OSP Connected
February 2022-Office for School Performance-Volume 56
Message from Dayle
Last month I talked about the need to be flexible in order to meet student needs. I shared a story of a teacher who does five minutes of yoga to transition their students back to class after recess. I also talked about a senior who wasn’t ready to come back to school, but our patience and persistent belief in her helped her meet her goal of graduating on a different timeline. I received a few emails appreciating these stories and requesting permission to support the students we each serve in the way that they need. But I also received a few questions and concerns about staff feeling the pressure to prepare our students for SBA and making sure they do well on tests. One asked, “How do staff make sure they serve students' needs with all that pressure?”
The answer to this concern is not simple. As staff, we know the purpose of school is to educate students. We are here to make sure students can read critically, share thoughts through writing, have math skills for daily life and career, etc. Our charge is to teach the standards. We are also held accountable to our students, their parents, our community and state to monitor students’ success through measureables like SBA scores and graduation rates. Those things are important and press us to do well with our students, but I do not believe they should be the most important pressure we feel.
At the end of the day we should feel pressure to take care of our students, supporting them to be healthy, successful humans and also working to ensure they graduate career and college ready. But the care comes first!
The Oregon Department of Education is starting to catch up to what we have known all along - that it starts with attending to safety and health. There are now materials and a focus on equity and social emotional learning in our ODE resources. There are also new aspects of mental health as a focus in education rolling out soon. As we have returned from distance learning we know that our students need a different level of care and support. In collaboration with your principal and each other, having discussions about these challenges can help.
I’m not going to tell anyone not to worry about students’ academic achievement. I am also not going to say teaching standards and doing well on assessments aren’t important. But, I am going to say that the staff we have in HSD are amazing and I believe our staff know how to create balance to help our students be their best. That may look like five minutes of yoga in first grade, a change in a graduation timeline, learning about cultural assimilation and Indian boarding schools in 8th grade, or discussing trauma’s effect on the brain as we normalize students’ life experiences, their responses and provide strategies for healing. I can’t remove any pressure you may feel but I can say I believe our staff will do the right things for students.
Structured Academic Talk
As we move into the new semester, it’s a great opportunity to reestablish those classroom learning routines. All of our students benefit from structured routines around practicing and building academic language. Increased structured student talk not only builds academic language, but supports learning retention. The more students talk about what they’re learning, the better they will understand and the more they’ll retain.
Structures for academic talk are short, focused, and intentional, and students need to practice them several times to become fluent in the process. Here are reminders of three strategies to support structured academic talk:
Lines of Communication: Students stand up, form two parallel rows (red and blue), and pair up. The teacher poses a question on the content being studied and students on the red side share their thinking with their blue partners. Then the blue side shifts one person to the right (the student on the end goes to the other end), and blue-side students share their thinking. In order to allow for increased spacing between students, consider making two sets of lines on either side of the classroom.
Numbered Heads Together: Students form groups of four and each student gets a number 1-2-3-4 (if there’s a group of three, #3 also answers for #4). Groups are asked a comprehension question or given a problem to solve, and students individually write down their answer and then discuss as a group. The teacher then calls out a number – two, for example – and that number student in each group gives the answer.
Stand Up, Hand Up, Pair Up: Students stand up, the teacher poses a question, and starts music playing. Students mill around and when the music stops, they freeze, raise their hand to indicate they need a partner, and pair up with the person nearest them and share their answers. The music starts and stops two more times, with students pairing up and sharing with a different classmate each time.
CAREER & COLLEGE READY
Student Support Networks Information: Each comprehensive high school, beginning Semester 2, will begin to integrate an advisory and access time four days a week (no Wednesdays). Please see the overview and goals for this time.
Oak Street Campus (formerly known as Miller Education Center officially changes their name on Feb 2, 2022, with a ribbon cutting ceremony to open a new building on campus and celebrate the services and support that the campus and new Pathways Center on Oak Street Campus (OSC) offers. At OSC, we want students to explore careers and options to find their own path to success. Our goal is that through intentional collaboration with both HSD and out of district schools and programs we will ensure students' transitions are free of systemic barriers with multiple access points to achieve their goals.
CAREER & COLLEGE READY: CTE in Middle Schools
During February and March 2022, HSD middle school students will have the opportunity to explore Career and Technical Education (CTE) through virtual and hands-on experience in after school programs run by their feeder high schools.
Postsecondary Preparedness: Career and College Readiness supports are available at your middle and high school through Washington County Chamber’s Career Events!
Planning for Fall: Your high school’s academic planning events and forecasting will be happening in quarter 3.
HSD Early College: Our students who attend HSD Early College have recently completed their fall term at Portland Community College. We are so proud of their successful transition and the hard work and tenacity they have shown in their classes and in our program. This year we have started a student leadership team that is working to create social and academic opportunities within our program. We have recently hired 14 of our students to support our 2022-2023 recruitment process as interns; they will travel to all HSD high schools as well as virtual events to promote HSD Early College.
*** Please Note: February is National CTE Appreciation Month and National School Counselor Appreciation Week (2/7-2/11).
Climate & Culture: Willing to be Disturbed
As we work together to restore hope to the future, we need to include a new and strange ally—our willingness to be disturbed. Our willingness to have our beliefs and ideas challenged by what others think. No one person or perspective can give us the answers we need to the problems of today. Paradoxically, we can only find those answers by admitting we don’t know. We have to be willing to let go of our certainty and expect ourselves to be confused for a time.
