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Mrs. Browns' Learning Family classroom


    
   

Multi-age Learning Families

The Hearns Charter School has created Multi-age Learning Families: This heterogeneous grouping of students encourages teachers to focus upon individual learning needs rather than age/grade expectations. During the three primary years, a teacher will keep his or her students for 2 years, and another teacher will keep the students for the intermediate grades, 3-4. This practice will create a continuous, stable learning environment during the critical early years as well as fostering positive student/teacher/parent partnerships.

Mastery Learning Classrooms

The Hearns Charter School utilizes Mastery Learning Classrooms: the curriculum is broken down into a set of sub-skills, which are then ordered in a hierarchy of instructional objectives.   For each step in the instructional hierarchy, a criterion referenced test is designed, and a performance criterion indicating mastery of the sub-skill is specified.  The teacher starts at the lowest step in the hierarchy, pre-tests, teaches the objective, and post-tests on the material. When students do not demonstrate mastery, the teacher uses corrective strategies and refers the student to Renaissance Enrichment until mastery is achieved. Once mastery is achieved the teacher will advance the student to the next, more difficult step in the hierarchy.