Inclusive Practice

I am pursuing my Master’s degree at Portland State University and have obviously been neglecting my blog.  For the fun of it, I thought I’d post my inclusive practice platform. Feedback is welcome.

The time has come to embrace an educational model that is rooted in the realities of the 21^st century.  The “one size fits most” mentality inherent in an industrial era standard of schooling is unsustainable in an age when cultural and linguistic diversity are the norm and the cultivation of responsible, global citizens is our goal.  We must embrace a pluralistic approach that honors differences, fosters pride and emphasizes the principles of interdependence, cooperation and collaboration.

We will begin to address the diverse interests and needs of the school community when we normalize the presence of multiple perspectives and incorporate these distinct viewpoints into the school’s culture, curriculum and common instructional strategies.  This shift to a model of inclusion will be evidenced at the classroom level by the proliferation of more active learning, an increase in student voice and choice, a greater reliance on democratic principles and an emphasis on high expectations for all students.  In addition, engaging the staff in standards based reform with an emphasis on common learning outcomes will promote shared responsibility and accountability for the achievement of a diverse group of students. Inclusive practices further require that educators respond to individual differences by incorporating personalization and continually developing their skills in cross-cultural competence.

We must examine the culture of the school with a critical eye, recognizing and reforming elements that breed exclusivity or create barriers to full participation by stakeholders who are not part of the majority. We can create the capacity for cultural self-assessment by investigating our history and abandoning a color- or culture-blind mentality.  Furthermore, we can establish rituals that reflect shared values, creating traditions that honor learning, affirm the desire to succeed, and that symbolize the hope and promise of education.   Ultimately, a school culture that is imbued with optimism, empathy and energy will be reflected in the outlook and actions of the staff, students and community.

Engaging families and community members in a collaborative decision-making process as we consider changes will be instrumental to increasing both ownership and involvement.  We must seek out diverse representation on our site council and in our various parent organizations, and learn more about the needs and desires of our stakeholders by initiating two-way communication that is both respectful and consistent.  Focus groups, home visits and interviews can uncover expertise and perspectives that might otherwise have been overlooked. Building on existing partnerships with social service agencies and local businesses will also help foster a sense of joint responsibility for maximizing educational outcomes.  In the end, involving all members of the school community to participate in the realization of the school’s mission will result in validation, empowerment and the eventual transformation of an antiquated educational system.

References

Deal, T.E. & Peterson, K.D. (2009). Shaping school culture: pitfalls, paradoxes and promises. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Gay, G. (2010). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research and practice. New York: Teachers College Press.

Hawley, W.D. & Nieto, S. (2010). Another inconvenient truth: Race and ethnicity matter. Educational Leadership 68(3), 66-71.

Singleton, G.E. & Linton, C. (2005). Courageous conversations about race. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publication.

Voltz, D.L., Sims, M.J., Nelson, B. (2010). Connecting teachers students and standards. Alexandria, VA: Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Zemelman, S., Daniels, H. & Hyde, A. (2005). Best practice: Today’s standards for teaching and learning in America’s schools. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

 

 

 

 

Filling the Affirmation Well

The last week of school is upon us, and even though it’s still raining here in Oregon, summer has arrived. If it doesn’t mean sunshine quite yet, it does mean the end to another school year and a well-deserved break.  It’s been a challenging year, trying to juggle multiple roles and not feeling like a very effective coach. It would be easy to focus on the places I came up short and dwell on the negative, but I’ve already mastered that approach and it doesn’t always serve me well. What I need to focus on are the small victories, the things which I often too easily dismiss, but that I need to hold onto because the rewards in this profession are often intangible and fleeting.

First, I need to remember that I did have an impact on my students. They learned the value of feedback and revision. They discovered how to strengthen their writing with imagery, figurative language and symbolism. A few of them got turned on to slam poetry, and one even started his own Ning. My second semester group, who as a whole were very reluctant to share their work at the outset, created a class book for the final project and all but three of them read a piece during our publication celebration. They gave each other genuine, meaningful praise and they were excited to see their names in print.  Several students who had a very loud inner critic have learned to turn down the volume on that voice, and they are more confident as a result of taking my class. Yes, I did make a difference this year.

