Working with Immigrant Students and English-Language Learners

We watched this video from Guadalupe Valdes, in class, today (go to "videos," then "specialist commentary"). It gives great food for thought when it comes to working with English-language learners. As we expanded upon this video, we also came up with the following.

What should we know about the backgrounds of our students, particularly immigrant students and English-language learners?

• How long have they been in school? What has their school experience been?
• Cultural meaning of schooling; social networks formed within schools.
• What is the family structure? Who is in the household? Why did they immigrate?
• English proficiency of family/household members
• What are their conceptual/content understandings?
• Can they read and write in their native language?
• Can they communicate common/daily needs/questions?
• Do they understand me?
• Where are they in the continuum of learning to speak conversation English (2-3 years) and learning to master academic English (5-7 years)?
• Is there evidence of trauma?
• What is their responsiveness to speaking English/American culture/structural assimilation, etc.? 
• How can we minimize the role and impact of stereotypes?
• Integrating the home country into the curriculum.
• Use of native language to help with processing of content.
• How can we pre-teach vocabulary found in our lesson, and provide practice using English at ratios of smaller than 30:1?

Cooperative Learning Principles

For next week's microteaching, you are are encouraged to incorporate cooperative learning principles. What are those?

Much school is individualistic ("my success is independent of your success or failure") or competitive ("my success comes at your expense"). A truly cooperative structure means we all "sink or swim together."

This is hard to achieve, especially in a competitive society. But we make it harder for ourselves when we assign students to do group work without clear functional roles, to perform tasks that are not "group worthy."

Consider, then, these principles, and see if you can integrate them into your teaching next week. Consider the Jigsaw teaching strategy as a paradigm of what cooperative learning might look like.

Cooperative Learning Principles

1. Positive interdependence: shared goal, rewards, resources, functional roles in group

2. Individual accountability: responsibility for own and group's learning

3. Promote face-to-face interaction: shared decisions about materials, monitoring and outcomes; reflection on the process

4. Collaborative skills: decision-making, trust, communication, conflict-management

5. Group processing: reflection on goal-achievement, fostering group working relations

Geography Resources for Secondary Social Studies

What is geography? Is it any more than maps and the absolute location of various physical features? How does geography impact history (and culture, and the economy)? How can geographic concepts and inquiry be used as part of education for democratic living? Does geography determine destiny? These are questions we would like you to be considering as you work your way through our consideration of the school subject of geography.

The links below will be updated as we go through our exploration. Please let me know if you would like others added!

Resources:

Why is north up?
Cartograms
The True Size of . . .
Mental Maps
What is a Continent?
Gapminder
Dollar Street
Historypin
Nat Geo Mapmaker Interactive
Google Tour Builder

Meeting the Needs of All Kids through On-Going School-Wide Assessment

As a new teacher, you will be expected to understand and join school-wide initiatives that are meant to support the learning of all students. Our talk with Colleen Pringle, data coach at Haslett Middle School, was an awesome introduction to those practices as they exist in our host school.

MTSS, which stands for Multi-Tiered System of Support, is a system meant to track progress for all students--but with particular attention to those students who have traditionally fallen through the cracks. As this article explains, MTSS is "the practice of providing high-quality instruction and interventions matched to student need, monitoring progress frequently to make decisions about changes in instruction or goals, and applying child response data to important educational decisions."

MTSS has both an academic component and a behavioral or social component. On its academic side, it has incorporated a movement called RTI (Response to Intervention). On its behavioral side, it has incorporated a movement called PBIS (Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports).

On the academic side, MTSS' most fundamental characteristic, and the one that most departs from past school practices, is universal screening. What we mean by this is that the progress of every child is monitored, mainly in the key areas of literacy and numeracy. We saw that HMS does this three times a year. Depending on how a child performs, there are various levels of intervention that will take place.

