Written by Paul Needham, TE Instructional Coach

After watching this animation accompanying a speech by Sir Ken Robinson, I am struck by several thoughts.

1. I needed to watch this video again in order to allow the drawings to add to the message, rather than distract me from it. I would encourage anyone who remembers 2-3 drawings more readily than 2-3 arguments of the speech to re-watch the video as I had to. What do you remember most?
2. My biggest take away from this talk was the idea that the world has changed dramatically and that the educational system has not changed much in over 200 years. What worked a few generations ago, even when 20-something year-olds were in school, is no longer a best practice. This resonated with me because it was difficult for me to let go of the ways I was taught when I became a teacher. If I were to give you all a piece of advice, it would be to enter the 2012 Teaching Excellence Induction with an open mind. I truly believe that what you will be trained to do over the coming weeks and months represents the cutting edge in educating students to succeed in low-income areas and in today’s social and economic climate. What do your students most need for you to get at Induction?
3. All of our students bring tremendous value to our classrooms. Simply because the current structure of the educational system values academic intelligence does not mean that only a sub-set of our students who easily excel in this area are worth our time or are worthy of success in school. It is our charge as dedicated educators to discover, celebrate, and leverage the unique strengths in all of our children to allow them to become their best selves. While this includes academic success and achievement, it goes so much further. What about this idea may be challenging for you, given your own educational background?
4. My other thought upon digesting this talk is the charge to make aesthetic experiences for our students. The notion of creating experiences in which “all senses are operating at their peak” is one that is incredibly challenging but one that fills me with hope as well. Sir Ken Robinson evokes this idea when discussing the arts specifically, but it is even more powerful when considering it as a challenge for every lesson our students experience. If the arts capture our students’ interest so well because they evoke their senses in such a strong way, how can we create lessons in math, Spanish, writing, or world history that do the same things? What three adjectives would you like your students to use in describing your classroom lessons? 
5. The last thought that I will leave you with is a word of caution and relates to Sir Ken’s thoughts on ADHD. Certainly there are students who are improperly medicated because they find it difficult to focus on boring school lectures that do not attempt to engage them. A teacher would be wise to consider many means of engaging students and helping them focus prior to believing that they may be afflicted with this condition. However, contrary to the brief portion of this video that addresses it, ADD and ADHD are very real conditions that do not limit a child’s potential and still change how they best intake information and interact with peers and teachers. I would not want a new teacher to assume that a child who has been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD is lazy or faking it any more than I would want a student to be improperly medicated when it is not necessary. What other “labels” can adversely affect a child’s educational experience? 

I think what Sir Ken’s talk does best is illuminate the fact that the education system is trying to solve new problems with tools that are two centuries old. The best schools, administrators, and teachers create tools that allow their students to have as many choices open to them as possible. The educators that are being left behind are the ones who bemoan the fact that their students are not conforming to the methods that “worked for me when I was a kid.”

As a new teacher who may be joining us for Summer Induction, or as a veteran teacher who follows our blog – what were your takeaways and thoughts on this excellent talk and animation? Please feel free to answer any of my own italicized questions or pose your own for people to respond to.

Detailed descriptions are included below.

For more details about PLS, please email teaching.excellence@yesprep.org.

We are excited about the future for students in Houston in 2013, and we can’t wait for you to join us for the following sessions:

Detailed descriptions are included below.
**UPDATE**: The Rubrics session will be offered in February and March instead of January.

*Will also be offered during the February PLS

For more details about PLS, please email teaching.excellence@yesprep.org.

Our next Teaching Excellence professional learning event is approaching quickly along with the date for registering and taking the TExES Pedagogy and Professional Responsibilities exam. In preparation for this test, our next PLS will be dedicated to PPR review.

For ACP candidates studying for this test, here are a few tips to keep in mind.

1. Understand the test.

You need to understand the context behind the exam questions. Always keep the following BIG IDEAS in the back of your mind. They will help you narrow down answer choices to the best one.

• Think about the questions in the context of an ideal world where anything is possible. Teachers have all the money, time, admin and parental support to teach and make decisions. Additionally, all students are ideally behaved.
  
• Any “student-centered” or “students first” answer is correct. It is never about the pressure and demands of being a teacher; it’s all about the kids.
  
