Today I visited Hunter College Elementary School in Manhattan. It's a primary school with a high school on top! 25-40% of pupils who leave the high school join The Ivy League, the top universities in the USA. In the UK our equivalent is Oxbridge, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The school falls into the category of 'gifted' school and only admits pupils who have tested and shown that they are higher ability learners.
I met Mr Randy Collins the principal of Hunter Elementary and also the director of the entire campus. He took me round to the entrance hall where the 6th Grade (year 7) pupils has set up an activity that they'd been planning while learning about probability. Grade 2 (year 3) children were playing the fairground games that they'd created. I was given some tickets and played a few games. Each game cost a ticket & if you won, you got 2 back. The PTFA provided prizes for children who'd collected certain numbers of tickets.
Next I was introduced to a Year 3 class who were working on patterns by playing card games. They had to lay 12 cards out and make 'sets' of 3 cards and could group them according to their colour, shape, pattern or number. They were considering 4 different variables. Next I met with Miss Sirota one of the 6th Grade teachers. She was the one who had answered my first email and made the visit happen. We talked about activities and projects that both schools could share. Some great possibilities. For example, Miss Sirota's class are soon to study an Agatha Christie book and would love to learn more about British country homes, the kind of place where her stories are set. Perhaps we can find a country house near our school and film it for the children in New York. In the same way Trellech children could learn a lot about The Big Apple from friends at Hunter. We talked about the possibly of setting up a shared website and/or blog to share information.
At lunchtime I got a cab up to The Bronx and met up with the other headteachers. This afternoon we were at Francisco Oller School which has over 300 pupils. Once again I was really impressed by the children and the staff and the tranquility of the place. The Bronx is a tough neighbourhood with many social barriers and hurdles to wellbeing. I didn't hear a single shout, just calm and the children were inquisitive and, when I spoke with them, pretty friendly. I had a real feeling that Hollywood treats places like this really badly. Maybe they used to be dark depressing and dangerous places bit again all I saw today was colour and vibrancy....and very high quality teaching. Teachers I saw talked in such a positive way and constantly suggested that the children were doing well and could do well. One thing that was really evident today was that next to every piece of displayed work was an assessment sheet with clear simple marking and an explanation of the 'grade' that the work got.
This school uses what's called a linked 'model' so the health and support services are not in the school but very nearby and the staff escort the children when they need to go for treatment.
Again I was aware today that the decisions about how this support is provided can't be made in the school, they need to be made by the people who lead and manage the support departments and they need to split up the money in a different way.
When you spend the money making sure that people work in the school with the children (people like nurses, social workers, community workers, dentists etc) it means that you know the children are looked after and that they are ready and able to learn. Everyone is working to help the children IN the school and shaping their minds and telling them all the time that they can and should have dreams and that those dreams could come true.
Later tonight we are meeting again to talk about what we have learned this week.
