As budget season hits its stride, and the political war between charter and regular public schools is at high pitch, it is refreshing to find there are instances where the two sides get together for the betterment of the city’s students.
Such was the case Saturday, when educators from the City’s Department of Education and Uncommon Schools spent the day together as part of a charter-district collaboration that is focused on raising student achievement in Brooklyn.
“It’s a pleasure to see how many of you came out here on a Saturday,” DOE Chancellor Carmen Farina said to the over 130 teachers and principals in the cafeteria of Uncommon Charter High School, 1485 Pacific Street in Crown Heights, a brisk walk away from Bedford-Stuyvesant. “One of the things we are really working towards is much more collaboration between charters and districts.”
Uncommon Schools currently operates 22 public charter schools in Brooklyn. The full day professional development session is part of a series the charter network offers for district teachers from Community School Districts 16, 18, 19 and 23 in Central Brooklyn. Over 40 district schools were represented at Saturday’s event.
The collaborations between Uncommon, which serves over 7,500 students in Brooklyn, and DOE superintendents, principals, and teachers has been going on for several years.
Farina has said she’s been impressed with the systems that Uncommon uses at its schools that support teachers with a regular coaching and feedback loop to help teachers get better at their craft.
Saturday’s session focused on “Cold Call,” a technique featured in the global best-selling book “Teach Like A Champion,” which was written by Uncommon Schools’ Managing Director Doug Lemov. “Cold Call” is a technique in which teachers set the expectation for students that they may be called on to answer a question or share their opinion at any time, thereby increasing student engagement in the classroom. On Saturday, teachers role-played with the technique, at times pretending to be students so their colleagues could practice with them.
Taking a poll of the teachers in the room, Farina asked how many learned something on Saturday that they will implement on Monday. Nearly every hand in the room went up.
Uncommon Schools is nationally recognized for its teacher training work. Uncommon’s system of supporting teachers is credited with helping it to reverse the socioeconomic achievement gap with wealthier suburbs. Uncommon NYC elementary students outperformed non-economically disadvantaged students in the state by 23 percentage points in math and 12 percentage points in English in the most recent state exams.
About 80% of Uncommon Schools NYC students qualify for free or reduced priced lunch and nearly all are black or Latino. Uncommon’s students graduate from college at five times the rate of low-income students nationally.
“I don’t care if you’re a public school, private school, or charter school, they are still our babies, they are still our scholars, let’s turn them into leaders of tomorrow,” said Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams who also came to visit the workshop and commended the educators for being there on a Saturday to hone their teaching skills.
Senator Jesse Hamilton sent his chief of staff, Jarvis Houston, who noted that Uncommon Schools along with several community based projects that empower the community, have also been working with Hamilton’s groundbreaking Campus partnership, which is bringing high-tech educational opportunities to public housing residents and youth in Brownsville.
“Our goal is to continue strengthening relationships with parents and teachers and to provide a high quality education to our scholars,” said Houston.
The DOE-Uncommon collaboration will continue in March with another full-day professional development.
