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Jill Bergeron

Strengthening Student Engagement:A Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching - 0 views

www.ascd.org/...rally-Responsive-Teaching.aspx

culturally responsive cultural competency responsive classroom responsive

shared by Jill Bergeron on 11 May 16 - Cached
  • To be effective in multicultural classrooms, teachers must relate teaching content to the cultural backgrounds of their students.
  • Engagement is the visible outcome of motivation, the natural capacity to direct energy in the pursuit of a goal. Our emotions influence our motivation. In turn, our emotions are socialized through culture—the deeply learned confluence of language, beliefs, values, and behaviors that pervades every aspect of our lives.
  • What may elicit that frustration, joy, or determination may differ across cultures, because cultures differ in their definitions of novelty, hazard, opportunity, and gratification, and in their definitions of appropriate responses. Thus, the response a student has to a learning activity reflects his or her culture.
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  • motivationally effective teaching is culturally responsive teaching.
  • Because the importance of grades and grade point averages increases as a student advances in school, it is legitimate to question whether extrinsic motivation systems are effective for significant numbers of students across cultures. We can only conclude that, as long as the educational system continues to relate motivation to learn with external rewards and punishments, culturally different students will, in large part, be excluded from engagement and success in school.
  • It is part of human nature to be curious, to be active, to initiate thought and behavior, to make meaning from experience, and to be effective at what we value. These primary sources of motivation reside in all of us, across all cultures. When students can see that what they are learning makes sense and is important, their intrinsic motivation emerges.
  • We can begin to replace the carrot and stick metaphor with the words “understand” and “elicit”; to change the concept of motivation from reward and punishment to communication and respect. We can influence the motivation of students by coming to know their perspective, by drawing forth who they naturally and culturally are, and by seeing them as unique and active. Sharing our resources with theirs, working together, we can create greater energy for learning.
  • A growing number of educational models, including constructivism and multiple intelligences theory, are based on intrinsic motivation. They see student perspective as central to teaching.
  • Unfortunately, educators must often apply these theories within educational systems dominated by extrinsic reinforcement, where grades and class rank are emphasized. And, when extrinsic rewards continue to be the primary motivators, intrinsic motivation is dampened. Those students whose socialization accommodates the extrinsic approach surge ahead, while those students—often the culturally different—whose socialization does not, fall behind. A holistic, culturally responsive pedagogy based on intrinsic motivation is needed to correct this imbalance.
  • The framework names four motivational conditions that the teacher and students continuously create or enhance. They are: Establishing inclusion—creating a learning atmosphere in which students and teachers feel respected by and connected to one another. Developing attitude—creating a favorable disposition toward the learning experience through personal relevance and choice. Enhancing meaning—creating challenging, thoughtful learning experiences that include student perspectives and values. Engendering competence—creating an understanding that students are effective in learning something they value. These conditions are essential to developing intrinsic motivation. They are sensitive to cultural differences. They work in concert as they influence students and teachers, and they happen in a moment as well as over a period of time.
  • Figure 1. Four Conditions Necessary for Culturally Responsive Teaching
  • 1. Establish Inclusion Norms: Emphasize the human purpose of what is being learned and its relationship to the students' experience. Share the ownership of knowing with all students. Collaborate and cooperate. The class assumes a hopeful view of people and their capacity to change. Treat all students equitably. Invite them to point out behaviors or practices that discriminate. Procedures: Collaborative learning approaches; cooperative learning; writing groups; peer teaching; multi-dimensional sharing; focus groups; and reframing. Structures: Ground rules, learning communities; and cooperative base groups. 2. Develop Positive Attitude Norms: Relate teaching and learning activities to students' experience or previous knowledge. Encourage students to make choices in content and assessment methods based on their experiences, values, needs, and strengths. Procedures: Clear learning goals; problem solving goals; fair and clear criteria of evaluation; relevant learning models; learning contracts; approaches based on multiple intelligences theory, pedagogical flexibility based on style, and experiential learning. Structure: Culturally responsive teacher/student/parent conferences.
  • 3. Enhance Meaning Norms: Provide challenging learning experiences involving higher order thinking and critical inquiry. Address relevant, real-world issues in an action-oriented manner. Encourage discussion of relevant experiences. Incorporate student dialect into classroom dialogue. Procedures: Critical questioning; guided reciprocal peer questioning; posing problems; decision making; investigation of definitions; historical investigations; experimental inquiry; invention; art; simulations; and case study methods. Structures: Projects and the problem-posing model. 4. Engender Competence Norms: Connect the assessment process to the students' world, frames of reference, and values. Include multiple ways to represent knowledge and skills and allow for attainment of outcomes at different points in time. Encourage self-assessment. Procedures: Feedback; contextualized assessment; authentic assessment tasks; portfolios and process-folios; tests and testing formats critiqued for bias; and self-assessment. Structures: Narrative evaluations; credit/no credit systems; and contracts for grades. Based on Wlodkowski, R. J., and M. B. Ginsberg. (1995). Diversity and Motivation: Culturally Responsive Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
  • Jill Bergeron on 11 May 16
     
    This article offers up four conditions teachers can create in order to foster a culturally responsive classroom.
Jill Bergeron

