Learning Outcomes

After an incredible, collaborative year-long process (which I've blogged about here, here, and here), the TBS faculty has arrived at a set of learning outcomes that both capture what we have already been doing, and give clarity for our intentions about the future. We're thrilled at this list, even as we recognize that it is a "working document" that may be modified as we live with it next year. For example, we'll be asking the four faculty who are attending the Guggenheim Institute on Creativity in Teaching this summer to help us refine our definition of the #4 below.

Through their learning experiences at TBS, students will develop:

1. Autonomy: their qualities and skills of reflection, perseverance, confidence, patience, initiative, self-knowledge, and metacognition.

2. Interdependency: their understanding* of cooperation, compassion, empathy, mutual respect, commonalities and differences, diversity, active citizenship, community, and systems.

3. Critical thinking: their ability to conceptualize, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information; to reason, to pose questions, to test assumptions, to consider alternative viewpoints, and to derive conclusions and consequences.

4. Creativity: their curiosity and imagination to identify and resolve problem-solving opportunities that are of relevance to their personal lives and experiences across all academic and artistic disciplines.

5. Communication: their understanding* of effective written, oral, visual, physical, and artistic communication, active listening, non-violent interaction, and conflict resolution.

6. Health and wellness – their understanding* of the ways that nutrition, exercise, rest, and external environment factors influence their well-being, and will develop habits that promote physical, emotional, social, and intellectual well-being, as well as the ability to monitor and maintain that well-being.

7. Technological proficiency – their understanding* of modern technology as a means to communicate with others, to express ideas, and to search for relevant information, and their ability to choose, use , navigate, and evaluate new media carefully, responsibly and ethically.

8. Discipline understanding: developmentally appropriate abilities and awareness in each area of study – academic and artistic – as determined by intentional, rigorous, and inclusive processes of observation, assessment, and evaluation.

9. Learning habits: their understanding* of individual learning profiles, and their ability to use that understanding to identify, choose, use, and reflect on deliberate approaches to their work in school and at home that maximize engagement and learning, leading to the production of high-quality and satisfying work. *at TBS, “understanding” comprises motivation, ability, and awareness. After we shared these with the faculty yesterday, we immediately merged into a conversation about the big questions that will guide the curriculum review process that we're now designing. The questions we posed included:

1) How do we review and revise Section VI of the TBS curriculum guide for grades K-8 in specific disciplines of Cultural Studies, Language Arts, Math, Science, and Spanish, to ensure a) that the “taught” curriculum in the classrooms and the printed curriculum align, b) that the curriculum aligns with the learning outcomes, and c) that there are no major gaps in knowledge and skills in our curriculum?

2) How do we create a plan for developing the printed K-8 curriculum in Art, P.E., mindfulness, music, Seed-to-Table, and other areas or disciplines?

3) How do we create a first draft of a comprehensive curriculum for our Early Childhood Campus?

4) How do we codify the roles of Teaching for Understanding, Montessori, Reggio Emilia, balanced literacy, inquiry learning, project-based learning, and other frameworks in the curriculum at TBS? What are the formal components of our program that shape our work within these frameworks (Positive Discipline/Responsive Classroom, Facing History and Ourselves, Reader's Workshop/Writer's Workshop, TERC: Investigations, Words Their Way, etc)? Does this look different at different divisions?

5) How do we revise Sections I-V of the K-8 curriculum guide to more accurately reflect the TBS philosophy and approach?

6) How do we create a plan for ongoing curriculum review?

Stay tuned for more about the curriculum review process this spring and next fall!

Preparing to transition between classrooms

Because of the mixed-grade classrooms at our Early Childhood and Elementary divisions, transitioning from one classroom to another happens less frequently for students than it does for those enrolled in single-grade schools. There are many positives to this structure, which is why we have it, but one ancillary result is that sometimes anxiety or tension is heightened for a student or family who is making the transition from ECC to K, from 1st to 2nd, from 3rd to 4th, or from 5th to 6th grade. Because we know that this is the case, back in late March we asked each grade level team to pass on three or four top priorities for the next grade level down to be working on throughout the spring. This is just one of the ways in which we are thinking about supporting this transition both now, as school draws to a close, and in the fall, when we lead off the year with a variety of transition-related activities. Below, I've listed what the teachers asked each other to focus on as the year draws to a close.

What the K/1 faculty asked the ECC faculty to work on with incoming Kindergarden students:

1. A love of learning, and interest in the social aspect of learning.

2. Good separation strategies in place with the family.

3. Developmentally appropriate ventures with communication and conflict resolution.

4. Practice with transitions during morning work period, including lining up.

5. Familiarity with developmentally appropriate structured work in larger settings.

What the 2/3 faculty asked the K/1 faculty to work on with 1st grade students:

1. Social skills: sit in circle attentively for 20 minutes, wait his or her turn, be mindful of the feelings of others, be responsible for his/her own materials, do classroom care jobs conscientiously, speak respectfully to adults and peers, and articulate feelings to others.

