What I did on my summer vacation

Our school staff spent the summer, in addition to doing dozens of home visits to families, working on the tools they need to make sure Domus Academy is a rigorous learning environment with high expectations and a strong school culture. Last year, we were very successful creating trusting individual relationships with students, which helped us move beyond the lack of hope, motivation, and interest we saw in our students—despite their tremendous academic potential.

This year, we want to pair that keen ability to develop relationships with a focus on core values. In fact, we’re spending the first month of school on a school-wide core values unit centered on the names of our students’ homerooms: ICARE (Integrity – Community – Ambition – Respect – Empathy). Each value has associated with it three to five tangible behaviors and actions; students will self-report on how they’re doing, and staff will weigh in as well.

Along with this focus on school culture will be an increased focus on guided reading utilizing a new leveled library, providing students with engaging materials at their reading level. Columbia University’s Readers and Writers Workshop, a method of instruction successfully used in schools for over twenty years, is particularly helpful for schools and classrooms with students reading at a variety of levels. Our students will now be able to find many interesting books at their level and. Students practice skills like inference in a classroom setting, with their teacher modeling the skill, then do small-group classroom work, then independent work on their level using the new leveled library to find interesting books at their individual ability. The more they read books on their reading level, the more successfully they’ll build critical skills such as decoding, fluency, and comprehension.

So Year Two, with its luxury of lessons learned from Year One, will bring a tighter school culture with a foundation of key values and a more rigorous learning environment using proven methods from respected institutions. Add to that our intense social/emotional focus, and you have a whole-child approach to educating youth.