Relationship Building Through Culturally Responsive Classroom Management | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...sponsive-classroom-todd-finley

diversity classroom management cultural competency

shared by Jill Bergeron on 09 May 16 - No Cached
  • Cultural competence is the ability to successfully communicate and empathize with people from diverse cultures and incomes,
  • To build rapport, talk directly to children outside of class, using their names. Also begin class by checking in -- asking kids how they’re doing -- even if the misbehavior of the previous class reached biblical proportions.
  • Monitor your discourse style. Indirect requests (“Would you like to let me finish reading the directions?”) can confuse some children who are used to receiving explicit directives from their working-class parents.
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  • Be sensitive to how diverse cultures deal with conflict. Many citizens of Asian countries avoid open conflict, believing that differences are best worked out quietly. Written exchanges might be preferred over face-to-face conflict resolution.
  • Clarify expectations. If you put students into groups, for example, explain and model the difference between “helping” and “doing the work for” a partner.
  • Emphasize a positive environment, not punishment.
  • Increasing punishment fails to change student behaviors.
  • earned students’ consent and trust through humor.
Jill Bergeron

NAIS - Affirming the Well-Being of Black Teachers - 0 views

www.nais.org/...e-well-being-of-black-teachers

DEI belongingness PWI

shared by Jill Bergeron on 26 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • the necessity of emotional support in our schools through affinity groups and the need for culturally responsive professional development opportunities similar to ones offered at the NAIS People of Color Conference (PoCC).
  • In her book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Beverly Tatum outlines a familiar circumstance that many Black faculty face when working in PWIs. “Particularly in work settings, where people of color are isolated and often in the extreme minority, the opportunities to connect with peers of color are few and far between. White people are often unaware of how stressful such a situation can be.”
  • As confirmed in my research findings, affinity groups are one of the few places in PWIs where Black faculty and staff expressed a genuine sense of recognition and appreciation. Affinity groups provide teachers who share a common identity at our school the opportunity to meet, connect, and support each other. The Black affinity group gatherings at our school can range from informal check-ins to more structured and facilitated conversations about stress management and teaching practices. As important as these meetings are, they are unfortunately infrequent.    
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  • Another participant described affinity groups as “a space where I can say the things I need to say, you know, and be who I am and not have to couch it.” This kind of comfort can be a critical emotional lifeline for Black teachers.
  • If leadership at PWIs hopes to stem the tide of attrition among Black faculty, they need to invest in a consistent approach to professional development that is not reactionary.
  • I’ve established healthy boundaries, such as acknowledging that it’s not always my responsibility to coach my white colleagues through their misconceptions about race or Black folks.
  • It can be inefficient and, at times, ineffective to wait for our institutions to “make time” for us, so I had to find and build a support system at my school. Casual meetings for lunch, BIPOC group chats, and guidance from more experienced Black faculty and school leaders have helped me find a balance.
  • I hope school leaders will make it a priority to improve the teaching experience of their Black faculty by intentionally budgeting more time for supportive gatherings like affinity groups and providing more culturally responsive professional development opportunities to sustain teachers throughout the year.
Jill Bergeron

The Marshall Memo Admin - Issues - 0 views

www.marshallmemo.com/issue.php

leadership pedagogy new teacher improved teaching assessment Reflection Learning critical thinking problem solving emotional labor balance work-life balance longevity

