At 7:30 each morning, Principal Cindy Goodman and Vice-Principal Billy
Hardy take up their appointed hallway posts, greeting students by name
with smiles and enthusiasm. Laurel Hill students stride purposefully, to
breakfast or to their classrooms, down corridors alive with piped-in
classical music. Parents often troop in with their kids, eager to catch
teachers during the 7:30 to 8:00 classroom "no appointment necessary"
time.

With a 75-year history in Scott County, North Carolina, Laurel Hill
Elementary has been a bedrock for generations of families in this once
prosperous and still close-knit community. In recent years, industry and
employment losses have been so severe that the county now ranks among
the poorest in all of the state. Laurel Hill, with academic
distinctions, excellent faculty, shining classrooms and well-kept
grounds, is a source of pride for the community and symbolizes the
district's investment in a brighter future for all students.

**Inclusion -- A Catalyst for Change and Success**

![](media/image1.jpeg){width="4.147222222222222in"
height="3.120833333333333in"}Teachers and parents credit the school's
success to Principal Goodman, who brought high expectations, strategic
thinking, instructional know-how, and unflagging energy to Laurel Hill
when she took charge five years ago. She, however, credits the
challenge---low achievement by special education students---and the
faculty's positive response, as the true catalysts for Laurel Hill's
success.

Only four years ago, students with educational disabilities spent most
of their instructional time in self-contained classrooms, with limited
exposure to the general education curriculum and their age-mates. Public
reporting of student achievement, a requirement of the No Child Left
Behind Act, spotlighted Laurel Hill's special education students'
achievement gap and kept the school from meeting the Adequate Yearly
Progress benchmark. This
wake-![](media/image2.jpeg){width="3.0708333333333333in"
height="2.313888888888889in"}up call motivated faculty to look for more
effective ways of teaching children with disabilities. Influenced by Dr.
Marilyn Friend's professional development video, The Power of Two,
faculty members became convinced that inclusive education was the right
thing to offer exceptional students, and that regular education students
would benefit as well. This year, 90% of Laurel Hills special education
students achieved proficiency in the state's reading test---a victory
that didn't come easily or quickly.

With teachers motivated to reinvent theirs as an inclusive school,
Laurel Hill began a several year change process that transformed
teaching roles and assignments, raised teacher-student ratios, ensured
grade-level planning, accommodated block scheduling, and energized
assessment and instructional practices. A teacher recalled, "All these
changes didn't happen overnight. We learned by trial and error.
Sometimes changing one thing still didn't get it right; it just opened
the door to something else that needed changing."

Teachers pointed to the principal's role in guiding change and finding
the resources that made changes possible---using, for example, Title I
and district funds strategically to employ highly skilled part-time
teachers for core subject instruction. This effectively reduces class
sizes for critical instructional groups and lets teachers work with
fourteen to eighteen students at a time, about six fewer per class than
the county average. Teachers said that the low teacher-student ratio
makes differentiating instruction manageable for students with diverse
needs.

![](media/image3.jpeg){width="2.888888888888889in"
height="2.0493055555555557in"}Experienced and well-qualified teachers
are among the school's strongest assets. More than half the faculty has
more than 10 years of experience; five are Nationally Board Certified,
and more are working towards this or administrators' certification.
Principal Goodman actively recruits strong teachers to meet the needs of
grade-level teams and carefully matches classroom and special education
co-teachers by strengths and personalities. Most important, she knows
what's going on in each classroom. She and Assistant Principal Bill
Hardy make daily, unannounced visits into classrooms. Their visits are
so matter-of-fact that if Principal Goodman misses a classroom, students
ask her where she was. The visits have also helped keep standards high:
one teacher said, "I want to be the best I can be when Ms. Goodman comes
in, so I am always at my best."

**Skill-Level Instructional Blocks**

Laurel Hill follows state and district standards, with district-created
online curricula, pacing guides, and assessments. Grade-level planning
teams thoroughly review the curriculum and instructional objectives each
week to ensure that all teachers address the same standards at the same
time. Weekly goals and daily class schedules are posted outside each
classroom so a visitor or an administrator knows what will happen during
an observation. Teachers set timers during activity blocks and all of
the school's clocks are satellite-synchronized, giving proof of the
faculty's commitment to staying on task and staying on time.

![](media/image4.jpeg){width="3.251388888888889in"
height="2.4131944444444446in"}They are encouraged to channel their
creative energies into the subjects they love. Teachers in grades 3, 4
and 5 elect to be content specialists, rather than teach all subjects,
and divide responsibilities for preparing and delivering instruction in
reading, math, science, or social studies. "I know I was born to teach
this grade and especially to teach reading. I can pour myself into
reading now," a teacher reported, with exuberance. Freed from having to
prepare and teach in all of the core content areas, teachers acknowledge
that "going with their strengths" gives them more time to prepare
lessons, delve deeper into subject content, apply more and different
instructional strategies, and share what they do best with others on the
grade-level team.

Students move in instructional blocks for core subjects. Their
assignment to groups is driven by their learning needs; consequently
they may be assigned to different levels for different subjects. Laurel
Hill uses "co-teaching"; classroom and special education teachers fully
share instructional responsibility for all the children in the least
restrictive setting. Teachers who work with the lower-achieving groups
co-teach with a special education colleague. One co-teaching pair has
learned so much from working together, they said. They both felt more
competent and they have enlarged their "teaching toolkits." Co-teaching
has been so successful that teachers now request to take on this
challenge of teaching special education students alongside their
age-mates.

In addition to subject specialties (who teaches what), grade-level teams
also plan who teaches whom---that is, which teachers are matched with
what groups of learners. These assignments are not static and teachers
rotate, teaching high, middle, and lower-achieving instructional groups
in turn. Schoolwide math and reading specialists support all teams with
curricular resources and instructional strategies.

![](media/image5.jpeg){width="2.8333333333333335in"
height="3.5722222222222224in"}Library, art, music, computer, and
physical education classes---the "specials"---are scheduled so that that
grade-level teaching teams have three single periods and one double
period (80 minutes) for planning and collaboration each week. Teachers
at every grade level saw this grade-level planning time as essential.
One grade-level team described itself as "a well-greased machine," using
every minute of the time allotted. During planning, teams review the
curriculum and pacing guides, discuss how students are doing, and
consider how to adapt strategies to match different learning needs.
Teachers agreed that they often forget which students are \[special
education\] kids; the goal is to find ways to move everyone along the
same curriculum.

![](media/image6.jpeg){width="1.9597222222222221in"
height="2.8256944444444443in"}Teachers keep their "specials" colleagues
well-informed about the objectives and themes of their curricula. The
librarian stocks classrooms with fiction and non-fiction material at
different levels to build background knowledge. Specialists teach music,
art, and computer science classes from curricula that incorporate
grade-level standards, and call on their learning disability training to
accommodate different learning styles and reading levels.

The physical education class lives up to its mission to "provide our
students with opportunities to grow physically, mentally and socially
through a variety of activities." Students spend the 40-minute class in
continuous movement and activity. They begin class by stacking buckets
as high as possible without toppling them, then move on to an aerobic
activity. After coordinating the steps in the Shag, the state dance,
they finish the period with a game or hockey or basketball. In a Laurel
Hill physical education "rite of passage," all 4th graders take swimming
lessons and pass the swimming test, taught by the school's seasoned
physical education teacher and his corps of volunteers.

**The Active Art and Science of Teaching**

All teachers work across the curriculum on essential learning skills.
All incorporate writing across the subject areas, always helping
students put their thoughts into expressive sentences and paragraphs.
Science lessons introduce concepts with new words that call upon
phonetics rules for decoding. All teachers come together daily in
"reading