We weren’t trained to admit we don’t know. Most of us were taught to sound certain and confident, to state our opinion as if it were true. We haven’t been rewarded for being confused. Or for asking more questions rather than giving quick answers. We’ve also spent many years listening to others mainly to determine whether we agree with them or not. We don’t have time or interest to sit and listen to those who think differently than we do.
But the world now is quite perplexing. We no longer live in those sweet, slow days when life felt predictable, when we actually knew what to do next. We live in a complex world; we often don’t know what’s going on, and we won’t be able to understand its complexity unless we spend more time in not knowing.
We have the opportunity many times a day, everyday, to be the one who listens to others, curious rather than certain. But the greatest benefit of all is that listening moves us closer. When we listen with less judgment, we always develop better relationships with each other. It’s not differences that divide us. It’s our judgments about each other that do. Curiosity and good listening bring us back together.
Sometimes we hesitate to listen for differences because we don’t want to change. We’re comfortable with our lives, and if we listened to anyone who raised questions, we’d have to get engaged in changing things. If we don’t listen, things can stay as they are and we won’t have to expend any energy. But most of us do see things in our life or in the world that we would like to be different. If that’s true, we have to listen more, not less. And we have to be willing to move into the very uncomfortable place of uncertainty.
In these ever changing times, discourse is needed in our buildings. We’d encourage you to continue to be willing to be disturbed.
Full Article: “Willing to Be Disturbed”
Commemorations: Black History Month
Black History Month is quickly approaching and also marks a whole year since we first started the Commemorations Project! Due to so many of the challenges we’ve faced this year, it has been difficult to add more lessons to our current collection but we have gone through and revised the lessons and resources and are ready for you to dive in! If you have any lessons that you would like to contribute to our district document, please reach out and we will add them to the appropriate grade bands. Sharing is caring!
While we do celebrate the diversity and contributions of African Americans during Black History Month, these conversations and lessons are not limited to the month of February. When our students’ diversity is appreciated and visible, all our students thrive from learning about one another.
We hope you enjoy the contents of Black History Month and if you have any questions or would like ideas with implementation, please don’t hesitate to ask your TOSAs for support: Catherine Jager, Maricruz Acuña and Yessica HardinMercado
Adapted PE
This month we are introducing you to our amazing HSD Adapted PE team! Brigette Brown, Amy Henderson, Danielle Spirlin, and Kathy Taibbi are supporting many students across the district - when you see them say hi and ask for an invite to class. It’s one of the most fun places to be in HSD!
To see past editions of Student Services Coffee Conversations on a variety of topics, visit our YouTube Channel. If you have an idea of a topic we should cover or you want to star in one of our videos, email us!
Dual Language: Translanguaging
This fall a few of our DL colleagues attended La Cosecha and OABE in the winter. We learned more about Translanguaging. Ofelia Garcia, one of the authors of the book, The Translanguaging Classrooms, states that, “Translanguaging is the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as autonomous languages, in order to maximize communicative potential.” In other words, every multilingual brain accesses linguistic features from one linguistic repertoire to make meaning and express thoughts based on the context. Sometimes the context is in English or in Spanish and since it is pulling from one linguistic repertoire, it may pull what it knows in one language to express it in the other. What a super power! As educators, our task is to help multilingual students understand those connections (bridging) in order for students to utilize their linguistic features appropriately in each language. We invite you to read some translanguaging examples provided at OABE by Susana Ibarra Johnson, another author of the same book.
If you haven’t yet, please read the fall edition of the first Dual Language Family Newsletter. As we prepare for the winter newsletter, we invite you to nominate a student, staff member and/or family member that have contributed to your DL program. Submit your nominations in this form.
Tech Teach Grow Team
OUR PURPOSE
Support educators with digital curriculum and technology integration in the classroom. Our hope is to provide HSD staff with tech integration ideas, info and updates via quick digital media that is easily accessible at your convenience. Everything we share works with current HSD tech.
WANT A DIFFERENT RESULT? TRY SOMETHING NEW!
Tech Tips of the Week: #12-14
Tech Tips of the Week: The Tech Teach Grow team will be providing quick tech tips for staff each week through Monday Notes. The tips include updates and integration ideas that relate to the work educators do. Each tip has a brief written description, video/GIF and a way to access the tech integration TOSA team for support on digital curriculum or tech tool/app integration. We will also collect the tech tips for each week and post them here in OSP Connected.
TeachFlix for PD Calendar & Resources
For your convenience, TeachFlix has been updated with all available 2021-22 PD resources that staff can access on demand. There is also a new PD Calendar tab that houses topics, dates, times and Meet links for upcoming PD sessions.
Thank you to those that have attended PD sessions! Please see the playlists below to learn more about them. We encourage you to attend! Extended contract is available for those engaging in PD. See your building admin for details.
Please Note:
- All of the PD resources from 2020-201 can be found under the HSD Originals tab.
- Find new TeachFlix link icon (shown above right) on MyApps
Teaching Resources: Teaching & Learning 2.0
Link to site: Teaching & Learning 2.0
Teaching Language to Access Learning
Language Central
Three Ways to Scaffold Language for Access to Learning