CANTON, Ohio — Canton Harbor High School has announced a unique learning model they hope will help students excel better in the classroom.
“Our students will come four days a week, Monday through Thursday, the regular school hours,” said Cantor Harbor High School principal and administrator, Steven Nichols.
Then on Fridays, Nichols says students will have the opportunity to receive two hours of one-on-one time from peers and teachers in areas they may be struggling in, like math or reading.
“We're trying to be a little bit creative,” said Nichols. “You know, as we kind of looked around and saw what our students needed and then saw what the world was kind of doing.”
Nichols tells News 5 it didn’t take long for the district to approve this scheduling model and work through the details to best meet the needs of their students.
“We have made an effort to build in that time to give specific opportunities for our teachers to collaborate with each other, to build community service projects, to build real-life learning opportunities for our students,” said Nichols. “Something that's more hands-on.”
While this approach is different from most traditional settings, Interventionalist Specialist Debi Kilpatrick says she supports it.
“I think the collaboration on Fridays is going to be very helpful, not only in the instruction part of our day, but for the students from nine to 11, but the teachers being able to get together and work as a team, we talk about that,” said Canton Harbor High School Interventionalist Specialist, Debi Kilpatrick.
Kilpatrick says she works with students who have disabilities that are impacting their education.
She says this extra time will allow her to get the paperwork done and plan ahead with individualized lesson plans.
“There's never that opportunity to collaborate,” said Kilpatrick. “This offers us that opportunity, which I think again benefits our students because we're all going to be on the same page.”
This setting is still very rare.
But research shows the pandemic and teacher shortage did accelerate things, so there is a possibility more districts will begin following the same model soon.
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