BHS Tutorial

Providing individualized, content-based support to enhance the academic performance of students with mild learning difficulties.

After initial funding from the BHS Innovation Fund, BHS Tutorial is fully integrated into the Brookline High School curriculum.

By Federal and State law, school districts are required to provide children with special educational needs a “free appropriate public education.” Due to advances in medical technology, an increase in the number of children living in poverty, and the requirement to educate children in their local schools rather than in outside institutions, more children with special needs are entering and being served in the public schools. As a result, special education (SPED) expenditures nationally and across Massachusetts have risen dramatically in the last decade. Exemplifying this, Brookline’s expenditures on SPED programs have increased about 70% since fiscal year 2001 — the cost of SPED services has grown by close to 30% per year. As a result, SPED now accounts for more than 25% of Brookline’s overall school budget with approximately 20% of enrolled students receiving services (the statewide average in Massachusetts in approximately 17% of enrolled students).

Given constraints on state and local budgets, these mandated increases in SPED spending mean that school districts are increasingly forced to cut other services (e.g., honors programs, arts and music curriculum, athletics, and early childhood programs) in order to sustain balanced budgets.

This exceptional growth in special education expenditures is a national issue. The Innovation Fund introduced three programs to address this issue directly: Tutorial (for students in grades 10–12), Freshman Tutorial, and Enhanced Tutorial. These programs have not only reduced the cost of special education within Brookline High School by approximately $240,000, but they have also met the needs of students with less serious yet notable learning issues within the mainstream of the school community and without having to provide them with costly SPED services.

The Tutorial Program represents a radical change in the structure and organization of the school. With increasing interest in educating students with disabilities in inclusive settings, and with federal requirements mandating that all students achieve high academic standards, BHS identified an opportunity to restructure its approach to special education.

The BHS Tutorial Program began as a pilot program in 2002 involving eight teachers and 40 students to test the theory that individualized academic support would enhance the academic performance of students challenged by mild learning difficulties with the same success as a more expensive special education alternative.

BHS Tutorial now serves students with any of the following academic profiles:

• Students needing assistance to meet the course expectations of an Honors or Advanced Placement class;
• Students with organizational difficulties;
• Students needing additional review of course content to gain mastery of material;
• Students operating “under the radar” who could benefit from individual support.

In collaboration with their Tutorial teachers, students identify specific focus areas for improving academic performance and receive individual content-based tutoring. Class time is divided between personalized consultation in content areas and independent practice (where the student implements recommended strategies).

A two-year evaluation study was completed in 2004, led by Thomas Hehir of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. It concluded that the program was equally as effective as special education services for students with mild learning disabilities with regard to standardized test scores, and slightly more effective in improving course grades. The report praised the Innovation Fund’s Tutorial Program as an innovative and impressive alternative to traditional special education programs for these students. 

In 2006, Watertown High School launched its own Tutorial Program based on the BHS Innovation Fund model. Lexington High School has also reviewed our program and is examining ways to incorporate many of the program elements into their curriculum. Detailing the Tutorial’s support of special needs students, a professional paper authored by BHS Headmaster Dr. Robert Weintraub and Fund Co-Chair Julie Joyal Mowschenson entitled “Beyond Special Education: A New Vision of Academic Support in the 21st Century” will be published in the winter of 2009 by the Phi Delta Kappan, the country’s leading educational journal.

Engineering By Design

After initial funding from the BHS Innovation Fund, Engineering by Design is fully integrated into the Brookline High School curriculum. See the classroom space and hear from Mr. Aubrey Love about the course here.

Engineering by Design was launched in the fall of 2006. The Program was designed to address a major national issue:

• Fewer college students, particularly females, are majoring in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) despite the technology boom.
• Massachusetts had been ranked second to last of New England states among Science and Technology majors.
• Future economic growth nationally depends upon STEM talent.

Engineering by Design was developed by teachers from all areas of the BHS Science Department in collaboration with the Tufts University School of Engineering. Together, they created a curriculum challenging students to identify problems, design, build, and test their solutions. The program offers students a look at the fundamentals of engineering, allowing them to take on the roles of engineers as they design solutions to real world problems. Projects are interdisciplinary in nature and draw from the fields of Biomedical, Chemical, Electrical, Civil, Environmental, Mechanical, and Materials Science Engineering. Projects include building and programming robots, designing clean energy storage devices, and modeling real-time biosensors. Students explore the cutting edge of biomedical engineering as well as examining the accomplishments and failures of important projects throughout history.

