Tag: Targeted and Relevant

Roots teacher, Lecksy Wolk, explains the school’s Habits of Success curriculum, Dovetail Learning.

Transcript: Lecksy Wolk: habits of success time is actually in the morning during morning circle, and that’s when we do socio-emotional learning. And so we do the like, dovetail where we can give kids like a quote-unquote toolbox where they have lots of things to like, pull out of their toolbox, like their breathing tool, their safe place tool, their take time tool, their use your words tool. But that’s in the 20 minutes when they’re switching between breakfast and lunch.

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

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.