Meeting the Needs of Struggling High School Students Through Putting Student Voice at the Center

March 1, 2017

As a teacher of struggling readers, I find myself constantly grappling with what to do with my high schoolers who are reading multiple grades below level. They walk in and out of my classroom each day and I see their sense of self as students waver as they are confronted with harder and harder texts. The need to serve them is immediate but also daunting. No two struggling readers seem to have the same need and the research about supporting readers is vast and divergent. In an effort to design the best strategic reading class for 14 incredible students who are challenged by reading each day at my small school in the Fruitvale of Oakland, I leaned on best practices. I had learned about the practice of “Mazes” to support reading comprehension during my Masters program and decided to adopt it as a weekly routine. Mazes are short passages where every 7th word has been omitted. Students then choose the correct word from a choice of three as they read the passage. They have 3 minutes to do so and are measured on their number of correct selections and their words per minute. This provides both the student and the teacher immediate data about silent reading comprehension and fluency. I hoped that weekly practice with this exercise would help them develop their fluency and comprehension and, as they saw their own improvement, develop their confidence in themselves as readers. A few months into the practice I found that students were not seeing growth, nor was I, and collectively we were feeling more and more frustrated around the practice. With my Mills Teacher Scholars facilitator, Jen, I began to think about the forms of data I could collect about the practice in order to gain a better understanding of whether it was helping meet my learning goal for students. She suggested that I provide students more space to reflect on the practice and share with me their own opinions about the plateaued results on the exercise. I decided to embed an additional data source into my routine in the form of a post- Maze reflection that asked students to look closely at their progress. I found myself unsure about how best to serve my students as I read their reflections that were bleeding with frustration. One student wrote, “In my opinion Mazes are not helping my reading because I am still only getting 13 correct answers.” It was answers like these that caused me to dig deeper and turn to the students even more around the routine. The class was for them, and their needs were urgent.

Tags: Students at the Center
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What Makes Mills Teacher Scholars Unique?

January 26, 2017

Program Associate Jennifer Ahn When I was a teacher, I sat through countless professional development workshops. The topic varied, but the format was often the same: I would sit with my notebook at hand and scribble notes as an expert told me how to do something--how to teach vocabulary to second language learners, how to support students to engage in academic discussion, how to get students to write analysis. Sometimes I was asked to engage in small activities that mimicked the experiences students would have; other times a presenter would model the new teaching strategy. I would leave these workshops energized with some new ideas to try in my classroom, yet these notes and workshop handouts would get buried under a pile of essays I had to read or the binder collected dust on a bookshelf. It wasn’t that I didn’t learn anything in these workshops—often the presenters were engaging and the content was thought-provoking. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to improve my practice or felt that I had no room to grow. Quite to the contrary, I attended those workshops because I wanted to find new, better ways to help my students learn. The real barrier was that I didn’t have the time or the thinking space to really dig into these tools as I practiced them and make sense of them in the context of my students’ learning. I usually tried something once or twice, but rarely did any of the “best practices” have lasting power. A student-centered approach Teacher-driven inquiry is a different approach to improving practice. The goal is the same-- to improve teaching to support student learning; the difference is really in the journey. Instead of solutions driving the work, inquiry starts with uncertainty and wondering. Teachers focus in on a particular instructional routine and ask themselves questions: “What are my students able to do?” "What does success look like for these students in my classrooms?" “What is getting in the way of my students’ learning?” When Mills Teacher Scholars partners with a school or a district, we don’t bring answers to these questions. Instead, we create a collaborative thinking space and create the conditions in which teachers can investigate these authentic, complex questions with the support of their colleagues. We don’t talk at teachers or talk broadly about student learning; rather, we encourage teachers to look for and examine student data in their classrooms to find answers to their questions that address their students’ specific needs.

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More Than Just Rock, Paper, Scissors: Relationship Skills to Support Mathematical Partnerships

January 26, 2017

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.

Tags: Inquiry and Equity
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Oakland Computer Science Teacher Scholars Spotlight

January 25, 2017

How do we get students comfortable with uncertainty? What does it look like to give permission to struggle? How do I evaluate risk-taking? What kinds of peer collaboration support effective problem-solving?  These and other questions about productive struggle...

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Education Flows Both Ways: An Inquiry into the Needs of Mam Speaking Newcomer Students

December 15, 2016

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.  

Tags: Inquiry and Equity
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How Can Leaders Leverage Teacher Inquiry for School-Wide Improvement?

May 11, 2016

Throughout the year, as teacher scholars engage in Mills Teacher Scholars inquiry work, they deepen their understanding of specific learning goals for students and become more aware of how their students are approaching a specific area of learning. This knowledge builds as teachers collaborate with colleagues, analyze classroom-level data, and get feedback on changes they are making to their practice throughout the year. The transformative potential of teacher inquiry work, however, does not stop at the individual teacher level. Mills Teacher Scholars supports inquiry teams to leverage these individual learnings by asking teachers to consider how what they have learned might contribute to whole school improvement efforts. At year’s end, we invite teachers to make sense of their inquiry findings at a collective level, asking the entire group of teacher scholars at a site to weigh in on the implications of the inquiry learning for their school. Instructional leadership in this context moves beyond formal teacher leaders and the ILT and is distributed across the staff. By listening to what teachers have learned through their inquiry and by inviting teachers to look for patterns and themes and to consider implications of their inquiry work, site leaders have the opportunity for the teacher inquiry to drive school-wide change.

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Highlights From Our Teacher Inquiry in Action Forum

April 13, 2016

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.

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But What If I Hurt Their Feelings?: Supporting Students to Give Authentic Peer Feedback

October 29, 2015

  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.

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