Morningside Academy: Not the “Michaela of America”, but just as important

Today I visited Morningside Academy, an evidence-informed school that I featured on Progressively Incorrect last month. While Morningside is famous amongst educators with a behavior analysis background, it is practically unknown by teachers – including me, until recently – on EduTwitterX. The few short hours I spent at Morningside left me absolutely blown away by this charming school, and I’ve become a major believer in behavioral education.

What makes Morningside so special?

Perhaps the most striking feature of Morningside is that students are not grouped by age or grade, but homogeneously by achievement. This allows students who enter the school in, say, the 8th grade, to take classes on material that is typically taught in 1st grade, or earlier. At one point I listened to an older student confidently reading multi-syllabic words in a Corrective Reading lesson while surrounded by much younger classmates. Apparently he had arrived earlier in the year with hardly any reading skills at all.

Which brings me to the observation that initially interested me in Morningside: their use of Direct Instruction. In my time at Morningside I saw Corrective Reading and Reading Mastery being used with stunning skill and efficiency. This isn’t a school that shies away from using “canned curricula.” There were entire store rooms filled with textbooks and teachers guides from various curriculum providers. The use of these curriculum programs did not de-professionalize the teachers. In fact, these were some of the most talented and knowledgeable teachers I have ever observed. With these programs in hand, the teachers were able to focus their planning hours on analyzing their data to inform interventions. I saw data being collected on clipboards, posted on the walls, and recorded by the kids themselves. Which brings me to another quirk of Morningside: Standard Celeration Charts.

Morningside uses an approach called Precision Teaching, which in the simplest of explanations, means facilitating various timed tests to promote fluency and tracking the results on a graph called a Standard Celeration Chart. The students plotted their own progress with dots, which is compared visually to a goal that served both an assessment and motivational purpose. When you walk the halls of Morningside, you’re bound to hear the beeps of kitchen timers as students practice the material to mastery.

Choral response is the other thing you’ll hear in Morningside’s halls. Besides an emphasis on getting kids to respond in unison, teachers cold called students with proper wait time, and occasionally asked for hands up. Teachers taught bell-to-bell (although there were no bells) and gave students points for specified behaviors on a little sheet at the corner of their desks, which were all forward facing. The points they earned were then consolidated onto their “Support Card”, which they took from class to class, and finally, home. One student I interviewed told me that she had once been dinged on her Support Card for having a messy desk, which, she said, “motivated” her to never do that again.

As a private school with small class sizes and a relatively wealthy intake (not to mention a completely different ethos and instructional model), it is neither appropriate nor necessary to compare Morningside with Michaela Community School in England – a school I have also featured on my podcast. What Morningside contributes to this space is its commitment to shaping behavior through explicit instruction and reinforcement, an insanely sophisticated and comprehensive approach to assessment and intervention based on MTSS principles, and a curriculum that emphasizes the importance of secure foundational skills as a means for achieving higher order outcomes.