Rose Ferrero School
Week Of: December 7-18, 2020
WEEKLY QUOTES FOR OUR TEACHERS AND STAFF
Welcome to Mrs. Schoch's Counseling Corner. Even during school closure, Mrs. Schoch is proving counseling services. Should you need her assistance, click the link below.
LCAP GOAL 5: SUPPORT FOR TEACHERS – Strategies to Encourage Students to Turn Their Cameras On
If a teacher wants to incorporate social and emotional learning (SEL) strategies to prompt camera use among his/her students, start with the recognition that words matter. Our communication with our students needs to be rooted in community, not compliance. From there, you could leverage any number of SEL approaches, such as ….
Survey students. Ask students individually or in a Google form what deters them from using a camera and what would make them comfortable. Once you identify the barriers to camera use, you can collaborate with students to reduce or remove those barriers.
Use icebreakers. Try community-building activities that encourage camera use. For example, prompt students to “find the largest yellow thing in your house that you can safely bring back to the camera.”
Play games. Rock, paper, scissors works well in a remote classroom setting, as do Pictionary and charades. Explore 25 games to play on Zoom, which includes options that work for different ages.
Encourage students who have social capital to use their cameras. The best role models are likely in your classroom already. Consider using a Google form to ask students to name three classmates with whom they would most like to be in a breakout room or with whom they would most like to work on a group project. The students with the most requests are likely the students with the most social capital and can be positive role models for camera-on activities.
Be empathetic. Share with your students times when you haven’t felt like being on camera in a meeting. Talk about how you prepare yourself to turn on the camera, even when you’re not in the mood. If you’re self-conscious about looking prepared or about multitasking while on camera, talk about it. Sharing will bring out your humanness.
Since most teachers utilize Zoom, here are some Zoom Tips to encourage camera use ….
Admit students into class one by one. Arrive to class five minutes early and enable the waiting room. As students arrive, admit and greet them individually, and check in with them about camera use. You might be able to check in with only a few students before needing to “admit all,” but those who arrive early and have their cameras on will gain comfort from being in a small group to start. Plus, as the other students enter, they will register that some cameras are already on.
Use the “Ask to Start Video” option. As the host, you can invite participants to turn on their cameras by clicking the participant’s black screen; then click the horizontal “…” and select “Ask to Start Video.”
Send a private message in the chat. Use the chat feature to welcome the student, check in with them, and encourage them to turn on their camera.
Encourage virtual backgrounds. It could be that a student is resistant to using their camera because of their home environment, so teach them how to use Zoom virtual backgrounds or introduce them to Unscreen.
Finally, here are some Instructional Tips to encourage camera use ….
Let students know when cameras can be optional. Brainstorm with your class times when it is fine to have the camera off and when it’s best to have it on. Discussing camera-optional policies and having camera routines provide students with predictability and autonomy.
Allow students to show only part of their body or space on camera. Some students are particularly self-conscious about exposing their face on camera. Consider allowing students to dip their toe into their onscreen time by encouraging them to turn the camera so that only a portion of their body appears.
Provide options for rubrics that include camera usage. At the onset of a lesson or unit, share rubrics or criteria for success for a given objective. If having the camera on is relevant to your objective, then consider including it as a criterion for success. Many students will align themselves with the rubric if they know the expectations upfront before instruction begins. To avoid forced compliance, consider providing options for students to create their own rubric based on the objective.
Have students submit a prerecorded video demonstrating skill or objective. If students need to visibly demonstrate a skill, allow them to make a recorded video. While the whole class won’t see it, you can still assess the student and build their comfort with being on camera.
Ask students to suggest alternatives. Your students might have insights into other ways to participate and share their learning visually.
LCAP GOAL 2: PROFICIENCY FOR ALL – Nurturing, Not Stifling, Imagination and Creative Thinking in Our Youngest Learners: Three Ways to Do Just That
An educator recently recalled this story from his elementary school experience:
When I was attending elementary school, there was one question on the end-of-semester 1st grade math test that counted for 20 percent of the final grade:
There are 14 apples on the tree.
A hungry monkey eats 5 apples.
How many apples are left?
The other students gave the correct answer: nine apples. I, on the other hand, answered: "Not sure, as I do not know how many apples may fall." My reasoning was that when the monkey took apples off the tree, other apples might fall to the ground, so there was no clear answer to this question. Even though my idea was creative, I received a bad grade on the test and ranked last in the class. My parents were asked to come to school to talk to the math teacher, for I had been designated as a student with a potential learning disability. This experience adversely affected my early childhood school life. I began to curb my imagination, from which I had always derived substantial pleasure, and sought only the answers and behaviors my teachers and parents preferred in order to do well on exams and receive praise.
