Spring 2005 Activity: Ready to Do Whatever Needs to Be Done

Charles Venegoni has a can-do attitude. As chairman of English and fine arts at John Hersey High School in Arlington Heights, Illinois, he leads a team of teachers who share his approach. At a recent in-service session, he sits with the audience as some of his teachers introduce a new instructional resource bank they've developed with a “mini grant” from their district, Illinois Township High School District 214. The system organizes a growing library of exercises the teachers have created over the last several years.

There are no textbooks that deliver instruction the way Venegoni and his faculty deliver it.

“We struggle with that all the time. There is a real mismatch of resource materials to help us do this.” So his teachers created their own.

Most textbooks teach a skill in isolation. For example, a section on how to use a comma usually covers comma usage from the most simple through the most obscure rules. Venegoni advocates teaching the rules of comma usage through reading and writing exercises, at the level appropriate to a student's skills.

Charles Venegoni “Instead of soup-to-nuts commas we break it into levels,” Venegoni said.

The Standards for Transition guide the teachers as they create some of their own teaching materials. Teachers download exercises they and their colleagues have created and adapt them to their own needs. As they develop new exercises, each one is identified by the Standards for Transition skill it addresses and the score range it targets. New exercises are uploaded for sharing as they are developed.

“The effort becomes completely teacher led,” said Venegoni. “No one person can really run this model in its entirety.”

Perhaps not, but Venegoni's commitment clearly is driving the model's success so far.

First, he collaborated with John Hersey principal Barbara Horler to implement it in 2001. Then he got the teachers on board. Good results at John Hersey caught the attention of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation connected Venegoni with the Chicago International Charter School and eventually awarded CICS $4 million to open four schools based on Venegoni's model. The first opened in 2003, and standardized test scores there are already up from the scores of the school that used to serve the same neighborhood. Now a dozen more Chicago-area schools are interested, and the Gates Foundation is studying CICS more closely to learn about school success.

“Our experience reveals that content and higher-order thinking can be enhanced by a purposefully designed program that develops skills. ACT's Standards for Transition provide educators with a skills spine around which content and higher-order goals can be wrapped. It's crucial that educators understand that either/or assumptions about testing can be dismissed by shifting the paradigm that determines what is taught from the teacher to the student. It's all a matter of purposeful alignment by design,” Venegoni said.