No one is teaching to the middle at Hillsboro Elementary/Middle School, winner of the 2014 middle school SCORE Prize. Core academic courses are levelled – in each middle school grade, as many as five different levels of rigor are offered in separate classes. A flexible, creative master schedule provides extra time for students needing subject…
There’s a scoreboard in every fourth-grade classroom at 2014 SCORE Prize finalist Highland Park Elementary in Lenoir City. Sure, the displays could also be called data boards. But Principal David Clinton, a former high school football coach, likes to infuse the school’s data-rich culture with language that is both motivating and meaningful. Highland Park staff…
As eighth-grade students arrive in Scotty Hicks’ classroom at Maryville Junior High, they each pick up an assigned laptop and move to their desks. They know the routine. Students log into the online learning management system, find their daily work, and get to it. They see notes to go over during the lesson, and a…
What is your level of effort? What is the best that you can give? These are questions asked of students daily at SCORE Prize winner Dresden Elementary, according to fourth-grade teacher Honey Cantrell. Students are encouraged to give “their absolute.” And in classrooms driven by creative, engaging, and differentiated instruction, teachers know that students’ best…
Sewanee. Vanderbilt. Georgetown. The homeroom names at KIPP Academy Nashville, a SCORE Prize finalist school, have a familiar ring to them. Howard. Belmont. Georgia Tech. The names were carefully chosen to represent schools with high rates of college completion for Hispanic and black students. Some of these schools are familiar and close to home for…