Craft Category: Artifacts

Roots Executive Director Discussing Benefits of Heterogeneous Groups

Roots ED and Founder, Jonathan Hanover, discusses why the teaching team uses heterogeneous grouping approaches.

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Transcript: Jon Hanover: I think of the benefits in two ways. First, it’s just an efficiency game. Like every public school in the country, we have limited funds and so we’d love to have a 1:1 student to teacher ratio, but we can only have the student-to-teacher ratio that we have. So, throughout each content we look for what are instructional routines that get the most bang for your buck to do one-on-one or in small groups and what instructional routines would maybe be better if they could be done in small group but are okay if they are done in a larger group because we have the teachers that we can afford. The second reason is that a lot of the routines that we do in large group or whole group are actually better done with more kids. For instance, this is where we would do CGI, cognitively guided instruction, where kids are really doing group problem solving on a story problem of the day and sharing out their strategies with the group. And there’s a benefit to having a larger group of students so you have a diversity of strategies and perspectives on it.

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August 8, 2016

Roots The Grove Map

The Grove is an area at Roots where students and teachers have choice around where and how they learn and work with students.

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August 8, 2016

Roots Director of Operations and Innovation Provides an Overview of the Physical Space

Roots Director of Operations and Innovation, Jill Tew, shares how physical space is used differently at the school to accommodate and enable personalized learning.

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Transcript: Jill Tew: the space at Roots looks a little bit different from a traditional school. We don’t have self-contained classrooms where the same child sits in the same classroom, with the same 25 other kids and the same teacher every day. The space is laid out in a way it allows for much more movement throughout the day, which to us equates to more choice for students in how they’re spending their time. So, we have a large open area called The Grove, where there are five different centers of activities where students can spend their time, rotating from the library, to the writing center, to the maker space – all over the course of their morning, and that’s based on the schedules that teachers have put together for scholars based on their needs, their gaps, their interests, and how they learn best. So, the space really mimics – the amount of options that we want on the table and that menu for kids, so that they’re able to, over the course of their time at Roots, start having a more active role in shaping their own day, and what they’re spending their time doing. So, The Grove is kind of the heart of our model where about 100 kids between two – sometimes three kind of grade levels are overlapping, and then around The Grove on the periphery we have classrooms of different sizes as well, which again gets back to our focus on choice and options being the best path to customization so that you have a choice as a teacher of which classroom you’re going to use for a lesson. If that lesson makes more sense as a small group instruction, you’re going to pull five or six scholars into a small group room that really is only the size for a kidney table, maybe some materials for you and the small group you’re with. But if you’re doing a whole group read-aloud and you want kind of the larger, more heterogeneous mix of scholars in that group, you would go into the more traditionally-sized classroom for read-aloud time on the carpet.

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August 8, 2016

Roots Executive Director Providing Overview of Staffing Model

Roots ED and Founder, Jonathan Hanover, explains how the school is staffed into content areas.

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Transcript: Jon Hanover: so our staffing model is basically we have eight teachers who team-teach together for a group of about 100 kids that are multi-age, and that macro group is what we call a growth. And we split those eight teachers I think kind of horizontally and vertically in half. So half of those eight teachers are academic content teachers, half of them are Habits of Success teachers, so they focus on that academic content. And then within each of those teams half are lead teachers and half are teaching fellows. So in our Habits of Success team we have two lead Habits of Success coaches and two Habits of Success fellows. On the academic content team there’s a lead humanities teacher, a humanities fellow, a lead STEAM teacher and a STEAM fellow.

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August 8, 2016

Roots Teaching Fellowship Job Description

Roots offers aspiring teachers the opportunity to work under a Lead teacher for a year through its Teaching Fellowship. Fellows earn an elementary teaching license through the University of Colorado (fully paid for by Roots) as well as a living stipend.

The attached document provides further detail on the Teaching Fellowship job position.

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August 8, 2016
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