Blythewood Middle School is helping all students develop the World Class Skills of the Profile of the South Carolina Graduate. To this end, all of our teachers are required to have the Profile of the South Carolina Graduate displayed in their classroom. This serves as a daily reminder to all of our students, the skills needed for them to be successful in the classroom and beyond.
Per our mission statement, “At Blythewood Middle School, our goal is to provide engaging and meaningful opportunities in a rigorous environment where relationships are built, successes are celebrated and students are competitive in the 21st century". To this end, during the 2023-2024 school year, Blythewood Middle School worked to ensure that all students were provided with engaging learning opportunities. While both, our district and our school is a 1:1 learning environment, Blythewood Middle School ensured that there was a greater focus on paper and pencil assignments as our school committed to an 80/20 initiative: 80 percent of instructional time would be focused on direct instruction with paper/pencil assignments as a means for getting students to be more focused on reading and writing, and committed to productive struggle, while being less reliant on technology. Only 20 percent of class time would utilize technology. In addition to this, all teachers placed greater emphasis on utilizing textbooks, particularly in math classes, as there was an emphasis on getting students to take guided notes in the math classroom. Our students learned that math is more than just the compilation and computation of numbers; math is also about reading, problem solving and understanding complex word problems. At Blythewood Middle School, we continued to look for ways to close the learning gaps in math that have been exacerbated since the COVID pandemic. Our teachers offered Early Bird tutoring for our students that needed additional support in math. Similarly, we created a Math Fun day that helped students see that math could also be enjoyable. On this day, our math teachers designed fun math games and other hands-on math activities complete with manipulatives that allowed our students to be creative while using their math skills to drive home the fact that math does not have to be boring or scary. To further close learning gaps for all students, across all content areas, emphasis was placed on providing our teachers with professional development on retrieval practices. Teachers received professional development on interleaved practices and were provided with data, as well as examples of how to use interleaving in their classroom instruction, as well as assessments.
Blythewood Middle School continued to focus on our successes as we celebrated our students, as well as our faculty and staff. We increased our number of Junior Scholars from eighteen to twenty-seven; 16 band students earned placement on the Region Honor Band; 3 band students earned SC All-State distinction; 28 Superior ratings were received by our band students during the Band & Solo Ensemble Festival; Blythewood Middle was named a Special Olympics Unified Champion School; again this school year, a teacher was named WLTX Teacher of the Week; a teacher intern, and future 2024-2025 Blythewood Middle School teacher, was nominated and named South Carolina Association of Middle Level Educators (SCAMLE) “Teacher Candidate to Watch”; and our very own principal was named South Carolina Association of School Administrators (SCASA) Middle Level Principal of the Year.
