After Fall To An F, Trial And Error Helps Nora Rebound

Hands on learning, such as making shapes on a "geo board" as part of a geometry lesson, is one strategy Nora Elementary School uses to help students who are still learning to speak English. Photo by Scott Elliott/Chalkbeat

Test scores plummeted immigration boomed, an increasingly common occurrence in Indianapolis

Put them in the shaky fingers of a five-year-old who can’t speak English. Could simply rolling clay or stacking shapes for just a few minutes soothe the surrounding blizzard of unfamiliar symbols and sounds?

That was the idea, and Nora Elementary School teacher Shawn Schlepp desperately wanted to try it out.

Hands on learning, such as making shapes on a “geo board” as part of a geometry lesson, is one strategy Nora Elementary School uses to help students who are still learning to speak English.

By 2013, a surge of number of Nora students needing to learn to speak English had left the school scrambling for solutions as its test scores dropped and its letter grade all the way to F just five years after consecutive A’s.

An F was stingingly unfamiliar and heartbreaking.

So Schlepp and two colleagues spent a day out of their weekend to pitch “creative stations.” With $1,500, she said, they could stock eight classrooms with tinker toys, legos, play dough and more.
It was a modest ask: $7,000 in prize money on the line for the most innovative education ideas.

Five other groups were competing in the Teach Plus-sponsored event.

Even as Schlepp talked up the hopeful plan to the judges — six business and nonprofit leaders — her voice quaked with disappointment when she talked of Nora’s future. Its days as a top-rated school felt long past.

“We received a big fat F even though all of our teachers are working very hard,” she said, sorrowfully. “We are never going to be an A school.”

The pitch didn’t work.

The committee instead gave $6,000 to fund a pitch to launch a citywide poetry slam league and $1,000 to boost a charter school’s student-run cafe.

Nora’s creative stations never happened.

Nora’s story is increasingly common in Indianapolis: Schools with track records of success, even those that do well with small groups of language learners, can quickly find themselves overwhelmed by rapid immigration.

Over the course of a year or two, schools like Nora can find themselves with an entirely new and challenging focus as they discover their new No. 1 job is teaching foreign language-speakers the English language.

An A school falls to an F

For years, Nora had done well with a manageable group of Spanish-speakers, numbering about a third of its students. Schlepp minored in Spanish and used her knowledge to build trust with her students who had yet to learn English.

Nora Elementary School fifth grade teacher Shawn Schlepp helps students make geometric shapes on a Geo board using rubber bands during a math lesson.

For her, and the the rest of the Washington Township school, things worked fine.

Nora Elementary School fifth grade teacher Shawn Schlepp helps students make geometric shapes on a Geo board using rubber bands during a math lesson. Photo by Scott Elliott/Chalkbeat

But by the time Schlepp stood before the judges, the percentage of foreign language speakers boomed first to 42 percent, then to 46 percent and then to more than half the school. Driving the shift, in part, was the resettlement into nearby apartments of Burmese refugees who spoke several dialects of an utterly unfamiliar language.

Teachers scrambled for new ideas.

In Schlepp’s class, for example, it no longer worked to simply pull out the language learners for specially tailored lessons during English. They nearly all needed tailored instruction.

That meant frequently breaking the class into small groups to better match their skill levels and language needs. But it required a lot more lesson planning. She needed the right type of learning tasks matched to the right language level sometimes for five or six groups of students.

“It was very overwhelming,” she said. “There weren’t enough hours in the day.”

But scores kept falling — for four straight years. In 2007, 69 percent of Nora students passed ISTEP. By 2011, it was down to 54 percent. The school’s grade tumbled from an A to a C and then to an F.

It didn’t seem fair, Schlepp said.

“If you teach at Nora you just have this true love for your children and for what you do,” Schlepp said. “You believe anyone can make it and you fight for them. It’s difficult to see them given expectations on these tests that are not developed for students who have been in the States for little over a year.”

Once the shock of an F rating wore off, lot of changes were made.

The district, for example, placed more teachers with language learning credentials to support the classroom teachers. The school now has a team of eight such specialists, almost twice as many as three years ago.