Students who take this course at BHS are more prepared to make an informed career decision regarding engineering. Furthermore, students should discover that engineering is fun, interesting, and intellectually rewarding. These students:

• Learn the range of engineering disciplines by surveying several areas of this profession;
• Develop problem-solving skills;
• Collaborate as part of a team on long-term projects;
• Learn that design is a structured process; and
• Apply the principles of design to projects with practical and useful benefits to society.

The Program was successfully launched in 2006. Since its inception, teachers of the course have observed a trend that every year students produce new and more sophisticated designs than the year before and the class data as a whole improves.

“I chose to take Engineering by Design because I learn a lot more through hands on activities,” said one Engineering by Design student. “I have a hard time keeping focused when I am just lectured to all day. This program taught me all of the things necessary to do if you want to be a good engineer. It takes time, designing, planning and patience. It also showed me how fun engineering can be. After doing this program I feel like I can fix, design, or build anything. My favorite part of this program has been to put my creative mind into physical things. My other classes don’t allow me to express my creative ideas.”

BHS Writes

Putting writing at the center of the BHS culture.

Currently over 300 students (Semester 1) / Over 600 students (Writing Center) / 18 teachers / 30 student writing coaches

Launched in 2010, this program makes writing central to the culture of BHS by focusing on both students and faculty as active and evolving writers. The program offers teachers across all disciplines the incentive and the support to reflect on their own experience as educators and to publish their writing. The Writing Center provides peer support for less confident student writers through a student-staffed writing center (the student version of Teachers Mentoring Teachers).

BHS Writes is oriented around three core goals:

1. Nurture a writing culture at BHS that reaches all levels of its community — students and staff alike.
2. Encourage BHS educators to write and publish their stories and to support them in doing so.
3. Identify students in the school who are adept writers and train them to be compassionate and effective coaches for other students who are less confident as writers.

Why This Program is so Important for Brookline Students
The College Board’s National Commission on Writing has acknowledged the widespread and pressing need to create stronger culture of writing in American schools. The Commission’s 2003 report asserts, “American education will never realize its potential as an engine of opportunity and economic growth until a writing revolution puts language and communication in the proper place in the classroom.” The report observes that the “always time-consuming” process of writing — both the teaching and the practice of it — has become “increasingly shortchanged throughout the school and college years in America. … Of the three ‘R’s, writing is clearly the most neglected.” We are in the Information Age, and in this complex, “high-technology world,” writing is no longer strictly “thought on the page”; it is also “thought on the screen.” Yet even in this text-saturated culture of the twenty-first century, writing “whether on paper or on screen, … is an overlooked key to transforming learning in the United States.”

To address this problem, writing centers and Writing Fellows programs have been established at many schools, particularly at the university level: Brown University, Barnard College, Boston College, Brigham Young, California State Universities, CUNY schools, Lafayette College, Providence College, Swarthmore, Texas A & M, and Tufts University, to name just few. The principle behind these initiatives is that “Writers at all levels benefit from good feedback, and that’s why the Writing Fellows Program recruits undergraduate students to work with their peers in courses across the curriculum. Writing Fellows are chosen for their strength as writers and their interest in helping others to improve their writing… Writing Fellows do not grade papers. As peers, Fellows serve as sympathetic readers, providing informed, constructive criticism directed toward the argumentation, analysis, organization, clarity and style of papers. Writing Fellows work in a spirit of collegiality, helping to extend intellectual discourse beyond the classroom. Mutually engaged, Fellows and Fellows ultimately do more than focus on writing; they shape their own and each other’s education.” (www.brown.edu/Student_Services/Writing_Fellows).

