Parellels?

In Creating the Opportunity to Learn by A. Wade Boykin and Pedro Noguera (2011), parallels arise between the racial achievement gap in the U.S. and the inequalities I'm finding in teaching the aboriginal students in our small rural schools. Our Alberta government is striving to close this achievement gap, but I'm finding it difficult to actually make it happen on the front line.

Boykin and Noguera maintain that "countering the normalization of failure must be seen as the first step in any effort to close (or at the very least reduce the achievement gap." (p. 35) I find this statement encouraging. At the grass roots level, we hold all of our students to the standard. However, like these researchers, we also see that we need to understand the culture that these students come from and provide the supports they need before we can expect the same from them as from our students that already have the supports they need.

Much of the U.S. data, according to Boykin and Noguera, has been gathered through self-reporting data and instruments chosen by the investigators. They are concerned that may studies have asked indirect questions regarding the actual learning processes that are at play and that factors or conditions possibly leading to "gap-closing performance outcomes" may or may not actually gain results.

That said, certain trends emerge and by coupling these trends with what works for all students, hope is evident in the general scheme of things. "the most proximal factor to achievement outcomes is student engagement in academic tasks. Engagement is the bellwether for enhanced student achievement. It is the precursor to gap-closing academic outcomes. It is the beacon of greater opportunities to learn for all students." (p. 40)

I am intrigued by this book as I can see parallels to our own concerns with the aboriginal students in our small school. As I continue to read this book, I will continue to reflect upon how they are related and what I can take from these researchers to improve my own practice.

What works in effective school cultures is...

What works in effective school cultures is 'tough love' that allows kids (and their parents) think they want or need.

It is a sense of genuine affection built on mutual respect. It is unconditional love that accepts people as they are, finds what's right in each person, sees what the other person can become, and never gives up.

(p. 122 in "Don't Teach the Canaries Not to Sing: Creating a School Culture That Boosts Achievement" by Robert D. Ramsey)

My two favorite phrases in this quote - mutual respect and  never gives up.

Essential Questions and Performance Assessments

Since September, my fellow teachers and myself have been involved in a project with the Alberta Assessment Consortium. We've been learning how to create good performance assessments.

Our certified staff decided we would create and plan for a performance assessment in Science as it is sometimes the most difficult to plan for in a multi-grade classroom, due to the wide range of unit themes there are across the curriculum and throughout the grades.

We first looked at the curriculum and created the essential questions we would answer at the Grade 3, 6, and 9 levels.

For Grade 3:
- How do living things grow in order to adapt to their environments?
- What characteristics of rocks and soil make them useful in the community?
- What decisions need to be made in order to create the best product possible?
- What makes sound, sound?
For Grade 6:
- How can humans make informed decisions about their actions on a forest ecosystem?
- How can we pose questions and make inferences based on investigated evidence?
- How can we use what we know about air and aerodynamics to construct working flight models?
- How does the position of the Earth in the universe affect humans?

For Grade 9:
- How can humans make informed decisions about their actions on ecosystems and the global environment?
- Why is it important to understand reactions of matter in your environment?
- How has the development of technologies contributed to the exploration and understanding of space and the to the benefits on Earth?

Once we had the essential questions formulated, we took the outcomes according to the Alberta curriculum from Grades 1 to 9, cut and pasted them along a continuum so that they would lead to answering the questions above. We then decided to create a performance assessment that would cover as much of the curriculum as possible while going deep into the learning in order to answer the essential question we decided to focus on during this project.

The essential question I wanted to answer in my Grade 1,2,3 classroom was dealing with the construction of a product that could serve a real life purpose. Because there is a unit of study in grade 2 as well as Grade 3 dealing with construction, and because the Grade 1's in this class were very hands on oriented, and could use some instruction and  review in using the tools and materials involved, I chose to create a performance assessment that would link the product creation essential question to something very real in their lives.

Now that we have completed the construction process and are reflecting on the skills developed during this project, I can see that some of the students were stretched in the area of directly related skill development. More importantly, several of the students exhibited growth in confidence and were able to throw out some of their ideas and begin again without the previously exhibited temper tantrums.

This was huge for them and for me!

The Resourceful School

These are the days when we begin looking at next year's budget in light of the government education budget and speculation as to what they expect us to do with it. The United States seem worse off than Alberta from what I am reading in the Educational Leadership Journal. The December 2011/January 2012 edition of this journal is entitled "The Resourceful School". Looking at this edition and reading several articles has given me some insight as to what schools in the U.S.A. are doing to offset the economic recession.

To quote Michael A. Rebell in his article, "The Recession--and Students' Rights", In California over the last three years, the average amount spent per pupil has dropped by about $4,500, causing many school districts, including Los Angeles, to cut 8 to 10 instructional days from the school year. Last year, average class sizes in Los Angeles bumped up to 30 and were more than 40 in some high schools, and Hawaii furloughed teachers and canceled classes for 17 Fridays in a row. For 2011-12, school districts in California and South Dakota cut back the number of school days to four per week; the Miami, Florida, schools eliminated after-school programs for 4,500 students; Illinois eliminated funding for advanced placement (AP) courses for school districts with large concentrations of low-income students, and Texas terminated preschool services for 100, 000 mostly at-risk students.

Rebell is questioning whether or not, the constitutional rights of students get put on hold during a recession. Other articles go into the whys and wherefores of the cuts being implemented.

Then, in an article entitled "Turning Crisis into Opportunity" a North Carolina school, Ashley Park PreK - 8 School in Charlotte, North Carolina shows how they are a resourceful school. Intriguing changes in how they operate have me stopping to think how our small school can be more creative and think about our resources in different ways so as to meet the needs of our students within our budget constraints.

Grouping students and having them take the electives through the services of paraprofessionals allows teachers to plan lessons together, analyze data, talk about students, and call parents during a block of time each day while students are taking their electives. Individualizing instruction allows the cultivation of close relationships between teachers and students, and combining English Language Arts with Social Studies in a larger class enables teachers to create more flexible groupings, allowing for more differentiated instruction.

Other resourceful ideas include going to year-round schooling, lengthening the school day to have one third planning and two thirds teaching, and focusing on project-based learning. Some of these ideas would not be feasible in a small school such as ours, but they do give food for thought. If this school can look at their resources in different ways, so can any other school.