On the behavioral side, MTSS has encouraged schools to adopt uniform procedures for school life: school codes that set up expectations for how classroom routines will play out, for what a responsible learner and citizen looks like, and for how teachers will gain student attention ("clap if you hear me") or regulate student talk ("voice levels").

If a child is more-or-less on grade level in terms of their academics, and is not struggling behaviorally, they are in tier one. Tier one is thought of as normal classroom instruction. However, "normal" here does not mean business as usual, but rather as the embracing of certain school-wide instructional norms: the use of bellringers and exit tickets as powerful formative assessment strategies as well as consistent use of constructivist literacy strategies, such as "talk to the text." Every teacher plays a role in tier one strategies--especially social studies teachers, who do so much with informational text.

Tier two is where we target particular groups of students to help bring them up to grade level. At HMS, this happens when students are encouraged/advised to take reading or math support classes as an elective--one that is in addition to their core class (in that way, avoiding blatant tracking).

Tier three is for those students experiencing the greatest troubles in school. Often, this means a combination of behavioral and academic struggles. Here is where administrative attention is focused on bringing teachers, parents, and other support staff together to talk with and about the child, to search for strategies that might most benefit the child. The whole school works as a team to support the child.

The move away from marking periods and grades is a good thing. We need to help students formulate goals and help them keep in constant sight how they are doing as they reach for those goals. 

The downside here is that we start valuing only what we assess rather than assessing what we value. MTSS has focused on literacy and numeracy as important skills in a child's life. PBIS gets us toward a shared culture of behavioral norms. But we are far from helping kids set goals that go beyond academics and helping to cultivate their individual talents and gifts.

We have made a good start. It will be to the next generation of teachers to keep it going.

PS: To think more about what role data plays in today's schools, you might check out this podcast I made as I talked to a teacher, a parent, an administrator, and a comparative educational researcher about this issue.

National Student Walkout

As I’m sure you might have heard by now, a number of marches and protests are being planned in response to the recent school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Perhaps the one receiving the most attention is Women’s March Youth EMPOWER’s call “for students, teachers, school administrators, parents and allies to take part in a #NationalSchoolWalkout for 17 minutes at 10am across every time zone on March 14, 2018 to protest Congress’ inaction to do more than tweet thoughts and prayers in response to the gun violence plaguing our schools and neighborhoods.”

Some schools have responded by saying they will suspend students who participate in any such activities during school hours.

What should the job of the social studies educator be in such a situation?

First, I would recommend you check with your mentor teacher and school administrators about how they plan to respond to any student walkouts. If your school has not had any discussions about their approach, perhaps you can suggest that the school be pro-active and organize initial discussions among the teaching faculty. Perhaps teach-ins for interested students might follow.

Second, I would have you consider what opportunities are available in your existing curriculum to discuss and study gun violence, gun control, and student protest. Where appropriate, consider studying the Parkland shooting, the media coverage, and responses from various social and political groups.

Finally, I would recommend that you view your own role, through all of this, as guardians of the democratic process. Of course, you are a citizen and have a right to form and share opinions (as do your students and colleagues). But as a social educator, I would argue that your main role is to assist students as they make up their own minds about the issues, in general, and the walkout, in particular.

A student can walk out of school for the wrong reasons—out of unthinking conformity or simply to get a day off. A student can stay in class for the wrong reasons—out of fear of suspension or unthinking conformity. As social studies teachers, our job is to help students reason about their course of action.

In short, while I think it is very appropriate for teachers to stand in solidarity with the victims of the shooting and to join the walkout on March 14, I think it essential that we preserve a thoughtful and free space where reasoned disagreement and peaceful protest have a space to (co)exist.

Challenging How We Remember the Past

I thought today's discussion about Hamilton was rich--though I wished a few more people felt comfortable jumping in. Thanks to everyone who spoke! (And sorry if any of you felt lost through parts of it! I'll do better on that in the future.)

What today's discussion boiled down to for me was that the musical Hamilton challenges how our society popularly remembers Hamilton--as an old, white-haired, "Founding Father"--who must therefore be dignified, stoic, selfless, and the like.

