Hawk Herald
News and Notes for Teachers- September 24th
Dear Staff
Education I will be talking with you about your goals and giving feedback on any walkthroughs I may have done. Purpose is still the focus this week. As i briefly touched on at our last meeting,we have a variety of learners in our classes. As we know, being on the same page with your colleagues that teach the same subject, stating clear objectives, modeling directions and having examples visible,as well as multiple checks for understanding as you circulate around the room can help all learners.We all want to give our students the best chance possible to succeed. Bravo for all your efforts.
Have a great week.
Mary
Attendance
Classroom Basics
Academic Seminar-Wednesday
Secondary Leadership Collaboration
Friday
Focus of the week
INBs, Focused Note-taking and Bellwork.
Meetings and Events
Monday-24-Check the advisory calendar for daily lessons
- https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=barrazaj@hsd.k12.or.us
- MS Climate and Culture(Krista and team out)
Tuesday-25
- Team Meetings- Coopers and Red-tails 8:00 pod 4
- Coopershttps://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UbYgBtmoyRsQhRUquBTx4XcvqKV2cKTLC0FDFRgSW00/edit#gid=566445022
- Red-tail https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10FezBsysk06kmoQPRq-_gx7FOh39pJ-txxbHdYDMFjg/edit#gid=2077096193
Wednesday-26
- Academic Seminar-Principal Directed
- Attendance meeting 10:10
Thursday-27 (Krista and Mary out)
- Team Meetings-Royals and Sparrow Hawks 8:00
- Secondary Leadership Collaboration at AC(Krista and Mary out)
Friday-28
- Parent Coffee with the Principal 7:30
- SST 8:00
- Honor Roll certificates passed out during advisory
Team Meetings
AVID Secondary
Every week I will put something about AVID in the newsletter to keep us working on our SIP goal of increasing our use of AVID strategies. Here is a description of AVID to help you come up with a short response when people ask you what AVID is.
"Our nation’s schools are full of students who possess a desire to go to college and the willingness to work hard, but many of them do not truly have the opportunity to be college-ready. These are often the students who will be the first in their families to attend college and are from groups traditionally underrepresented in higher education. AVID Secondary equips teachers and schools with what they need to help these students succeed on a path to college and career success.
To address this need, AVID has developed the AVID Elective course. For one period a day, students receive the additional academic, social, and emotional support that will help them succeed in their school’s most rigorous courses. Districts have the flexibility to decide how many AVID Elective classes to start and which grade levels will implement AVID first. Additionally, in middle school, the language and literacy needs of long-term English language learners can be addressed through the AVID Excel elective class.
The power of AVID Secondary is the ability to impact students in the AVID Elective class and all students throughout the campus. AVID Secondary can have an effect on the entire school by providing classroom activities, teaching practices, and academic behaviors that can be incorporated into any classroom to improve engagement and success for all students. Teachers can take what they've learned at AVID training back to any classroom to help all students, not just those in AVID, to become more college- and career-ready."
What’s Really Involved With Culturally Responsive Teaching?
In this Cult of Pedagogy article, Jennifer Gonzalez says that “culturally responsive teaching” has been getting a lot of attention recently, which is a good thing given the increasing diversity of U.S. classrooms. “The not-so-good news,” says Gonzalez, “is that in some cases, teachers think they’re practicing culturally responsive teaching when, in fact, they’re kind of not. Or at least they’re not quite there. And that means students who might really thrive under different conditions are surviving at best.”
Gonzalez asked Zaretta Hammond, an author and consultant specializing in this area, to share some common misconceptions and set them straight:
• Misconception #1: Culturally responsive teaching is the same as multicultural or social justice education. In fact, each of these addresses diversity from a different angle:
- Multicultural education is “the celebration of diversity, what we usually see in schools,” says Hammond. “While those are really noble things and critical to a high-functioning classroom and school climate, it doesn’t have anything to do with learning capacity.” It’s great for students to see their cultures reflected in school, but it won’t affect their cognitive abilities. Better than focusing on “surface culture,” she says, is learning about collectivism, an ideology common in many of the cultures from which students come. Understanding collectivism helps teachers reach diverse students.
- Social justice education “is about building a lens for the student, really being able to look at the world and seeing where things aren’t fair or where injustice exists,” says Hammond. Again, this is important, but it doesn’t address students’ learning capacity. For example, learning about social justice doesn’t address the issue of a student who is three grades behind in reading.
Culturally responsive teaching, by comparison, “is about building the learning capacity of the individual student,” says Hammond. “There is a focus on leveraging the affective and the cognitive scaffolding that students bring with them.” The test of culturally responsive teaching, then, is whether students of color, English language learners, and immigrant students are learning. If they’re not succeeding, a teacher’s approach might need to be more culturally responsive.
