Trial and error and dedication: Nora rebounds from an F

Tinker Toys and Play-Doh. Legos and Silly Putty.

Put them in the shaky fingers of a 5-year-old who can't speak English. Could simply rolling clay or stacking shapes for a few minutes soothe the surrounding blizzard of unfamiliar symbols and sounds?

That was the idea, and Nora Elementary School teacher Shawn Schlepp desperately wanted to try it out.

By 2013, a surge in the number of Nora students needing to learn to speak English had the school scrambling for solutions as its test scores dropped and its letter grade fell all the way to F just five years after consecutive A's.

An F was stingingly unfamiliar and heartbreaking.

So Schlepp and two colleagues spent a day out of their weekend to pitch "creative stations." Their comparatively modest request for $1,500, she said, could stock eight classrooms with Tinker Toys, Legos, Play-Doh and more.

Most of the five other groups asked for more of the $7,000 in prize money for the most innovative education ideas in this first-of-its-kind competition in Indianapolis. The event was sponsored by Teach Plus, an organization that aims to help teachers get involved in education policy and advocacy.

Even as Schlepp talked up the hopeful plan to the judges — six business and nonprofit leaders — her voice quaked with disappointment when she talked of Nora's future.

Its days as a top-rated school felt long past.

"We received a big fat F even though all of our teachers are working very hard," she said, sorrowfully. "We are never going to be an A school."

The pitch didn't work.

The committee instead gave $6,000 to fund a pitch to launch a citywide poetry slam league and $1,000 to boost a charter school's student-run cafe.

Nora's creative stations never happened.

Nora's story is increasingly common in Indianapolis: Schools with track records of success, even those that do well with small groups of language learners, can quickly find themselves overwhelmed by rapid immigration.

Over the course of a year or two, schools such as Nora can find themselves with an entirely new and challenging focus as they discover their new No. 1 job is teaching foreign language speakers the English language.

An A school falls to an F

For years, Nora had done well with a manageable group of Spanish speakers, numbering about a third of its students. Schlepp minored in Spanish and used her knowledge to build trust with her students who had yet to learn English.

For her, and the rest of the Washington Township school, things worked fine.

But by the time Schlepp stood before the judges, more than half the students in the school were foreign language speakers. Driving the shift, in part, was the resettlement into nearby apartments of Burmese refugees who spoke several dialects of an utterly unfamiliar language.

Teachers scrambled for new ideas.

In Schlepp's class, for example, it no longer worked to simply pull out the language learners for specially tailored lessons during English. Nearly all of them needed tailored instruction.

That meant frequently breaking the class into small groups to better match their skill levels and language needs. But it required a lot more lesson planning. Schlepp needed the right type of learning tasks matched to the right language level, sometimes for five or six groups of students.

"It was very overwhelming," she said. "There weren't enough hours in the day."

But scores kept falling — for four straight years. In 2007, 69 percent of Nora students passed ISTEP. By 2011, it was down to 54 percent. The school's grade tumbled from an A to a C and then to an F.

It didn't seem fair, Schlepp said.

"If you teach at Nora, you just have this true love for your children and for what you do," she said. "You believe anyone can make it, and you fight for them. It's difficult to see them given expectations on these tests that are not developed for students who have been in the States for little over a year."

Once the shock of an F rating wore off, a lot of changes were made.

Washington Township Schools, for example, placed more teachers with language learning credentials to support the classroom teachers. The school now has a team of eight such specialists, almost twice as many as it had three years ago.

They work in the classroom, helping small groups of students, and by pulling out those who need more help for extra tutoring. Those specialists also have helped train the classroom teachers in techniques that help English language learners.

Teachers think they are turning the corner.

Nora has seen three years of rising test scores, and its grade rose to a D and then, last year, to a C. About 58 percent of students passed ISTEP. But Nora still has a ways to go: The state average last year was 74 percent passing.

So many questions

Schlepp knows something about finding yourself in an unfamiliar place. Her father was in the Navy, and the family moved 22 times while she was growing up.

After eight years, she has known the old Nora, experienced the wrenching transition and now is part of the team she hopes will reclaim its top-quality academic reputation. But it's a daily challenge to adapt her teaching to her students' many needs.

Take Oliviea, an African student in Schlepp's class last year whose native language is Swahili.

Oliviea wanted to know it all.

Schlepp would use a word such as "cattle," and immediately Oliviea wanted to know: "What is cattle?"

When the class was studying the American Revolution, he could not move past one fact that struck him as bizarre.

"He would just keep saying, 'I don't understand why they wore wigs,' " Schlepp said. "You know what? It's a good question."

That eagerness should be celebrated and nurtured, but Schlepp had a whole class to teach. Still, if she put him off, Oliviea would sulk.

"His coping skill was that he would get mad and shut down," she said.

Schlepp took him aside. Slow down, she told him, and let her answer his questions fully. Her answers might cover other questions popping into his mind.

It helped, but Schlepp soon found "wait time" worked both ways. Oliviea reacted better when she also slowed down, listened carefully to his questions and answered with a more soothing tone of voice.

It worked: He pouted less. But still, she worried about him when he went to middle school.

Recently Oliviea was back at Nora. He made a point to tell Schlepp he was getting his questions answered. It's gratifying when a strategy works, she said. But that comes only after trial, error, failure, new ideas and more effort.

Even when she's not at work, getting her exercise by running through her neighborhood, it's hard to turn her mind away from her class.

"As I run, I think about what worked and what didn't," she said. "I pore over it. 'Why aren't they learning?' "

The quiet girl

Asking too many questions might have been a problem for Oliviea, but an even bigger worry is English learners who ask too few.

That's something Schlepp watches for: The culture shock for her immigrant students can be jarring but also easily overlooked.

Last year, Schlepp had a student move in from China. In class, the girl rarely made a sound.

She often stood alone on the playground, too, Schlepp noticed. She asked some other girls in the class to help. Slowly, the quiet girl became part of the group.

As she grew more comfortable, Schlepp got a sense of her academic gifts.

"Her math was out of this world," Schlepp said. "What's so great about numbers, it doesn't require a lot of translation."

But learning English came slowly. The girl struggled daily to connect English words to their meanings.

Then, finally, a breakthrough.

She was working on a group project when her teammates excitedly called Schlepp over. As they were writing, they noticed the quiet girl understood enough to copy an entire sentence into Chinese, and it was her one of her classmates who recognized, and celebrated, that as a big step.

"I still feel that moment," Schlepp said. "You have a surge of pride. I'm so proud of all of my students because there is so much acceptance and so much love and embracing one another."

The quiet girl's family later moved, and the girl transferred to another school. But on her last day, her father came to class to say thank you. She handed out handmade paper gifts to all of her classmates.

It's little successes, small breakthroughs, that build into the progress that eventually gets kids where they need to be, Schlepp said.

"Once you get into a groove, they grow," Schlepp said. "That's great, but when you see them grow, you have to move them again. If they are not moving ahead, you have to get them growing again."

Scott Elliott is the bureau chief of Chalkbeat Indiana, a nonprofit news website that reports on educational change in Indiana. Email him atselliott@chalkbeat.org.

About the series

This is part of a series on English language learners through a collaboration of The Star, Chalkbeat Indiana and WFYI Public Media.