By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 15, 2007

First in an occasional series on innovation in the classroom

Inez Lemmert, a sixth-grade teacher, motioned toward a tall boy hunched over a thick novel. He was among her students with learning disabilities. But in recent weeks, he had asked for honors-level work and had thrived on the challenge.

In three classrooms along a short corridor at Blue Ridge Middle School in Loudoun County, there were several scenes last week of educational convention turned upside down. Lemmert and colleagues Alisa Gladstone and Amy Wood decided last year to experiment with placing honors, regular and special education students in the same rooms, offering a course that unified social studies and English, and encouraging every child to reach higher than before.

Such innovations are uncommon in U.S. public schools, given the old pressure to conform to tradition and the new one to raise standardized test scores. But plenty of teachers still find that if they are seized by an idea, as Lemmert, Wood and Gladstone were, and can convey that passion to supervisors, they have a chance to see what happens when they go in a different direction.

Most of the 1,166 students at Blue Ridge Middle in Purcellville are in classes that segregate honors and non-honors students and keep English and social studies separate, which is pretty much the situation across the country. Changing those practices "is something that only an enlightened principal will attempt, and she must have great confidence in the teachers and in herself," said Joan Lipsitz, a middle school expert and founder of the Center for Early Adolescence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"I was like, 'Come on, let's try to do reading and history together,' " said Lemmert, 55, who had taught for 30 years. "At first the administration wasn't too keen. I'm not sure why. Then I twisted their arms, and they were like, 'Sure.' "

Assistant Principal Bonnie Soto said it didn't take much to persuade Blue Ridge Middle's principal, Roberta Griffith, given the skill and experience of the three teachers. Griffith arranged training for them. She also saw a benefit in reducing the number of teachers sixth-graders had to deal with each day by combining language arts and social studies.

Putting students of different achievement levels in the same rooms would, the school's administrators thought, help slower-developing students see new possibilities. "Many of those kids think, 'I can do it,' and they do," Soto said.

During one of Lemmert's 20-minute reading periods last week, her students opened a wide assortment of self-chosen recreational reading. One boy had a thick volume titled "Eragon," the first book of the Inheritance trilogy by Christopher Paolini. A girl was reading "Lily's Crossing," an award-winning World War II coming-of-age novel by Patricia Reilly Giff. On the other end of the reading scale was one boy's "Star Wars: Jedi Quest" novel and another boy's copy of USA Hockey magazine.

Each student could see what the others were reading. In the second year of their experiment, the three teachers said the tendency was for students at or below grade level to try books and projects considered above them. "It's more challenging for the kids," Lemmert said. "They bring themselves up to these new expectations, rather than someone dumbing down all the work for them."

Schools and school systems often create labels for learning levels. In Loudoun, children with learning disabilities are called "team-taught" students, because they have a classroom teacher and a special-education teacher. Evelyn E. Baker-Jamieson, 62, fills that role in Lemmert's, Wood's and Gladstone's classrooms. Those who achieve at about grade level are called "academic" students. Those above grade level are labeled "honors" students.

In the three classrooms, honors students have more open-ended essay questions on their tests. They are assigned projects that demand more thought and imagination. But every student has chances to volunteer for higher-level work, the teachers said, and students go over what they learn in discussion groups in which all levels are represented.

Gladstone, 43, said she organizes "thematic literature circles" in which students reading different books discuss common themes, such as friendship. "Last year those circles worked so well," she said. "The team-taught kids are bringing in street knowledge, which they use to interact with the other kids. And you have honors kids who are so factually oriented . . . that sometimes they don't have common sense. It's really neat to see them interact in these groups."

Lemmert said, "Some of my team-taught kids loved it when we did group work in history, because they were very good at discussion, when they might not be able to put it on paper."

Wood, 56, said she and Lemmert had joined forces informally in recent years as Lemmert taught social studies and Wood taught language arts. In Virginia, sixth-graders study U.S. history to 1877. So Wood would have her students read Carolyn Reeder's novel "Shades of Gray" during English lessons, and Lemmert would have them discuss the Civil War events depicted in the book for history lessons. Their teamwork has become more extensive and formalized with the addition of language arts teacher Gladstone.

Parents have been known to complain when honors students are mixed with others, but the three Blue Ridge Middle teachers said only one parent has raised an issue. The mother said she thought her child was supposed to be in an Advanced Placement class. The teachers explained that AP was a high school program and that their honors students would be getting higher-level work. That satisfied her. Parents seemed pleased that their children, used to one teacher handling all subjects in fifth grade, would have one teacher for reading and history in sixth grade, easing their middle school transition.

Pat Graff, a National Council of Teachers of English expert on combining subjects, said middle schools where she works in Albuquerque have taught social studies and language arts together for a decade. Students like it, she said, because seeing connections between the two subjects makes the lessons seem more relevant to the outside world.

At Blue Ridge Middle, students seem to enjoy helping one another out. Lemmert asked one class how an Indian in a dry area not known for furry game could have acquired animal skins. "Trading," a student said. That was the right answer. But another boy was not satisfied.

"He could have made a really cool weapon and killed those animals, those dogs, what are they called?"

"Prairie dogs," another student said.

"Right, prairie dogs," the boy said, taking the group one extra step.