School Briefs 

Under the leadership of Principal Serge Marshall Davis, teachers at The Sheila Mencher School in Van Cortlandt Village continually immerse themselves in professional planning to help students learn.  Schools have changed enormously since parents of today sat in the classroom. Curriculum is fluid, a work in progress built element by element utilizing best practices to meet the standards of Common Core, rigid academic guidlines set forth by the U.S. Department of Education.

Teachers work their magic with the support and ideas from their colleagues, and other school staff. Through collaborative efforts, teachers weave facts and concepts, interconnecting various subjects, particularly English Language Arts, mathematics, science and social studies into the school day, planning various activities for children and youth to explore and practice what they are learning. Words such as scaffolding, questioning and differentiation take on extended meaning, bringing any subject matter to life.

Diandra Salmeri, a teacher, says classroom instructors should anticipate the student readiness to approach the skills to be introduced, through formal or informal assessment of their prior knowledge. She approaches the construction of lessons as a process and a product.  Kevin McMahon, another teacher, develops different “access points” for students to make connections with a subject and to help them with what they are struggling with.

Jessica Rivera, an experienced teacher, indicates that curriculum building, or scaffolding, is a complicated process, both constructing, block-by-block, the sequence of what students need to know, as well as deconstructing the sequence, to rebuild the lesson with different activities for different students at different levels of ability.  She calls this “chunking the tasks.”

Differentiation is a logical process of engaging and motivating students, since students learn in different ways and this planning specifically has the students, as individuals, in mind.  She bases her lesson planning with the zone of proximal development in mind, that is, starting the sequence of learning from the point the student has reached then adjusting the task so that it is manageable for the student to be able to do independent work. With multiple sequences designed for specific students or groups of students, all students can reach the same end point.

Nadim Farooqi, another teacher, adds that complex thinking is needed to design multi-tiered questions to promote deeper learning for all students.

Teacher collaboration is a big part of the ongoing creative process at PS/MS 95, through extensive, frequent sharing of ideas.