Content area
Full Text
Introduction
Departmentalization is a common organizational structure in American secondar}7 schools (Rossi & Montgomery, 1994). In the departmentalized model, students receive instruction from several different individuals in a given school day. In contrast, elementary schools have tended to follow a self-contained model where students are taught by one teacher every day. Increasing accountability demands are now leading some districts to departmentalize or consider departmentalizing at the elementary school level (Delviscio & Muffs, 2007). In states like Kentucky and New York, highstakes accountability testing is occurring at the intermediate elementary level leading some principals to re-design their elementary schools, including the utilization of departmentalization (Delviscio & Muffs, 2007).
The trend in departmentalizing elementary schools is illuminated by articles advocating departmentalization at the elementary school level. For example, the National Association of Elementary School Principals published a research-based argument on departmentalizing elementary schools (Chan & Jarman, 2004) and then collected feedback from their readers on whether a self-contained classroom was adequate in the context of high-stakes accountability. The Conference Board of Mathematics published a report in 2001 recommending that math be taught by specialized teachers in intermediate elementary grades.
The departmentalization model has many advantages as seen in the middle school and high school levels (see Chan & Jarman, 2004). It allows teachers to specialize and teach one content area in-depth, which may in turn lead to higher teacher satisfaction and teacher retention. At the secondary level, the departmentalization model is reinforced by federal and state regulations requiring certification in the content area an instructor is teaching. For elementary school teachers who have traditionally been generalists, moving to a departmentalization model may be appealing because it allows them to focus on a specific area and teach similar lessons across different groups of students instead of having to prepare multiple lessons for one group of students each day.
However, little research exists as to whether a departmentalization model is developmentally appropriate for younger students. Elementary school years are the formative years in which students develop their attitudes toward school and toward learning. Early educational trajectories have been shown to persist and, consequently, high quality beginning school experiences are especially crucial (Pallas, Entwistle, Alexander, & Cadigan, 1987). Students as young as first-graders have been shown to have strong,...