Creative, Courageous Writing in Kindergarten

October 29, 2015

Emily Starr Bean It has been well researched that by the time children enter kindergarten, a wide skills gap already exists in terms of language, literacy, problem solving, and school-readiness. One of the ways I have observed...

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Everybody Has A Job To Do!: Text Evidence TK-5

September 9, 2015

At Roosevelt Elementary in San Leandro, teacher scholars used their inquiry work to examine student learning in response to Common Core-focused instructional shifts. In this Q+A, teacher scholar leader Kenny Moy discusses what a cluster of Roosevelt teachers learned about teaching elementary...

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Teaching With Tech Tools: Putting Student Thinking at the Center

June 11, 2015

Sharing of technological pedagogy often devolves into sharing of more tools--new apps, new sites, new search engines. I am guilty of this as well, and I have countless under-used usernames on obscure websites to prove it.   I don’t want to imply that these tools are not worthwhile--I’m sure they are great. But signing up for all these sites and services has not changed the way I interact with the internet. But, what has developed my online engagement?   Learning skills and tricks that apply across different platforms (like hashtagging) Being pushed to use a familiar tool in a new way (setting up a Wordpress blog that was not personal, but for team publishing) Practicing the same skill over and over again, then seeing the fruits of this work (collaborative editing on Google docs) As a teacher, I want my students to have these meaningful digital literacy experiences. I want students’ experiences with online tools to emphasize and stretch their own power as writers and thinkers. My inquiry project through Mills Teacher Scholars and Oakland’s Educating for Democracy in a Digital Age initiative supported me in questioning and developing my own practice of teaching tech resources. Through working with these two professional development programs, I was supported to collect data and collaboratively analyze how my students were using technology in the research process. While the results of my inquiry (detailed here) have to do with teaching online research specifically, they also have implications for how teachers can integrate technology more broadly into their courses. Informed by the pedagogy of various disciplines, the following shifts will inform my own practice going forward.

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First Graders Lead Their Learning: What Happens When You Take the Teacher Out of The Talk in Student Book Groups?

April 23, 2015

Academic discussion opens a space for students to become aware of their ideas and use academic language to express those ideas with others. By setting up autonomous academic discussion groups, I wanted to make the students the leaders in those discussions. I would later discover that as a result of the structure of those groups, power shifted not only from me to the students-- but also became shared between students. Central to this discovery was the use of multiple modalities in the discussions, like game pieces, hand signals, language frames, and graphic organizers that gave equitable access to all students. I came to realize that this surprising shift between students was a product of the fact that quality academic discussion in a dual immersion context rests not only upon academic traits like comprehension skills and language, but also on social-emotional components like risk-taking, social-awareness, and empathy. Excellent Teachers Strive for Student Autonomy For my Mills Teacher Scholars inquiry project last year, I wanted to know, “What would it look like for first graders to have an academic discussion about text, all by themselves?” This question was inspired in part by the notion that excellent teachers strive to remove themselves from the center of the learning environment, appearing and disappearing when necessary. By consistently using and modeling strong practices and scaffolds, excellent teachers gradually become more and more superfluous to their students because they have empowered the students to exercise skills independently. What would I need to do to remove myself from academic discussions in my classroom?

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Academic Discussion: What Does it Mean?

February 19, 2015

Mills Teacher Scholars' inquiry work supports teachers to understand both what students are doing/thinking/learning and what is that they want students to do/ learn/think. Kirsti Jewel Peters’ exploration of academic discussion is a wonderful illustration of how teachers need time and support to make sense of complex concepts (academic discussion, balanced literacy, technology integration, critical analysis) on their own terms in order to effectively guide students to deeper learning. On her journey of incorporating academic discussion into her classroom, Kirsti starts with passing along tools to her students that were passed to her, yet through her Mills Teacher Scholars inquiry work explores the central--but often over looked-- question: What do I mean by academic discussion? What are we talking about when we say "academic discussion?" The Common Core State Standards are here, and we teachers are trying to wrap our minds around how they’ll shift our teaching and our students’ learning experiences. There are gripes about the shift, confusion about what’s so different, and some praise that we’re not glued to past curriculum. Curriculum has been purchased across districts and professional developments are in session. Teachers are preparing themselves to take on the CCSS with excitement, some uncertainty, and a little bit of optimism. Meanwhile, I’m in East Oakland, trying to figure out what this nationwide shift will do to and for my students. One of the big takeaways from OUSD’s discussion of the CCSS, is that, regardless of what you’re teaching, you must support your students’ usage of academic discussion. Academic discussion should be used in E.L.A! Math! Science! Art! Sounds easy enough, right? Simply, teach your students (from K-12) about any given topic, and have them discuss it… with absolute sophistication. Unfortunately, when beginning my inquiry around academic discussion in math, the simplicity of the task was lost on me. I kept wondering, what is academic discussion? Is it using jargon words associated with certain fields of study? Is it speaking in complete sentences? Does it mean using a British accent, and having your pinky in the air?

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Having Real Conversations about Books: A Look at Reading Partnerships in 6th Grade

January 22, 2015

Dina Moskowitz is a middle school Humanities teacher and department mentor at Creative Arts Charter School in San Francisco, CA. A long-time participant in the Mills Teacher Scholars program, she has focused much of her inquiry work on the question of how to get reluctant readers to passionately read, write and talk about texts.  What does it mean to have a good conversation?  If you think about your own daily interactions, you probably have about ten different types of conversations daily.  Your communication with someone at the grocery store has a very distinct tone and expectation from your conversation with your boss, which in turn is pretty different from when you meet your best friend for coffee. Not only the topics, but the expected body language and level of comfort you can use vary widely. As adults, we usually can assume the correct posture and language at a moment’s notice without much thought, but when I started looking closely at partner reading conversations in my sixth grade humanities class, I soon learned that in order to have students engage in thoughtful, authentic conversation, I had to begin by teaching the basics of what is expected in these kinds of conversations. A lot has been written about the concept of code switching for urban students, but It’s not just low SES students who need support in this area. I found almost all my students needed to be taught what I meant by an academic conversation, even in middle school.

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Who Has A Story to Tell? : Addressing the Gap in Early Literacy Foundations

January 22, 2015

Talk to Berkeley teacher Brook Pessin-Whedbee for more than a few minutes about her teaching and you realize that she is a standout when it comes to documenting her young students’ thinking and learning. As a Mills Teacher Scholar working collaboratively with a group of educators from around the Bay Area, she has used this authentic real-time classroom data to develop clear literacy-focused goals for her students that guide her day-to-day instructional practice. Through video, photos, and detailed narrative observations documented in blog form, Brook captures golden moments that are easily missed in the cacophony of the classroom. For the last few years she has focused her inquiry work on Story Play time, through which she wants her transitional kindergarten students to develop strong oral language and story writing skills, as well as the ability to work together in collaborative partnerships. "Are you ready to tell me your story?" I asked as I crouched down next to the table where Marian and Sharon were drawing intently on the same paper. Marian looked at me with a smile, then widened her eyes at Sharon, as if to say, 'You start.' "There was a pig and a barn and the pig was walking on a path," Sharon pointed out each element of character and setting as she spoke. Marian listened to Sharon's story beginning. Feeling more confident, she added on. "The little guy was like, 'Moo' and it was not a cow it was a pig. And he run to a person named Joe." Marian stopped here, seemingly unsure of what to say next. Sharon picked right up where Marian had left off, moving into the middle of the story with a problem and some dialogue.

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