6th Grade Buddies; 7th Grade English

Today I met with Marcella and Norman to talk about the nascent 2/3+6 buddy program, and how to give it stronger legs. Right now 6th grade students are working with the 2nd graders in Temescal Creek on a volunteer basis, reading to and with, and being read to, once a week. Our conversation focused on two parts: the pragmatic and the philosophical. On the former, we talked about arranging the logistics, the impact of giving time to this compared to other curricular elements, when and how the planning needed to happen, how to manage conflicts, and other program-management aspects. On the latter, we talked about some possible goals for the 6th grade students, focusing on three draft topics; 1) developing empathy and understanding of younger students, 2) developing the self-esteem and self-confidence that comes from being seen as highly capable, and 3) developing leadership understanding and awareness. We also talked about how to make the program effective without being a major curricular initiative; how to establish it as an integral part of how the 6th grade program is meeting the needs of students; and how preparation for middle school and high school must go beyond the academic and into the social and emotional lives of students.

Last week I observed in a 7th grade English class. The students are reading "The House on Mango Street" by Sandra Cisneros, a powerful book of short vignettes about the growing adolescent identity of a young Latina from a first-person perspective. In a previous class, Emma had tasked the students with creating dramatic interpretations of one of the vignettes, which she then filmed. This class began by watching and writing in response to four different video clips of the same vignette, and then a discussion about those choices, and how they influenced the viewer's experience and understanding of the text. Later, Emma displayed a piece of original writing that she had done in the style of Cisneros, and asked students to critique it based on Cisneros' use of imagery, metaphor, personification, and other rhetorical devices, as well as diction and word choice. The period ended with extended time for students to consult with each other and peer-edit their own vignettes, or begin working on new ones.

Parent Step-Up Tours

This week we hosted two step-up tours for current parents. On Wednesday we had parents of current K-7 students; as luck would have it, all of the student from 2nd through 6th grade were doing math first thing on Wednesday morning! After the tour and faculty panel, the parent of a current 1st grade student pulled me aside to tell me the following story: When her group made it up to the 6th grade classroom, the teacher was called out of the room for 10 minutes. Without prompting, the student who has the Teacher's Aide position stood up and began class - reviewing the homework, and organizing the students to begin discussing the assigned reading. As the parent told me, "What could have been an utter disaster was instead an incredible moment."

On Thursday we had hosted 30 current ECC 4 families. Thursday's tour started with 40 minutes in the K/1 classrooms. In one, students were celebrating "cake day", and doing a variety of math and cooking activities. They created bingo charts, an activity that combined mathematics and literacy; they worked on separating three cakes into equal slices for 18 students; and they used color charts to design the color of the icing they wanted for their own cupcakes, before actually creating that icing and using it (and other toppings) to decorate their cupcakes. In the other classroom, students made a Y-chart (What does it sound like? Look like? Feel like?) about jazz while listening to Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk, and then moved among several different stations to make art in response to different types of jazz.

After a tour of the rest of the classrooms, parents returned to the K/1 level for 30 minutes of conversation with the K/1 teachers, followed by 30 more minutes with a teacher panel of K-8 faculty. Questions ranged from "How do you address differentiation?" to "Are you happy teaching here?"

Faculty meeting on Learning Outcomes

At today's faculty meeting, the topic of conversation was our ongoing process to define learning outcomes for the school. After a brief reframing of why, how, and what we are doing, the faculty considered the following definitions of "competency", in continuation of our discussion of proposed core competencies that all students would develop while at TBS:

1) possession of required skill, knowledge, qualification or capacity

2) the condition of being capable or able

Some faculty liked the first one more, while others liked the second. Both "possession" and "required" were thoughtfully challenged (I added "for success in a future that is un/known" in response to the thread of discussion about "required"). Differentiating the competencies from personal character traits was brought up, along with many other ideas.

Faculty were then asked to engage in the Circle of Viewpoints thinking routine by taking the perspective of a faculty member at a different level from their own, which lead to another round of discussion, including the question of whether these are all present at all times in all children and therefor we need to talk about the relative development of each one - similar to how we talk about both the diverse intellectual profile of each child, and the idea of each child's gifts and challenges.

It was a complex, nuanced conversation about important educational philosophy, to say the least!

