Two paths to knowledge

For students who who always finish their class work early or want more information than you have time to give, try curriculum compacting.

By Waverly Harrell

Brenda LaFayette's seventh-grade students built this model of the respiratory system after completing required class work through curriculum compacting. (Click the photo to enlarge.) (More about the photograph)

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Do you have students who always finish their class work early, or students who want more information than you have time to give them? Brenda LaFayette, a seventh grade science teacher at Wakefield Middle School, has come up with ways to keep those students busy learning while still providing the explanation and repetition her other students need. LaFayette teaches four science units each year (this year, genetics, atmosphere, human systems, and forces and motion). Throughout the year, anchor activity learning centers at the back of the room give students who work quickly a way to earn extra credit. During the middle two units, LaFayette offers the option of curriculum compacting. Students who want to work faster and more independently can complete their required class work in less time and, if they do well on the unit test, spend the remaining weeks working on a project of their choosing.

LaFayette has been teaching for fifteen years, six of them in Wake County. The science classes at Wakefield Middle are heterogeneous, with special needs students and academically gifted students in the same classroom. One of her classes this fall had thirty-five students, while her smallest class had thirty. Since the school has moved to flexible scheduling, each period is sixty-seven minutes long. It’s a long time to keep a large and diverse group of students engaged and productive. “The kids really like the compacting,” LaFayette says. “I really like it. It’s amazing what they do every year. It’s invigorating to watch them.” Together, compacting and learning centers allow her to differentiate the curriculum for students working at different levels and different speeds.

Curriculum compacting

LaFayette explains compacting to the students as one of two paths to knowledge. Each student can choose the traditional teacher-directed path or a student-directed path. For the student-directed path, “you have to be more responsible, more of a self starter. You get less input from me.” If the regular class has eight weeks to complete a unit, curriculum compactors take the unit test after five weeks. If the regular class has seven weeks for the unit, the compactors have four weeks. She gives them all their assignments at the beginning, and they can complete them in any order. “I make sure they understand that there are certain rights and responsibilities. You can have all the materials when you want them. I am here to help you at certain times; I don’t help you all throughout class. Your responsibilities are: you will stay on task, you will complete the work, you will not interrupt my class, you will turn your work in on time.”

[Pullout:Self-motivated students not classified as academically gifted may do very well in compacting, and students with learning disabilities or ADHD may stay on task better when they work at their own pace.] She gives students who want to join the compacting group a contract for their parents to sign. “I give them a deadline for that, because if they’re really responsible and really belong in this group, they’ll bring back that contract by the time it’s due. There are always a few who say, ‘Oh, wouldn’t you just please let me bring it tomorrow?’ And the answer’s no, because then they always want that one more thing, one more thing.” She doesn’t limit the group to students identified as academically gifted. Self-motivated students not classified as AG may do very well in compacting, and students with learning disabilities or ADHD who have trouble focusing in a regular class setting may stay on task better when they can work at their own pace in a smaller group.

Those students whose parents agree to their doing curriculum compacting move to sit in small groups at the back of the classroom. LaFayette lets them group themselves. Participation varies, but on average about 20 percent of a class completes a unit in compacting. LaFayette doesn’t offer compacting in the first or last unit of the year. At the beginning the year she feels she doesn’t know the students well enough to give them that independence, and at the end, “they’re tired, and you have testing, and things come up and they can’t get projects done.”

Management

She provides compacting students with the state objectives for the unit and a study guide listing all their assignments, such as worksheets and graphing activities. “I figure they should know what it is I’m expecting them to learn, and that’s what the state tells me, so I give them the sections of the chapters that fit with the objectives.” Since students may complete the assignments in any order, the teacher has to be well organized and prepared at the beginning of the unit. “I have to have every run-off for my entire unit, all materials, anything they might need has to be ready, because they choose what order they do it in.” The advantage of this system is that once it’s done, it’s done. LaFayette explains, “I don’t have to think about what to do each day because I’ve already done it for them. And then I just add in lab activities and things they wouldn’t necessarily do.”

Some assignments are checked off if the students have completed them and made an honest effort. Others, marked “AP” for application on the study guide, are graded for accuracy. Those activities require the students to apply their knowledge and “tie all the other pieces together.” After LaFayette checks or grades the compacting students’ assignments, they can check their work against her answer keys. They follow an honor system, checking only work that’s already been graded and not sharing their answers with anyone else.

Compacting students are welcome to participate in any labs the regular class does, such as the dissections conducted during the human body unit. LaFayette doesn’t generally require them to hand in lab work, because lab papers are often designed to determine whether the students understood the material, whereas the compacting students “will get out of it what they want out of it. They’ll get the information.”