2. Academic skills: mastery of all consonant and short vowel sounds, know most digraphs, write several sentences using phonetic spelling, rote count to 100, using some method (finger counting, pictures, manipulatives) to combine amounts, know what "take away" means, has the idea of sharing by making equal amounts.

What 4/5 faculty asked the 2/3 faculty to work on with 3rd grade students:

1. The ability to overcome challenges/failures.

2. Managing the emotions of having homework.

3. Math fact recognition, especially with addition and multiplication.

4. Making connections while reading.

What 6th grade asked the 4/5 faculty to work on with 5th grade students:

1. Academic stamina.

2. The ability to transition between routines, subjects, and classes.

3. Ownership of their own learning.

Ralph Cantor on drug and alcohol awareness

Last night, Ralph Cantor spoke to the middle school parents about drug and alcohol awareness, and the biology of the brain. His work coincides with and compliments the sexual health and puberty education, and street smarts program that are also currently in process in the middle school. Comments via email from parents this morning include "Ralph Cantor's session on teen drug and alcohol use last night was fantastic! I now feel armed with good, research-based messages to give our son. It's great to know that TBS is drug-free, but no matter what high school he attends, unfortunately, peer use of drugs and alcohol will be part of the milieu," and "The talk last night was AMAZING – one of the best yet!!" Click here to download the powerpoint.

YouTube has a nine-part video of a presentation that Ralph did last year at a PTA meeting for Emerson Elementary. It gets good (i.e. into the neurology) at the 3:00 minute mark of the video below, which is part two.

Today's learning walk: division reigns supreme

While out buying ham and cheese croissants at Cafe Fanny for a special Mother's Day breakfast yesterday, my 7 year old daughter asked me how to divide 120 into three equal parts. She quickly understood that 60 was half of 120, so 120/2 = 60, and with a little bit of prompting she understood that 30 was half of 60, so 120/4 = 30, but 120/3 remained a puzzle to her. This morning riding our bikes in to school, I tried to break it down a different way; first, we determined that 120 is made of up 12 groups of 10. Then, we agreed that 12/2 = 6, and 12/4 = 3, after which she was able to reach the conclusion that 12/3 = 4. At which point we counted by 10s (aka multiplied) to reach the conclusion that 120/3 = 40.

While doing a 45 minute walk around the 2nd-5th classes today, I saw numerous ways in which students were engaged in mathematical thinking building their division skills.

One group of second grade students was working on static subtraction, using either a bead frame or working mentally with just a paper and pencil. Subtraction is an important concept on its own, but it is also foundational to division, which can be conceived of as repeated subtraction (the inverse of how multiplication can be seen as skip counting, which is repeated addition). The other group of second grade students was working with the division board, a Montessori material that literally makes division visual (in this image, 12 beans have been divided into 4 equal groups of 3 per group).

Third grade students were also working in two groups. One was doing

"pencil & paper" work on a group of problems that included addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of numbers with four digits. The other was learning to write the remainder of division problems such as 32/10 in more sophisticated mathematical expressions, from "3 r 2" (where "r" = "remainder) to 3 & 2/10, to 3.2, using materials including the Stamp Game, Fraction Tiles, and Test Tube Division. BTW, the Stamp Game is an incredible material that can be used to teach all four operations (in this image, 2432 x 4 = 9724), and some important extensions of those ideas - you can check it out here.

In 5th grade, students were working on graphing. In the story problem, one child had grown at a steady rate from age 2-10, while the other had grown more rapidly from age 2-4, and then less rapidly from age 4-10. They had been given the choice of either completing a table showing the two rates of growth and then plotting those lines, or drawing lines to represent the growth and then determining the amount of growth in interval to fill in the table. In a fascinating bit of insight into 5th grade mentality, every single one of the 21 students had chosen to draw the lines of change first - which left them to work out some complicated division problems involving decimals.

The disproportionate impact of budget cuts

An interesting thread runs between these articles.

In this op-ed, Kathleen McCartney makes clear the importance of funding Head Start, and the value of pre-school programs.

This article from Katy Murphy at the Oakland Tribune looking at how budget cuts will impact school layoffs, as new teachers get fired first in a "last-in, first-out" process.

And this article, by Wyatt Buchanan at the SF Chronicle, details how a new bill in the CA state senate would let school districts raise taxes within their own districts.

What's the thread? Equity. Head Start - and the prison system - enrolls primarily non-White, socio-economically disadvantaged people. Urban schools with high numbers of new teachers tend to serve the same population. And suburban school districts with high income earners will be more likely to vote for further taxes to support their schools than those with lower income earners (ex: what happened with last year's voting in Berkeley and El Cerrito on the same issue).