I also made a difference with my colleagues. Lori came by yesterday to tell me that her English 9 class, the one with all of the ELL students, got a 74% average on the Romeo and Juliet test. We had worked together to create a differentiated unit, and with a big smile, she told me, “That unit works!” Elaine sent me an email with a PowerPoint slide attached that shows the growth that Latino students made on the state science test, from 20% meeting the benchmark last year to 47% this year. She wrote, “You have been enormously helpful with preparing our curricula…and have helped us raise the science scores of our Latino population.  Thank you.” I moved that message to my “Saved” file. Heidi, the Culinary Arts teacher, is excited about trying proficiency based grading next year after participating in the study group that I facilitated, and when Veronica found out that she was getting new Marketing textbooks and that I would be back to coaching full time next year, she came right down to my office to reserve a block of time during the August inservice so we can work together.

Even though the year is coming to an end, like Veronica, I am already excited about next year and eager to get back to work.  As I wrap things up over the next couple of days, I will continue to be conscious of shifting my focus from the negative to the positive. I already know that I can learn from what I didn’t do well; reflecting on it helps me to improve. But I also need to fill my well with affirmation and drink from it regularly.  I already feel empowered after writing this post. Stuart Smalley would be proud.

Surviving not Thriving

As April winds down and I look ahead to the crazy that I know May will bring, I wonder what my job will look like next year. This is my third year working as a high school instructional coach and coordinator of the Secondary Literacy Program. For the first two years in this position, I felt like I was effective in my role as a “teacher of teachers”, and I was excited about the changes that were happening in our building, especially around teacher collaboration and grading. There was a clear focus on literacy throughout the district, and we were building a high quality staff development model that incorporated elements of the best research and practice in teaching, learning, and leadership. Then, due to budget cuts last year, a few more things were added to my plate, including teaching one section of Creative Writing and coordinating the TAG (Talented and Gifted) program.

I approached this year with a positive attitude, knowing that I would have the opportunity to put the new ideas I had garnered over the last two years into practice in my own classroom, and hopeful that I could continue to build on the coaching relationships that I had developed with staff. It’s only one class, I told myself repeatedly over the summer and into the fall, even as it became clear that my work load was overwhelming and that I would not be able to maintain the same level of staff support that I had provided in the past. As I struggled to keep up with the planning and assessment for my class along with all of the other duties in my job description, the time I spent working with teachers on improving instruction dwindled. While I was incredibly busy, I didn’t feel like I was having much of an impact on students beyond those that were in my own class. Those students were my first priority, and rightly so, but I couldn’t help but feel that the ratio of my time spent on teaching related duties was disproportionate to the actual amount of FTE allotted to that responsibility.

Along with the other four secondary instructional coordinators, I voiced my concerns about continuing to teach in the future, as it was having such a significant impact on my effectiveness as a coach. The outlook for next year was good, we were told, and we soldiered on with hope that this year would be just a bump in the road. Now the word is that our job description for next year will be “status quo.” Of course, nothing is set at this point, but as I consider the prospect of another year feeling like I am not doing a good job at much else but teaching (and there are plenty of days where I don’t feel like I’m doing a good job at that, either), I feel disheartened. I have enjoyed being back in the classroom, and I have learned so much this year implementing both a writing workshop and proficiency-based grading system. It’s just that I feel like our school improvement efforts and staff development have suffered for it, and the momentum of those first two years has diminished.

