Sticking with students

By Sarah Leavenworth / Leader staff

POLSON — A Polson High School science teacher given the task of sticking with some of the school's most at-risk students took the mandate personally — and literally.

Earth Science teacher Mike Sitter, an educator involved in the Polson High School Cohort Program, said his approach to working with freshmen and sophomores on the brink of failing classes and dropping out of school has involved flexibility, creativity and plenty of glue.

Sitter told the Superintendent's Community Council Thursday that one of his novel teaching approaches involves gluing assignments to his students' notebooks, helping them better keep track of their work.

Sitter said he's blown through 36 bottles of rubber cement since the program was implemented during the 2006-07 school year, and has since switched to compiling paperwork in three-ring binders.

Sitter's glue approach may have failed, but by all accounts, the Cohort Program — English and science classes taught by general education teachers with the assistance of support staff — is a statistical success.

The program

The Cohort Program includes science teachers Sitter and Brett Morehouse (biology), English teacher Lori Dickson and aides Kim York and Tanya Elliott. Kick-starting the program, Kimzey said, required the educators to completely revamp their curriculum and teaching methods. The Cohort teachers focus on "depth over breadth," or core concepts, in the subject matter; students are assigned no homework, unless they fail to complete classroom work on time. The program focuses instead on guided practice during class time. Cohort students do not take semester finals and their tests tend to be shorter than the tests in the same general education classes.

Cohort student, identified for the program by grades and test scores, attend their English and Earth Science classes for 100 minutes daily rather than 50 minutes, and their overall course load is reduced by one. When possible, students are separated into classes by gender, and the Cohort educators work with the middle school guidance counselors to make decisions about which Cohort class students should be placed in. The small class sizes foster strong relationships between students and teachers, Kimzey said, and the initial success students experience with the Cohort Program renews their excitement in education.

One struggling student became the school's Student of the Quarter and is now "among our highest fliers," according to Kimzey.

The students have taken field trips to news stations to learn about the weather, Glacier National Park and a mine in Butte, part of the Cohort Program's emphasis on hands-on learning.

By the numbers

During the 2006-07 school year, all but two of 31 students participating in the Cohort Program earned a freshman English credit. The average grade of the English students was 77.5 percent - the first time, Sitter and Kimzey noted, that many of the students had ever received a passing grade.

Sitter's Earth Science Cohort students similarly thrived in 2006-07, with 23 of 26 earning a science credit with an average grade of 76 percent.

The Cohort debut, in fact, was so successful that Kimzey decided to springboard from the freshmen's success into a sophomore year program. In addition to Cohort Program freshman English and Earth Science, Polson High School now offers a sophomore English course and biology.

The statistics from the first semester of this school year mirror last year's data: all 11 students in the freshman English Cohort Program passed the course with an average grade of 83 percent; 14 of 15 sophomore English students in the program received the course credit with a 78 percent average; 100 percent of the 16 Earth Science students passed with an 83 percent average; biology students received an average grade of 85 percent, with 13 of 13 students earning the course credit.

Cohort's roots

Kimzey said he saw a program like Cohort implemented successfully in the North Dakota school district he formerly worked for.

After assuming the assistant principal role at Polson High School, Kimzey said he was interested in pursuing similar curriculum for the average of 30 kids yearly who were failing courses or dropping out. A group of freshmen were having to repeat core courses like English and Earth Science, resulting in larger classes and strain on teachers. Failure, Kimzey said, also gave the struggling students the impression that they couldn't succeed in the classroom, Kimzey said.

Though Kimzey said getting the program off the ground was challenging, "in the long run, I believe it's much more efficient."

Kimzey attributes part of the program's success to its design, but said Cohort is making a difference because of the teaching and support staff.

"I would rather not do it at all than do it with the wrong people," Kimzey said. "We've got the right people in place."