs being implemented provide the third layer of support.

The final and fourth layer of support is provided by Talent Development Middle School instructional facilitators employed by Johns Hopkins University who work closely with both the curriculum coaches, lead teachers, and principals to design the on-going staff development, customize and localize the instructional programs, and keep the instructional intervention on track.

Implementation support is most intense in the initial year of implementation of a curricular component, with weekly classroom visits and intensive professional development. The goal, however, is to develop the district's and school's capacity to sustain the Talent Development Model after the implementation phase. The professional development and teacher on special assignment are important components in the development of internal capacity to maintain the model independently.

Training
Teachers receive 36 hours of professional development per year per subject. These hours are usually a combination of afterschool and half-day Saturday sessions; however, TDMS will design a schedule that meets schools' needs. Teachers in the core subject areas implementing the model participate. These workshops are both on and off-site; in communities where TDMS works with more than one school, staff rotates schools for the workshop meetings, while in a community where TDMS works with just one school, the professional development is at that school. The training is grade and subject specific.

A TDMS instructional facilitator in each subject area works with the school's lead teacher to design the training. Ideally a school will designate a lead teacher in each of the four core subject areas. The instructional facilitator, employed by Johns Hopkins University, may review and model upcoming lessons and present content information, depending on the needs of the teachers being served. Each subject has a specific training. The training includes extensive content information, teaching strategies such as cooperative learning, and facilitation support. A curriculum coach, who is a Hopkins employee, provides non-evaluative in-classroom support including modeling and troubleshooting

The Emergent Leader is one of the four tiers of teacher support in implementing the TDMS instructional programs. These teachers are successfully implementing the model in their classroom, and receive additional training to serve as a lead teacher for faculty in their subject area. Emergent Leaders are able to conduct workshops and serve as peer coaches. The goal of two Emergent Leaders per subject is recommended in order to build capacity and sustainability within the school.

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View other Comprehensive School Reform Models

AIM at Middle-Grades Results • Different Ways of Knowing
Making Middle Grades Work • Making Schools Work • Middle Start
Success for All Middle School Program • Turning Points