It will be interesting to see how it all shapes up, especially since we will have a new principal in our building for the first time in eight years. We will also have new leadership in some key positions at the district level. I feel hopeful about the possibilities, but my optimism is tempered with a dose of realism at this point. I don’t want this position to become a dumping ground for delegated administrative tasks and a hodgepodge of other duties that need a home, which has happened this year to a greater extent to some of my colleagues. I would like to see the district leadership refocus on improving literacy instruction in the core, which is why this position was created in the first place. I’m surviving, but, like the title of Cathy Toll’s book on being an effective coach, it’s a long way from thriving, which is where we need to be to effect lasting change.

My Respite from Rain

I have had ideas for this poem floating around in my head for a couple of weeks now, and last night I finally got something down on paper. What really motivated me was wanting to show my creative writing students that I am willing to write along with them and to risk sharing my work. They gave me some good feedback today and some valuable suggestions for revision. I also wanted to model the kind of reflecting that I want them to do in their Writer’s Blogs, so I wrote an example and I think the act of reflecting on my writing actually motivated me to write.  I was pleasantly surprised by that outcome, and now I’m hopeful that the Writer’s Blogs might do the same thing for my students.

My Respite from Rain

The heralds of spring arrive
in a balmy February:
Leafless tree limbs burst into
puffy pink clouds and
the cheerful crocus emerges
dabbing bright spots of yellow and purple
on a muddy canvas.

Daffodils hang their heavy heads
still sleepy from the weight of winter, and
the blood of the rose starts coursing
through its thorny veins,
leaking into new red leaves.

Blue sky and sunshine bring back
California memories
that warm me from the inside.
Distant days of seasonless innocence
and the rarity of rain
dance at the corners of my consciousness;
Calm settles in.

The next day
the streets are slick again and
the sun is tucked under a blanket of clouds.
It is gray and cold and dull.

I sigh and slip back into my cocoon
where I mentally mark time
with each magical rebirth
and curl myself around
the budding promise of spring.

Good Teaching Is…

Here’s the found poem that my students created from my last post and the responses to it that I got via the ECNing.

Good teaching is an art form,
the most important job there is.
It is listening more than you talk.
Creativity and practicality
Flexibility and structure
Passion and energy poised to infect.
It rarely looks the same
But you know it when you see it.
Helping fellow human beings
Realize the dream of themselves
And gooseflesh at the witness of an epiphany.

What is Good Teaching?

One of the exercises I did this semester with my students to start exploring our ideas about writing and to begin building a community of writers was a freewrite about what “good writing” is. After the students had written for about 7 minutes, I told them that they were then going to take the best ideas from their freewrite and combine them with a few other people’s best ideas to create a collaborative “found poem” on the topic of Good Writing.  First, I asked them to underline key phrases and words in their own freewrite, then share these with their group, and finally, combine their selections to form a poem.  While a few of the groups were successful, the majority of the students struggled with the activity and the quality of their products certainly reflected that.

This was the first time I had done this activity, and I realized afterward that I probably would have gotten better results if I had done a better job of modeling what I wanted my students to do.  When the new semester starts, I will have a second go at this lesson, so to model the exercise for my students, I have chosen the topic of “Good Teaching.”  You can read my freewrite on the topic below, and then please contribute your own thoughts by adding a comment. My hope is that my next post will be the found poem on Good Teaching that I will create by combining some of our best ideas.  Thanks for your help!

Good Teaching

Good teaching is an art form, a balance of give and take, a practice that involves the head as well as the heart.  Good teaching is all about learning. For everyone: both the students and the teacher.  It is about knowledge, critical thinking, reflection and a sense of direction.  Good teaching has an end in mind, but knows there are different ways of getting there. Flexibility & structure, creativity & practicality.  Having a plan and also knowing when it’s appropriate to throw it out the window.  Good teaching is engaging. Good teaching is empowering. It is about building connections between people, ideas and synapses. Between yesterday and today. Between who you are and who you can be.

