Category Archives: Education

The Wrong Kind of Tired

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Education, Education Policy, Elementary, Life in the Classroom, Mentoring, Professional Development

In December, I realized I was drowning. I was frequently getting sick, my class was spiraling out of control, and I would leave work so exhausted. I was facing overwhelming anxiety each day. 


When everything is a mess, it’s hard to know where to start. 

New teachers often find themselves in this position. It’s the position of not knowing what you don’t know. Looking back on my first year, it was incredibly hard to ask for help because it was impossible to pinpoint exactly what I needed. 

Entering my second year I felt much more confident that I had it down, but as the months ticked by my classroom management began falling apart. 

I reached out to one of my instructional coaches about what was happening in my classroom and she came in to observe a few times. While observing she never intervened, even when things got chaotic. We met a few days later to debrief. Surprisingly, she didn’t give me feedback on what she saw; instead, she just listened as I told her all of the things I felt were falling apart.

At the end of the conversation, she said to me, “You are the wrong kind of tired. You are exhausted because you spend your day putting out fires, not teaching. That’s called burnout and we are going to fix it.” 

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Reconsidering College as “The Goal”

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Education, Education Policy, Social Issues | , , , ,

Let’s say a prototypical U.S. graduating class has one hundred students.

Of that hundred, sixty-seven enroll directly into a two- or four-year college. (Source: National Center for Education Statistics)

Of the sixty-seven who do enroll, only forty-eight will make it into their second year of college (whether at the same institution or a different one)… the rest drop out. (Source: National Student Clearinghouse Research Center via NPR; computation mine)

Of those forty-eight who make it into year two, only twenty-eight will have earned a degree even six years after enrolling in college. (Source: National Student Clearinghouse Research Center Persistence and Retention; computation mine)

That’s worth repeating:

Of the one hundred graduating seniors in that prototypical class, only twenty-eight will statistically have earned a college degree within six years of leaving high school.

There are a multiple ways to interpret this.

On one hand, we could indict the K-12 school system for not preparing kids to persevere in the post-secondary education system.

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The Need for Novelty

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Education | ,

As I’ve said before, the first and most important need for truly gifted students is quality time with their intellectual peers. Second, they need increased depth and complexity. Third, they need a faster pace.

I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about their need for novelty. Honestly, teachers can help meet that need by increasing the depth and complexity of content and increasing the pace of instruction. After all, if more challenging information comes at a faster pace, chances are you—the teacher and the student—will move into the territory of new information pretty quickly.

That’s where Highly Capable students want to live.

According to Charlotte Akin (retired administrator, HC program director, and WAETAG past president), “Gifted kids want to learn something new every day—and they would love to learn something new every period.”

As the NAGC STEM Network Working Group said, “Productive struggle is especially important for these students. They need to be challenged to make continuous progress and learn something new every day if we are going to foster their brain growth, persistence and resilience.”

My very first year teaching gifted students, I worked in a district with a pull-out program. I met with students one day a week. Kids came to me for advanced content instruction and intensive independent projects. One day, as a group was working diligently in the library, I asked them, “Is what you do in here harder than what you do in your regular classroom?”

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Equity in School Discipline

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Education, Education Policy

On July 30, 2018, House Bill 1541 allowed OSPI to address equity in student discipline and close opportunity gaps in learning across Washington state.  

As educators, we differentiate instruction for students who struggle academically or learn in a different manner.  It makes sense that educators use the same process for regulating behavior, as discipline is not a one-size-fits-all model.  The new format is a prevention-based approach, schools must attempt to correct behavior before requiring disciplinary action. Following this format ensures fair and equitable practices across the state for all students.

The changes to federal and state laws are this: 1) Limit the use of exclusionary discipline in schools. 2) Minimize the impact of exclusionary discipline on students who are excluded. 3) Reduce disparities in the administration of student discipline.

Many educators have a false perception of the new discipline laws simply because they aren’t well informed.  I have heard many educators assume that the new rules mean two things. One, students perceived as “bad” can not be suspended for their behavior. And two, that those same “bad” students will be rewarded in hopes the rewards will change their behavior.  This simply isn’t true.  

OSPI’s Equity and Civil Rights Office officially advises schools to review the effectiveness of discipline and/or intervention strategies using a four-part model based on their school’s discipline data.

  • Plan: Analyze the data and identify root causes
  • Do: Decide on a plan and implement
  • Study: Evaluate and monitor progress
  • Act: Adjust your plan, if necessary

In reviewing discipline policies schools should adjust their discipline rules if data shows little or no progress in student behavior.

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A Window and a Mirror

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Books, Education

My journey to bring in contemporary literature from a different perspective than the monolithic racial identity of authors dominating our curriculum turned out to be more of a whirlwind than I expected: I submitted the book for District approval back in September, gained my principal’s support to purchase copies of the novel, and received official District approval in time to integrate the book into my sequence in November.

Now it is December, and already my seniors have wrapped up their final projects from our reading of There There by Tommy Orange.

In part because of the accelerated nature of my school’s schedule, we tore through the novel at breakneck pace, engaging in regular discussion and frequent journal writing. Like any time teaching new content, there were hits and misses. My overall mission was two-fold: One, expose students to a work of literary merit that offered voices and perspectives otherwise not present in their school experience, and two, examine the craft and structure of the novel itself in order to consider different approaches to storytelling.

