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IDs first, thank you.
Good morning Summer, how are you?
SUZETTE DYER: The Urban Assembly School
for Law and Justice is a small school in downtown Brooklyn.
It's about 454 students
and a cap of about 120 students in our incoming freshman class.
ROBERT HUGHES: What I think we did well in New York City
was not only to create smaller units of school, small schools,
but to look at the variety of systems
that intersect with school.
It's really a grand active redesign
of what we think about as secondary education.
Thank you, have a good day.
Good morning, have a good day.
HUGHES: One of the untold stories of the small schools
is that we required every school to begin
with a community partner.
We have a really strong partnership
with our founding partner,
which is a law firm in Manhattan.
MERILEE VALENTINO: In ninth grade,
the students have multiple opportunities to go there
and to really think about the law and being a lawyer.
We did a trial where we talked about cases
and we did the defendant and the prosecutor,
and we got to see real life lawyers
display that case as well.
When you have the support of the community,
I think it makes for a richer learning environment.
So this whole theme of law, justice,
speaking up for yourself, they're very interested in it.
MATTHEW McRAE: Literacy is a huge component
of our ninth grade here.
VALENTINO: We have students who come in
multiple grades below grade level,
so we really think about building a year
that has explicit literacy strategies throughout every unit
and that builds upon previous units.
Daniel, can you remind us what the pre-reading procedures are?
"What are the predictions you can make about
what this would be about?"
McRAE: The skills of annotation
and analysis and questioning in an English class
work in a science class.
They're just annotating and analyzing different things.
Some hair can be sticking off of the slide, that's not a problem.
Literacy is your ability to understand the content
that's in front of you and make connections.
Look at that tiny piece, look!
Keep looking and I'll move it, look.
See it?
It's not focused.
Is it lightly or tightly?
McRAE: The literacy strategies that are used,
not only do they translate from subject to subject,
but they also allow students to use literacy
in a completely different way.
So what did you add to your definition?
Two sides are congruent in the included angles.
VALENTINO: We have the agenda in front of us.
We're going to try to keep to time.
McRAE: In grade team meetings,
we discuss what's called Kid Talk,
where we present a certain student
and we figure out how they're performing
and how we can make them more successful here at the school.
Today, I was requested to submit an activity
that I would be giving students in my class.
This is designed to help students go through
the scientific thinking and writing that is involved
when you are putting together a lab report.
And one student that we were discussing
is in one of those classes.
VALENTINO: We're going to break up into two different groups,
and then what you should be doing
is having a ten minute conversation
of how this can be modified.
McRAE: Each teacher in the team meeting
gave me specific feedback
on where I can make certain modifications
to help this student and any other student
access the material a little bit more.
RENEE HAMPTON: A lot of those skills that were used before
can be used here in other content areas.
We're teaching kids how to break down information, right?
We're teaching them how to use scaffolds,
how to be critical thinkers.
VALENTINO: The student benefits
from having some things read aloud,
so whether that's in a small group with a teacher
or one on one, that's another alternative modification.
That experience for me was very genuine.
We are all here to help every student that's in front of us,
so therefore, I take the criticism extremely well.
VALENTINO: Next week, bring in work that you've modified,
so thinking about some of the work that we've done today
and applying it to a different assignment
or taking loosely some of these ideas and applying them.
SUSAN KNIGHT: Our student population
typically don't come from college-going families.
Our staff create a sense
that college is possible and probable,
and that begins really with freshman year
so that there's that sense from the beginning
that we have the highest expectations.
We're going to start to think about the things
that you are interested in studying
maybe when you go to college,
or the types of careers that you might want to have
when you leave SLJ.
KNIGHT: I think that what our staff does
is we're the parent with a master's degree
at the kitchen table for 100 kids.
TEACHER: Put a star next to the one that interests you the most.
KNIGHT: There's a caring relationship,
there's that sort of parental, "You have to do it.
"We're not going to let you veer away.
"In our family, this is what happens when you're this age.
You apply to college and you do it very well."
100% of the students here apply to college.
About 90% actually matriculate.
How many people here know somebody who is in college
or has been to college?
Really don't be afraid of the challenge,
because we've got young people
who really are capable of doing amazing thing.
I had science, technology, engineering and math.
HUGHES: We have to create structures
that enable them to do that,
constantly looking at where kids are in skills development,
constantly diagnosing where they are
and then providing that support in real time.
Good, perfect.