Manual Arts Senior High School
Location: Los Angeles, CA
School Information
The entrance to Manual Arts High School
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General Information
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Manual Arts is the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD).
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It is the third oldest high school in Los Angeles and the oldest high school still located on its original site.
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Sponsored by The LA Promise Fund.
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Circumstances that Impact Planning and Delivery of Instruction:
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When I first began teaching at Manual Arts, California had just adopted the Next Generation Science Standards. At the time there were no curriculum maps or pacing plans. I was selected to attend a monthly district wide professional development workshop to draft these plans.
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One of my colleagues and I had complete creative control over our curriculum and delivery of instruction. We created nearly everything from scratch our first year and refined it during our second year teaching together.
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Small Learning Communities (SLCs) and Magnet Program
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Manual Arts is divided into three SLCs—each with a different focus. I taught in the School of Medical Science, Arts, and Technology (SMART).
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I collaborated frequently with the chemistry teacher in the Magnet Academy and we fully aligned our courses.
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After-School Programs
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Athletic—we have a full range of athletic teams. Some of our most popular are football, basketball, cheerleading, cross-country, tennis, and dance.
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Academic—after school tutoring is offered through City Year and internship opportunities are available through a partnership with the University of Southern California’s Upward Bound program. We also have an online school newspaper—the Toiler Times—and a gardening club where students can learn about healthy eating, environmental consciousness and sustainability.
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ROTC—our Junior ROTC program is consistently ranked one of the best in the nation. Students take great pride in their accomplishments through this program.
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Students Run LA—a mentorship program designed to teach students goal setting and motivation through training for and completing the Los Angeles Marathon. I acted as one of our SRLA coaches while teaching at Manual Arts.
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Classroom Information
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Content and Grade Level:
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Secondary Chemistry
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Classes are 90 – 120 minutes depending on the day of the week.
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We operate on a block schedule and I had six different sections serving between 35 and 45 students per class.
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One period was a ‘sheltered’ course with 45 English Learners—all classified as ‘newcomers’ or ‘EL 1.’
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Assignments Outside of the Classroom:
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Twice a week, I had an advisory class. I had the same students their sophomore and junior years. This period was dedicated to working on cross-curriculum development of a project-based learning (PBL) assessment. The theme of PBL changed every semester to introduce students to a variety of real world topics to which their classroom learning could be applied.
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Materials
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General Materials: We had very limited access to materials through Title 1. However, I was required to personally purchase and provide the majority of materials for labs and activities.
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Technology: While I did have a laptop cart in my classroom, 25/30 computers were broken and the remaining five did not have access to the Internet. We had two computer labs but they were almost always reserved for testing and not available for class use for the majority of the year.
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Textbooks: while we had textbooks for compliance purposes, they were not aligned to standards. For this reason, we used three ring binders to create our own textbooks as the year progressed.
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Each classroom had a SMARTboard but mine was broken and only operated as a projector
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Manual Arts' mascot—Tommy Toiler—and I
Student Information
One of my students working in our school garden
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Gender breakdown
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755 male students and 653 female students.
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Ethnicity breakdown
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81.5% Latino, 16% Black, and 2.5% other.
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Inclusion and other types of special-needs students
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Between my first and second year, we transitioned to a full inclusion model of special education. When we fully integrated our special education students, each general education instructor was paired with a special education teacher in a co-teaching model. Unfortunately, my co-teacher resigned the second week of the school year. I was left with a fully integrated classroom that I taught on my own for the remainder of the year. On occasion, a special education teacher would pull out my students for one-on-one support, but this was not a common occurrence.
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During the 2016-2017 school year, I had 20 students with IEPs and during the 2017-2018 school year, I had 37 students with IEPs. These students were fully integrated into my general education classroom.
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Free/Reduced Lunch
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91.1% of students.
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Academic Levels
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Manual Arts is a secondary school with students in grade 9-12. We are on a three-course plan for science education with chemistry being taught during a students’ 10th grade year.
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English Language Learners: During the 2016-2017 school year we had 421 ELs out of 1,408 students total. I had, on average, four to 10 ELs in each of my sections as well as a ‘sheltered’ course with 40 students all classified as ‘newcomers’ or ‘EL 1.’
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As shown in our SBAC data in the table below, the majority of students at Manual Arts are below grade level in regards to reading, writing, listening, and research skills. We had a saying that every teacher is an English teacher. Regardless of context, every teacher was expected to incorporate Common Core Literacy Standards into their planning to close this knowledge gap.
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2017 SBAC data