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The Cape Henlopen School District is full of great teachers, but district Superintendent George Stone says many are using outdated teaching methods that will not raise student achievement or test scores.
Stone is calling for a districtwide overhaul of teaching methods to get Cape classrooms up to date by collaboration or school board policy. Speaking at the board’s Thursday, Oct. 23 meeting, he said the district must have top-notch instruction in every classroom.
Some Cape classrooms are “out of this world,” said Stone. Yet, in visiting others, he said he found many teachers are not using best practices proven to raise test scores and achievement levels.
Stone said accepting the bell-curve theory that a majority of students are average, with a few outstanding ones and a few who lag behind, is accepting outdated thinking.
Stone said if teachers do not update teaching methods, Cape will never ensure all students meet high academic standards.
J. Cagney France, business education teacher, spoke on behalf of district teachers who were given a copy of Stone’s presentation. He told board members teachers cannot be expected to teach a certain model if they have not been trained in it. “We need to have instruction to learn what you want us to do and how you want us to do it,” he said.
Cape Henlopen High School Principal John Yore said during his school improvement report, “We can’t go into a classroom and expect someone to be doing something we have not told them about.”
He acknowledged teachers ma DAWN received funding from Maryland and Virginia, the University of Delaware and the Center for the Inland Bays.y not be trained in the latest theories and methods and that they may not understand best practices proven to raise test scores.
Stone said it would take more than 25 years to teach Delaware’s curriculum. Public schools have students for just 13. He called for prioritizing curriculum, changing lesson plans and relying less on textbooks.
Lesson plans must be taught from beginning to end – not bell to bell – said Stone. He said lesson plans must answer critical questions, improve student vocabulary and allow students to write summaries of lessons along the way. Writing during learning is one of the best ways to retain material, he said.
Teaching by textbook alone leads to 70 percent retention of material, but textbooks don’t fully correlate with standardized tests because they often appear on the market four to five years after the version of the test they were designed for, said Stone.
Stone said establishing classroom learning environments, with posters and instructional material on the walls, benefits pupils. He said he sees far more high school classrooms with plain walls than elementary ones. Students have been shown to benefit from passive learning.
Dressing up plain walls may require weekend, early or late hours from teachers, said Stone.
Stone cited methods by education guru Max Thompson that can help schools with diverse student bodies reach 90 percent success on standardized tests. Stone said Thompson will be working with all 19 of Delaware’s school districts on issues relating to standardized tests.
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