At the high school level, writing centers and Writing Fellows programs have not been so widely or successfully established, largely because of schedule and budget limitations. Some public school ventures have taken root: Mountain Valley High School in Rumford, Maine, and Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook, Illinois, have both established writing centers that use peer tutors. Locally, Newton North High School has instituted a writing center, which was originally staffed by teaching aides. Budget cuts, which tightened staffing, required that they rework their model this year into a peer-tutoring system. All of these centers reinforce “writing as a process” and create “a low-risk environment … with its goal to make students better writers and thinkers beyond the paper they are working on”. Because they welcome writing from all subjects, they reinforce the Writing Across the Curriculum principle that writing is a “method of learning” and “produces better thinkers” (T. Tierney and Shanahan, [1991]).

What distinguishes the BHS Writes program from these others initiatives is its three-tiered approach (as outlined in Program Abstract). It embraces both students and faculty as active and evolving writers, equally engaged in learning and communication that reaches beyond the classroom and into the community. Students and teachers alike will be encouraged—and provided the support — to think of themselves as writers. For too many, writing is something assigned and assessed. This program aims to change that view of writing and to cultivate a culture in which writing is an integral part of who we are, how we interact, and how we contribute to society.

The Social Justice Leadership Program

Supporting Student Action for Justice and Education.

After initial funding from the BHS Innovation Fund, the Social Justice Leadership Program is now fully integrated into the Brookline High School curriculum. Watch a video interview with teacher Kate Leslie here.

The Brookline community has traditionally welcomed innovation in areas that nurture the development of responsible citizenship and ethical debate. Presently Brookline High School offers students a variety of community service opportunities as well as coursework on social issues. However, as important and beneficial as these opportunities are, they are all too often limited either by the confines of a classroom experience or in the service they aim to achieve.

The primary goals of SJLP are as follows:

• To equip students with the tools necessary to become active leaders in the community of ‘change makers’;
• To nurture a profound sense of citizenship that incorporates humility, global awareness and social responsibility;
• To cultivate an interest in particular areas of concern and gain a sense of their own individual importance as an agent of change;
• To transform students to endeavor to create justice in their own lives and also the communities they seek to impact.

Further, the program seeks to distinguish between community service and social justice, emphasizing collective rather than individual responses to injustice, and transformative rather than temporary relief from social problems. Social Justice Leadership aims to fill a void, creating a novel program offering students an experience that is student-defined and action-oriented.  It complements the existing student group, Student Action for Justice and Education (SAJE) — where there is a clear demand for more structured and supported social justice work.

The core of the program is completion of an internship project in a local social justice organization. A program coordinator procures internship placements for students and provides supportive curriculum, which includes readings, speakers, and opportunities to share experiences. Activities include:

• Trainings on issues of racism;
• Visit to a prison, in conjunction with discussions on socio-economic class and race;
• Speaker series on an array of social issues, such as: gay marriage, low-income housing, wealth and equality, and environmental justice (domestically and internationally);
• Field trip to and student exchange with a Boston inner-city school;
• Tours of Boston neighborhoods, in conjunction with discussions on environmental justice.

The program offers students social justice leadership training that includes defining and refining personal mission statements, collaborative organizing to achieve social justice goals, and formalized training in effective leadership skills. Seminar topics align with quarterly foci: identity, organizing to make change, identifying issues of interest and leadership. Seminars are also a forum to analyze internship experiences and evaluate writing.

Students who complete trainings, internship and attend seminars receive certification in social justice advocacy.

“There are countless examples around the world of students — including high school students and younger — who made a huge difference in the way we see things,” teacher Roger Grande says. “One of the great things about BHS is we don’t shy away from mature topics,” Grande continued. “This is a crucial time to meet kids around issues. They learn history in a more sophisticated way.”

Go to the bottom of this page to read the mission statement of Sadye Sagov, BHS 2009, and Social Justice Leadership participant.

They Can Change the World

Medical Interpretation and Translation

Training students to become Spanish/English medical interpreters.

Currently 16 students / 1 teacher

Offered through the BHS the World Languages Department, this course begins by training students to become Spanish/English medical interpreters. For the first year, the target group of students will be seniors who can speak, read, and write fluently in English and Spanish. Credit earned may be applied to either a student’s World Language or Career Ed profile.

Shadowing opportunities for the second semester have been secured at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and at Beth Israel Hospital. Cori Green, the program leader, continues to research connections with other local hospitals and health facilities for more experiential learning opportunities.

