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“Even when people come and go from Gateways the bonds stay strong”
- Gateways Alumni
The Gateways Program is a therapeutic academic independence program designed to assist Wellesley High School students with managing the challenges associated to high school life. We are committed to creating an inclusive learning environment that teaches and develops our students the educational, social, and personal skills needed to succeed beyond graduation.
The Gateways philosophy begins by recognizing that WHS students already possess many skill strengths that our staff can build upon to achieve students’ goals. By partnering with the students they quickly learn how important their voice is regarding the goal setting process. To achieve the goals, Gateways staff provide the students with the skill building training needed to independently manage complex school-related matters.
Students can remain connected to Gateways their entire high school career or for shorter durations. The majority of Gateways students attend the program one daily academic block, five out of seven school days. Our program also affords the flexibility to add or reduce time. By January of senior year we expect our soon-to-be graduates to have earned our trust so that they can utilize the Gateways program on an “as needed”, basis determined by them.
The Gateways staff employs great care when constructing students’ schedules. We take into consideration their current school production, mental health status, and past academic performance. By attending carefully to our students’ current status we avoid overextending their resources, a problem that has led to frequent school-related challenges in the past. Furthermore, the personalized schedule enables the Gateways staff to find the class section that will best contribute to advancing a student’s academic and social skill. Students do earn academic credit toward graduation by attending the Gateways program.
New Criteria to Define School Success
Every Gateways student has a story that includes where, when, who, what and why their school life has yet to be fully rewarding. As we listen to our students, we learn where positive and negative experiences occurred and influenced their school success. A crucial lesson we have learned is to deemphasize students’ academic grades. For us, grades frequently represent a secondary and, occasionally, tertiary level of success. Rather, the Gateways definition of school-related success is consistent school and class attendance, increased communication to teachers/staff, better organizational skill, improved peer relations, and sustained emotional balance. When the above skills become operationalized, students make progress, and, to no one’s surprise, earn improved grades.
Positive Behavior Intervention Systems (PBIS) & Response to Intervention (RTI)
In order to incorporate the national trend to employ PBIS and RTI, the Gateways program has created a positive pro-social model that employs data collection to guide service delivery. “Positive behavior support is an application of a behavioral based systems approach to enhance the capacity of schools, families and communities to design effective environments that improve the link between research-validated practices and the environments in which teaching and learning occur” (Adelman, Howard & Taylor Linda. 2010). The Gateways program employs two inter-related systems to evaluate our students’ progress.
System One - Self-Regulation and Self-Efficacy (SRSE)
Gateways has implemented an innovative skill building model that combines self-regulation and self-efficacy skill (SRSE) to improve our students’ academic success and social/emotional regulation. Academic success refers to specific skill areas every high school student needs to develop as they prepare to transition into the world beyond Wellesley High School. Social/emotional regulation pertains to the complex interpersonal and psychological matters that have complicated our students’ lives.
What is the spark behind developing the self-regulation skill that leads to school-related success? From our experience, this is where self-efficacy comes into play. Self-efficacy refers to the degree to which a student feels capable, and prepared to successfully performing a certain task, such as completing a science lab, making friends, dancing a solo or getting accepted to college. Self-efficacy is much more than a mindset, rather self-efficacy arrives when the student knows what skill she or he must improve and implements a thoughtful approach to attain his or her goal. The Gateways staff helps our students target their individual skill areas while monitoring their progress.
Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS)
Dr. Ross Greene’s CPS model (Greene 2014) emphasizes the positive view that every student wants to do well if he or she can. Our responsibility as educators is to help the students develop the needed skills to reach their goals. By employing a healthy dose of empathy we try to ensure that our students know our staff understands their experience. The Gateways team partners with the students, teachers and families to find mutually satisfying solutions.
The What's Up Form
The What’s Up form is specific to one situation. It records a student’s progress in relation to his or her social/emotional goal. The What’s Up form is completed when a student needs additional staff support due to challenging feelings. The student writes as little or as much as they need to explain the challenging moment. Upon completion of the form the student will process the content with a staff member. Only after the student knows our staff and the teacher understand his or her experience, the student, the teacher and the Gateways staff will construct a plan.
Gateways Teaches More…
The Gateways staff believes that our program does best when each individual appreciates the whole community, just as the community appreciates individual differences. Regardless of race, nationality, orientation or religion, the Gateways staff will always see the student first. By welcoming diversity and promoting inclusion our community welcomes each individual to find his or her niche. Whether a child is an athlete, musician, theatre arts performer, or gamer, we meet the student where his or her interests lie, thus increasing the chance that everyone feels respected within our community
Transition Planning
When every Gateways student arrives to our program, we begin our initial conversation by asking; “If tomorrow was the day after graduation are you ready for college/work/military/gap year?” Even freshmen hear this question and we remind our students that eventually they will have life after WHS. The Gateways program takes special pride in our effort to ensure that transition planning begins early and becomes a natural part of our students’ lexicon.
* Zimmerman, B. and Bonner, S. Developing Self-Regulated Learners – Beyond Achievement to Self-Efficacy. 1996. Washington, D.C. American Psychological Association
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