shared by Jill Bergeron on 04 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • In This Issue: 1. Four secrets of peak performance 2. “Emotional labor” on the job 3. Getting students thinking at higher levels 4. Student work analysis to improve teaching, assessment, and learning 5. Elements of the Haberman principal interview
  • “The key to resilience is trying really hard, then stopping, recovering, and then trying again… Our brains need a rest as much as our bodies do… The value of a recovery period rises in proportion to the amount of work required of us.”
  • the best long-term performers tap into positive energy at all levels of the performance pyramid.” Here are the four levels:
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  • being able to mobilize energy when it’s needed – depends on two things: (a) alternating between intense work and recovery; and (b) developing regular rituals to build in recovery.
  • For those of us who are not professional athletes, regular workouts each week, coupled with good nutrition and sleep, make a major difference in work productivity and enjoyment.
  • Positive emotions have a remarkable impact on reducing physiological stress, whereas negative emotions, even simulated, increase stress. The key, psychologists have found, is to “act as if.”
  • Here are some workplace conditions that increase emotional labor: -   A mismatch between your personality and what’s expected on the job; -   A misalignment of values, especially if what you’re asked to do is in conflict with what you believe; -   A workplace culture in which particular ways of expressing emotion are endorsed, or not endorsed.
  • The key to improving cognitive work is focus, say Loehr and Schwartz. A big part of that is managing down-time – knowing the body’s need for breaks every 90-120 minutes – and using meditation and visualization.
  • Practiced regularly, meditation quiets the mind, the emotions, and the body, promoting energy recovery.” Experienced meditators need considerably less sleep and have enhanced creativity and productivity.
  • Spiritual capacity – By this, Loehr and Schwartz mean “the energy that is unleashed by tapping into one’s deepest values and defining a strong sense of purpose.”
  • Sometimes, when we’re doing work that isn’t in synch with how we feel, we have to put on our professional game face. That effort is known among psychologists as “emotional labor” – remaining energetic and upbeat despite a bad night’s sleep,
  • framing his response in positive language.
  • If you’re in a job that’s meaningful and largely aligned with your values, the best way to reduce emotional labor, says David, is to substitute surface acting with what she calls “deep acting.” Some tips:             • Remind yourself why you’re in the job you’re in.
  • Explore “want to” versus “have to” thinking. What aspects of the job energize you? How can other aspects be made more efficient and pleasant?
  • Do some job crafting. Can you and your boss tweak the work so it’s of greater value to you and the organization? Or is there a new project that would be fun and productive?
  • “Drill-and-practice is boring. But thinking, for most students most of the time, is actually fun.”
  • four strategies to engage students in higher-order thinking:             • Open questions – Every lesson should have two or three of these to highlight key content and thinking skills.
  • Wait time is important. Think time, no hands up, is a good admonition. “If you don’t provide enough wait time, you’ll get either no responses or surface-level responses,
  • In all-class discussions, teachers should resist the temptation to comment themselves, instead asking specific follow-up questions to get other students involved.
  • All too many student projects are simple regurgitation,
  • Students thinking, not just retelling
  • The way out of this dynamic is posing a thought-provoking problem
  • Another approach is asking “what if” and “what else” questions to push students to expand or elaborate on what they’re studying
  • Self-assessment – “Students who can self-assess are poised to be life-long learners,” says Brookhart. “They are poised to use self-regulation strategies and to be their own best coaches as they learn. They are able to ask focused questions when they don’t understand or when they’re stuck.”
  • Teach students to self-assess with rubrics. It’s important that the rubric goes beyond the basic level and stipulates higher-level criteria like stating a position, defending one’s reasoning, using supportive details.
  • Use confidence ratings. For example, students might be asked to use the “fist of fives” on their chest to indicate how confident they are that they understand a particular term or concept
  • Have students co-create success criteria. Studying material with which students are familiar, they can jointly create what the teacher and students will look for in their work.
  • consultant Karin Hess suggests analyzing student work in three layers: first describing the student work we actually see (or what students tell about it); then interpreting what the evidence might mean (specific to the intended purpose); and then evaluating what next steps should be taken. Hess outlines how the process of analyzing student work can be helpful to teaching and learning:
  • • Purpose #1: Improving the quality of tasks/prompts and scoring guides – Piloting tasks and looking at student work helps to clarify prompts, make tasks accessible and engaging for all students, trim unnecessary components, modify the wording of scoring rubrics, and tweak questions so they will measure deeper thinking.
  • Students can use assessment evidence to set and monitor progress, reflect on themselves as learners, and evaluate the quality of their own work. “Valuing both one’s struggles and successes at accomplishing smaller learning targets over time has proven to have a profound influence on deepening motivation, developing independence as a learner, and building what we have come to know as ‘a growth mindset,’”
  • Purpose #3: Monitoring progress over time – A good pre-assessment focuses on the core learning or prerequisite skills that students will need to build on, and teachers can sort and work with students according to what they need to learn to be successful in the unit.
  • Purpose #2: Making key instructional decisions – Observing and taking notes on students’ responses to this task gave teachers two specific teaching points.
  • What does the student know now that he or she didn’t know how to do as well on the first task? What were the areas of improvement?
  • Which piece of work comes closest to the expectations? What’s the evidence?
  • Purpose #4: Engaging students in peer- and self-assessment – One approach is having students look at two pieces of work by other students side by side and asking them (for example): -   What does each student know and understand and where might they improve?
  • Purpose #5: Better understanding how learning progresses over time – Many skills, concepts, and misconceptions revealed in student work analysis are not explicitly addressed in curriculum standards. Looking at students’ learning trajectories in interim assessments and student work can guide teachers in the next step that students at different levels of progress need to take. • Purpose #6: Building content and pedagogical expertise –
  • it is analyzing evidence in student work that causes teachers to reflect on how students learn and how to make their instructional and assessment practices more effective.”
  • “students who engage with rich, strategically-designed tasks on a regular basis learn that finding the answer is not as personally meaningful as knowing how to apply knowledge in new situations and explain the reasoning that supports their thinking.”
  • 13 dimensions of school leadership
  • Jill Bergeron on 04 Oct 16
     
    The first four articles have to do with building a better teacher and leader. The last article looks at educational leadership and the qualities that support it.
Jill Bergeron

The Marshall Memo Admin - Issues - 0 views

marshallmemo.com/issue.php

21st century skills critical thinking problem solving PLC program evaluation pd professional development reading literacy vocabulary bullying bullying prevention art arts education creativity character education movement

shared by Jill Bergeron on 18 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • students who have four years of art score 91 points higher on the SAT than students who don’t.
    • Jill Bergeron
      Jill Bergeron on 18 Apr 17
       