• Generally, answers that include “buzz words” or key terms are often correct. Most answers that include technology AND instruction are correct.
  
• Answers should be age-appropriate. Sometimes two answers sounds right, so you have to double check the questions for the grade level; the right answer is the one that fits best for that particular age.
  

2. Study strategically.

ETS publishes the testing framework for the PPR EC-12 exam, which tells you all sorts of helpful information including the content of the test and how each domain is weighted. The pie chart below reflects the percentages of questions in each domain. When you’re preparing, focus your energy on the more heavily weighted portions. Additionally do a quick review of all the domains and competencies narrowing your focus on the ones that seem less familiar.

3. Prepare for the test day.

Any good test prep class will tell you to get lots of sleep and eat a good breakfast on test day. And it’s true; feeling rested and well-fueled will contribute to a higher score.

For those of you in the Teaching Excellence program, feel confident in your preparation. Take full advantage of the opportunity to take the PPR Diagnostic and study the areas where you struggled. At the PPR Review day we’ll work on internalizing the BIG IDEAS above, and we’ll have plenty of practice thinking through test questions. Plus you’ll have six months of teaching under your belt!

Any veteran PPR test-takers have any other tips to share?

All of these educators understand that part of growing as a humble leader is recognizing how much there is to learn. At Teaching Excellence this idea guides all that we do, from classroom observations to check-ins with campus admin to staying after school to help a teacher coach the track team. Yet especially during these first two-hours of our monthly Professional Learning Saturdays we have a unique opportunity to connect master educators with up and coming teachers who are growing exponentially in their practice. In these sessions, content specialists provide new teachers with specific professional development related to their content and grade levels over and above general instructional techniques. They plan time for collaboration among peers who teach similar subjects, and the specialists are available for advice and feedback. In addition to all this, these specialists work hard to deliver very specific resources so that teachers walk away with ready-to-use materials.

Teaching Excellence would like to thank the following content facilitators and contributors for their effort and time to make content sessions at TE PLS an excellent part of our professional development:

Leslie Stiles

Peter Iverson

Brian Lawton

Mishaal Mahmud

Katie Norwood

Emily Shisler

Joseph Bartolotta

Chris Schumacher

Keith Desrosiers

Brenen Blair

Rhiannon Killian

Mollie Johnson

Michael Buck

Melissa Ng

Michael Dies

Lilia Pineda

Tatiana Caycedo

We’re thankful for everyone who is a part of the movement to transform Houston, and we can’t wait for you to join us for the following sessions:

Detailed descriptions are included below.

For more details about PLS, please email teaching.excellence@yesprep.org.

What are you grateful for this year? Who can you thank for investing in your growth these past few months?

I recently attended the ASCD conference in Philadelphia and the final morning of the conference, I participated in Eric Jensen’s session on Teaching with Poverty in Mind. Early in the session he described the effects of chronic stress and the two major ways it manifests itself in our students’ behavior.  The first he called ‘prolonged response’ where the students stay in an actively stressed state that doesn’t go away.  These are the students, he said, that will overreact to stressful situations and don’t hesitate to get in our faces or lash out at any provocation.  I have had very few experiences like this with students in the past decade, so I was feeling pretty good about myself and my approach to my high-poverty students over the years.  And then he presented the second manifestation of chronic stress, the ‘inadequate response.’  As he described it, two students’ faces popped in my mind—Jose, from my first year teaching, and Esteban, from my 5^th year of teaching.  Jensen talked about how students with an ‘inadequate response’ disconnect and detach; they look and act like they don’t care.  Their bodies don’t respond to stress so they don’t have to deal with it.  Everything Jensen said seemed to make complete sense with these two boys and as the session went on I had the sinking feeling I had failed them miserably.

Both boys had failed my class and so failed for the year.  Jose was 13 in my 5^th grade class and so I was responsible for him repeating a 3^rd grade level in elementary school.  I don’t know what happened to Jose after elementary school, but a glance at the statistics of students who enter high school after failing more than on grade tells me that he most likely didn’t get past 9^th grade.  Esteban was in 8^th grade when I taught him and he failed my English class and so failed for the year; this was his second retention.  Unfortunately, I know what happened to Esteban.  He went on to fail 10^th grade and then get sent to jail for selling cocaine during his sophomore year at the age of 18.  Last I heard he had just gotten fired from his full-time job at Foot Locker.

