Rose Ferrero Bulletin
Week of: September 6-17, 2021
Rose Ferrero’s Employees of the Month
In this first Bulletin of September, we wanted to make sure to introduce you to our Rose Ferrero Employees of the Month. Our Certificated Employee of the month is our SPED Pre-School Teacher, Heather Miller (pictured on the left). This is Ms. Miller’s second year with us here at Rose, but in some ways, it is like her very first year at Rose because last year, she spent the entire time online in her virtual classroom. Ms. Miller has been a blessing for the students she serves. Her patience and understanding of their special needs are what sets her apart from others and makes her the valuable educator she is. Our Classified Employee of the Month is our Health Aide, Daisy Diaz (pictured on the right). Daisy has been the Health Aide here at Rose as long as I have been here, and as long as I have been here, the students at Rose get the best medical care of any school I have ever been a part of. Daisy knows all of our students, and our students know her. It’s not, “Do you want to go to the Nurse’s Office?” at Rose when a child isn’t feeling well, it’s, “Do you want to go and see Ms. Daisy?” Heather Miller and Daisy Diaz are great at what they do because they truly care about students and want to be the best at what they do, and for that we are grateful that you are a part of the Rose Ferrero team.
LCAP GOAL 2: PROFICIENCY FOR ALL – It is Time to Put the Person Back in Personalized Learning: If we expect to recover from the past year and a third, we must center students’ humanity, emotions, and strengths – not turn to tech-driven remediation (as if that is even a thing).
As discussions around “learning loss” are sowing panic in schools, the worry here is that educators, administrators, and parents across the country will fall into a deficit-based way of thinking. The worry is that they’ll become vulnerable to the seductive messaging of some education technology companies, a message that conflates personalization with individualization. And even if we wanted to totally individualize every student’s education, using an algorithm to assign activities individually, is that ideal? Using an algorithm and delivering content through customized outputs has a cost. It can be impersonal and dehumanizing. Working on pre-created digital modules focuses on consumption of educational materials instead of meaningful interactions.
The sheer amount of wealth within the technology sector has allowed it to amass a significant amount of power. Not all of this power is used altruistically when these companies focus on reimagining the school system. Some powerful players in the tech world have learned that the education system provides a steady stream of revenue as schools search for methods to reach all students.
To further emphasize the paragraph above this line, let’s read the words from someone who worked in the Edu. Tech industry:
Personalization shouldn’t be used to industrialize kids’ learning; it should humanize it through dialogue, discourse, and inquiry. If we continue to allow technology like this to have outsized influence in schools, we will have another year of kids trying to learn from a computer screen. The fact that many kids were miserable staring at their screens for the last year, craving interactions, isn’t the only reason that would be problematic. Web-based, adaptive tools generally become glorified tracking systems, with students consuming and regurgitating information into a database. They can exacerbate gaps in accessibility to rigorous content by providing “high achieving” students more rigorous content than students who the algorithm determines are learning at “lower levels” receive. This perpetuates discrepancies in access to high-level learning materials. Though we certainly should be talking about how to personalize learning in this new era of education, the path to personalization doesn’t lie in digitized programs that create individualized activity lists of mini-lessons and narrow recall-based activities. The path to personalization lies, instead, in the humanization of learning.
Too often, we contextualize conversations around equity solely with discussions of standards, assessments, and skills students need to learn. Though it’s important to name and measure what we want students to know and be able to do, we can’t limit our definition of equity to academic skills. We must remember that learners are emotional and sentient human beings who need love, belonging, and connection to thrive. The aforementioned, industry-scale web-based programs don’t provide for these needs. Many educators would argue that they chip away at connection and erode a sense of belonging in classrooms, centering students’ academic achievement over their natural right to feel connected to a community of learners.
Center Students’ Humanity … We can’t help students feel they belong in our classrooms if we don’t have a real sense who they are. Thus, try starting the year with an identity study, in which students tell stories about their life or family and share pieces of themselves. Not only will this help you get to know them better, but it will also bond students to one another, creating a community of learners who truly know one another. Moreover, encouraging students to learn about themselves gives each one a handle on their assets, challenges, and goals—which enhances independent learning.
Embrace Complex Instruction … Complex instruction, as defined by researchers Elizabeth Cohen and Rachel Lotan, grounds itself in three criteria: leverage multi-ability curricula; use instructional strategies that foster collaborative learning; and treat problems of status and inequity by ensuring equal access to learning. Complex instruction humanizes personalization because it keeps learners connected to one another, meanwhile differentiating learning through varied access points. Open-ended tasks allow for students of varying abilities to apply methods of varying sophistication to tackle the same problem. Complex instruction is about creating access for all learners—and the good news is that some tech tools can actually help with this. Apps like Seesaw let students demonstrate their learning in various ways, using pictures, images, and even recordings of their work. Tools like Popplet allow students to create mind maps, and BrainingCamp offers every student their own digital math manipulatives.
Teach in Three Dimensions … To make personalized learning sustainable, we must remember that individualization is not the same as personalization. In fact, personalized learning can happen in whole-group, small-group, and individualized instruction; These are the three dimensions of personalization. In the whole group, we can build a collective consciousness among learners, preserving connection through open-ended tasks and complex instruction. In the second dimension, we create both homogenous and heterogeneous small groups to teach in a more intimate setting. In the third dimension, teachers can provide feedback on learning habits and skills, offering a high degree of personalization while keeping kids connected to whole-class instruction.
At the end of the day, this is what personalized learning is really all about. It’s what we should be centering as we move forward from a traumatic year. As we start this new school year, we mustn’t lose sight of the importance of making learning relevant to children’s humanity. We must constantly remind ourselves—even using last year’s pain to help us remember—that the value of meaningful learning lies in the connectedness we feel when we discover new ideas. And not just new ideas about academics, but ideas about ourselves, who we are together, and our collective purpose in this uncertain world.
Three Reminders for the First Week of September:
1). Teachers: Please remember to use the What, Why, & How regarding your Learning Targets … explaining to students What we are going to learn, Why we are going to learn this, and How they (the students) will know when they have learned it.
2). Teachers: Please remember to check your mailboxes periodically – at least once before lunch. And on that note, check your email from time to time as well. Thanks.
3). Please make sure we close and lock all entrances to the school after we enter to ensure the safety of everyone on campus.
DUTY SCHEDULE
Cafeteria Helpers - Bassetti
Morning Duty - 2nd & 5th
Afternoon Duty - 3rd & 6th
Dismissal Duty - 1st & 4th
September 13-17
Cafeteria Helpers - Collins
Morning Duty - 3rd & 6th
Afternoon Duty - 1st & 4th
Dismissal Duty - 2nd & 5th