      This seems correlational.
  • Danny Gregory applauds the arguments made for the importance of art and music in schools: they improve motor, spatial, and language skills; they enhance peer collaboration; they strengthen ties to the community; they keep at-risk students in school and improve their chances of ultimately graduating from college; and
  • In middle school, the majority start to lose their passion for making stuff and instead learn the price of making mistakes.
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  • In short, every child starts out with a natural interest in art, but for most it is slowly drained away until all that’s left is a handful of teens in eyeliner and black clothing whose parents worry they’ll never move out of the basement.”
  • As of 2015, only 26.2 percent of African-American students have access to art classes.
  • Gregory has a startling suggestion: take the “art” out of art education and replace it with creativity education. Why? Because creativity is something that almost everyone agrees is vital to success.
  • Solving problems, using tools, collaborating, expressing our ideas clearly, being entrepreneurial and resourceful – these are the skills that matter in the 21st century, post-corporate labor market. Instead of being defensive about art, instead of talking about culture and self-expression, we have to focus on the power of creativity and the skills required to develop it. A great artist is also a problem solver, a presenter, an entrepreneur, a fabricator, and more.”
  • We need to make sure that the kids of today (who will need to be the creative problem solvers of tomorrow) realize their creative potential and have the tools to use it.
  • A total of 21 percent of students said they had been bullied in the following ways: 13 percent made fun of, called names, or insulted; 12 percent subject of rumors; 5 percent pushed, shoved, tripped, or spat on; 4 percent threatened with harm; 5 percent purposefully excluded from activities; 2.5 percent told to do things they didn’t want to do; and 2 percent had their property purposefully destroyed. Girls reported more online harassment (16 percent) than boys (6 percent). These were the locations where students said the bullying occurred: -   42 percent in hallways or stairwells (similar for boys and girls); -   34 percent in classrooms (perhaps mainly during entry, transitions, and exit); -   22 percent in cafeterias; -   19 percent outside on school grounds; -   12 percent online or by text; -   10 percent on school buses; -   9 percent in bathrooms/locker rooms.
  • hallways and stairwells, taken together, are nearly twice as likely to be the source of the problem as the cafeteria, playground, or buses and bathrooms. Supervision and vigilance in those fluid spaces between classes is likely to benefit vulnerable students disproportionately.”
  • dance, gesture, and other forms of movement can improve motivation, engagement, and learning.
  • students in classrooms that integrated movement were “significantly more excited by, engaged in, and focused on the lessons” than they were with conventional teaching methods.
  • Dancing to memorize information
  • Moving among stations
  • Applying movement to assessments
  • Forming lines, rows, or other groupings – Each student gets a card with a punctuation mark or a word and students silently arrange themselves to form a complete sentence.
  • Representing terms or ideas with actions – After reading a book about emotions, students stand and act out furious, satisfied, courageous, and other words.
  • – The teacher gives each group of students sets of fraction cards and they take turns moving to another group in search of equivalent fractions, bringing possible matches back to their group to see if they’re correct.
  • – To test knowledge of synonyms and antonyms, pairs of students jump straight up and down three times, then choose to land on either their right or left foot; if both land on the same foot, they must come up with synonyms for a word on the board; if they land on opposite feet, they must name antonyms.
  • – Doing a dance skip-counting numbers (5, 10, 15, 20…) to the “Macarena.”
  • Many teachers assigned tasks with complex instructions and procedures, but little higher-level thinking was required of students
  • How many of these do schools teach? Just three, say the authors, even in schools where students get high state test scores: application, recall, and (sometimes) analysis.
  • a synthesis of the skills they believe adults need for successful lives: Cognitive skills: -   Recall -   Application -   Analysis -   Evaluation -   Creative thinking Interpersonal skills: -   Communication -   Cooperation -   Empathy -   Trust building -   Service orientation -   Conflict resolution -   Negotiation -   Responsibility -   Assertiveness -   Advocacy Intrapersonal skills: -   Flexibility -   Adaptability -   Appreciation of diversity -   Valuing learning -   Cultural appreciation -   Curiosity -   Forethought -   Self-regulation -   Self-monitoring -   Self-evaluation
  • Most teachers presented students with complex content, but the tasks students were asked to perform were simple recall and application
  • interpersonal and intrapersonal skills almost never showed up.
  • These exceptional instructors created “a harmonious environment,” say the researchers, “demonstrating an understanding that doing so is a prerequisite to academic learning.”
  • It was the teacher, not the subject. This level of intellectual and affective demand cropped up in different subjects, grades, and classes with different student achievement levels. The variable was the teacher.
  • In a 10th-grade honors humanities class, for example, students were asked to invent questions to guide their study of Western imperialism in China (having just finished a unit on the colonization of Africa). Guided by the teacher, students brainstormed possible questions, decided which were most important, and edited questions until the questions were intellectually stimulating and open-ended.
  • These outliers managed to weave rigorous instruction of content across the cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal domains, putting to rest the notion that content- and skill-focused instruction precludes higher-order thinking – and vice-versa.
  • Teachers adapted their teaching to the moment.
  • to teach a deep and broad range of skills while also addressing disciplinary knowledge – requires intelligence and years of practice.”
  • Instruction was tied to complex assessments. Often designed by the teachers themselves, these checks for understanding stood in contrast to the test-prep oriented assessments in other classrooms.
  • Teachers built strong relationships with students.
  • First, Nehring, Charner-Laird, and Szczesiul suggest that schools need complex, high-level assessments to make all classrooms accountable for teaching the full range of adult skills. Second, “excellence requires highly skilled teachers with finely tuned radar and improvisational ability.” And third, “good teaching is about caring relationships, a parental affection that gives and receives, that honors the fundamentally human nature of our work as educators.
  • Thomas Guskey (University of Kentucky) stresses the importance of professional development starting with clear outcomes.
  • “In education, getting better generally means having a more positive influence on the learning of our students and helping more students learn well,” says Guskey. “Knowing our destination provides the basis for determining the effectiveness of our efforts.”
  • Polly details the 5E approach, in which students spend most of a lesson exploring mathematical tasks with limited support from the teacher, and some students get individual or small-group support: -   Engage – The class is given a math task or activity. -   Explore – Students have time to work on the task with their partner or a small group, with the teacher giving only instructions and circulating, sometimes posing questions to support students’ exploration. -   Explain – The class comes together to discuss the problem and how different students solved it. The teacher facilitates the discussion, perhaps choosing a main focus based on what was observed during the work time, and provides direct instruction as needed. -   Elaborate/extend – For the rest of the class, the teacher gets students working on activities, math games, and small-group activities that deepen understanding of the concept and zeros in on students who seem confused or off track. -   Evaluate – Students solve a final task or participate in a discussion of concepts, allowing the teacher to assess learning and plan for future lessons.
  • “Looking beyond the intended goals to the broader array of possible outcomes is an important aspect of evaluation and vital to judging effectiveness,”
  • What sparks robust discussions in PLCs is looking at variations in students’ responses to individual items on common assessments and writing prompts.
  • “The primary purpose of this collaborative data analysis,” says Guskey, “is to guide these teachers’ professional learning experiences so they can improve the quality of their instruction and help all students learn well.”
  • One additional cautionary note: PLCs tend to jump into “debating new ideas, techniques, innovations, programs, and instructional issues,” says Guskey. “While these are important issues, we must remember that they are means to an important end that must be determined first. Our journey always begins by deciding our destination… Ninety percent of essential questions in any evaluation are addressed in the planning process, before the journey begins.”
  • “When a teacher models and provides direct instruction at the start of a lesson, it rarely enables students to explore mathematical tasks or engage in productive struggle,” says Drew Polly (University of North Carolina/Charlotte) in this article in Teaching Children Mathematics.
  • researchers have found that if students grapple with a task before the teacher explains and models it (and receive appropriate follow-up), they’re more engaged and learn better.
  • What student learning outcomes do we aim to accomplish? -   What evidence will tell us if we met the goal? (ideally more than one source of data) -   What unintended consequences might occur, positive or negative?
  • “[T]he size of a person’s vocabulary is one of the strongest predictors of his or her reading comprehension,” say Tanya Wright (Michigan State University/East Lansing) and Gina Cervetti ((University of Michigan/Ann Arbor) in this article in Reading Research Quarterly.
  • Students who enter school knowing fewer words are likely to continue with relatively small vocabularies and struggle with text comprehension throughout school. Students who start with larger vocabularies, on the other hand, have broader general knowledge, need to spend less time accessing memory of words (which frees up working memory to grasp the meaning of a text), read and enjoy their reading more, and build stronger vocabularies – a reciprocal relationship that tends to widen the achievement gap.
  • Teaching word meanings almost always improved comprehension of texts containing the words taught. • Teaching word meanings doesn’t seem to improve comprehension of texts that don’t contain the target words.             • Instruction involving students in some active processing was more effective than dictionary and definition work at improving comprehension of texts containing the words taught. One caveat: researchers don’t know how much active processing is enough.             • Teaching one or two strategies (e.g., context clues or morphology) for solving word meanings doesn’t seem to improve generalized reading comprehension.
Jill Bergeron

