Group items tagged

clearing the path is about thinking through the details of the teachers' next steps and removing barriers so that they can visualize these steps happening and articulate how they'll happen.

a concrete plan to focus on as they think about next school year.

he or she should be the one leading the ideas for these next steps based on whatever meaningful focus areas you've identified together

it's too easy for the summer weeks to fly by until, all of a sudden, it's the first day back at school, and the teacher hasn't accomplished any of the summer plans that he or she intended to

Find out from the teachers you support what they appreciated about your support, what they wanted more of, and what they'd want to change.

it helps them identify what they need from a coach or evaluator, and it helps you get insight into how to better support your teachers next year.

closing the year strong with positive, actionable takeaways will ensure that teachers walk away feeling empowered, inspired, and ready to come back even stronger next year!

we know that great attention must be paid to how a meeting is designed.

Frame the purpose and desired outcomes for the meeting and review agenda.

planning reflects an awareness of how power dynamics and systemic oppression may manifest in this group and seeks to interrupt these dynamics

We want to ensure that all will voices will be heard and will have equal access to decision-making and input.

Articulate the role participants will play in the meeting

Name any decision-making points and processes that will be used Identify the structures or activities that will be used in this meeting and how they'll connect to the desired outcomes

Articulate expectations for behavior or procedures

anticipates the emotional, cognitive and energy needs of the participants

Use a variety of listening strategies including paraphrasing and active listening

Determine structures to hold members accountable (self-monitoring and reflection, use of process observer, use of a team process rubric)

Use data gathered in the moment to modify and inform facilitation

Protect time for reflection and feedback within the established time

use various strategies to help a group a recover from a breakdown

Hold team members accountable to agreements, goals, structures, and protocols

Read the group's emotional and energetic state and adjust accordingly

Hold the expectation that members will learn, think creatively, and push each others' thinking

Show up as a grounded, calm presence that believes in the capacity of team members

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.

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.

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.

74% of schools increased their technology budgets.[6] Thirty-six percent expect IT expenses to increase further in 2021-2022.[7] Other schools appear to be angling to attract and retain staff despite the cost: 43% increased salaries (compared to 21% who cut them), and 74% hired additional staff (though data from a different sample of NAIS members found that 30% had implemented a hiring freeze, while 19% instituted layoffs).[8] Additionally, 38% of schools have increased their general financial aid budgets, with 31% increasing it by more than 5%. Fifty-four percent have established a separate emergency grant fund for students needing additional assistance.

Despite the need for additional teacher training in online and hybrid learning, professional development budgets have frequently been cut to make up for additional spending elsewhere, with 41% of the schools decreasing the amount allocated (and 26% decreasing it by more than 16%).[10] Thirty-nine percent of schools are likely to continue to reduce professional development in 2021-2022, and 22% may freeze it altogether.

adding new degree programs was a common and successful tactic for boosting enrollment during the Great Recession and one that was also popular with faculty.

A parallel tactic for independent schools in markets that have seen increased demand for their programs, whether in-person or online, would be to add a part-time or afterschool component for parents worried about learning loss for their public school students.

49% of schools experienced a decrease in enrollment for the 2020-2021 school year, with 33% seeing a decrease of greater than 5%. At the same time, 47% of schools reduced their fundraising goals from the previous year.[2] Tuition revenue will only help fill the gap at some schools: 49% increased their tuition, while 41% kept it the same and just 5% of schools reduced it.[3] However, 70% do expect to raise tuition in 2021-2022.[4]

The goal of financial sustainability seems to have been superseded by the reality of teaching during a global pandemic

One-time revenue shortfall (with expected rapid recovery): This scenario is optimistic during the pandemic, but schools that were unable to hold a large revenue-earning event in 2020, such as an auction, community fair, or summer camp, but expect to be able to do so in 2021 can rely on endowment funds for the time being. One-time or short-term expenses: Schools may need endowment funds to repair the campus after natural disasters or offer emergency financial aid grants for families facing hardship. Short-term expense for long-term savings: Schools that haven’t already done so, or haven’t done so to as full an extent as they would like, can use endowment funds to upgrade technology or PPE infrastructures in order to attract and retain students in the long-term.

When making financial decisions, school leaders need to be honest about the challenges affecting their final choice.