WCSD PBIS Newsletter
Volume One: September 2016
Positive School Climate for Student Success
Collective Teacher Efficacy: A team's belief that their actions will lead to success for all students = Effect size of 1.57
This issue of our inaugural newsletter shares strategies and hot-off-the-presses information for building relationships and connects you to sources for further exploration. Enjoy!
WCSD Schools win Bronze Awards from the California PBIS Coalition
Classroom Strategies for Building Relationships
You’ll get to know your students faster and more thoroughly if you have a system in place, a way to make sure you give sufficient attention to every child and store the information you gather for easy access later. In my years teaching at the middle school and college level, I developed a 4-part system that worked beautifully for
me, and I think it will work for you as well."
Here are the highlights, but click on the link above for access to downloadable tools:
1. Ice Breakers - she shares 3 favorites
2. Take an inventory of student interests
Cult of Pedagogy shares tried and true favorites.
3. Store your data - a system for organizing the information for future reference.
4. Do regular check ups - throughout the year, ask students how things are going for them. Don't wait for the end of the year when it's too late to change anything.
*** Also check out this FREE online inventory for teachers to use with their students, the Panorama Get to Know You Survey. Students answer questions about their interests and hobbies outside of school, as well as about their values and learning styles. Teachers sign up for a free account and take the survey before their students take it in class. Students will instantly see what they have in common (up to 5 shared items) with their teacher upon finishing the survey. Teachers can then sign in to view what they have in common with their students and be prompted to reflect on these similarities.
The 2x10 Strategy: A no-paperwork way to build relationship with those students who might already be on your "radar"
"The 2×10 strategy is simple: spend 2 minutes per day for 10 days in a row talking with an at-risk student about anything she or he wants to talk about.
There’s no mystery to the reasoning here, of course–the strategy builds a rapport and relationship between teacher and student, and lets the child see that you genuinely care about him or her as a person.
The miracle is in how it turns that abstract, overwhelming, where-do-I-start concept of relationship building into something easily manageable with an immediate payoff for everyone involved.
And the miracle is in how well it seems to be working in real classrooms, at all grade levels, across the country."
Read more on Angela Watson's website, The Cornerstone for Teachers and her follow-up post about what to do when students won't talk, you don't have time for individual conversations, or you don't know how to start the conversation.
Want students to show grit? Give them a sense of belonging, competence & autonomy
Journalist Paul Tough describes effective school programs that nurture academic perseverance and motivation in students from stressful environments.
Tough also taps research that finds our most successful teachers build relationships with students that somehow strike a delicate balance between nurturing them and maintaining academically demanding standards.
In one key study, researchers at Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin found that a simple, one-sentence note of encouragement made a huge difference in academic outcomes for African-American students, who often have fraught power relationships with teachers.
In the experiment, teachers affixed one of two Post-It notes to students’ marked-up essays. A control group received the generic message: “I’m giving you these comments so that you’ll have feedback on your paper.” Another group got a Post-It with this sentence: “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.”
That’s it — a single sentence, one or the other, stuck to everyone’s homework.
The results? White students were only 5% more likely to revise their paper if they got the “high expectations” message. But among African-American students, the difference was stark: 72% in the “high expectations” group revised their papers, compared to 17% of students in the control group.
In a follow-up study, students who got the “high expectations” note got higher grades as well."
Interview in USA Today (Greg Toppo, June 2, 2016)
FREE ebook copy of Helping Children Succeed, with video content.
Can an Increase in Empathy Lead to a Drop in Suspensions?
In this blog post, Evie Blad (April 27, 2016) reports on an important Stanford University study of a one-time intervention to help teachers and students empathize with each other, resulting in a 50% reduction in suspensions at five California middle schools.
Many schools have sought to reduce suspension rates in recent years, citing research about the negative effects of classroom removals on students' academic and life outcomes. Critics of those efforts have said they can result in misbehavior going unpunished, leading to chaotic classrooms. But, the Stanford researchers suggest, if teachers change their mindsets while disciplining students, it may lead to less of a need for such discipline in the future by changing the classroom's climate.
"We hypothesized that a punitive response to misbehavior can, ironically, alienate disaffected students and thus incite the destructive, oppositional behaviors it aims to prevent," the authors write. "A response that values students' perspectives and maintains high-quality relationships in disciplinary interactions may improve outcomes. Much research shows that feeling respect for and being respected by authority figures can motivate people to follow rules enforced by those figures, especially in conflicts. If teachers convey this respect while disciplining students, this may improve students' behavior."
"Importantly, the empathic-mindset intervention did not attempt to teach teachers new skills for interacting with students or introduce new policies for how to discipline students. Nor did it attempt to build students' self-control or social-emotional skills, another common approach to improving student behavior. Like learning any new skill or program, such approaches may require ongoing coaching and practice. Instead, we assumed that teachers were capable of building better relationships with students and that students could behave more positively with more supportive treatment. The intervention simply encouraged teachers to view discipline as an opportunity to facilitate mutual understanding and better relationships and empowered teachers to do so in a manner effective for them and their students."
See also:
Study: Suspensions harm 'well-behaved' kids
EdSource, Jan 8, 2015 | Jan Meredith Adams
One Key to Reducing School Suspension: A Little Respect, EdWeek July 13, 2016, Sarah D. Sparks.
WCSD PBIS: Positive School Climate for Student Success
Email: pbis@whittiercity.net
Phone: -