Positive Discipline

TBS K-6 Music Teacher Kim Headlee submitted this report on a recent professional development training she attended about Positive Discipline, a paradigm for thinking about interactions with children that forms one of the foundations of our approach to classroom management.

Positive Discipline with Lori Onderwyzer

October 26/27, 2012 at Mills College, Oakland, CA

After reading about Positive Discipline, it was an unparalleled experience to have the chance to practice and discuss it among a diverse group of teachers, counselors, and administrators. All equally passionate about making a positive difference for children, we came from a wide diversity of experience: from public to private schools, from 1^st year to retired teachers, from pre-K to high school. We spent two full days exploring ourselves as both learners and teachers, and delving into practical theories for the modern classroom.

Positive discipline is based on Alfred Adler’s idea that all humans have a basic need for belonging and significance, and uses this idea to foster connection and mutual respect, and to empower children to realize their own capabilities. For example, Positive Discipline emphasizes encouragement over praise; the first creates intrinsic motivation and self esteem while the latter builds worth only through external means, which disappears with external source. Encouragements are about the student; praise is about the teacher. Praise and other external motivation like rewards and punishments create a fixed reality with no room for improvement, only regression. For example, think of how, “I’m so proud of you!” feels as opposed to “You should feel so proud of yourself.” 

Positive Discipline, along with its guiding principles, suggests simple classroom management tools. A few of my favorites are the one word redirect, and using 10 words or less whenever possible. Remember Charlie Brown’s teacher? Another is providing the “wheel of choice,” a set of problem solutions that kids can do themselves, including “apologize,” “count to ten,” and “use an ‘I’ message.” Lastly, asking “what” and “how” questions (not “why”) put the onus on children to follow their own learning process. It is this learning process we strive for as educators; after all, the root of the word is “ēducāre,” which means “to draw forth.” And the root of the word “discipline?” It’s “disciplina,” which means “to guide.”

Girl's Leadership Institute

My nine-year-old daughter and I just finished attending a four-week session run by the Girls Leadership Institute, and I can't recommend the experience highly enough. Titled "Real Parents, Real Daughters", the program spent sessions on relational aggression, emotional intelligence, learning to own mistakes and say sorry, and ended with practice using a loose script for conflict resolution. It gave both my daughter and me tools to use to talk and listen to each other better. There's another session beginning next week for parents of girls in 4th and 5th grade.

Using neuroscience in the classroom

Today I sent around this article about using neuroscience to inform classroom practice to the faculty. A quick hit of some highlights:


- Establish the relevance of the lesson to previous and future lessons.

- Allow more time for inquiry; ask fewer spontaneous questions, and focus on specific, planned questions. Also, slow down the pace; extend your "wait time" for student answers.

- Incorporate movement, play, and collaboration into the lessons.

And of course, teach students about their brains!

Parent Ed Event on raising boys

A Day in the Life....of 4th Grade Math

This morning I had the pleasure of observing a fourth grade math class. Though we have two mixed 4th/5th classrooms, every morning the students regroup by grade for math, and this year Jeff and Kellyne are teaching 4th grade math.

The class began with the teachers taking the students to the basketball court, and organizing them into two groups to play a 10-minute long math version of Giants, Elves and Wizards. One group was Even and the other was Odd; the teachers would shout a computation problem (such as 4x3), and the group with the appropriate characteristic to the answer (in this case Even) would then chase the other group to a safety line, attempting to tag as many people as they could (tagged students then had to switch sides and become part of the other group). This 10 minute warm up combined mental calculations of addition, subtraction, and multiplication, and knowledge of odd and even, with a kinesthetic action (chasing or fleeing) that motivated students to attempt to speed up their computational speed.

Everyone then moved inside to the rug, where they found their notebooks and pencils, and worked on a series of warm-up problems displayed on the interactive whiteboard. The students had 10 minutes to work on their own, and then 10 minutes of whole-group sharing and discussion about the problem set, which included logic problems (Two men play five games of chess, and each wins an equal amount as the other. How is this possible?), greater/less than symbol application (155 > 99), and connected pairs of algebraic problems involving addition or subtraction with one variable (If 27 - X = 20, what is X? Next, what is X + 14?)