• Misconception #2: Culturally responsive teaching must start with addressing implicit bias. “You need to get to implicit bias at some point,” says Hammond. “It’s just not the starting point. If you start there, you can’t pivot to instruction. Whereas when you understand inequity by design, you can actually talk about instruction but also come back to talk about micro-aggressions. The sequencing of that is really important.”
• Misconception #3: Culturally responsive teaching is all about building relationships and self-esteem. “There’s a big effort afoot in terms of social-emotional learning programs,” says Hammond, “trying to help students gain self-regulation, and build positive relationships with students. Here’s what the schools are finding that do surveys: After a few years of this kind of work, their positive climate has gone up, satisfaction surveys among adults as well as kids are really high, but the achievement doesn’t move.” It’s certainly true that building trusting relationships is important as an “on-ramp” to higher-level cognitive work by students, but it’s a means to that end, not an end in itself.
• Misconception #4: Culturally responsive teaching is about implementing certain strategies in the classroom. For example, some teachers add call-and-response to their classroom routines and think that will reach diverse students. But while this is a good first step, the real question is whether call-and-response is being used to deepen student thinking. “Teachers need to interrogate their practice a little more robustly,” says Hammond, “because it’s not an off-the-shelf program, it’s not two or three strategies. It’s not plug and play.”
Hammond advocates three broader approaches to making instruction more culturally responsive: First, gamify it – that is, make routine curriculum work (like memorizing science vocabulary) into a game that involves repetition, solving a puzzle, or making connections between things that don’t seem related. Second, make it social – that is, organize learning so that students rely on each other, building on their communal orientation. Third, storify it – that is, create a coherent story or narrative about the subject matter.
Perhaps the most counterintuitive thing about culturally responsive teaching is that it’s not just for certain groups of students. “This kind of teaching is good for all brains,” says Hammond. “So what you’re doing to actually reach your lowest-performing students is going to be good for your highest-performing students.” In short, Gonzalez adds, “the instructional shifts that will make the biggest differences don’t always look ‘cultural’ at all, because they aren’t the kind of things that work only for diverse students.”
Tips for New Teachers
“Teaching is one of the only professions in which new hires bear the full responsibilities of the profession beginning on their first day on the job,” say New Jersey educators Mark Wise and Beth Pandolpho in this ASCD Inservice article. Here are their suggestions on how new teachers can avoid “siren calls” that might lure them to ineffective practices:
• First things first – avoiding the compulsion to “cover” everything in the curriculum. Like a movie director, teachers must make choices on which elements will move the story (learning) forward and which need to be cut. When planning lessons, teachers need to put in the essential elements (the “big rocks”) first, making it easier to make on-the-fly decisions about what to abandon or shorten.
• Choose the right format or strategy – avoiding faddish practices that don’t fit the situation. Teachers can have students sit in rows, groups, a circle, or a fishbowl. They can lecture, stage a debate, have students think/pair/share, or rotate through stations. And they have many options with technology. The question is not what’s coolest, but what is best for the learning objective.
• Circulate with a purpose – avoiding the tendency to walk around monitoring compliance. The right questions in the teacher’s mind: What am I looking for? What am I listening for? What is the evidence? What will I do if I don’t see it? Is this a time for an all-class mini-discussion? All those questions lead back to the planning objective: How can I make students’ thinking visible quickly and efficiently so I know if they are “getting it?”
• Check the understanding of the whole class – not calling on only the students who raise their hands. Teachers should use systems that accurately assess all students’ learning in real time so as to reveal misconceptions and errors and make good decisions on immediate next steps.
• Produce mental sweat – not doing the heavy lifting for students. “We want our students to succeed,” say Wise and Pandolpho, “but when we over-scaffold, even with the best intentions, we are not doing our students any favors.” It’s not enough to teach students how to “do school;” to be prepared for college and life, students need to work hard, make mistakes, get feedback, fix problems, and become autonomous learners.
• Allow time for reflection – avoiding the pressure to “move on.” Especially in middle and high schools, students traipse from class to class with little time to consolidate what they’re taking in. They need time and space to jot answers to big-picture learning questions, followed by small-group discussions: What new information did I learn? How does this connect to what I already know? What questions do I still have?
South Meadows Middle School
Email: mendezm@hsd.k12.or.us
Website: http://schools.hsd.k12.or.us/southmeadows
Location: 4690 Southeast Davis Road, Hillsboro, OR, United States
Phone: 503-844-1220
Facebook: facebook.com/SouthMeadowsMiddleSchool