How School Leaders Can Support Teachers and Students This Year | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...students-can-only-take-so-much

leaders stress pandemic SEL

shared by Jill Bergeron on 13 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • One of the things we know about brains that have been pushed too far is that they can’t learn. They just can’t. They need an opportunity to calm, to feel safe, to find their way out of the lizard-brain response that is fight-flight-flock-freeze-appease.
  • High social complexity + low form predictability = stress reactive behaviors.
  • High social complexity (lack of clarity around the social expectations, cultural norms, and how to navigate the expected social realities of a situation) + low form predictability (confusion about what is going to happen moment to moment, day to day, week to week) = stress reactive behaviors (fight-flight-flock-freeze-appease or signs that the amygdala, the lizard brain, has taken control and the prefrontal cortex—the part that learns and plans and creates—isn’t fully engaged).
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  • What can we do? We can seek to decrease, wherever possible, the social complexity by slowing down, by working in the smallest groups possible, by building real community through meaningful work, by building expectations with students—keeping them simple and concrete—and then using those expectations to provide much-needed boundaries.
  • Administrators must seek to do the same: build appropriate, clear, simple, concrete expectations with teachers around expectations and routines for students and for one another and then present a unified front with the professionals in their classrooms.
  • We didn’t get here in a few months, and it’s going to take more time than that to get beyond it. We all must commit to actions and values that demonstrate a culture of support and above all flexibility. We’ve suffered a collective trauma—we’re still suffering it—and expecting business as usual or even more than that isn’t going to get us anything but anger, frustration, and hostility from those we seek to serve.
Scott Nancarrow

Bullying in Schools Plagues Neurodivergent Students: ADDitude Survey - 0 views

www.additudemag.com/neurodivergent-students-report

bullying

shared by Scott Nancarrow on 02 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • Advertisement ADHD Parenting Friendships & Activities Friends at School Bullying Is the Norm. So Is an Inadequate Response. Bullying plagues a majority of neurodivergent students at school, on social media, and/or on the bus. When asked about the school’s response to incidents of bullying, 72% of ADDitude readers surveyed said they were dissatisfied and only 12% said the bullies faced any punishment. By ADDitude Editors Verified Updated on October 28, 2022 Email Save Save
  • Bullying Prevention Strategies
  • For Educators and School Staff
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  • e
  • vigilant.
  • B
  • Respond quickly and consistently to bullying. Always try to stop bullying on the spot, as it can stop bullying behavior over time. Do not ignore the situation and assume that the issue will resolve on its own. Avoid forcing the bully and victim to “work it out” on the spot. Get medical attention or police help if warranted.
  • Incorporate bullying prevention activities in lessons. Get creative. Students can learn how to respond to bullying, how to report it (including cyberbullying) to teachers and staff, and the role they play in fostering a culture of safety, inclusion, and respect at school.
  • Conduct school-wide bullying assessments and evaluation prevention efforts. Refine plans as necessary.
  • Bullying generally happens in areas where supervision is limited – playgrounds, crowded hallways, lunchrooms, school buses, etc. Monitor these hot spots.
Jill Bergeron

