February 19, 2017 - 20:49
I have been to my placement twice so far this semester at the Science Leadership Academy. The school is just on the outskirts of Philadelphia, and the majority of the students who come to the school commute from various locations around Philadelphia by public transportation. This is important for the atmosphere of the school, I was at the school last semester as well, and during the SEPTA strike about half of the students were not able to make it. The school has around 100 students per grade, and this is the first year that it is made up of 4 class years. For the past 4 years, they have been adding one class year, making 2017 the first graduating class. Every year as a high school year has been added, a year from the middle school which is now located just on the first floor of the building of the high school, has been taken away and added to Overbrook Elementary. So at this time in the physical building, there is an 8th grade on the first floor and 4 years of high school on the second and third floor. From talking to students and teachers last semester here, there is not a great relationship between the two schools. Overall, it seems that the middle school has more discipline problems with their students and that they do not mesh well with the high schoolers. The student body is overall pretty diverse. Predominately, the students are of color but there is a racial mix.
This school is project based in their classes, there is a large emphasis on collaboration. Most of the assessments and major learning seems to be done task based rather than exams or writing. A lot of championing of innovation and creativity. Each senior has to do a senior capstone project which almost all self-directed as to what they do it on. There is also a lot of attention put on to technology. Each student has their own chrome book from the school that almost all of their assignments are on. Every class that I have seen here all the students are on their laptops using them for an assignment. However, only classes that I have seen have been science related or a study skills class with a special education teacher. In the school itself, walking around you often see groups of students in the hallway. There are couches around some places, and there is a very fluid movement of students in and out of classes. We were there this semester during lunch periods so this was especially true. Lunch in this school is 65 minutes long, in theory this is so each student has a working lunch where they have time to eat and then time to go see teachers. When talking to one of the teachers, they said this is not always the case and it is hard to get students to come during this time. Overall though, there is an extremely close relationship between students and teachers. Every teacher I have interacted with here and their interactions with students shows a very reciprocal trusting relationship.
For the past two visits, we have been in the "Lit Lab" which is a resource for students to come during their lunch periods to get help with writing. On the first visit, there were no students there so we worked on resources to be used in this lab about citing, plagiarizing, and grammar. On the second week, for the first hour and 15 min about, we had no students and continued to work on resources. Then, one student came in and a Haverford student worked with her on a paper and we got one more student who I worked with. The dynamic of the Lit lab we are having some trouble with mostly because the role feels a little confusing. There is always a teacher present when we work with students and it feels overwhelming to work with a student on a paper when a teacher is listening in, you are much less confident. I also feel that it is a little tricky because I don't feel overall confident in my essay writing abilities to be authoritative. As college students, we all possess writing abilities that allow us to work in this space. However, a little more direction in terms of the quality of writing and what to focus on would be helpful.
Overall, I enjoy being at this school because of the teacher-student relationships and the dynamic that is present. As mentioned, I was at this school last semester as well and it is really nice to be able to be back in the space and see the teacher I was with and continue to build relationships at that school.