Mariner Middle School

Triton Time is a whole-school intervention and enrichment period built into the master schedule. Triton Time is a progress-monitoring system where student placement is determined in a ten-day rotation via common assessments. Students spend the first two days of every rotation with a mentor teacher. With the mentor teachers, the students track levels of standards mastery, graph their common assessments, converse in data chats, and set academic goals. For the remaining eight days of the cycle (or rotation), students are either assigned to an intervention group or have chosen an enrichment class.

Intervention is provided for English Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, and Foreign Language. In all these classes, your child is tracked daily through formative bell ringers (short activity completed at the beginning for each class).

On the tenth day, students take the Mastery Assessment (mini quiz) to determine standard mastery. Mastery is defined to your child as 80% or greater. Your child is assigned into intervention according to their Mastery Grade Assessment score. All of this data is tracked in a program called Castle.

During the intervention, students work on mastering the standard in fun, creative new ways. Our intention is for this to be fun for students and not seem like a punishment. At the end of the two-week cycle, students take the Mastery Grade Assessment again to show improvement in their scores. New scores are recorded in the grade book to reflect mastery.

During enrichment, your child has the benefit of extending and enriching their learning. Many of the enrichment classes are inquiry-based learning which requires critical thinking strategies through the application of knowledge into real-world scenarios and situations.

Students have the opportunity to attend enrichment by showing they “get it” on all their Mastery Grade Assessments. Students identified for enrichment have proven standard mastery for the cycle in all core classes, have completed their Teen Biz requirements, and do not have any “Z’s” which drop their grade below 74%. These students select three enrichment choices for where they want go more in-depth on academic topics to challenge themselves more.

Another opportunity for students is the option to be a peer coach. These students chose to tutor and coach other students in a subject in which they are confident. Several 8th-grade students used this time as part of their IB Community Project and went helped 6th graders with math as peer tutors.