The class then continued a stations-based work period begun earlier in the week, for about 30 minutes. One station drew on Marcy Cook curriculum for creating dynamic triple-digit addition equations involving regrouping. Two stations drew on JUMP! Math curriculum for investigations into linear measurement and time telling. One station drew on Everyday Math curriculum for work with pan balancing (solving equations using various weights on either side of a balance scale); and the last station contained cuisenaire rods for students to use in working with the Show Me 1/2 fractions curriculum. In the last five minutes of class, students returned to the rug to preview the homework assignment, ask clarifying questions, and organize their materials.

There were many aspects of this period that artfully embodied the elementary division's approach to instruction. The introductory activity (on the basketball court) combined the use of prior knowledge with current skill development, while providing movement-based reinforcement using a high-motivation game format. The second phase of the class (on the rug) provided guided practice on current concepts and whole-group sharing of strategies for arriving at answers, balancing individual students' desires to work alone (some students wore noise-canceling headphones to help them concentrate) or in groups (some students engaged in spirited conversation while attempting to solve the problems). The third phase of class (five table workstations) allowed for student-directed choice about which concept and activity to practice, and also gathered students together to support their understanding of how the homework connected with the work they had been doing. Taken as a whole, the tripartite structure of the lesson provided adequate time in each phase for students to dive into the knowledge and skills presented, while factoring in student motivation and the constraints of their ability to maintain attention.

Lawrence Hall of Science

I'm passing this on from parent Sherry Hsi, who works as a Ed Tech researcher at the Lawrence Hall of Science.

Calling East Bay residents! The Lawrence Hall of Science is embarking on a long range planning process and we want to know what you think! We are creating a plan for where we want the Hall to be in 10 years and beyond. Our goal is to create a dynamic, vibrant and financially sustainable institution to serve our customers. As part of this process, we are pulling together a few focus groups of community members who don’t currently use our services, to find out how we can better serve you in the future. We also want to know what you think about some new directions in which we might be going and how they might affect you.

Please consider attending one of the focus groups we’re holding to talk with us about these topics. The conversation should take no more than an hour, and will be held at the Lawrence Hall of Science. In appreciation of your time, you will receive a family pass to the Hall and a gift certificate to the Discovery Corner Store!

The focus groups will be at the following times:

Friday, October 19  3:00-4:00pm at the Lawrence Hall of Science

Friday, October 19  5:30-6:30pm at the Lawrence Hall of Science

Childcare and food will be provided, so that you can focus on helping us shape our future. We welcome you to attend regardless of whether or not you have children, and regardless of children’s ages.

To register to attend, please call Leah Reisman at 510-643-7559, or email her at lmgreisman@berkeley.edu.

Laurel Creek Maternity Sub planning

Here's the letter I sent to families in the Laurel Creek (K/1) classroom yesterday about our process for hiring a long-term substitute while Cate is out on maternity leave. If you know any qualified candidates, please let me know or encourage them to contact me!

Oct.25 and Nov.14 parent ed events

We All Live in a Yellow Submarine

This morning featured the second K-8 assembly of the year. After a short reminder of why we have assemblies (to Build, Strengthen, Share, and Celebrate, of course), we launched into a rousing rendition of Yellow Submarine (The Beatles were September's "Composer of the Month" in K-6 music).

The first Showcase of Learning this year was presented by Laurel Creek, who treated us to three songs they have learned about the sounds of letters. I captured the second half of the Vowel Song: the movements provide a kinestic reinforcement for the sound to the students.

Kate Klaire then discussed the work of this year's Student Council, including an acknowledgement of last year's pioneering Student Council representatives.






Next, the Middle School presented a Showcase of Learning about the recent 7th/8th grade rafting trip, complete with tableaus of the emotions they felt at various points of the trip, reading aloud a reflective essay about the experience of one student, and finishing off with a slide show.






We completed our celebration of The Beatles (Happy birthday, John Lennon) and closed out the assembly with All You Need is Love.

Inside a K/1 Math Workshop

This morning I was leading an admissions tour (yes, they've already started), and during the 10 minutes we spent in Blackberry Creek (K/1), we observed students playing a variety of math games in a Math Workshop period.


