Reply to Question about middle school English differentiation

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "Question about middle school English differentiation "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think there are two issues here, and they might need to be tackled separately.

1) Curriculum: MCPS has decided that all MS-aged kids would have access to the "Advanced English" curriculum. However, within that curriculum, there are massive disparities across schools. Some MS-ers never read a book in "Advanced English," while others read several per year.

Why the huge swing? MCPS has never said and the only reason folks know it exists is people speaking across schools.

2) Tracking: Back when MCPS introduced "local norming" to the middle school magnet process, there was an explicit promise that those kids would be cohorted. I'm not sure if they ever followed through, but parents should put pressure on to hold them to that promise.[/quote]

+1. There was a whole thread a week or so ago about no novels being read in MS, which was a real surprise to some of us as novels are assigned each quarter.  Just to verify I asked about it at back to school night this year and English teacher’s response was last year due to Covid they read less novels but this year the plan was to go back to 1-2 per quarter with some of those being choice novels.[/quote]

I'm the PP and as far as I can tell there is no rhyme or reason to which schools are having kids read novels and which are not. It's not rich vs. poor schools, or geographically concentrated. The ability to engage with an entire book is an age-appropriate skill for MS-aged kids and it is deeply unfortunate that MCPS is not enforcing some sort of uniform standard across the district. [/quote]

It’s really strange.  Not sure why some schools are not assigning or doing choice novels at least 2 times a year.  They can use Studysync the remainder of the time to focus on specific  skills.  But engaging with a text and having class discussions is helpful.  [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics