All photos taken by Gabriela Parini Cordova.
This year’s ELA department has had a bit of a setback with Audrey Birkett leaving the building. The department will miss her as she has taken on new opportunities. There is currently a new teacher in the department who was hired soon after Birkett’s departure. Her name is Janine Gauvin and she teaches both ELA and special education students.
Even though she first applied to be a literacy assistant she was advised to take on the ELA and Special Education position, which she was excited for. Gauvin stated, “I love reading, I love helping kids learn how to write and communicate their ideas and Special ED helps me to make more of a difference, so it’s like a win-win.”
She has a lot of passion for her job and likes to collaborate with other teachers and is excited to do so. “I feel like people here and the choices of classes and things are very creative and I feel like people here are constantly trying to change things for the better,” she said. Her first impression of the school was that it was different from any other. She saw the teachers here that are energized and excited about the things they are teaching.
Amber Malm, the director of the department, brought up that “right now…all across the board in every district, we’re hurting for teachers, whatever subject. I think it’s been a tough couple years for teachers and for students.” After covid and the pandemic, many teachers have been struggling. They are still trying to find their footing and figure everything out with how difficult the past two years have been.
The ELA department has many projects coming to the students of Malden High School. They are currently working towards the state standard-based work for each grade level and aligning with a protocol called GLEAM. The GLEAM protocol stands for Grade, Level, Engaging, Affirmative, and Meaningful.
Principal Christopher Mastrangelo stated, “We were noticing that some of the standards, we weren’t necessarily teaching.” He continued that the goal was also to “not just teach to the standard” but to “make those lessons engaging, affirmative, and meaningful for all of our students.”
While the standard-based work is being set for students, there are also department goals that mention the changing of books used in the ELA curriculum. “We are going to continue to build our libraries with culturally diverse texts that students can see themselves in and learn about the world in,” Malm stated. Mastrangelo has also talked about adding Malinda Lo’s book Last Night at the Telegraph Club into the curriculum to represent the Asian and queer communities better.
Malden High School’s students can also look forward to a passionate project that is put together by Brian Wong of the ELA Department and his Hip Hop Literature class. “At the end of the year we do this project where we form a collective… and we all create different things and we put on a show in the courtyard,” said Wong. He continued that he “just wanted to make that even better than it was last year—that’s the passion project for this year.” This is an exciting opportunity for students as they get to use their creativity to make something new and present it to their peers.
With all of these projects and updates to the curriculum, there is time behind the scenes that the teachers need to plan and create bonds with each other. Mastrangelo said, “I think [the bond between teachers is] hugely important and I think in the last few years that’s dipped. I think we’ve become very what they call, siloed because we’re all over the place.” The bond in the ELA department is hard to maintain as they only have 40 minutes within the entire month to meet, discuss, and plan for their classes.
Yahaira Marquez, the Lead Teacher of the department, said, “Overall, I think that one of the struggles in the school is just not having enough time to work together as departments...[which is] beneficial not for just strengthening what we do in our classes and strengthening our instructions but also our relationships in the department.”
Many teachers in the ELA department agreed that they did not have enough time to connect with each other and felt as though they have to figure things out on their own instead of as a team. “When we get together we have a whole agenda of things that we do and we really try to squeeze in time for us to talk but it’s not enough time,” stated Tia Johnson, another ELA teacher.
Even though there is not enough time for the department to fully bond they are still open to the idea. Melissa Sheehan, another ELA teacher, said, “There are some teachers that I don’t know as well as I would like to and I would love to be able to get to know them better.” Knowing most if not all the teachers in your department is crucial to understanding the work being put out to students and if they had more time the ELA department would have closer bonds together.
Malm has said to fix this the teachers have suggested going to Boda Borg and working together in the escape rooms. “I can just imagine taking the department of English teachers to Boda Borg and maybe bonding that way, I think they do need to build relationships so we can trust each other…but just trying to find the time when everybody can do it is kind of hard,” said Malm.
