School Notes: Stoneview Elementary Tailors Tutorials for Success

Stoneview Elementary, on the south end of DeKalb County, is one busy place during the school week, and just a few weeks ago, Saturdays were no different.

In a collaborative effort to practically guarantee that the third, fourth and fifth graders fully grasped the concepts they were learning in class, Principal Laconduas Freeman, Assistant Principal of Instruction Kim Rhodes and several teachers implemented Saturday Tutorial, or Saturday School, right after Spring Break, to help the students when taking the CRCT.

But these were not your ordinary tutorial sessions.

While other schools around the county were also opening their doors on Saturday mornings for extra learning, Stoneview teachers set their tutorials apart from the pack by first, giving each child an online assessment of their knowledge of reading and math lessons that were previously introduced in class, then gathering the results and breaking the students up into small groups.

The gathered results determined which groups the children would be in, and, within each group, the children needed help in the same areas.

From there, the teachers created a different curriculum each Saturday that was based on each student's performance on the online assessment and that honed in on each child’s weaknesses in reading and math.

“Based on best teaching practices, you always want to use data to drive which direction you take with the children,” said Principal Freeman.

"We knew if we worked them and kept the class size small, which also made a difference, and let the children drive everything, we thought we would get more bang for the buck, and we did," Freeman said.

And so for 10 weeks, during tutorial, the students learned concepts that clarified any gray areas of information that they may have had.

And, according to Freeman, students also had intense accelerated enrichment and a review of the lessons that they went over in class during the prior week, which may have included Geometry, for instance, for some fifth-graders.

“They had a three-hour session for reading and math. It was two or three rotations and then they switched so you were in class no more than 45 minutes," Freeman said. The students then went to computer lab for more online assessment tests that conformed to Georgia Performance Standards.

On a good day, there were about 80 kids participating in the tutorial sessions.

These were the first weekend learning sessions that Stoneview has had in many years, so the teachers were excited that the students and parents welcomed the change.

“A lot of the feedback that we got is that the teachers really saw a difference in the kids when they have that extra help, Freeman said. “We will definitely do it again next year.”