Inside Miguel Melchor’s Classroom at Clinton Elementary
What happens when a district prioritizes personalized learning and school leadership support educator collaboration? You get a 6th grade team that works together to build out the necessary supports to meet the needs of every student.
Clinton Elementary School in Chicago is a diverse school community in an urban area, with a high percentage of newcomers, representing over 50 different languages! Three years ago, school leadership implemented a personalized learning framework. Using individual learner profiles, they set goals around agency and equity, but allowed grade level teams to determine how they fulfilled these goals. The 6th grade team spent that year learning about the model and building new skills to meet the needs of their learners, particularly in math.
Miguel Melchor, 6th grade educator, led the charge with the 6th grade team and saw improvement in student performance in just one year.
Together, the 6th grade team built instructional content to support student learning at various learning levels, built classroom structures to support a flexible-paced classroom, and oriented learning toward mastery. When used together, this creates lessons that build on one another, but allow students to drop into learning based on their level of mastery.
Benefits for Students
Transition from memorization & summarization
Increased independence and autonomy
Multiple chances to revise and master content
Benefits for Teachers
Built-in professional learning community
Shared planning load
Consistency across grade level
REACH Performance SY 2022-2023
This massive shift in student performance has led to schoolwide adoption across the Clinton Elementary community of educators, which further promotes student achievement.
“Because more teachers are using the model in my building, students are getting used to the structures of the personalized learning framework. They're coming in with more experience and they're excited because they know what's expected.”
