WWMS #2 Community

The school community is academic-focused, with students primarily focused on core subjects like math, English, and science. The students are attentive, respectful to teachers and each other, even during physical education classes. There is not much collaboration among faculty, but within classes, students often work in small groups or as one large group. The teacher encourages collaboration through activities like crossword puzzles with word banks, allowing students to work together and learn from each other. So for the next slide here, we're covering community. I would like to kick this one off with just the, what is the nature of the school community? I think that's probably one of the easier questions to answer. This is a school that's filled with students who are primarily academic focused, mainly with their core subjects. I didn't run into a situation where any of the students were kind of blowing off health class necessarily, but this is most certainly a school that is focused on math, English, science, those types of subjects. But with that said, just their culture of the students as well as their culture of their identities really lends itself to just being attentive students and focused in their classwork and making sure that they're doing the best job they can possibly do, getting the correct answers, those types of things. So in terms of respect to the teacher, that was never really an issue. I didn't have a single moment through any piece of the shadowing where there was a student that was even really disruptive during class where there would need to be any kind of talking to a student after class or any kind of reprimanding even inter-class. So respect to student to teacher, never an issue there. Even student to student, even through some of the physical education classes that I was shadowing as well, most of the students tend to be very respectful to themselves and to the other students in the classroom. So that tended to be like a real highlight and I don't necessarily think that's the case everywhere, but at least in this middle school, these students, they care a lot and I find them to be very respectful. As far as faculty goes, not a ton of collaboration necessarily. There's a lot of communication in terms of moving pieces and the gymnasium and who needs what space and what's going on. So a lot of collaboration in that sense, but not necessarily in the sense of, hey, we're doing this lesson, what do you think about this? Or can I ask you a question about that? It was more so this is what we're doing, the curriculum was given to us by either the state or the community, the township, and then it's really just kind of up to the teacher to put that together. So not a ton of collaboration there. However, a lot of collaboration within the classes. So particularly when working in shadowing with Joe, a lot of his do now activities and even some of the classwork activities really revolved around students either working in small groups or working as just one large group. I wanna say in the previous slide talked about going across the classroom and people just discussing what they thought healthy human qualities were. So this slide here in particular does have a, has a crossword puzzle that Joe used in one of the classes, one of the last classes I was with him for. So some of the handouts actually had a word bank attached to them with the terms for this drug unit. So he would kind of strategically place them out so that not everybody student, not every student had a word bank access. So it would kind of, but he would allow them to team up with each other so that they could collaborate and it would create those opportunities. Of course, they didn't have to, but it was encouraged to collaborate with fellow students. If you didn't have a word bank, well, you might wanna find somebody who did. So those were the ways where he was just trying to just gently nudge them in that direction. Of course, there's gonna be students who are not interested and that's their prerogative, but he was always trying to push that collaborative side of things so that students were working together.