FAY SCHOOL / SOUTHBORO MASS-Read More
Excerpt From Book-Growiing Smarter: A Crash Course On The Intelligence Of Being Organized
•What People are Saying About the
WorkCenter™ Organizer
Teacher Excerpts- Jim McDaniel, Head of the Upper School, Fay
School
The WorkCenter Organizer, as it exists at Fay School, is the most
effective teacher of organizational/study skills which I have
seen in my twenty-plus years of working with middle school
children in school settings. Having spent a major portion of my
educational career at Columbia Teachers’ College studying
the use of metacognition in remediation of learning and reading
processes, I have found that this system most effectively
develops this self-awareness in students. By teaching students to
think about how they learn, organize and perform most comfortably
and effectively, students will learn those conditions or
strategies that produce the highest yield possible for them in
the most efficient time frame.
The WorkCenter Organizer, with its well-designed set of pockets
and folders, allows students to maximize their output
(performance), because it enables them to most effectively
capture, store and retrieve essential curricular input. Through
uniform adoption of the WorkCenter Organizer, not only has the
importance of organization and workflow been naturally brought to
the top of the school’s cultural agenda in the minds of the
students and parents, but it also receives the attention of the
faculty as they work to more consistently interact with students
across the different disciplines in our grades six and seven.
Teachers daily reinforce the process of capturing, storing and
retrieving information using a common lexicon, which is the
result of this uniform, color-coded binder system. For example,
when a teacher asks her students to take out his/her notes
section to take class notes, the actual mental/visual image
provoked with this command is common for each student. If, in
fact, a member of the class should happen to incorrectly transmit
or misunderstand the oral command, the visual cues are present in
the room to guide the student to proceed smoothly and
independently with the class (i.e., a student can look left or
right to see exactly where each of the members of his/her class
is in their Organizer, such as in a red tri-pocket.
The positive effect of this subtle, but powerful feature on
classroom management and student academic independence is not to
be underestimated. When a student is able to comfortably manage
workflow, successful academic results occur. Not only is that
student’s productivity higher due to his/her learned
organizational effectiveness, but the student gains confidence in
his/her own ability to perform such academic tasks.
Faculty using these Organizers are naturally reinforcing lessons
in organization while they consciously inculcate in their
students their planned, discipline-related curriculum. The
teachers may use the Organizer as a framework for their
presentation of material, providing a consistent, logical study
tool for the students. The shared medium of the Organizer makes
the transmission between the two parties clearer, more efficient
and more effective than in educational settings where teacher and
students do not share such a common vision of integral work tools
and processes within a classroom.
The teacher who has the luxury of teaching a classroom full of
students with common WorkCenter Organizers has the benefit of
clear and effective communication around the issues of
note-taking, paper filing and homework retrieval. Significantly,
both teacher and student are able to focus more clearly on the
content of each lesson. In addition, with consistent teacher
reinforcement, students begin to understand that there is a
direct relationship between being organized and experiencing
academic success. The depth of this learning experience is
enhanced if the teacher uses either effort or academic grades as
a reward for proper use of the Organizer. Students then more
readily internalize this important relationship between process
and outcome in relation to their individual academic success.
The power of guiding students in becoming organized, independent
learners influences not just the students as individuals, but the
entire school. Community self-awareness and pride around
excellence are stimulated, providing a positive academic peer
culture. When pride and excellence are valued by both the adults
and students in schools, many successes occur because they are
the results of what a liberated, supported student will do for
him/herself in an environment which fosters individual
responsibility and academic excellence in its community members.
At Fay School, the WorkCenter Organizer is an essential component
of our strong, positive peer culture which motivates our students
to perform at their top level each day. In short, academic
success is valued by our students. The WorkCenter Organizer helps
our students realize this success, providing a road map which
allows them to most efficiently and effectively reach their
personal educational goals. For the “organizationally
challenged” student, it is used religiously. For the
confident navigator, it serves as a general guide which may be
more directional and strategic in nature. In either instance, our
travelers are learning enough about themselves, their strengths
and weaknesses to understand that if, in fact, they do lose their
way, they will have learned to stop and check their own progress
at the nearest service station, a.k.a., the WorkCenter Organizer.