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Christine Cziko's Freshman English Class, Thurgood Marshall High School
San Francisco, CA
School Type: Public
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School Setting: Urban
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Level: High
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School Design: Traditional
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Content Presented By:
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Center for Resource Management (CRM)
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The Education Alliance at Brown University
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Summary
The practice: Creating a Student-Centered Classroom
- Urban school with emphasis on college preparation
- 40% of students with GPAs of 2.0 or below at start of program
- High failure rate attributable to low reading comprehension levels in content areas
- 10-unit, yearlong course for all incoming freshmen
- Awareness-building of reading purposes and processes
- Reading modeling/apprenticeship
- Sustained Silent Reading
At the Thurgood Marshall School, the Academic Literacy course began as a 10-unit, year-long course for all freshmen in Fall 1996.
At that time, many students were failing, and reading comprehension was considered part of the problem. Offered through the
Strategic Literacy Initiative, a research and professional development effort based in San Francisco, the course builds students'
awareness of reading purposes and processes. It also provides them with a common conceptual vocabulary for thinking about their
own cognitive processes. Students learn about schema, metacognition, and attention management. They make use of Silent Sustained
Reading and are coached on how to determine which strategies to use for particular types of reading. After seven months of
instruction, students on average increased their reading comprehension by two grade levels at Thurgood Marshall.
This site also exemplifies the following practice(s):
- Making Connections to Students' Lives
- Having Students Interact with Each Other and with Text
- Creating Responsive Classrooms
- Roles of the Teacher
- Reading and Writing
- Speaking and Listening
- An Emphasis on Thinking
- Vocabulary Development
- Understanding Text Structures
- Recognizing and Analyzing Discourse Features
- Supporting the English classroom through literacy development
- Supporting the social studies classroom through literacy development
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