7th Grade Business Plans

Today I sat in on a 7th grade math class in which students continued working on the development of small-group business plans, a 7th grade math project now in its fourth year at TBS. Besides the interesting ideas for businesses - such as pet care and coffee, or video-game delivery service - and the lessons that come from working in groups, two content dimensions jumped out. First, learning to write business plans calls for skills from a variety of disciplines beyond the mathematical calculations and modeling; students were also learning the language of business (revenue and profit), as well as how to create compelling narrative pitches in writing and advertising, and how to present these to their peers. Second, students were learning to use spreadsheet software to calculate formulas and graphs, and being introduced to the professional and practical life use of technology as a tool to assist them in their problem solving. At the end of the class, despite repeated notices, Sima still had to go around the room to each table and convince the children to stop and transition to the next class!

Fifty Nifty United States

Today I stopped by Cerrito Creek to see a mixed 4/5 Cultural Studies lesson. The 45-minute period was broken into several chunks of time. In the first activity, lasting 5 minutes, students gathered at the SmartBoard and sang along to the Fifty Nifty United States. In the second activity, lasting 10 minutes, students worked in pairs (set by the teacher) to label a map of the United States of America with all 50 states. Students then had 5 minutes to compare their maps with another pair's work, and make any corrections or additions they needed. In the third activity, lasting 10 minutes, students again worked in pairs, this time to identify skills of the head, heart, and mind possessed by the adventures they would take with them if they were to set out on a Lewis & Clark style expedition, building on the homework assignment from Friday. In the fifth activity, lasting 5 minutes, students played a version of musical chairs in which they tossed two balls around the circle; when the music stopped, whoever held a ball had to name a "push" (poor economy, etc) or "pull" (untapped resources, etc) reason that people immigrate or move (lists of which adorned a classroom wall from a previous discussion). And in the sixth and final activity, students were read-aloud to from Scott O'Dell's Streams to the River, River to the Sea, "a work of historical fiction based on the journey of Lewis and Clark from the perspective of their Indian guide, Sacagawea" (I'm quoting from Mike's blog there).

Two aspects of the classroom jumped out at me during this observation. The first was the use of varied groupings, tasks, and modalities to engage students - singing as a group; labeling in pairs; comparing in small groups; analyzing and assigning in pairs based on individual work; throwing and catching as a whole class; speaking to the group. Each student was drawn into a rich learning experience that was teacher-directed while also honoring the independent and interdependent learning needs of the students. Perhaps students increased their ability to identify which states are located where on a map; perhaps some began thinking about the abstract ideas of individual qualities and how an individual affects a group; perhaps others started to think about how history has affected their lives, and how they were creating personal and group history in the moment of class - whatever it was that each child was learning, his/her motivation to learn was activated, awareness of learning moments was heightened, and knowledge/skill was being grown.

The second dimension that stood out about this lesson was the rapid pacing of the sections, for two reasons. First, no single idea was sat with for more than 10 minutes, and the tempo of the lesson met the children's needs for late afternoon activity. Second, by approaching the discipline from a variety of entry points, rather than simply a textbook reading of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the students experienced history as a complex, multi-faceted discipline.

Sir Ken Robinson

Besides being a fantastic thinker and advocate for a revolution of educational paradigms, Sir Ken Robinson is a wonderfully droll speaker. Here are a few choice bits to whet your appetite.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9LelXa3U_I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

The TBS Library

Yesterday I met with MaryBeth Ventura (4th-8th grade Learning Support Coordinator), and volunteer parent Jean Marstens and Jenny Scholten. The three of them have been doing amazing work on the TBS library in the Depot this year, and with MaryBeth about to go on maternity leave for three months, I am getting involved as the staff contact. Together MaryBeth, Jean and Jenny (who holds a Masters in Library Science) have created a three-part plan with short, medium, and long term objectives. Short term goals almost complete include reorganizing the north end of the library for younger and older readers; next steps include new signs and organizing tours for teachers and students. Some of the longer term goals already underway include labeling all books with the Dewey decimal system, considering implementation of an electronic cataloguing system to replace the clipboard sign-outs we currently use, and investigating online information databases for middle school students.

In addition to those goals, we agreed upon a few other concrete goals for this year, including creating a map of the library, making new acquisitions to promote the classroom curricula, and most importantly, creating a vision for the library. The basis for a library vision statement seemed to rest on three main ideas: giving students what they want to read, promoting the teachers' curricula, and teaching information literacy. Here's the very first draft of the vision statement, as written by Jenny:

In support of The Berkeley School's mission, The Berkeley School library seeks to

inspire, inform, and delight students as we prepare them to be lifelong learners;

to reflect and to enrich school curriculum; and to promote information literacy.

The library's mission is accomplished by:

• collection development to meet students' educational, informational, and

recreational needs.

• collaboration with teachers and administrators to provide informational materials

that support the school's curriculum and philosophy.

• orientation to library use so that students can find and use information relevant

to them.