There is a possibility of expanding the program to train students who are bilingual in English and another language if the program is successful. These students should have an interest in the sciences and/or medical professions. It is recommended that they complete the Medical Careers Class prior to taking the Medical Interpretation and Translation Course (in their sophomore or junior year), but it is not a requirement. These students should be emotionally mature in order to adequately deal with the serious issues that may arise in a medical capacity.

Background
For the past 20 years in the World Language Department we have been trying to figure out how to best serve the heritage language speaker population. Since then, the Hispanic population at Brookline High School has increased. Maria Carreira, a professor of Spanish at California State University in Long Beach states that “it is best to separate heritage and non-heritage language learners because their needs are so different.” Many other heritage language experts agree. Yet, at the present moment we include heritage speakers in the same classes as non-heritage language learners. Medical Interpretation and Translation highlights the strengths of the heritage speakers and help them to grow in an authentic way. Another growing body of students are those who have completed our highest level of Spanish (5AP) by the time they have finished their junior year. This number will continue to increase now that we have Spanish in the elementary schools.

Why this Program is so Important for Brookline Students

Who are heritage speakers?
Heritage languages expert Guadalupe Valdés, a professor in the School of Education at Stanford University, gives a widely-cited definition of a heritage language-learner as an individual “who is raised in a home where a non-English language is spoken, who speaks or merely understands the heritage language, and who is to some degree bilingual in English and the heritage language” (The Language Educator, February 2011).

Why do heritage speakers need a separate Spanish class? Why can’t they be placed in the existing Spanish classes?
Heritage-language learners study Spanish for different reasons than non-heritage-language learners. According to the results of the National Heritage Language Survey conducted by Maria Carreira and Olga Kagan, 50.2% of heritage-language learners said they were studying Spanish to make connections with family and friends in the United States. However, the curriculum in a Spanish class often focuses on the Spanish-speaking world. “Carreira believes that for heritage language learners, lessons should be meaningful and authentic in the U.S. context” (The Language Educator, February 2011).

Heritage-language learners have a more personal connection to the language, and they come to the classroom with valuable skills and knowledge. In the past, however their skills were devalued. “‘What prevailed before was the deficit version — that they don’t speak well, and their knowledge should be eradicated and we should start anew’…Her research showed that instead we should build on what they have” (The Language Educator, February 2011). We need to emphasize that heritage-language learners’ second language is a huge asset, especially to speakers of Spanish, whose language and culture is often denigrated.

ACTFL (the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) suggests that language programs can ensure the academic success of heritage speakers by providing the following:

• Curriculum design that reflects the fact that the needs of native speakers and heritage speakers are often significantly different from non-native and non-heritage speakers;
• Challenging curriculum that builds upon the existing linguistic skills and the cultural heritage and knowledge of the students;
• Assessments that integrate language, culture, and literature for all students Pre-K through 16;
• Opportunities for heritage and native speakers to become involved in their language communities beyond the classroom; and
• Systems to award credit or appropriate placement for oral and written proficiency and prior learning for native and heritage speakers.

Why medical interpretation?
Bilingual students possess an existing skill that, with development, could offer them a means to provide an important service to others and a means to support themselves. According to the results of the National Heritage Language Survey, 71.1% of Spanish speakers said they were studying Spanish with a future career or job in mind. Medical interpretation is a growing field despite times of high unemployment. A new study published in the book Closing America’s Job Gap indicates that English translation and foreign languages is among the top ten emerging job opportunity sectors. According to the 2011 Hot Careers for College Graduates, a study published by UC San Diego Extension, Spanish/English Translation/Interpretation is one of the top ten best career choices of the moment. This is because the Hispanic population is the largest minority in the U.S. and it is the fastest growing. Translators and interpreters are needed in a variety of industries, but “[i]n particular, demand is strong for interpreters and translators in the health care and legal fields, due to the critical nature of the information.” As a result of these factors, the UC study predicts a large growth in employment in Spanish English Translation/Interpretation within a ten-year span: “Growth in employment within this field is projected to increase in the United States by 22 percent between 2008 and 2018.”

At Brookline High School we are fortunate that we are in such close proximity to many of the finest hospitals in the country, enabling students to shadow and train with highly qualified interpreters. They will thereby have the opportunity to put the skills they have learned into practice in a real-world setting, which has long been a core-value of courses offered in the Career Ed and a goal of the World Language Department.