Tinkering Spaces: How Equity Means More Than Access | MindShift | KQED News - 0 views

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diversity tinkering making makered

shared by Jill Bergeron on 09 May 16 - No Cached
  • Existing inequities play out when adults engage with kids around tinkering or making. And, while makerspaces are a unique kind of learning space, many of the techniques thoughtful educators are using to improve their interactions with students could be used in other venues.
  • Sewing has been one of the most successful projects in the program Escudé helps run at the Boys and Girls Club in San Francisco’s Visitacion Valley neighborhood. Kids shared their family histories of sewing and even invited grandparents to participate and share. The activity was framed as intellectual thought and valued as equal to any other tinkering task. The success of this activity came from giving students the space to share themselves and build relationships with one another and the facilitators, not because they were using the most recent technology or because they were building robots.
  • it’s a cultural assumption that kids would think taking apart toys would be fun.
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  • often, maker educators assume that because they’ve offered students freedom and choice, the space is automatically equitable. She says being intentional about how adults interact with kids in these spaces is more important than self-direction.
  • It would be easy to assume that the student was off task or didn’t want to do the activity, but instead of assuming the worst about the student, the facilitator went over and started asking her questions that centered around agency and how she’d like to be involved. This gentle support helped the girl figure out how to start the activity.
  • They also focus on race and gender patterns around who is using which tools and the kinds of projects different kids are drawn towards. “There were some patterns around which students get intervened on more often and which students have projects taken out of their hands and fixed more often,” Vossoughi said. The video reviews help them notice these patterns and correct them.
  • A huge part of trying to bring equity to every moment of tinkering is to see students as full of strengths from their home community, their families, and their experiences. “Kids are brilliant and it’s our responsibility to notice their brilliance and deepen it,” Vossoughi said. This perspective has allowed kids who don’t fit into traditional ideas about what it means to be smart, or academic, thrive in the tinkering space.
  • Jill Bergeron on 09 May 16
     
    This article highlights the ways in which teachers can be mindful of inherent biases when they are engaging students in maker and tinkering activities.
Jill Bergeron

The Marshall Memo Admin - Issues - 0 views

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bias decision making evaluation teacher evaluation differentiation self-efficacy independence cold calling classroom management exit ticket formative assessment