![](media/image7.jpeg){width="4.259722222222222in"
height="3.797222222222222in"} dialogue" sessions to instruct a small
leveled reading group for 45 minutes of guided reading and instruction
in fluency, comprehension, and background knowledge. In one such class,
students discussed poetry in terms of stanzas, personification, and
alliteration, using cards the teacher had imprinted with these literary
terms. After the children read the poem together, the teacher helped
them interpret it, using everyday language or things the students could
relate to in exploring the poem. All lessons start with "essential
questions" that anchor new concepts to children's prior knowledge. For
example, an essential question for the reading group was: "How do good
readers identify cause and effect relationships in the text?" The
teacher gave a real-life example: "Because it snowed ten inches in
Laurel Hill, what happened?" Students responded, "built a snowman, no
school, hit mom with snowball." The teacher accepted each phrase but
also prompted students to expand their thoughts into complete sentences
that showed the cause-effect relationship. When a student faltered, the
teacher said, "I didn't do a good enough job of explaining this," and
gave the student more help by quickly drawing a picture of a
cause-effect example on the whiteboard. Soon after, the student
observed, "This is really easy once you get used to it." In a twenty
minute segment, students moved from concrete, real-life experience to
extracting cause-effect relationships in their text, using cues such as
"always look for because in the sentence." The rhythm of instruction
flows from gentle to racing as students grasp knowledge through all of
their senses. In a morning kindergarten class, students learned the
sounds of the alphabet by dancing to a phonics song and tossing beanbag
alphabet letters, then easily transitioned to asking probing questions
using who, what, and when words, part of a thinking map session. In a
pre-reading session of second graders, students identified title,
author, and illustrator and discussed character, setting, and story line
while the teacher helped them draw connections between their experiences
and the vocabulary words. Students played tic-tac-toe to reinforce sight
and vocabulary words, some of them challenge words from the third grade
list.

![](media/image8.jpeg){width="2.1013888888888888in"
height="2.297222222222222in"}Teachers change activities frequently. In a
class on units of measure, the teachers used pictures, books, and other
objects to demonstrate different units (length, weight, capacity). Using
a tree map, students called out what can be measured under each unit:
inches, feet, yards vs. ounces, pounds vs. cups and pints. The teacher
pointed out what students needed to know for upcoming state assessments
and students designed "measurement" booklets to help them remember key
measurement facts and tools.

In another math class, co-taught by the math and a special education
teachers, students recited the eights multiplication table using an
overhead. "Look at how many ways are you learning---by seeing, hearing,
and saying it," the teachers noted. When the students turned to a long
division practice sheet, one of the teachers said, "Don't forget Do
Monkeys Smell Bad Really," to which students replied, "Divide, multiply,
subtract, bring down, and remainder." The teacher explained that these
tricks help all kids remember math processes.

In a reading class of third graders, students began by noting their
homework assignments in their planners, then participated in a written
practice session on contractions through "call and response." One group
called out the contracted word, such as "Let's," and the other yelled
out "Let us!"

![](media/image9.jpeg){width="3.9902777777777776in"
height="3.265277777777778in"}Following that exercise, the children
quickly moved to their next activity for the day: learning about China.
They used the KWFL grid (what do we Know? What do we Want to know? How
do we Find out? and what did we Learn?) to find facts, as opposed to
opinions, about China. Prompted by the KWFL questions, a student
confidently stated, "We know they eat a lot of rice in China," while
another added, "Yes, they also use chopsticks." Students used the
classroom's many resources about China, a world map, and a globe to
verify some of the facts they had written on the KWFL grid, and were
encouraged to use "who, what, when, why, how" to probe for details after
their classmates made statements.

![](media/image10.jpeg){width="3.7916666666666665in"
height="2.8069444444444445in"}The teachers used different reading
strategies and techniques to keep the students engaged. Students learned
more about China from a story on tape. They discussed the title and
background of the story and used the recording to look for clues about
the story. The children were asked to take a "picture walk" to learn
more about what the story

was about, and were asked to predict what the pictures told them about
the story (this story was about helping people and volunteering). In the
final 20 minutes of the class, color-coded groups of students received
assignments and went to their stations, some working independently on
vocabulary words while others worked with the classroom or special
education teacher on phonics and decoding skills.

