Draft Day

Being into sports, I always felt as though putting together classes every spring is very much like a draft. Normally the fourth grade teachers will convene in a room during planning time and write out cards for each of the students. The cards contain information about a student's ELA and math proficiency, whether they are a multilingual learner (MLL), receive extra support (IEP) or have potential behavioral issues. 

Then we begin to split up the cards, usually beginning with gender, then with English Language Proficiency. We then begin to look at the 'other cards', those are the students with IEPs and emotional or behavioral issues and distribute those students evenly throughout the grade level, taking special care to make sure that the students that don't do well together are separated. The same way that not all adults get along...the same is the case for students, so some students just can't be in the same class. 

We then make little tweaks taking into account other factors. There are some teachers that have relationships with previous sudents' families, so that may be a fit for the sibling. There may be the reverse, where a teacher had some difficulties with a student, so they ask to not get the sibling of that student.

Draft Day is tough. There are a lot of moving parts and it all ends up feeling like a blur. Also, you aren't making decisions about your class, you are making decisions about the grade above yours.

When looping with your class though...Draft Day is very exciting, because you are putting together your own class. You get to see it being built in the moment.

In 'The Looping Handbook: Teachers and Students Progressing Together' by Grant, Johnson and Richardson, there are some really astute observations about building classrooms when looping. They make some points about not creating an elitist program by putting all the gifted students in one class, or balancing out special needs students amongst the grade and creating potential friction with unequal class size. 'As teachers, we are all going to have to accept the fact that we will be having lots of children coming to school with lots of problems, from now on. But these children need to be distributed evenly among all the classrooms in the schools, so that one or two classes aren't impacted more heavily than others, to the detriment of the students in those programs.'

I knew going into the day that I was not going to leave any student behind. The plan was to take them all with me and to add two students...Gloriela and Hunter. I had enjoyed working with Gloriela, a smart, quiet and kind young girl, in our RICAS After-School Program. Hunter had been in Jenna Andrade's fourth grade class and she told me, 'Please take Hunter. He will thrive with you and all he will bring is joy to your class.'

When we started building rooms though, we realized that with PPSD's new classroom structure includes 'bridge rooms' which are a new take on newcomer rooms (with extra support for students that are new English language learners). I decided, even though I am fully TESOL (Teaching English to Students of Other Languages) certified that I wanted to keep my class as complete as possible and not teach in the bridge room. Even though there were no other teachers in the grade level at this time, we needed to build the classes as if there were three teachers at the grade level.

A few days before building classrooms, Courtney had asked me if I would be willing to take on one of Andrea Luisi's more difficult students citing that she had made great strides during the year and was in a much better place emotionally. I thought about it and ultimately decided to do it, knowing that my class would probably be at 24 students (26 is the maximum roster in Rhode Island).

When we started to build the bridge room, we realized that we would have to send two of my students that were new to the country with lower scores on ACCESS testing to the bridge room. In turn, I took one of Jenna's students out of the bridge room and moved them with me. This meant I would have 20 current students and then add 4 more from other rooms.

That would seem like a big number for most, but I was really excited about continuing with this group and I felt as though the new additions to the classroom would be terrific.