Instead, the musical portrays a "bastard, orphan, son of whore," an immigrant who, "just like [his] country," is "young, scrappy, and hungry." He drinks with his bros, he shoots off his mouth, he gets into duels, and he womanizes.

Is this what you thought of when you saw a ten-dollar bill?

Showing you the Tony performance of Battle of Yorktown was meant to complicate things further. You don't just hear the music and lyrics, but you see Black actors inhabiting white, slave-owner roles. Truly, the "world turned upside down!"

My question was whether we should embrace this or be careful with it? Is this redefining the traditional American narrative or confirming it? Are we led to think differently about women's and African Americans' roles in the Revolutionary period?

I don't think there is a clear answer to that question.

This leads me to your popular memory lesson plan assignment. As you think about your popular memory lesson, here are a few things to consider:

1) What form should your lesson plan take? Does it need to be elaborate?

My answer: It's up to you, but I think a formal lesson plan is best. If your school has a way to do official lesson plans, use that. If not, use the format we used last year. Create a "show-stopper" lesson plan, with all the bells and whistles, that you can use for the job search.

2) Should I critique how an event is normally remembered by Americans?

Yes, I think so. A really easy way to plan interesting history lessons is to take the "popular" or "Hollywood" version of a historical event and see what is changed, what is emphasized, and what is downplayed. Downright inaccuracies are interesting too!

If popular memory of the Holocaust is Germans = aggressor, Jews = victims, then a movie like Defiance, which shows the Jews actively resisting Germans, challenges us. If popular memory of the Holocaust is Germans = bad, Jews = good, movie like Schindler's List, which shows a German war profiteer coming to care about Jewish victims and working to save them, challenges us.

3) Can I use a non-written text?

Yes! Movie or movie clips are probably the best for this. But so are photos, or museum exhibits, or memorial plaques. Remember the past is all around us. So take a place where the past is commemorated or explained for the public and start to think about it with your students!

4) Anything else?

Yes. As I was thinking about it, you probably want to get student input as you start the lesson. Ask them to create a timeline, narrative or story about what happened and who was involved. It can be short and quick. That raw input lets you see how students remember the past and what differences exist in the class.

The point of this assignment is to help students challenge how we (however "we" is defined) remember the past and to ask how particular versions of the past reinforce stereotypes or benefit certain groups at the expense of others.

I think this is something that interests most people, so I'm hoping your students will find it interesting and you will have a successful lesson.

I really look forward to continuing this topic through viewing the film, Detroit, and discussing the complications involved in understanding the 1967 Detroit riots (disturbances? uprising? freedom fight?) and what it means for us today.

Curiousity and Teaching!

One of my all-time favorite commercials reminds us to, "stay curious, my friends!" Especially good advice for teachers.

This week, I asked you to figure out how your school community voted in the last presidential election and how that might impact your teaching. I thought it was a wonderful conversation. One thing that surprised me, though, was how hard this task was going to be for some of you.

For East Lansing, it was somewhat easy. The boundaries for the East Lansing School District overlap nicely with the city borders. This is not the case for many of you, that have school districts that draw from diverse townships and counties! Of course, even in East Lansing, with schools of choice, there are many students attending from outside the city borders. So defining who is in the East Lansing School District community is not so easy after all!

While information on Ingham County is easy to find, the city of East Lansing was a bit harder. Nonetheless, I could pretty easily find a chart of precinct reporting and do some easy math!

But some of you were going to have a harder time, with precincts spread across diverse political boundaries. It took some searching, but finding this map with the national precinct results--put together by a graduate student at Washington State University--was well worth my time spent looking around. What a great resource to use with our students!

There is a lesson here. As teachers, our own questions can drive our search for resources, which we can then share with our students! We never stop learning!

I look forward to talking about Hamilton and the power of collective memory over the coming weeks!