**Knowing How Students Are Doing**

At Laurel Hill, student assessment is everybody's business. The district
and school leadership---superintendent, principal, vice-principal, and
curriculum specialists---track students' performance on state tests,
pinpointing areas of strengths and items missed. District benchmark
tests are aligned to district curricula and every six to nine weeks
teachers get feedback which they use to place children in small
instructional groups and to "move them up" when they are ready. Teachers
conduct item analyses from district assessments and daily work to
determine what content students missed and what skills need re-teaching.
"Assessment is our roadmap," a teacher said, "the map tells us when to
back up and when to move ahead, but we know that every minute we teach
matters if we are going to stay on the road."

Grade-level teams of teachers spoke of "shar\[ing\] a brain." Planning
time is full of brainstormed ideas, strategies, and materials. Because
the teachers know all of the children in a grade, and share
responsibility for teaching them, they can encourage each other in
difficult times. They won't give up on a single child, they said and
described going "way beyond the extra mile" to find strategies that
work.

The school responds quickly when children fall behind. Each year, about
10% of Laurel Hill's students are referred to the Student Services
Management Team because of academic or social concerns. Made up of an
administrator, guidance counselor, social worker, two veteran teachers,
a special educator and the school nurse, the team discusses students'
learning needs with parents and brings in community resources, if
needed, to solve problems. The school's optional tutoring and enrichment
program, funded by the district's 21st Century grant, offers scholars
academic tutoring, homework assistance, and structured sports and
exercise opportunities. Parents testified that the school works
diligently to connect families with the support and resources students
need.

**Importance of Routines and Structure**

![](media/image11.jpeg){width="3.6430555555555557in"
height="3.220138888888889in"}Students know how to work independently,
with partners, and in small groups. In every class, students moved
seamlessly among different instructional settings. Teachers at all grade
levels talked about the importance of high expectations for learning,
predictable consequences for behavior, and consistent classroom
routines.

Teachers at Laurel Hill are masters of routine and transitions. With
students moving among groups and activities several times an hour,
teachers achieve order through deftly executed transitions: One clap
means "stand up"; two means "push in your chair"; three means "move to
the circle." Students wear their shirts tucked in and travel the halls
in near-silence. They carry their supplies from class to class in
school-provided tote bags and use planners and note-taking books as
organizational aids. Student work tables have baskets with pencils and
paper to save instructional minutes that are otherwise lost when
students grope for supplies. Worksheets are designed to serve as graphic
organizers.

Teachers help children succeed by providing structure and discipline.
The whole school shares a consistent approach to behavior and each
teacher records behavior on color-coded charts. No child is kept in at
recess time, but some students have to "walk off some minutes" at recess
as a "misbehavior consequence." Parents are called "early and often" and
the principal and teachers work with families to manage problem
behaviors.

**In Summary---A Culture of Success**

At Laurel Hill, success for all students is driven by high expectations,
collaborative teaching, consistent discipline, mutual respect, and
faculty empowerment. Parents speak very highly of their principal "who
raised the bar" and the teachers who work so hard with their children.
The school embodies the "It Takes a Village" concept, a parent said,
referring to teachers as "family." Another parent added, "even if a
child is 'labeled' as having a problem, the school does not treat him
differently." A father said that he liked the school's rules and the
rewards students get if they follow those rules. Another parent said
that she feels that there is "a lot of learning besides academics" and
appreciated that students are taught to be independent and encouraged to
take on responsibilities.

Teachers credited Principal Goodman with helping them focus their
teaching and for setting high expectations for everyone. Praising her
ability to recruit highly qualified teachers who are willing to work
hard---and the autonomy she gives them to perfect their craft---teachers
said the changes she instituted have changed the school culture and led
to dramatic improvement in student achievement.

  ------------------ ------------- ------------ ------------ -------------
  **Laurel Hill End                                          
  of Grade Results**                                         

  **% proficient and                                         
  above: 5th grade                                           
  Reading**                                                  

                     2003          2004         2005         2006

  All                78            95           99           91

  Low income         74            92           98           89

  **% proficient and                                         
  above: 5th grade                                           
  Math**                                                     

                     2003          2004         2005         2006

  All                82            91           96           73

  Low income         77            89           95           71
  ------------------ ------------- ------------ ------------ -------------

![](media/image12.jpeg){width="5.416666666666667in"
height="4.072222222222222in"}