The Core Knowledge Blog

Webster Elementary School in San Diego credits its turnaround to explicit instruction on how to behave in class (Hat Tip: This Week in Education).  The “Webster Way” teaches “scholarly behaviors” such as eye contact, cleaning up your trash, and greeting teachers by name, reports the online Voice of San Diego newspaper.

“The Webster Way originated in a school-wide effort to understand poverty and its impact on education. Most teachers at the school are white,” VOSD reports.  “Their students are mostly from low-income Latino and black families. Teachers read and reflected together on sociological texts about poverty and the achievement gap, but the Webster Way emerged from their own efforts to observe and document what set their best students apart. They jotted down notes about their highest-achieving students, then pooled their research.

“They spoke up in class. They balanced when to speak and when to listen. They turned toward the speaker. Those behaviors — not their brightness — separated them from their lower-achieving peers and enabled them to absorb information.”

The Webster Way sounds very much like a description in the New York Times Magazine of how KIPP and Achievement First students are explicitly taught to Slant, an acronym which stands for sit up, listen, ask questions, nod if you understand, and track the speaker with your eyes. 

According to Paul Tough’s 2006 article What It Takes to Make a Student, “Americans of a certain background learn these methods for taking in information early on and employ them instinctively. KIPP students need to be taught the methods explicitly. And so it is a little unnerving to stand at the front of a KIPP class; every eye is on you. When a student speaks, every head swivels to watch her. To anyone raised in the principles of progressive education, the uniformity and discipline in KIPP classrooms can be off-putting. But the kids I spoke to said they use the Slant method not because they fear they will be punished otherwise but because it works: it helps them to learn.”