An interview with Angela Galvin, Special Education Teacher at Wells Middle School in Southbridge.

What is your role at Wells Middle School?
I’m a sixth grade special education teacher. I co-teach math and English and also support students in science and social studies. In addition, because of the expanded day, I now teach a semester-long elective class on environmental conservation and education. Even with a longer day, it still goes by so fast.

Now that you have more time in the school day, what are you able to do with students that you couldn’t before?
With more time, I’m able to work more closely with my co-teachers and students. I can differentiate instruction better than in the past. We’re able to work in small groups more, do more computer-based work, and embed writing into more of our classes.

What differences have you seen in students because they have more time in your classes?
Because my co-teacher and I give children more attention, we can tailor the work to them more specifically. All students are working on the same standard and lesson, but the work we ask them to do or the work we do with them in small groups fits their needs better. This helps all students, but especially the special education students. Their confidence has been built up because they can actually do the work and then want to do more. They feel comfortable working in a small group and can do the work more consistently. This leads to small successes which lead to bigger successes.

What has it been like for you to teach children when you have more time?
It’s been remarkable. I see the little successes and how they build on each other. To see real growth over time is a huge reward.

Has more time enabled you to work with your colleagues in different ways?
Yes. Definitely. We built our schedule from the ground up and it gives us much more time to work together. It’s a six-day cycle and every other day we have time to meet with our colleagues to plan, have professional development or have department meetings. Last year we met by departments once a month and only had professional development on district-wide professional development days or early release days. Everyone has planning and professional development time now where many of us didn’t before.

Also, we feel calmer now. We’re not so rushed in trying to grab five minutes here or there. We don’t have the pressure of having to find a person. We know we’re going to meet them on a certain day and what we’ll meet about.

This time has definitely brought our staff together. We know each other better and are more comfortable working together and having conversations about the work. It’s built more of a sense that we’re in this together. The additional time helps a lot.

What are you able to do during your professional development time?
We have PD time for 70 minutes once every [six-day] cycle. During this time we read an article and use a protocol to guide our discussion. For the PD time, I’m working with gym, health, art, music, band, creative writing, as well as other special education teachers. I don’t usually work with these teachers, so it’s great to learn with them. I know them better than ever before. In addition to being aligned with the district’s professional development, the topics of the PD were based on the instructional strategies taken from the Research for Better Teaching (RBT) model. Most of our professional development has been around our academic focus of Writing. We also discussed an article revolving around how joyful learning can flourish in schools. We are currently discussing articles on how to give students effective feedback on their writing. In the future, we are going to have the staff that are using our newly identified best practices train our teachers on how to implement them in their own classrooms. When we’re doing professional development, the other teachers are teaching. And the next day, when we teach during this time, the other teachers are doing professional development together.

Have you been able to apply the work you’re doing in the professional development time to your teaching?
Yes, definitely. Because we’ve stuck with topics and we work on them over time, I’ve been able to pull that work into my classroom. I’ve been able to apply some of the work we’ve been doing from RBT.

I know most of the ELT schools are really working on an Academic Focus and School-wide Instructional Practices. How is that going for Wells?
We published our academic focus and have made it very public. Right now we’re working on posting student data. We’re starting off with some more safe data like attendance, but we’re moving forward with putting up our SMARTe goals. On our last district wide half-day professional day we had a faculty meeting where we brainstormed a list of best practices surrounding the area of writing. We then put “dots” on the best practices that we felt the strongest about. Once this activity was completed, we could immediately see the top three best practices. They are placed on our Weekly FYI and our principal is now monitoring for them. Our WMS Best Teaching Practices are: 1) Underline key words and phrases and use them in response; 2) Read the question or prompt before answering or responding in writing; and 3) Demand specific writing details.

The expanded day has also allowed you and other Wells staff to teach new elective classes. Can you tell us about the class you’re teaching?
I’m teaching a class that I’ve designed and created based on the Project Wild curriculum that focuses on environmental conservation and education. I love wildlife and wanted to teach something that I could tie into the standards and share something that I really love. The point of the class is to help them to think about wildlife and humans’ impact on wildlife.

I like it because it’s problem-based learning. I’m not up there lecturing, I’m the facilitator. I present a problem that wildlife faces and the students have to figure out how to solve it. I don’t teach them how to think about wildlife and the environment. I let them grapple with problems and they draw conclusions from their work.

What’s it like teaching with more time? Is it more tiring?
Teaching is always tiring, but I haven’t seen the burnout that maybe I expected. Maybe because we alternate some days teaching additional time and some days meeting with other teachers, we haven’t had that burnout. I’m still surprised by how fast the day goes. The day never drags, it still flies.

Do you have any suggestions for schools that are considering expanding and redesigning their school day?
ELT has been seamless. I expected more bumps. It’s due to the time and effort we took writing the grant. We really let our vision for what we wanted the school to be drive our thinking and the new schedule. We also anticipated problems and tried to work out kinks, ahead of time. We didn’t figure them out all ahead of time, but the time we spent in the summer before school opened helped us be ready. We spent a lot of time working on the curriculum for our new courses and that helped us be ready.