Hay Elementary School 1018 North Laramie Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60651 773-534-6000 Sandra Crosby, Principal

John Hay Community Academy is a school in a predominantly African-American neighborhood on the west side of Chicago, serving an average of 800 students yearly in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade. When the CLC concept was introduced at the school in 1994, ten teachers in grades K-4 and special education came together in the interest of collaborating with colleagues. During the first two school years of CLC at Hay the ten teachers met monthly, with NEIU professors, to discuss selected curriculum areas and best practices in these areas. In the first year this group focused on language arts in primary grades, sharing ideas and consulting with university faculty members from the Reading Department and from Curriculum and Instruction. At the start of the following school year, this teacher group chose to look at the issue of resiliency in the inner-city child; the group met and discussed a number of readings on the subject, reflecting on their own experiences with challenged students.

The team had difficulty defining a focus after the dialogues on resiliency. It was later in the project's second year that the teachers, with the help of two particular NEIU faculty members who began working with CLC, identified two areas which they wanted to explore in depth. They divided in two working teams, though many of the teachers became part of both teams. One area was technology and the classroom; the second area of interest was improving math instruction. The teams began meeting with these two university professors who had expertise in technology and primary math, respectively, and who were commited to offering assistance in Chicago public schools.

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| Introduction to Hay School | Hay Math Their Way Team | HayTech Team |
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