“They don’t just sit back here for four weeks, then take a test,” LaFayette says. “They have to turn work in. If I don’t get work for say a week, I will say, ‘I’m not getting any work.’ And if they tell me, ‘Oh, I’ve been holding on to it till I get a bunch,’ I’ll say, ‘You need to give it to me.’ Usually that fixes the problem.” Students who still fail to turn work in after prompting are removed from compacting and join the regular class.

Compactors are asked to be quiet and to stay within their part of the classroom. “Basically we create an invisible wall between the two halves of the room. Compactors don’t cross the room unless it’s an emergency or they need to sharpen their pencil.” Of course, LaFayette does monitor them. “You can’t just assume that they’re doing their thing and not keep an eye on them, so you have to be able to divide your attention. But once you get it up and running, it’s self-sustaining. I think once most people do it, they find they like it, and it’s not as hard as they thought.”

Compactors are allowed to ask each other for help on class work—not for specific answers, but for guidance. “They become a really good support group.” If they can’t solve a problem within their group, they’re instructed to move on to another activity and ask the teacher about the problem the next day. LaFayette checks in with the compactors once a day. “I walk around when I check agendas every day. I’ll come back and say, ‘Do you have any questions for me today?’ And if they do, great, we answer those questions. They’re usually about an application activity.”

Compacting allows a middle school teacher to act more like a professor, and the compacting students take on responsibility we often expect only of older students. “You have to be willing to give up some control,” LaFayette acknowledges, and some teachers may find that difficult, at least at first. “I don’t want to be in complete control. As long as you can do it, I’d rather you do it, and I’m just here in case you get stuck. It’s fun to be in that situation when so much of your day is spent answering, ‘What do I write down here now?’” She likes to watch the more independent students take the material and run with it. “They want that control, they like the control, and they feel freed up. And they usually do some amazing stuff.”

Compactors also choose which nights they have homework. They have more assignments than most students could possibly complete in the required class time, so they assign themselves homework three nights a week. “They have to look ahead and say, ‘I think I’m going to get through here. This will be my homework for tonight.’ Maybe they’ve got basketball games on Tuesdays and Thursdays so they do homework Monday, Wednesday, Friday.” The rest of the class usually has homework Monday through Thursday. On the board where their homework is listed, the message for compactors reads “Follow study guide to complete your work.”

Evaluation

After week four or five, when the compactors are supposed to be done with their work on the unit, they take a unit test. (In keeping with their pattern of self scheduling, they are allowed to take this test early, and LaFayette prepares it early, but she recommends they wait until the end of the unit.) “If they get an 85 percent, which is a B, or better, they stay in compacting and they have three weeks to create a project related to the unit. If you don’t get the 85 percent or better, you come back to the regular group, and then you would relearn the material.” Students who rejoin the rest of the class at this point redo assignments on which they did poorly, take the final test with the rest of the class, and don’t create a project.

The number of students who leave compacting at this point varies. “I usually have more with the first unit than the second because there are kids who think it’s easier than it is,” LaFayette explains. The compacting students need to study for the unit test; she doesn’t give them a study guide clearly indicating what the test questions will be. “If they’ve got a few days left before the test, they should be studying. Some of the kids will work up review cards and quiz each other.” Some students don’t prepare adequately, while others don’t check their answers carefully. In some cases, LaFayette feels parents shouldn’t have agreed to put their child on the student-directed path. “Generally it works out to about 20 kids out of 100 in a unit who would go through the whole thing, pass the test, do a project. I get some really great projects.”

Projects

Once students pass the unit test, they can begin work on independent projects. (Click the photo to enlarge.)

Students can choose from three types of projects: model, research paper, or experiment. Each type actually requires work in more than one medium. A model project includes not only a free-standing, labeled model but also an explanatory paper highlighting important points about the subject. A research paper is more involved than the paper for a model and must be accompanied by a visual display, such as a PowerPoint presentation or storyboard. An experiment must come with both a lab report and a visual display. Each student presents his or her project to the class. “And usually I can get them to donate their projects to me,” LaFayette says, “so I get some really great models.”

Examples

Models are all over the classroom, inside and on top of cabinets, in boxes or shrouded in plastic bags to protect them from dust. There’s a DNA double helix out that she’s been using to illustrate her genetics unit, made of tinfoil, beads, and colored pipe cleaners, carefully labeled. There’s a yard-long neuron in blue and yellow with a cell body the size of a soccer ball, created one year for a unit on the human body. The student made it from a styrofoam ball and plastic tubing coated with foam craft material. “It’s stretchy foam stuff. You can mold it into just about anything, and then it hardens.” Along with the neuron, the student wrote a paper on the human nervous system.

