Roxboro Community School

On March 18 through 20, nine staff members and two students from Roxboro Community School (RCS) went to Atlanta, Georgia, to visit the Ron Clark Academy (RCA). RCA is a non-profit school that has achieved national and international recognition for its success in creating a loving and educational environment.

On this trip, teachers spent their days participating in professional development, observing classes and interacting with the staff and students of the academy. “We learned how to make learning incredibly engaging and meaningful for students while still holding them to high standards and making school a place they want to be,” said biology teacher Ashley Bailey. Kinesthetic learning was another thing they observed at the academy. “One of the things that I loved was how they did vocabulary instruction,” Bailey said. In classes at RCA, they added gestures and even changed the way you say the word to help convey the meaning, therefore helping students remember and study better and more effectively. When she came back to RCS after the trip, Bailey started using these strategies with her biology tutoring classes, and it has really helped students improve their class performance.

The staff that attended were also pleasantly surprised with how the RCA students interacted with them. For instance, eighth-grade math teacher Chari Denny and eighth-grade academic success teacher Kara Roberts were eating lunch alone when a fifth grader came over and asked if they wanted to eat lunch with her. They were impressed to see a fifth grader have the courage to do that on their own, which showed them that RCA is doing something right.

Two teacher cadet students, Hannah Buchanan and Piper Shearin, had the opportunity to go on the trip. Buchanan was excited for this opportunity, and she shared that it will not only help her be a better teacher but also a better student. “I think it will help me with how I interact with my other classmates, and it will also help me with how I act while in the classroom with my students,” said Buchanan.

The teachers have been able to take some of the things they learned and implement them in their own classrooms to help improve learning, but changes aren't just in the classrooms. Since returning, when students are on their way to their classes in the morning, they have been greeted with music coming from the lobby. This has helped students wake up and start the day in a cheerful or good-spirited mood. Along with music in the morning, teachers have started playing background music in some of the classes when the students are working on quiet work, lightening up the mood and helping them concentrate better, all ideas teachers took from RCA.

Roberts has taken other things she saw at the academy and implemented them in her classroom, like “trying to be more engaged with the students and have them do more partner work and reporting back to the class and just moving more in class too,” she said. With all of these changes, teachers hope to continue to improve their teaching, thus helping students improve their academic performance.