Acceleration - Who’s Doing It?

Toni Enloe
Jan 26, 2009

Nestled in the mountains of Lincoln County, West Virginia sits Duval Community School, a K-8 school with an enrollment of a little over 560 students. The middle school teachers have made it their mission to build confidence through acceleration. After attending the Catching Kids Up workshop, these teachers returned to school determined to make an even greater impact on student learning.

What is Acceleration?

"Acceleration is an instructional model that addresses the 'root causes' of learning difficulty for many students - the lack of prior knowledge, vocabulary, and experiences that are necessary to connect to new knowledge and skills."

Catching Kids Up with Acceleration moves students forward by previewing upcoming new concepts and skills and provides scaffolding for new learning. Acceleration is done prior to students learning these concepts and skills.

What did Duval do differently?

Duval has one "flex" class period each day that had been allocated to reading. During this time students in these classes usually read novels together and worked on vocabulary development. The middle school teachers decided that "flex" period could be used to accelerate those students needing more support.

After attending the Catching Kids Up workshop in early October, the middle school teachers saw an opportunity to address the needs of their struggling students. Their goal was to have the new structure for "flex" time in place by the beginning of the 2nd quarter (end of October). Through many hours of collaboration a plan for acceleration was drafted.

The first step was to identify those students who were scoring "novice" or "partial mastery" in math and ELA on the state test and to determine how many of the "flex" time teachers would be needed for acceleration classes. They determined that they would need two math and three ELA teachers. The middle school team, approximately 16 teachers, redesigned "flex" time. Placing their struggling students with content specific teachers, they created small groups (10-12 students). To accommodate all of the students needing acceleration, an alternating schedule (every other day) was devised.

What are they accelerating?

Teachers are using the Student Learning Maps developed last summer in the Power Curriculum workshop to identify which lessons and/or skills need to be accelerated. They report that collaboration has been the key to their successful implementation.

Are they getting results?

At the end of the second week of implementation teachers were already beginning to see the benefits. One teacher stated that she ran down the hall to the acceleration teacher's class and said, "I don't know what you did, but they got it."

Others reported that they were seeing increased participation and confidence among the accelerated students. "I see a big difference in the "esteem" of certain students that normally don't participate much in class."

In Parts 1 and 2 of Connecting Strategies, we talk about the things that influence student achievement with 50% of achievement being directly attributable to students' Self-Efficacy and Self- Esteem (Competent and Confident). Acceleration can build confidence.

To learn more about Catching Kids Up with Acceleration click here.