Let the Learning Continue

I felt a sore throat coming on last night as I was working with my group on our final project for our grad class on Educational Research. Sore muscles, the chills and a killer headache: all the telltale symptoms of a typical cold.  One of my classmates asked if I was going to call in sick today, and my knee-jerk response was in the negative.  Since I started teaching ten years ago, this has been my standard reaction whenever I feel under the weather. I know that I’m sick. I’d like to stay home. But I have to teach! It always feels like more work than it’s worth to write up the lesson plans and deal with the aftermath of having a sub.  More often than not, I will suck it up and soldier through the day with the help of multiple doses of ibuprofen and a box of Kleenex.  When I went to bed last night, that was my plan.

But when I got up this morning, I realized that where I really needed to be was back in bed. Not sharing these miserable symptoms with my students and co-workers.  Not sucking it up and soldiering through, but resting it up and drinking fluids.  As I thought about my plans for class today, I realized that the systems and routines that I have put in place would make it easy for the work to continue in my classroom, even though I am not there.  My students know what it is that they need to do, and the workshop format of our class puts them at the center of the action.  In the past, if my sub plans called for a “work day” and we weren’t in the middle of a paper or project, my students wouldn’t know where to start without specific instructions from me via a sub, and ultimately very little work would get done. Now, the primary activity in my class is “work time”, following a mini-lesson or writing exercise. Prewriting, drafting, conferencing with each other, revising, blogging and participating in discussions on our class Ning: these things happen on a daily basis both inside the walls of our classroom and beyond.  Because I have let go of my former role as the “sage on the stage”, I can now rest easy when I’m under the weather and let the learning continue in my absence.

What Does an A Really Mean?

This will be the third year that I have facilitated a study group on differentiated instruction at the high school where I teach and work as an instructional coach. I love having the opportunity to learn with my colleagues, to discuss the book we are reading, and to collaboratively problem solve. It’s exciting and inspiring to witness teachers taking risks and changing their practice, despite all of the challenges involved, and the easy excuses they could lean on to maintain the status quo. Over the past year or so, many teachers at my school, including some who participate in the study group, have been engaged in a critical examination of assessment and grading practices. So this year, the study group decided to read Rick Wormeli’s Fair Isn’t Always Equal: Assessing and Grading in the Differentiated Classroom, looking for insight on the dual fronts of differentiation and assessment.

I am teaching a new Creative Writing class this year, using the workshop model and a portfolio system of assessment.  I am also using a proficiency-based grading system for the first time, so I was hoping to get some insight from our first month’s reading assignment.  In Chapter 2, Wormeli poses a crucial question, “What are we willing to accept as evidence of mastery?” (13).  I had been grappling with that concept all week as I attempted to create a rubric for the standards in my Creative Writing class.

One question that comes up for me is: What is the difference between mastery and proficiency? Or are they essentially the same thing? If mastery is simply more than being able to recite facts and it means demonstrating an understanding of the content at higher levels of Bloom’s (apply, analyze, evaluate) – my paraphrasing of Wormeli’s “working definition” of the concept – then I believe that I have structured the rubric to reflect that. I do, however, think that effort is also a part of demonstrating mastery, and this can be confusing. For example, one of the standards for the course is “Use creativity and innovation to generate ideas, products, or processes using current technology”, and the rubric indicates that to be proficient students must have the following evidence: “Six blog posts which include a minimum of 2 writing reflections; Each post is a minimum of one well-developed paragraph; Six comments on other blogs.” I interpreted proficiency in this standard as pretty much just engaging regularly in the blogging/commenting process, and if students demonstrate that they have done this, they meet the standard. This requirement doesn’t really address the “creativity and innovation” part of the standard, although it is addressed in the “advanced” requirements: “Meets requirements for proficient; includes additional posts and/or posts are of exceptional quality.” Wormeli states that “We wouldn’t want to declare students masterful because they can produce the medium” (14), but I feel like in my content area, the medium IS the content. I want all students to feel that being proficient is attainable, so I have struggled with the difference between what I would ideally like them to know and do, and what is a reasonable expectation for every student.