They work both in the classroom, helping small groups of students, and by pulling out those that need more help for extra tutoring. Those specialists also have helped train the classroom teachers in techniques that help English language learners.

Teachers feel like they are turning the corner.

Nora has seen three years of rising test scores, and it’s grade rose to D and then, last year, to a C. About 58 percent of students passed ISTEP. But Nora still has a ways to go: The state average last year was 74 percent passing.

So many questions

Schlepp knows something about finding yourself in an unfamiliar place. Her father was in the Navy and the family moved 22 times while she was growing up.

In a first grade class at Nora Elementary School, English language learners use pictures to match to English words.

After eight years, she’s known the old Nora, experienced the wrenching transition and now is part of the team she hopes will reclaim its top quality academic reputation. But it’s a daily challenge to adapt her teaching to her students’ many needs.

Take Oliviea, an African student in Schlepp’s class last year whose native language was Swahili.
Oliviea wanted to know it all.

Schlepp would use a word like “cattle” and immediately Oliviea wanted to know: “What is cattle?”
When the class was studying the American Revolution, he could not move past one fact that struck him as bizarre.

“He would just keep saying, ‘I don’t understand why they wore wigs?’” Schlepp said. “You know what? It’s a good question.”

That eagerness should be celebrated and nurtured, but Schlepp had a whole class to teach. Still, if she put him off, Oliviea would sulk.

“His coping skill was that he would get mad and shut down,” she said.

Schlepp took him aside. Slow down, she told him, and let her answer his questions fully. Her answers may cover other questions popping into his mind.

It helped, but Schlepp soon found “wait time” worked both ways. Oliviea reacted better when she also slowed down, listened carefully to his questions and answered with a more soothing tone of voice.

It worked: he pouted less. But still, she worried about him when he went to middle school.
Recently Oliviea was back at Nora. He made a point to tell Schlepp he was getting his questions answered. It’s gratifying when a strategy works, Schlepp said. But that only comes after trial, error, failure, new ideas and more effort.

Even when she’s not at work, getting her exercise by running through her neighborhood, it’s hard to turn her mind away from her class.

“As I run I think about what worked and what didn’t,” she said. “I pore over it. ‘Why aren’t they learning?’”

The quiet girl

Asking too many questions may have been Oliviea’s struggle, but an even bigger worry is English learners who ask too few.

A wall display at Nora Elementary School welcomes students in several languages
That’s something Schlepp watches for: The culture shock for her immigrant students can be jarring but also easily overlooked.

A wall display at Nora Elementary School welcomes students in several languages. Photo by Scott Elliott/Chalkbeat.

Last year, Schlepp had a student move in from China with a name so difficult to pronounce she had to record it and play it back over and over to learn it. But in class the girl rarely made a sound.

She often stood alone on the playground, too, Schlepp noticed. She asked some other girls in the class to help. Slowly, the quiet girl became part of the group.

As she got more comfortable, Schlepp got a sense of her academic gifts.

“Her math was out of this world,” Schlepp said. “What’s so great about numbers it doesn’t require a lot of translation.”

But learning English came slowly. She struggled daily to connect English words to their meanings.
Then, finally, a breakthrough.

She was working on a group project when her teammates excitedly called Schlepp over. As they were writing, they noticed the quiet girl understood enough to re-copy an entire sentence into

Chinese and it was her classmate who recognized, and celebrated, that as a big step.

“I still feel that moment,” Schlepp said. “You have surge of pride. I’m so proud of all of my students because there is so much acceptance and so much love and embracing one another.”

The quiet girl’s family later moved and she transferred to another school. But on her last day, her father came to class to say thank you. She handed out handmade paper gifts to all of her classmates.

It’s little successes, small breakthroughs, that build up into the progress that eventually gets kids where they need to be, Schlepp said.

“Once you get into a groove, they grow,” Schlepp said. “That’s great, but when you see them grow you have to move them again. If they are not moving ahead, you have to get them growing again.”

Scott Elliott is the bureau chief of Chalkbeat Indiana, a nonprofit news website that reports on educational change in Indiana. Email him at selliott@chalkbeat.org.

About the series

This is part of a series on English language learners through a collaboration of WFYI Public Media, Chalkbeat Indiana and The Indianapolis Star.