My approach with these boys had felt right at the time.  It was basically a ‘tough love’ approach.  They were both incredibly bright and I knew they could handle the material easily, so I pushed them, held them to high expectations, and developed good relationships with them.   These are all good things and as I look back I know they’re good things.  The missing piece was the support they needed.  If they were absent from school and missed a test, following the school rules, I didn’t allow them to make up the test until they had a signed excuse note from their parents.  If they didn’t do their homework, I would give them a talking to along the lines of, “I know you can do this.  You’re a very smart kid.  You need to start buckling down or you’re going to fail.  Do you want to fail?  It’s your decision.  I can’t decide for you.”  Even though it was meant as a pep talk, this was a threat and came with the message, ‘You’re on your own.’  I thought I was motivating them and was ignorantly assuming they were deciding to be disengaged in class; deciding to not come to school; deciding to sleep in class; deciding to fail.  I knew their home lives weren’t good.  I had done all the right things as far as getting to know them and building a good relationship with them.  They were both kids I talked to during lunch and had overwhelmingly positive relationships with.  The problem was, they didn’t know how to help themselves and I didn’t know what kind of help they needed.  When Esteban missed the final exam in my class, I told him he wasn’t allowed to make it up without an excuse note from his mom and that he’d fail without that note.  Again, this was part of what I thought was a pep talk.  What it really was, was a threat that if he didn’t do X, Y would happen, and so his response should have been totally understandable.  Had I been able to read the signs of his chronic stress, I could have predicted that he would shrug his shoulders, walk out, and proceed to not get a note from his mom.

Despite the pit in my stomach over my mistakes with these boys, that guilt and frustration will only go away if I can learn from this experience in a way that positively impacts kids.  As an Instructional Coach, I now have the opportunity to touch the lives of hundreds more students every year than I could have as a teacher!  I’m empowered and reassured by the fact that my failure can become a success as I commit to making sure the novice teachers I work with are more aware of the impact of poverty and chronic stress on their students and don’t make the same mistakes I did.

Tune in next week for helpful strategies based on Teaching with Poverty in Mind…

The following sessions will be available:

More Questioning Strategies: Right is Right and Stretch It: BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND: Because the Uncommon Schools-based session on Cold Call and Call & Response was not only well received but is now improving classrooms, we are following up with this session.  These two strategies work in tandem and are used to ensure that your carefully crafted questions are given the highest quality answers by your students!

Data 101/Mail Merge: BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND – This session revolutionized the practice, data analysis, and efficiency of many teachers last semester, so we have brought it back.  This session will give you a peek at the inner workings behind Outlook, Excel and how to use the two programs to mail merge.

Developing and Maintaining Strong Parental Relationships: In order to maximize the instruction that occurs in your classroom, it is imperative that all stakeholders in the education of your students be on the same page. This session will give you the strategies and the motivation to begin forming these relationships as well as how to make existing parental relationships stronger.

Re-Teaching/Review Games: When traditional Jeopardy just won’t cut it because too many students can check out, where do you go next? This session will give you several new ideas to try or modify to meet the re-teaching needs of ALL of your students. Participants in this session will learn by doing!

Joy Factor/Vegas: Our two most recent “Teach Like A Champion” strategies are designed to turn your already productive classroom into a place of happiness, teamwork, cooperation, and RETENTION! Learn several strategies to make your lessons *POP* and get opportunities to plan them into your lessons!

Secondary Small Group Instruction: Why should elementary students be the only ones who get individualized, targeted instruction? This session will help you both set up and plan for small group instruction in your secondary classroom starting with the basics.  What will the rest of my students do? How do small-group lessons differ from whole-group lessons? These questions and more will be answered in this session. Elementary teachers are welcome to attend this session to steal ideas to modify for their own use.

Data-Based Decision Making WORK TIME: Work through a self-guided data-analysis protocol in order to learn from recent exit ticket, quiz, common assessment, or exam data. Take what you learn from this reflection and amend upcoming lesson plans in order to maximize the time you have with your students. Participants in this session will get one-on-one feedback on their reflections and next steps.

We hope to see you March 31st! Email teaching.excellence@yesprep.org for more details.