shared by Jill Bergeron on 13 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • professionals often make decisions that deviate significantly from those of their peers, from their own prior decisions, and from rules that they themselves claim to follow… Where there is judgment, there is noise – and usually more of it than you think.”
  • In a school, if a principal consistently gives harsher punishments to boys than girls for the same infractions, that is bias, but if she often gives harsher punishments to students just before lunchtime, that’s noise.]
  • A noise audit works best when respected team members create a scenario that is realistic, the people involved buy into the process, and everyone is willing to accept unpleasant results and act on them.
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  • The challenge, say the authors, is designing classroom observations that provide valid data on what’s happening day to day in classrooms, make meaningful distinctions among teachers, provide teachers with useful feedback, and support helpful, high-quality professional development.
  • To accomplish these important goals, several challenges need to be addressed: -   Quality assurance of supervisors’ observation and coaching skills; -   Achieving a reasonable degree of inter-rater reliability among supervisors; -   A rubric with research-based criteria for classroom instruction; -   The conceptual difficulty of capturing complex classroom dynamics in a rating instrument; -   Getting an accurate sampling of each teacher’s work; -   Giving fair evaluations to teachers working with different types of students
  • Addressing the tendency of principals to “go easy” on some teachers to keep the peace and/or avoid the hard work of following up on critical evaluations (are outside observers and/or multiple observers necessary to get truly objective data on teachers?).
  • I would suggest two more questions: First, are classroom visits announced or unannounced? If researchers don’t gather data on this, they are missing an important variable in the reliability of teacher assessment – teachers are likely to put on an especially good lesson when they know they’re being observed. Second, are teacher-evaluation rubrics used to score individual classroom visits, which is conceptually very difficult, or as end-of-year summations of multiple classroom visits with feedback conversations through the year?
  • Tomlinson and other proponents suggest that teachers differentiate by content (what is taught), process (how it’s taught), and product (how students are asked to demonstrate their learning).
  • students learn better, they said, when the work is at the right level of difficulty, personally relevant, and appropriately engaging.
  • trying to assess a teacher’s work asking, Is it differentiated? runs the risk of missing the forest for the trees. Better, says Marshall, to ask two broader questions (tip of the hat to Rick DuFour): -   What are students supposed to be learning? -   Are all students mastering it?
  • Good lesson plans build in multiple entry points, using the principles of Universal Design for Learning to make learning accessible to as many students as possible, and have clear goals; thoughtful task analysis; chunked learning; teaching methods appropriate to the content; links to students’ interests and experiences; checks for understanding; and accommodations for students with special needs.
  • a major factor in student success is a set of in-the-moment moves that effective teachers have always used, among them effective classroom management; knowing students well; being culturally sensitive; making the subject matter exciting; making it relevant; making it clear; taking advantage of visuals and props; involving students and getting them involved with each other; having a sense of humor; and nimbly using teachable moments.” But equally important is checking for understanding – dry-erase boards, clickers, probing questions, looking over students’ shoulders – and using students’ responses to continuously fine-tune teaching.
  • Timely follow-up with these students is crucial – pullout, small-group after-school help, tutoring, Saturday school, and other venues to help them catch up.
  • Among the most important life skills that students should take away from their K-12 years,” says Marshall, “is the ability to self-assess, know their strengths and weaknesses, deal with difficulty and failure, and build a growth mindset. Student self-efficacy and independence should be prime considerations in planning, lesson execution, and follow-up so that students move through the grades becoming increasingly motivated, confident, and autonomous learners prepared to succeed in the wider world.”
  • cold-calling actually increases students’ voluntary participation. “Cold-calling encourages students to prepare more and to participate more frequently,” said one researcher. “The more they prepare, and the more frequently they participate, the more comfortable they become when participating.”
  • If we don’t encourage students to come out of their shells for fear of putting them on the spot, we may be doing them a disservice… You’re curious about their views and their understanding of the issues being discussed. What they think is important – both to their own learning and to that of their peers.”
  • Drawing on two decades of data from the National Center for Educational Statistics, the authors found that between 1998 and 2010, the reading readiness gap closed by 16 percent and the math gap by 10 percent. The black-white and the Hispanic-white gaps also narrowed by about 15 percent.
  • the gaps closed because of rapid progress by low-income children, not declines in the readiness of high-income children, and the gains persisted at least through fourth grade.
  • What brought about the early reading and math gains? The authors believe several factors contributed: • The availability of high-quality, publicly funded preschool programs – the percent of U.S. 4-year-olds enrolled in state-funded preschools has increased from 14 to 29 percent from 2000. • The fact that more families are investing in books and other reading matter for children, as well as Internet access and computer games focused on reading and math skills. • More parents are spending quality time with children, taking them to local libraries, and engaging in learning activities at home.
  • Jill Bergeron on 13 Sep 16
     
    "In This Issue: 1. "Noise" in decision-making 2. Are classroom observations accurate measures of teachers' work? 3. A different way of thinking about differentiation 4. A professor changes his mind about cold-calling 5. Close reading of challenging texts in middle school 6. Good news about the rich-poor gap in kindergarten entry skills 7. On-the-spot assessment tools 8. Short items: The Kappan poll"
Jill Bergeron

The Marshall Memo Admin - Issues - 0 views

www.marshallmemo.com/issue.php

empathy management leadership gratitude generosity evaluation check-in collaboration parent-teacher conferences PLC English poetry math election 2016