“I had some students who built a working model of the respiratory system,” Lafeyette says, opening a box. The trachea and bronchi are made of PVC pipe, the diaphragm symbolized by red construction paper. The lungs are pink balloons. “There’s a valve in the back. They hooked a bicycle pump up to this and they could blow up the balloons with the bicycle pump.” The students used the valve to illustrate how during an asthma attack, the airways constrict and trap air in the lungs. “They would show partial closing, turning it a little bit and then restricting it some more. If the airway was constricted then the air didn’t go in and out, so the balloons wouldn’t deflate. They also did a whole report on asthma. It’s very ingenious. I don’t think of these things; it’s amazing.”

Other students have constructed a model of the kidneys, complete with filter to clear particulates so that water ran out clear, and a model of a town showing sources of air pollution (e.g., trucks, factories), made of construction paper with tissue paper smoke. “I would never have thought of doing that. I get excited every time I get a new project. This one’s cool and then the next year I get an even better one. They just keep amazing me.” Last year a pair created a model to illustrate the lymphatic system. “They made models of the major organs of the lymphatic system, like the spleen, and then they made a human sized model. They traced one of them, and then they drew on it all of the lymphatic system. And then they put Christmas lights in it to light up the different organs. It showed how it went all throughout the body. The kids loved it, because it wasn’t just a board that you looked at and you read stuff. It was fascinating.”

Another student made a series of models illustrating different types of winds. Painted styrofoam balls representing the earth are ringed at various latitudes by plastic doughnuts representing trade winds, easterlies, and westerlies. “They’re really cool. Winds are really hard for the kids. I was so excited when this kid said he was going to build wind models. The major wind systems are about the hardest ones we have to do. They’re a hard sell.” The models have been useful in teaching the atmosphere unit. LaFayette points out the westerlies, the west-to-east winds that heavily influence weather in most of the United States. “I try to explain to them that they’re doughnuts of air. They’re not flat, they’re three-dimensional.”

The student also made separate models for sea, land, and mountain breezes, with arrows and labels showing wind direction. Some arrows are reversible, because winds blow in different directions in winter and summer, depending on whether land or water is warmer. In the same class, another student wrote a report and created a storyboard describing prevailing winds: trade winds, the coriolis effect, Goldbergs, land breezes, sea breezes, jet stream, mesoscale winds, prevailing westerlies. The two presentations complement each other neatly. In another case, one girl did a storyboard illustrating alternative sources of energy (wind energy, solar energy, hydroelectricity, geothermal energy, nuclear power) while two boys in a different class built a model windmill. One year, a girl whose mother was diabetic wrote a report on diabetes and created a display supplemented by equipment her mother used to test her blood glucose.

“The third option is to do an experiment. I would think I would get more experiments done. I had one student who did collect weather data, and he compared his weather data to data online. I had another student who did one on reaction time, normal vs. if you spin around three times. He asked for volunteers and collected data from his classmates.”

Process

LaFayette describes project options briefly when students first sign up for compacting, then reviews the three types of projects in more detail after compacting students have passed the unit test. “The day that the kids are beginning their projects, I give my regular kids something quiet, a reading assignment of some sort. And then I give them a sheet that spells out the requirements for the project.” She gives the students a form on which to write up a project idea and a plan for executing the project. They have a day or two to work on it, and then they turn the ideas in to her for approval.

“Once they get their projects approved, then they start their research. Sometimes they can bring laptop computers in, and I’ll try to have laptops available.” The classroom has internet connections and a wireless network. LaFayette has also worked out a deal with the library whereby four or five of her students at a time can work on their research there. “They always are good. Those are the kids who are really the on task ones, so I usually don’t have any problem with them. So if I have eight kids, I might send four or five on a day, and then the next day another group could go and use the library facilities.”

[Pullout:“It’s their project — not their parents’ project.”] The students are required to build their projects at school, although they may do some subassembly at home. (For instance, the student who made the trade winds model painted his globes at home. “I think they hung them in a tree,” LaFayette says.) “The idea is that it’s their project—it’s not their parents’ project. They have three weeks to do it in. I do allow students to work with a partner on a project, but it has to be something that warrants two students’ work for three weeks.”

While they’re building their projects, students have engineering questions as well as scientific questions. “They’ll ask me, ‘We’re thinking about trying to solve our problem this way, do you think this would work?’ Or, ‘We’ve tried this and we had a little difficulty with it, do you have any ideas?’ So I get a chance to look at it from a totally different perspective. Sometimes I wonder how they’re going to actually create it.” Once two boys made a model of the stomach that used hot water to dissolve peppermint. “I think they worked for three or four days just trying to figure out what was the right mixture, and how hot to make the water, and how not to end up leaking water all over. It was an experiment in itself just trying to figure out how to create this model that they had in their heads.”

