Category Archives: Education

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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Knowing Your Students Helps Create an Equitable Classroom

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Education

Seeing students for who they are and where they come from, as well as providing each student with an equitable distribution of educational supports or resources that allow the student to feel safe and secure, is social justice in education.  In order for teachers to provide equitable educational opportunities, it’s important to become aware of each student’s background.  

To be clear;  this is not understanding how the student has done academically or behaviorally in their educational career, but truly knowing the student’s life circumstances outside of the classroom.

Getting to know students on the surface level is no longer enough.  It doesn’t allow for an equitable classroom. It is important for teachers to create a methodical approach to getting to know their students as to not yield an inequitable or unconscious biased environment. Here’s a strategy I’ve found useful: 

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WARNS of Trouble…

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Assessment, Education, Education Policy

Peace and quiet. Ahhh…I looked out at my students as they were silently reading and took a mental survey of what I know about this group of 6th-8thgraders. Who are these young people?

In my room, at least 60% are in homes where I know drugs and alcohol are playing a role in the family environment and nearly 80% are coming from homes where poverty has a firm hold. One in four are being raised by widows. Quietly they all read, lost in worlds of adventures far from the starkness of their real lives. 

It is not hard to see where almost every single one of my students faces a daily challenge in which they must use some kind of coping mechanism just to show up at school. I am actually quite surprised that truancy is a rarity in my classroom. However, I have had to become familiar with the new laws surrounding truancy this year. 

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Baby/Bathwater

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Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy | ,

The recommendation from the New York City School District’s “School Diversity Advisory Group” has sparked a national conversation, one that’s erupted right here in the Seattle Public School District. The NYC advisory group claimed that the best way to desegregate NYC schools was to eliminate most gifted programs. In their reply, the National Association for Gifted Children pointed out that NYC’s history of using a single test “actually exacerbated under-identification.”

Denise Juneau, the new superintendent at the Seattle Public Schools, is also pushing to phase out selective programs for advanced kids although she’s currently being blocked by two school board directors.

Juneau called the HC classes “educational redlining.”

Let’s all agree that the demographics of most gifted or Highly Capable programs in the nation—or in Washington state—don’t closely match the demographics of the districts at large. For example, in Seattle, the stats look like this:

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What is Social Justice?

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Education, Elementary, Life in the Classroom, Professional Development, Social Issues

Educators are aware of 21st-century skills required for students such as critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication, technology literacy, flexibility, leadership, and social skills. However, what about 21st-century skills educators must possess? 

Often this school of thought is overshadowed by the concentrated focus on student learning.  Current educators need to develop, practice, and implement skills like social justice pedagogy, intersectionality, culturally responsive teaching, and implicit bias.  Developing new skills will take time and mental reconfiguration of what teaching has become in the 21st century, but where to begin? Social justice would be a great starting point.

Social justice can be defined as seeing students for who they are and where they come from, as well as providing each student with an equitable distribution of educational supports or resources that allow the student to feel safe and secure.  At times it may seem easier to emphasize what social justice is not.  

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Critical Literacy in Rural WA

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Education, Literacy, Social Issues | , , ,

I just finished teaching a unit on literacy in my senior English class. I’m loving this class. The kids are amazing, and reading their ideas and listening to them discuss the issues around literacy today has been fascinating- and revealing. One article in particular, “Literacy and the Politics of Education,” by C. H. Knoblauch, really struck a nerve in my small-town classroom.

The article, published nearly thirty years ago, can be found here. For a quick look at the concepts, check out this handy study guide another teacher created and posted. To sum it up rather simplistically, Knoblauch outlines four basic types of literacy: functional literacy, cultural literacy, literacy for personal growth, and critical literacy. In essays and discussions, my students chose the literacies they valued the most and reflected on what their experience in high school had provided them so far. Their perspectives gave me food for thought. Continue reading →

“I Believe in You”: The Teacher’s Role of High Expectations

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Education, Education Policy, Elementary, Life in the Classroom

High expectations. The phrase has been bouncing around the education ether with increasing regularity over the years. As practicing educators, we know the “why” behind high expectations, but it is often easier said than done. Take my story. It is probably not unique, and other teachers may have buried away similar stories in their proverbial shoebox of “not-so-proud” teacher moments.

I share this story not as an omission of guilt or a way to vent, but as a window into the challenges that a multitude of novice (or not so novice) teachers encounter when trying to navigate the new territory of cultural competency in our practice. 

In my first year of teaching 1st grade I did not hold all of my students to high expectations and one of my English Learner students suffered the most.

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