shared by Jill Bergeron on 20 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • “While people usually gain power through traits and actions that advance the interests of others, such as empathy, collaboration, openness, fairness, and sharing, when they start to feel powerful or enjoy a position of privilege, those qualities begin to fade.”
  • Behaviors like these undermine leaders’ effectiveness by depressing the performance of those around them, and are ultimately self-defeating.
  • power puts us in something like a manic state, making us feel expansive, energized, omnipotent, hungry for rewards, and immune to risk – which opens us up to rash, rude, and unethical actions.” But it turns out that simply being aware of those feelings – “Hey, I’m feeling as if I should rule the world right now” – and monitoring impulses to behave inappropriately helps keep those behaviors in check.
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  • When Keltner works with up-and-coming executives, he counsels them to remember and repeat the virtuous behaviors that helped them rise in the first place and develop three essential practices: empathy, gratitude, and generosity.
  • To practice empathy: -   Ask a question or two in every interaction, showing genuine interest in the subject. -   Paraphrase important points made by others. -   Listen with gusto, orienting your body and eyes toward the person speaking and verbally showing interest and engagement. -   When someone comes to you with a problem, don’t jump right to judgment and advice but say something like, “That’s really tough” or “I’m sorry.” -   Before a meeting, take a moment to think about the person you’ll be with and what’s happening in his or her life.
  • The alternative mindset is that people can grow professionally and managers can change the way people perform through effective coaching, management, and intrinsic rewards like personal development and making a difference.
  • “From Silicon Valley to New York, and in offices across the world, firms are replacing annual reviews with frequent, informal check-ins between managers and employees.”
  • One observer called the traditional performance evaluation a “rite of corporate kabuki” that restricted creativity, generated mountains of paperwork, and served no real purpose. It was also an incentive to put off bad news until the end of the year, at which point both manager and employee may have forgotten what the problem was.
  • There’s one more reason: once-a-year reviews focus on past performance rather than encouraging current work and grooming talent for the future.
  • To practice gratitude: -   Make thoughtful thank-yous a part of how you communicate with others. -   Send colleagues specific and timely e-mails or notes of appreciation for a job well done. -   Publicly acknowledge the value that each person contributes to the team, including support staff. -   Use the right kind of touch – pats on the back, fist bumps, high-fives – to celebrate success. • To practice generosity: -   Seek opportunities to spend a little one-on-one time with people you lead. -   Delegate some important and high-profile responsibilities. -   Give praise generously. -   Share the limelight – give credit to all who contribute to the success of your team and your organization.
  • employees, especially recent college graduates, learn faster from frequent, detailed feedback from mentors and superiors. Second, companies realized they needed to be agile to survive and thrive in the competitive, ever-changing marketplace and real-time performance monitoring and feedback led to more rapid adaptations. And third, managers saw that teamwork was key to innovation and productivity and moving from forced annual ranking to frequent individual accountability was more conducive to teamwork and better results.
  • Studies of the workplace show that the time employees spend helping others is as important to their evaluations and chances of promotion as how they do their jobs. And Grant’s own research on “givers” (who enjoy helping others) and “takers” (who are focused on coming out ahead) shows that givers consistently achieve better results.
  • on the most difficult part of his exams – the multiple choice section – if a student was unsure of an question, he or she wrote down the name of another student who might know the answer – like asking for a lifeline on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” If the classmate had it right, they both earned points; one person’s success also benefited a classmate. Grant reports that this made a big difference – more students joined study groups, the groups pooled their knowledge, and the class’s average score went up 2 percentage points compared to the previous year. Why? Because one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to someone else, and that’s what was going on in the groups.
  • There was something else going on in the lifeline idea: transactive memory, or knowing who knows best and taking advantage of their knowledge. It’s easier to get help if you know where to look.
  • In this Chronicle of Higher Education article, Ellen Boucher (Amherst College) says the “pressure of perfection” is causing lots of stress for students in their teens and twenties, contributing to the rising suicide rate in this age bracket.
  • The burden of multiple obligations can seem insurmountable.”
  • Sociologists have shown that students from less-privileged backgrounds often have trouble understanding the unwritten rules of college life – the so-called hidden curriculum… [A]sking a professor for an extension doesn’t always come naturally. It might not even occur to them as an option.”
  • all students can elect to take a two-day grace period on any paper, with no questions asked.
  • “Since changing my policy, I’ve seen higher-quality work, less anxiety, and fewer cases of burnout.
  • Rebrand. A more inviting name for these perennial meetings is “progress conferences.” This is more positive and doesn’t seem to exclude foster parents and guardians.
  • Finesse the childcare issue. “To pay a babysitter to watch your three younger siblings so a parent can attend a conference is not going to happen,” says Ohio high-school teacher Allison Ricket. She invites parents to bring along other children and provides crayons and paper in an area at the back of her classroom where they can entertain themselves during conferences.
  • Accommodate. Some parents need an interpreter (children shouldn’t be asked to translate) and support with disabilities.
  • Change the dynamic. It makes a difference if a teacher sits side by side with family members and doesn’t hold a clipboard or pad of paper; open hands suggest an open mind.
  • Involve students. Progress conferences are much more helpful when students are at the table reporting on their progress, challenges, and goals. Advisory group meetings focus on preparing students to lead parent conferences and lobby their parents to attend.
  • • Listen. “Parents usually come in having an idea of what they want to talk about, so I like to be open and ready for whatever they need,” says Ricket. Although she has students’ grades and portfolios on hand, she lets parents go first and is careful to empathize with any concerns they have.
  • “mathematics is better taught when everyone shares in consistent language, symbols and notation, models and schema, and rules that support developing learners. The idea behind this comprehensive agreement is not unlike a schoolwide behavior management policy – whereby children hear the same phrases, share identical expectations, and experience practices that are common and consistent year after year across classrooms and throughout the school.”
  • Language – Moving from less conceptual language – borrowing, carrying, reducing fractions, the “Ring around the Rosie” property – to more mathematically appropriate language – regrouping, simplifying fractions to the lowest terms.
  • Symbols and notation – For example, writing fractions with a slanted bar 3/8 may confuse students who think the bar is the numeral 1 and think it’s 318.
  • Models and schema
  • Number lines or graphics should be consistent through the grades, for example, a graphic showing two parts next to one whole.
  • Rules
  • “This unified approach is particularly helpful for students who struggle,” conclude Karp, Bush, and Dougherty, “as it provides a recognizable component to new content. Additionally, all learners in a school can make connections among ideas in a unified and collaborative culture that promotes stronger learning in mathematics.”
  • Jill Bergeron on 20 Sep 16
     
    "Online Resources for Teaching About the Presidential Campaign             In this article in Education Week, Madeline Will shares five free classroom resources for teaching and discussing this year's election: -   Letters to the Next President 2.0 www.letters2president.org - Students' letters to the 45th president will be published by PBS member station KQED and the National Writing Project. -   Teaching Tolerance Election 2016 Resources www.tolerance.org/election2016 - These include a civility contract, civic activities, and PD webinars. -   iCivics www.icivics.org/election_resources_2016 - Materials on the basics of democracy, with an interactive digital game in which students manage their own presidential campaign. -   C-Span Classroom www.c-spanclassroom.org/campaign-2016.aspx - Primary sources with historical and contemporary video clips and related discussion questions, handouts, and activity ideas. -   Join the Debates www.jointhedebates.org - Curriculum materials for collaborative discussions on issues in the campaign and debates.   "Educators Grapple with Election 2016" by Madeline Will in Education Week, September 14, 2016 (Vol. 36, #4, p. 1, 12-13), www.edweek.org "
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