Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Snapshot of a great school

One of my favorite things to do in my role as principal at Henley Middle School is to visit our classrooms on a regular basis to see the incredible work our teachers and students engage in day in and day out.  The work they do never ceases to amaze me.  Here's just a sampling of what I saw as I visited seventh grade classrooms during our Orange 1 period today:
  • Students in Mrs. Insalaco's Math 7 class were making use of the ActivBoard and ActivResponse systems that she has in her classrooms.  The active responders are gadgets that look a lot like a cellphone and allow students to send a text message answer to a problem that their teacher has created on the Activboard.  Today's lesson focused on number sequence relationships and when I spoke with students about using technology such as the Activresponse system, they all raved about how much more engaging it was compared to the "old-fashioned way."
    Mrs. Insalaco's class
  • Dow the hall in Ms. Price's math class, students were also studying number sequence relationships, but were going about it in a different way.  Each of her students had a number of toothpicks in front of them at their desk and had been asked to begin building toothpick trains of triangles and recording how many additional toothpicks it took to create a new triangle.  They were then asked to create a mathematical formula that showed the relationship between the number of toothpicks and the number of triangles.  Again, kids were highly engaged and expressed to me how much they enjoyed a lesson that was set up with manipulative to engage them.
Ms. Price's class

  • Further down the hall in Mrs. Imbert's science class students were taking one of their first stabs at dissection by pulling apart owl pellets, finding the bones that were contained within them and attempting to identify the types of bones they found and from which type of animal they came.  While there was a little bit of squeamishness from a couple of groups, it was clear that this was a lesson born for middle school kids. They loved the "gross" factor of the pellets and you could see their eyes light up when they discovered and identified a new bone.
  • Mrs. Imbert's class
  • Next door in Mrs. Kooken's science class students had just finished swabbing different objects around the school as part of their study of bacteria.  They are hoping to grow some bacteria cultures from the swabs they collected to see just how many germs may be floating around places such as the bottom of the lost and found bin. 

So there's four classes from one period in one wing of the building selected at random at Henley Middle School.  Highly engaged students being taught by incredibly gifted teachers equals lifelong learning.  What makes this snapshot from today's classrooms even better, is that this could be any day, any period, any class, any grade level at Henley.  What a fantastic place to send your children to every morning--a place where they will acquire all of the tools necessary for success in school and in life!