I think that is the crux of the grading issue, too. I had a very lively discussion with my class on Thursday about what an A and a B should be. Initially, I started the conversation by asking them what they thought proficient should look like for each of the standards, and this developed into a discussion about how we would translate proficiency scores into a letter grade. Several students argued that if a student is proficient in all 10 standards that they should get an A. Others (including myself) argued that an A indicates that a student has gone beyond the minimum required, and that a student should be advanced in at least some of the standards to receive an A. When I look at the requirements for achieving proficiency, the evidence required and the work that students have to do is what we determined as “reasonable.” So if a student does what is considered reasonable for demonstrating that they are proficient, should that equate to an A? Shouldn’t an A be a reflection that a student has gone above and beyond the minimum?

Ultimately, I have come to the conclusion that effort IS part of my assessment system and I’m not sure that it shouldn’t be. Wormeli says, “We have to be clear as to what is evidence of mastery versus evidence of almost-mastery mixed with a lot of hard work” (18), and I agree with this statement when we are determining a student’s level of proficiency. In translating that into a grade on a report card, however, I’m not sure that it should be so cut and dried.

I’d love to hear what other people think about this.

Ode to Summer’s Passing

Ode to Summer’s Passing

The twilight of summer always
Creeps in when I’m not looking:
Suddenly plunged into the frenzied pace
Of Back to School,
I glance up just in time
To hear the pink-tipped silk tree blossoms
Slowly exhale.
Glowing embers that smell so sweet
And ripe with sadness;
The fragrance fills the air
And floods my heart with hurt.

I feel the silent urgency of the season
Humming in my veins;
I see it reflected in the suddenly overgrown blackberry vines
Who are taking one last long stretch before the final innings
And the yellow-red glow of the lone dahlia returned from winter
Whose fiery spikes will soon fade and curl.
Daylilies hold their breath before exploding
In a finale of golden starbursts,
Leggy headless petunias turn an ashen green,
And the sun sets too early in a blanching sky.
This is summer’s passing.

Each time I die a tiny death,
And then survive.

Do You Need a Boundary Buddy?

In our instructional coaches’ meeting today, we reviewed our job description, which has changed significantly from last year, largely due to budget cuts. One big difference is that we will each be teaching a class in addition to our other responsibilities which include coordinating the Secondary Literacy Program as well as coaching other teachers in order to improve instruction. Another change is that this year our coaching responsibilities, which had been focused for the most part on content literacy, now have an additional emphasis on differentiation, as well as meeting the needs of English Language Learners and students designated as TAG (Talented and Gifted).

We all were feeling overwhelmed as we discussed how to juggle our multiple roles and responsibilities and which ones we should prioritize. One of the best take-aways for me was the suggestion from a colleague to always consider the question, “To what extent will what I am working on impact student learning and achievement?” This is, after all, the goal we all should be focused on, both as teachers and coaches.

At times, others may see the priorities differently, however, and it will be important for me to be clear about what I can and cannot take on. It can be hard to say no, especially when it is something that I would like to do, but maintaining my sanity is one of my priorities, too.

Yesterday I was talking about the importance of setting boundaries with another colleague whose assignment has also changed this year, from full to part-time. She told me that since she had a baby, it’s been easier for her to know where to draw the line because her daughter Addison is her number one priority. Since I don’t have an Addison to remind me of the importance of “No”, Jen said she would be my “boundary buddy”: someone I can check in with when things start to get fuzzy and who will keep me accountable. In fact, as I’ve been working on this post, I’ve been feeling like I should have been working on preparing for our inservice next week instead, but I can hear Jen’s voice in my head saying, “No. You should be doing exactly what you’re doing. You need time for you!” This buddy system is already working for me, and my buddy hasn’t even done anything yet!

My goal for this year is to keep my workload manageable by setting priorities and maintaining boundaries. I’ve got a key question to keep my work focused on what’s really important and a boundary buddy for support. What’s your plan?