My students’ responses were interesting. As with any book I’ve tried to teach, there is always a subset of kids who see themselves as “bad readers” and whose default position is to approach with skepticism and negativity. This identity is often quite crystallized by the time the reach me as 17-, 18-, or 19-year-old high school seniors. I’ve yet to find the right way to reach every student with a given text, but the boundaries of who connects and who doesn’t shift in interesting ways.

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The Value of Their Voices

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Education, Life in the Classroom, Social Issues, Teacher Leadership, Uncategorized | , , ,

How much do you value student voice? By the term “student voice” I am referring to the values, beliefs, opinions, and perspectives of the students in our classrooms. I think we all instinctively understand that student voice is important, but do we value it so much that we intentionally make room for it? Do we value it as much as we value teacher voice in the classroom?

This year, I am focusing on creating relationships that promote social emotional learning. I have become increasingly aware of what students are saying, and, consequently, of what teachers are saying about their students. Although I am finding the student voices in my classroom to be informative and invigorating to the learning environment, it is clear that some educators are often frustrated with what students have to say.

Personally, I find joy in my classroom listening to the voices of my students. Every day I learn something new. Every day I laugh. My students bring life to my classroom and they fill my days with their varied perspectives, diverse backgrounds, interesting opinions and wild imaginations. My walls display their work. My units shift and change with their contributions and preferences. Every time I read a novel with a class, I see it through different eyes and hear it through different voices. Every time I give them a controversial topic to discuss, I hear a new perspective and learn a little more about their generation and our community. Continue reading →

Creating a Stress-Free Classroom for Learning

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Education

About a month ago I switched in-district teaching positions.  I left a classroom of fabulous 6th graders in elementary for 7th-grade math on a cart. As I observed the various classes I was to inherit, one thing was evident; students didn’t have a stable learning environment.  I witnessed displays of behavior not conducive to learning, students disengaged while the teacher instructed, and frustrated student faces.

During these days of observation, I kept asking myself two things. 

1. Why did I leave my 6th graders?  

2. How do I begin to create a stable and safe environment of learning for my new students? 

I previously wrote a blog that discusses how I discover what my students deal with in their lives outside of school and how I use that data to shape lessons and academic practice.  However, here it was the tail end of October and students were deep in their current math unit. I felt I was going to have to begin teaching with a triage approach.  

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(In)adequate yearly progress: Being basic and how to grow from it

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Education, Education Policy, Elementary, Life in the Classroom

Whether you are one year or ten years into your teaching career, you will be observed and evaluated on your teaching practices. These observations and evaluations are one way we as educators know how we are impacting student learning and receive feedback on our practice. 

My first year of teaching, I was rated “Basic” in every domain I was evaluated on, including my student growth. I accepted this evaluation despite my disappointment because it was, after all, my first year. As I entered year two, I remember thinking, “I know it’s still going to be so hard, but at least I won’t be completely blindsided.”

October rolled around and I was feeling good about how things were going. Nothing was perfect, but I was leaps and bounds ahead in my practice compared to this time last year. For example, my first observation and evaluation of this school year came in mid-October, and I was excited for my administrator to come into my classroom and see how much I had improved.

Fast forward to my post-observation meeting and a score of “Basic” in every domain. 

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The Care and Feeding of the Twice Exceptional Child, Part Two

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Education


While I’ve had 2E students in my gifted classes going back into the 1980s, the numbers of 2E students in Highly Capable classrooms are increasing as identification processes become better. In addition, we’ve seen an increase in the severity of the second identification, which can make it more difficult for the student to function in a self-contained, accelerated, academic, Highly-Capable classroom. Nevertheless, once students are identified and placed in my class, it’s my job to work with other staff to make sure their needs are met.

HC who get speech services. This is more common than you might think. Combine speech issues with typically high rates of introversion, anxiety, and perfectionism in the gifted population, and you might understand why I work so hard on public speaking skills with all my students.

According to his third and fourth grade teachers, a child I’ll call Lisa never spoke in class. The September she entered my fifth-grade class, I had the students read an article on introversion, and then I asked the students to define introversion. Lisa put her hand up, stammered for a bit, and finally blurted out, “I am an introvert.”

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An Example of Privilege

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Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy, Social Issues | ,

When I teach about privilege in my classroom, I’m careful to frame it not as an “easier life,” but rather, a life that more closely matches the life of the deciders.

We talk about it in terms of “proximity to power.” As we discuss issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, citizenship, ability, wealth (the list persists), we identify how society unconsciously arranges each of these on an axis. At the convergence of these axes is the “position of power.” Furthest from the convergence are marginalized identities. We talk about this as “social location.”

I am careful to clarify that when we place identities on these axes, we are not making value judgments. Rather, we are making observations based on data. For example, on the race axis we consider which race in our country occupies governmental policymaking seats, CEO positions, media mogul platforms, and socially powerful positions. That race is predominantly white, and disproportionate to that race’s representation in our society. Take gender identity, sexual orientation, sex assigned at birth, (and on down the list) and we get a map of social locations with proximity to power.

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