Based on a recent study of optimal early childhood learning, students' cognitive abilities, and emotional intelligence development, there are three skill sets that benefit students' emergent literacy and math development and are conducive to their social-emotional advancement in the long run: unconstrained skills, reflection literacy, and autonomy. These three domains in particular work together to nurture and boost children's creative thinking and problem-solving aptitudes, drive them to take more initiative to learn, and set them on course to mature into lifelong learners.
1. Unconstrained Skills: Recent research points out that early elementary school teachers may spend too much time on readily teachable skills (constrained skills) such as the letters of the alphabet, spelling rules, or sentence-level mechanics. Conversely, they may spend too little time on unconstrained skills such as background knowledge, reading critically, meaning making, and other knowledge learned across students' lifetimes that is not easily quantified but deeply influences their delight and accomplishment in reading.
Constrained skills, while necessary, are insufficient for the development of more sophisticated, complex reading abilities. Curricula dominated by a narrow set of finite limits and structures focusing on performing isolated skills within a short period of time cannot prepare students for future success with unconstrained capabilities like cognitive flexibility, critical analysis, and contextual variation.
Constrained skills are mostly taught through explicit instruction and learning to follow rules, but children need more than this. Research shows that in the long run, it is the unconstrained capacities that most influence children's cognitive, academic, and social-emotional development. Unconstrained skills such as critical thinking and meaning making in real contexts exert a great impact on the path to achieving full literacy. They aid in cultivating students' problem-solving skills and help them take more initiative, ownership, and responsibility. If unconstrained aptitude is compromised in early childhood, there will be a higher price to be paid later in reading and writing capabilities at the upper-grade levels; indeed, it may even ruin a child's psychological health. Therefore, teachers need to nurture students' unconstrained skills so that they can engage in and concentrate on deeper learning, take on challenges, and develop effective communicative and critical thinking capabilities.
2. Three Literacy Dimensions: The three dimensions of literacy—recognition literacy, action literacy, and reflection literacy—emphasize the importance of cultivating and mediating children's linguistic meta-language, creativity, and literacy consciousness beyond rule-based instruction and text reproduction, positioning students to see themselves in the text.
Recognition literacy focuses on students' development of verbal and visual recognition through the teacher's explicit instruction and demonstration, such as when a child learns phonology, grammar rules, vocabulary forms, and other linguistic (de-)coding skills in a decontextualized way. Action literacy is cultivated through communication and construction of existing established knowledge, such as when a teacher asks students to retell the events of a story in their own words, linking language usage in certain specific contexts. Both recognition literacy and action literacy can be nurtured by a teacher and will enable students to engage in powerful acts of meaning making at early ages. Reflection literacy aims to nurture students' capabilities for producing new knowledge and questioning standards or norms without purely following what others teach them. It is when students imagine, critique, inquire, and analyze their values and understandings of things in their immediate surroundings. In short, reflection literacy is crucial because it questions socially constructed meanings and conventions and builds a more in-depth, holistic understanding of social practices.
It is important to note that the three types of literacy education do not exist in a progressive relationship led by teachers step by step. All categories can and should be carried out at the same time, although the proportion of time spent on them may differ depending on the ages of the students. Even young children who are still at the stage of recognition literacy benefit from the cultivation of the three types of literacy simultaneously. Above all, reflection literacy skills must be developed as early as possible.
3. Empowering Autonomy: Teachers and parents want young children to listen to directions and follow rules exactly, and some parents punish their kids for misbehavior or other noncompliance. Nevertheless, the ultimate goal of education is to prepare students to be independent and resourceful, to take action when parents or teachers are not around to intervene or offer help, and to find ways to handle issues or problems that they encounter in daily life. We want children to become self-directed learners, set their own goals, and be responsible for their behavior.
Self-discipline and self-regulation can only be learned through empowering autonomy. Sufficient amounts of autonomy in decision making and time control are indispensable for students and should be taught and fostered at a young age. Not only will children develop a sense of ownership over their lives, being more motivated to communicate, collaborate, and take more personal responsibility, but they will also acquire a more active interest in the surrounding world and be prepared to shoulder social responsibility for good citizenship.