Classroom Snapshot

School: Stephen Decatur Middle School
Location: Berlin, Maryland
No. of Students in School: 650
Teacher: Dr. Janis Currence
No. of Years Teaching: 28 Years
Grade: 7th
Subject: Integrated language arts
No. of Students in the Classroom: 26

Stephen Decatur Middle School is located in Berlin, five miles from Ocean City on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It is the largest of Worcester County’s three middle schools, with approximately 650 students in grades seven and eight, of whom 30 percent are minorities. Decatur draws its students from three areas—a retirement community, a tourist destination, and a rural town. Most live outside walking distance. Families represent a wide range of incomes. Many parents, especially those in Asian American households, are employed at nearby Perdue Farms, while many others work in Ocean City’s thriving tourism industry. Students take the Maryland Functional Reading and Writing tests, which they must eventually pass in order to graduate from high school.

Although its students come from neighborhoods pocketed by both ethnicity and social class, Decatur has a closeknit school community. The building’s four wings house separate schools-within-a-school, each with its own teaching team and student population. This fosters a sense of security and identity by allowing children to interact within a smaller group of peers and adults. Teaching teams, two at each grade level, encourage interdisciplinary learning and create a standard set of behavioral and academic expectations across the day. Jan Currence’s seventh graders know, for instance, that they must use correct punctuation not only in integrated language arts (ILA), but also in science and social studies. Dr. Currence’s team includes two math teachers, two ILA teachers, one social studies teacher, and a science teacher, as well as an educational assistant and an in-class special education resource person. The team has regular meetings to facilitate cross-curricular planning. Class periods are double-blocked to allow greater freedom of instruction.

Within a seventh-grade class of 26 to 28 students, Dr. Currence may have reading levels spanning from second grade through college. According to county mandates, she must focus on particular genres—realistic fiction, historical fiction, mythology, poetry, and drama—but within this structure, she may select the individual texts her students will examine. To accommodate the range of interests and skill levels in her classroom, and to give children a voice in their own education, she allows students great flexibility in what they choose to read. She also reads books aloud to engage children in challenging discussions of texts that are above their reading level but not their comprehension. Individualized learning goals and performance-based assessments are the norm, and Dr. Currence regularly enlists students’ help in developing rubrics and grading criteria.

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