Carla, an English learner student who was in the Spanish bilingual program the year before, is working with Jerome, a fairly confident math student. Carla has written down an answer, 783 and explains to Jerome how she got her answer. Jerome, has a different answer on his page: 837. He explains his answer, and here is where an interesting thing happens: Although Carla is correct, she erases her answer, writes down his answer, and they continue working on the second part of the problem. For my inquiry last school year, I chose to explore math partnerships because our math curriculum required students to work together in partners on tasks to solve word problems. At the beginning of the year, I noticed that when I told the students to work together, almost all of them worked on the task individually and hardly talked to or looked at their partner at all. A few students would get into small arguments and then refuse to work together. By mid-year, students seemed to be working together well, but the video data of Carla and Jerome, which I collected to look at with colleagues in our February Mills Teacher Scholars inquiry session, helped me see the complexity of what it really means to help students develop the Social and Emotional skills they need to grapple with content and construct new understandings together.

As Oakland Unified School District and other districts across the country experience an unprecedented influx of newcomer English Learners, even veteran teachers are left with a myriad of questions about the best way to support their students’ social-emotional and academic development. Marla Kamiya of Bridges Academy at Melrose participated in our Teachers of Newcomers inquiry group. Her inquiry began with an exploration of the best classroom placement for Mam speaking students from Guatemala and El Salvador, but led her to some important realizations about the relationship between newcomer families and schools. My school, Bridges Academy at Melrose, is experiencing a huge increase in Mam-speaking students over the last two years--an increase mirrored in many other Oakland schools as well. Mam is one of the Mayan languages spoken in the highlands of Guatemala and El Salvador. It is one of the 21 Mayan languages officially recognized by the government of Guatemala. In this last school year, 15 Mam speaking students enrolled in our kindergarten classes, bringing our schoolwide total of Mam-speaking students to approximately 50 students over 10% of our student population. These new students were all placed in our Spanish bilingual program. Our school’s bilingual program is an early exit program designed for native Spanish speakers, a program designed to build upon students’ primary language to transition them in English. Since these students were clearly not Spanish-speakers, my fellow kindergarten teacher, Bernadette Zermeno, and I decided to study this question: Does it best serve Mam-speaking newcomer students to be placed into our school’s bilingual program or would they be better served in our Sheltered English program? I envisioned a relatively straightforward path that would include learning more about the linguistic features of Mam, consideration of common underlying proficiencies among Mam, Spanish, and English that may affect second language acquisition, and interviewing Mam speaking parents regarding their desires for their children’s education. We hoped, in our words, “to establish a clear school policy and procedure regarding the placement of Mam-speaking students into the Spanish bilingual or Sheltered English program.” Instead, we learned much more about the importance of relationship building, of drawing these parents into an ongoing dialogue about school and their child’s education, and we received a quick education about how deeply these parents want their children to learn Spanish, based on their own experience of bilingualism/biculturalism in their home country. The Complexity of Language, Identity, and Experience In order to learn more about the Mam language, we reached out to, Dr. Lyle Campbell, an expert in Mayan languages.  

Over 200 teachers, site leaders, university faculty and other supporters joined us on March 22nd for our Teacher Inquiry in Action Forum. Below are highlights from the event. The evening kicked off  with dinner and a poster session.

  The Common Core standards deem that students should engage in constructive feedback of peer’s work and ideas from kindergarten and beyond. But what does this really look like? What do students experience on a social-emotional level when they are asked to give constructive criticism to a peer? Moreover, what supports do they need from each other and from their teachers to generate effective critical comments? These are questions Ginny Tremblay has explored through her inquiry work over the last several years. “But what if I hurt their feelings?” There is a look of genuine fear and discomfort in my student’s eyes as she plaintively asks this question. For a fifteen-year-old, being told that she must publically critique her peer’s artwork seems tantamount to being asked to wear all her clothes backwards for the day. It makes her feel exposed, it makes her feel like she will say the wrong thing, be perceived in a way she did not intend - kryptonite to most of us, but especially to teenagers. Origin Story My inquiry began several years ago, when I first became an art teacher. I knew that I wanted to implement the routine of critique in my classroom; I felt it would make the experience of making and thinking about art more Real, more authentic. It was important for students to be able to give and recive valuable feedback to improve their craft.