A Hawley School Improvement Plan

For The ‘Whole Child’

By Tanjua Damon

Making sure all students are successful and good learners is what the Hawley School community continues to strive for during the 2001-2002 school year.

Representatives of Hawley School presented their school improvement plan to the Board of Education Tuesday night, asserting that the plan “encompasses” every child at the school.

The plan derives from a partnership between administration, faculty, staff, and parents who worked together to create a program that addresses the needs of everyone at the school, according to Principal Jo-Ann Peters.

“It’s really the end result of many people,” she said. “It’s with that partnership we have at Hawley that we can achieve academic success.”

The plan for 2001-2002 will address four areas: language arts, mathematics, technology, and diversity. The introduction to the improvement plan says, “The faculty at Hawley strive to develop and foster within students, attributes associated with cognitive achievement, the self-directed learner and process skills which emphasize critical thinking, problem solving and decision-making.”

It further states, “Hawley faculty continues to foster learning that encompasses the ‘whole child.’ Differentiating instruction is one way we address individual strengths and weaknesses.”

In language arts, goals have been set to have students find meaning from texts, think critically about what they read, enjoy reading, and be “strategic” readers. Language arts assessments will continue to drive instruction in grades K-5. The effort encourages students to make connections between reading and writing through interactive writing for sound-symbol correspondence as well as writing to communicate, writing aloud for modeling purposes, reader repines entries, writers’ workshops, and independent writing.

Language arts instruction will also continue to develop students’ ability to respond critically, both orally and in writing, using information from the text as well as personal experiences to support their responses. Revising and editing pieces of writing is another area in language arts that will be worked on continuously as well as refining the language arts instruction to build on the foundation and support instruction for each grade level.

In math, Hawley School’s Improvement Plan allows for various differentiated instruction through teachers observing the math/science specialist, modeling an investigation or topic using differentiated instruction with various resources; having teachers explore the Internet math Web sites to assist them in providing differentiated instruction in the classroom, computer lab and in homework; and having teachers try a differentiated learning technique and share the experience with their team.

Students in grades 2-5 will work on skills that will help to prepare them for the third generation Connecticut Mastery Test.

The technology goals for 2001-2002 include having at least one multimedia computer set up for network access in each classroom, having technology incorporated into the classroom using a mobile workstation, adding a mini-lab to the library media center to provide more access to students and teachers, continued technology training, and having staff review software to help support the curriculum.

Hawley’s diversity goal for the 2001-2002 school year is to continue to bring literature and direct instruction to teach diversity in the classroom. The school PTA will continue to provide cultural arts programs that bring various diversity programs to the students at school. The school has also established a diversity committee which is researching setting up a sister school that has a more diverse population of students, allowing Hawley students to write back and forth, and possibly visit the sister school to meet and talk with other students.

“We really foster education that encompasses the whole child,” Ms Peters said. “As a school community, we are only as good a sum of its parts. We can achieve anything we put our minds to.”