Need ideas from educators who departmentalize, please :)

[momm2four]

This year our seventh grade has 7 teachers. We had 8, but one was cut due to budget cuts. Right now, the teachers are divided into two "teams", each with part of the seventh grade students. Our team has four core teachers, and the other team only has three which means they teach their core subject, and then they all must teach science.

Next year, we are looking at the same situation of only having seven teachers, but we really don't want to do the "three man team" again. We are trying to think of ways to have a seven man team, but are at a loss on how to do that. (We consider our core subjects to be math, language arts, science and social studies)

Does anyone have any ideas on how we could juggle approximately 175 students between seven people? Keep in mind that we're not supposed to teach outside our subject area, due to NCLB.

Any help would be so appreciated,
Lori P.

 

[golfgal]

Your licencing structure must be different then ours and your school make up. I am licensed to teacher middle school and high school social sciences. I wouldn't be 'allowed' to teach other subjects without being licensed.

At DS's middle school they are on a block schedule, which I really like. They have a humanities block and a science block. Quarter 1 and 3 have the same classes, 2&4 have the same classes. They have math all year as well as band, choir or orchestra if they are in those, if not they have study hall. They must have about the same number of teachers for roughly the same number of students (I think there are 180 8th graders this year). Quarters 1/3 DS has Science, Phy-Ed, Band, Math and Industrial Tech (wood shop) or Home Ec (FACS), quarters 2/4 he has Social, Band, Math, Language Arts and Computer or another home ec type course that I can't remember what it is right now. The classes are 70 minutes long so for the science teacher they have their lecture/learning/discussion time then their lab work all in the same class. For math they are able to spend a lot of time on each lesson and then they have some class time to get homework started. It really cuts down on the homework for the kids, too.

At the twins' school (the Catholic school) they just have a science teacher that teaches all the science classes (there are only about 100 kids for each teacher), a social teacher for the social classes, math teacher for the math classes, Language Arts teacher for the the LA classes. Each teacher has a homeroom and they do religion then. The specialty classes like music, band and PE have their own teachers.

 

[momm2four]

Thanks for the idea. I probably wasn't very clear, but right now students on our team spend about 45-50 in each class. They have me for math, Mr. M for Social Studies, Mrs. O for Science and Ms. S for Language Arts. they also have one of us for a reading class for one period. The other two periods of the day, they go to other teachers for Related Arts (chorus, band, spanish, art, etc)

The kids on the other team do the same except the three teachers (math tchr, social studies, and l.arts trcr) must teach one class of science as well as the reading.

No Child Left Behind says that by the end of this year, you must be Highly Qualified in the area you are teaching. This should be the end of us having to teach reading, or anything else outside of our qualification. Therefore, we're unclear on how to schedule 7 teachers (probably 2 math, 2 lang. arts, and 3 other teachers, which may be 2 SS/1 Science or it may be 2 Sc/1 SS.), since we can't teach outside our highly qualified status. (For example, I'm licensed to teach grades 1-8, and can teach any 6th grade class since that's under the elementary umbrella, but can only teach middle school math, since that what I'm Highly qualified in. (Confusing, huh?)

I hadn't thought of doing 1/2 year science and 1/2 year social studies. I wonder how that would go over with our principal/staff.

Thanks for your input. I appreciate your time, and do want to bring the idea to my principal.

Lori P.

 

[Madaboutthemouse]

We have the same situation in the school where I teach. 3-8th grades and 3-7th grades. Luckily, 4 of the 6 teachers are double certified. We have math/science (me), math/SS, SS/language arts, and language arts/math. I am the only one who is currently teaching both subjects I am able to...4 math classes and one science. Other teachers are teaching both grades, but only one subject. Last year we had 7 homerooms...4-8th and 3-7th and everyone taught at least one class in both grades rather than have an 8th grade team and a 7th grade team.

 

[Sandy51]

We have faced this at our school. What we did was share one teacher. My team had him for 1st and 3rd nine wks, the other team for the 2nd and 4th nine wks. When we didn't have him, we would have a "reading class" of kids we had seen for our content class earlier in the day. We all read novels and did various activities with them. It wasn't perfect, but it worked.


Sandy

 

[Sparx]

this was my 7th year to a T. there were three teams with three teachers each. Mrs G taught SS and reading, Mrs S taught Math and english, Mrs C taught science, english and reading.
It was like that in every team.

It is probably still like that, I'm not sure.

 

[golfgal]

Thanks for the idea. I probably wasn't very clear, but right now students on our team spend about 45-50 in each class. They have me for math, Mr. M for Social Studies, Mrs. O for Science and Ms. S for Language Arts. they also have one of us for a reading class for one period. The other two periods of the day, they go to other teachers for Related Arts (chorus, band, spanish, art, etc)

The kids on the other team do the same except the three teachers (math tchr, social studies, and l.arts trcr) must teach one class of science as well as the reading.

No Child Left Behind says that by the end of this year, you must be Highly Qualified in the area you are teaching. This should be the end of us having to teach reading, or anything else outside of our qualification. Therefore, we're unclear on how to schedule 7 teachers (probably 2 math, 2 lang. arts, and 3 other teachers, which may be 2 SS/1 Science or it may be 2 Sc/1 SS.), since we can't teach outside our highly qualified status. (For example, I'm licensed to teach grades 1-8, and can teach any 6th grade class since that's under the elementary umbrella, but can only teach middle school math, since that what I'm Highly qualified in. (Confusing, huh?)

I hadn't thought of doing 1/2 year science and 1/2 year social studies. I wonder how that would go over with our principal/staff.

Thanks for your input. I appreciate your time, and do want to bring the idea to my principal.

Lori P.

I understood what you wrote. I think the difference here is that our school is set up Elementary, Middle, High School and so is the licensing. For us the 5-8th grade is middle school and the teachers hired for that would have a middle school/secondary licence. In MN that means they have a Major in a subject area (Social Science is mine) and a minor in Secondary Education. In the Elementary Grades they have a Major in Elementary Education and some have a minor or a concentration in another area, say math. An elementary education major would not be certified to teach at the middle school unless they had a middle school endorsement on their license, meaning they had a double major in elementary education and a subject (math for example).

With the block schedule the class times are longer so the contact time is roughly equivalent to a full year (the previous schedule was for 45 minute classes and the block classes are 70 minutes). Our high school is on a block schedule as well and they have 90 minute blocks. Our school has 3,4,5th blocks that are 28 minutes long to accommodate music classes and lunch but blocks 1,2,6,7 are 70 minutes.

It sounds like you are set up to be able to run on a block schedule. I would strongly suggest having year round math, however. They started with a block schedule for math and that was a disaster. You could have two math teachers teaching all the math, maybe one teach the advanced math and one the general or how ever it would break down. Then divide the other teachers into their subject areas and work the schedule that way. It may be a case where the school is going to have to hire another teacher to meet NCLB standards and take their cuts elsewhere. I know our districts preliminary budget came out and they have proposed cutting back the paraprofessional time to 7 hours instead of 8 because they don't really fall under the NCLB they have a little more leeway there.