Twin Lakes Academy Elementary Jacksonville, Florida District Solution Twin Lakes Academy Elementary, a big, two-story complex serving 1,261 students, was born of suburban sprawl around Jacksonville, Florida, in the 1990s. It is an attractive school with spacious, well appointed classrooms and many students from affluent families. But Twin Lakes managed only modest academic results and in 1999, in the hopes of improving its performance, it elected to become one of 63 Duval County public schools adopting the America's Choice School Design. Since then, the school has flourished and its state ranking has risen from "C" to "A." "We were an average school and we didn't know what we needed to do to improve," says Principal Debbie Menard. "America's Choice gave us strategies. Now, we have very high expectations and students are meeting them. It's very exciting." The Twin Lakes writing results are a case in point. The America's Choice program transformed the school's writing instruction and by 2003 nearly 90 percent of the school's students met Florida's writing standards. During a recent visit, Denise Robertson's 5th graders spent an hour on writing, as America's Choice students do every day. Robertson used a "workshop" format for the class shared by all America's Choice reading and writing classes. She began with a 10-minute lesson on a strategy for ending a piece of narrative writing, part of a five-week unit on narrative writing that is aligned with Florida's writing standards. With her students gathered before her on a rug at the front of the classroom, Robertson introduced the strategy -- bringing readers back to the beginning of the story -- and discussed how author Cynthia Rylant used the technique in the book, When I Was Young in the Mountains, which Robertson's class had read. Then students dispersed around the room to work on their own narratives during a 40-minute work period. Some of Robertson's students were planning new narratives. Others were drafting, revising or editing. Two students were seated on pillows in a corner of the room holding a "buddy conference" -- reading each other's work and offering suggestions that they documented on feedback forms. Robertson moved around the room, conducting one-on-one conferences that are part of the America's Choice design. One student was writing about her first boy/girl birthday party and wanted to know if her story lacked sufficient detail. Robertson felt she had too much detail rather than too little, and together, the teacher and student discussed ways of thinning out the narrative. After 40 minutes, Robertson's students convened on a rug in front of a rocking chair -- the America's Choice "author's chair," where students share their work with their classmates at the conclusion of every class. The first student climbed in and read her boy/girl party narrative. Students responded with compliments and suggestions of how to streamline her story. And then another student switched places with the first and discussed the closing to his narrative -- ending the class where it had begun an hour earlier. The Duval County school district has been pleased by the results of such strategies. It is having America's Choice train Duval staff so they can introduce the America's Choice model throughout the county's 131 elementary and middle schools. Back to Results