Presentations

A few days before presenting their projects, the students fill out what LaFayette calls a resident expert sheet, explaining their choice of topic and what they plan to say. “And then they practice. You don’t get up there cold and say your presentation—that probably is not going to go very well.” Students present their projects to the entire class and answer their classmate’s questions. “They get a grade on how well they present. Some kids present better than others. The kids feel pretty proud of that.”

At the time of the presentations, students also share their experience with compacting, “what they liked best about it, what was hard, what was easier. Most of the time they loved it, and even if they don’t pass the test and do the project, they will tell the kids that they learned so much more about how to organize themselves. If they weren’t successful, they learned why they weren’t and what they need to do the next time.” Students who didn’t complete the first compacting unit can try again in the second one. Lessons about organization and planning learned during curriculum compacting may also help students handle more demanding classes in future years.

“If I think a presentation’s really good,” LaFayette says, “I’ll make arrangements for them to come present to my other classes. Even if I don’t do that, we put up all the projects in groupings by type and category, and then we do a gallery walk.” The gallery walk allows classes that had few presentations to see more projects. Students take notes as they examine the projects, and then the classes discusses what they learned, which projects they liked best and why. “And then we usually try to put their projects on display in the library so that other people can see them.”

Learning centers

Although compacting goes on only during the year’s second and third science units, anchor activity learning centers are available all year for students who finish their class work and homework early. The learning centers are grouped together in the back of the room. Learning center activities are optional and count as extra credit. They reinforce or expand on material being covered in class. LaFayette provides directions, but she doesn’t help students with learning center activities because they’re not required. Students are allowed to get help at home or from each other. “You could require them to come back here, but this way they see it as something special and fun, and they can come back here at their leisure.”

The activities are organized into files by type: word games, science puzzlers, graphing, and logic problems. Some activities change over the course of the year. During the fall genetics unit, science puzzlers include Punnett squares. Past science puzzlers have included word searches. After finding the twenty words of a possible thirty that were in the puzzle, students were asked to alphabetize them and explain what they meant. There are also board games. Graphing activities require the children to create and interpret different types of graphs. Logic problems let the students practice deductive reasoning.

For example: Five families took vacations to five different places in five different months. The Lewises vacationed in November. The family who went to the beach traveled in August. The Mas were the first family to leave and did not go to Paris. The Battles went to the mountains one month before another family left for Alaska. Who went where when?

The easiest logic problems have few variables and provide labeled grids (labeled, for example, with family names, months, and vacation spots). More difficult problems have more variables or unlabeled grids, and the hardest have circles instead of grids. “They read the clues and mark things that would not fit,” LaFayette explains, and then they write out the solution. Marking the grid is not sufficient for credit. Although some students have never seen a logic problem before, they can start with the easiest ones and work their way up to much more complicated puzzles.

“Usually advanced students really love that kind of stuff,” LaFayette says. “They really get into the logic problems.” LaFayette used to include activities like this in her classes, but now the state curriculum is more crowded and she doesn’t feel she has time. She gathers activities from magazines and catalogues. Some resources are aimed at gifted children, and some of the activities are quite difficult, but she looks for activities at different levels.

During compacting, students on the student-directed path are not likely to have the free time to do extra credit activities, although “you get a few who are just really fast, so they might do extra credit.” Some students on the teacher-directed path may have time to work on learning center activities. But the centers get the most use at the beginning and end of the year, when curriculum compacting is not going on. “They work well with the compacting,” LaFayette says. “It really fits well with a lot of kids.”

Conclusion

Sometime in the future, LaFayette would like to develop a less structured path for some students doing curriculum compacting. “I’d like to try and figure out a way to have them choose other ways to prove to me that they’ve learned the work. Right now I have one path and you can choose what order you do the work in, and you learn the material more yourself. There are divergent thinkers who could prove it to me another way. But if I just said, ‘Here are the objectives—learn it,’ there would be no way for me to hold them accountable for the four weeks that I have them back here.” So, that’s a project for another year.

Right now, LaFayette’s students have the chance to work faster and more independently, help each other out, and expand their knowledge and skills through projects of their own choosing. “If you talk to anybody who’s been through school and has had that experience where they sit there and they’re like, ‘Can’t we get through this already? I got it on the first time around, and you’re on the fifth explanation already,’” those are the students for whom curriculum compacting is a gift. “For those people it’s like taking the weights off and setting them free,” LaFayette says. “Because right now we’re keeping them down on the ground when they could be flying off somewhere else doing a lot better stuff. Even if you’re struggling with a group where you’re just having difficulty getting them through the material, how can you be unhappy when you’ve got all this exciting stuff going on?”