Roll and Record is played exactly as it sounds: a student rolls two dice, adds the showing faces together, and colors in a square in the appropriate column of the tracking form (which has columns numbered 2-12). This activity provides a structured way to practice simple addition of numbers one though six, and introduces the concept of gathering and tracking data.


Start At/Get To provides another avenue into addition. Students are given a number line with all the numbers identified except two - one that is the "start at" number, and another that is the "get to" number. The student begins by using the surrounding numbers on the number line to fill in the missing numbers. Next, the student counts from the "start at" number to the "get to" number. Finally, the student uses those numbers to create an equation, in the form of "Start At + Counted Number = Get To" (such as 12 + 3 = 15). This activity introduces the concept of counting on (which is more efficient than counting all), as well as the tools of number lines and equations.


Compare at Home can be played alone or with multiple players. Two (or more) cards are flipped over from among a deck, and the card with the higher number is identified. Double Compare combines the concepts of addition and comparison. Two cards are drawn and added together to create a sum; then another pair of cards is drawn and added together to create a second sum; and then the student identifies which pair of cards has a greater sum (or if they are equal). Besides the explicit practice in addition and comparison, this activity helps students realize that while one pair may have the single largest number (10 + 2), another pair may have a larger total (7 + 7), thereby reinforcing the student's underlying understanding of number sense.


If you're interested in seeing more of games in the TERC: Investigations curriculum, you can check out quite a few of them online.


Bonus feature: The following blurb was written by Sima Misra, the TBS Differentiated Curriculum Instructor who is focused on math this year. Sima is continuing the 4th/5th math club she launched last year (based on her experience launching a similar program in the 6th grade the prior year), and shared this blurb with the 4/5 teachers for their blogs:
  
The 13 students in 4th/5th grade Math Club today were very engaged with a new problem, game, and puzzle today.  Some of the boys in particular enjoyed the new game Intersections, trying to make lines intersect as many other lines as possible.  Many girls and boys pondered the Growing Staircases problem, a classic pattern-finding activity where students try to derive an algebraic function to predict the number of blocks necessary to build staircases, by drawing pictures, using color tiles, and writing expressions.  Some kids were intrigued to find out what an "nth stair" is!  A few students worked on Puzzles, including figuring out how many different shapes one can make with 4 regular hexagons.  How many do you think there are?

Oct. 5th Professional Development Day

We are always thankful and excited to get the chance to gather as a faculty for a professional development day. I was excited to lead the second segment of the morning's work (the first was spent working on curriculum mapping), which focused on improving our progress reports. This summer I had a series of meetings with Kathy (our Early Childhood Division Head), Gretchen (our Middle School Division Head), and Jeanne (our database manager) to discuss this topic. We generated the following problem statement to drive our work: How can we make our progress reports more effectively and efficiently communicate students growth for both faculty and families?



We decided that to best capitalize on the precious time the entire faculty body had together, we would focus the discussion on one essential component of the reports: the terms we use to describe the stage of developmental mastery a student has reached for each criteria. To do this, we drew on the thinking routines of Project Zero to create an activity that helped faculty make their thinking visible to each other, and to foster a conversation grounded in shared experience and understanding.


Hung up around the room were several pieces of chart paper: one had our current K-8 terms (emerging, developing, comptent, effective, mastering), another had our current ECC terms (not yet observed, in progress, consistently, area of strength) and nine others contained alternative sets of terms we had gathered from various other public and private schools. Some examples of these other sets include novice, apprentice, practitioner, expert; below expectations, developing, at expectations, above expectations; needs support, inconsistently, usually, consistently; and below, approaching, proficient, advanced. Teachers put sticky notes with their thoughts, responses and questions to each set of terms on the appropriate piece of chart paper (or wrote them directly on the sheets).


Faculty were also asked to respond to two other questions. First, were there other sets of terms that they wished to suggest? Second, what did they think about having different sets of terms for different divisions (Early Childhood, Elementary, Middle School)? After about thirty minutes spent posting their ideas and reading the comments of their colleagues, we held a spirited discussion about what terms (and associated definitions) would help us improve the effective and efficient communication about student growth.


After lunch, the faculty worked in divisions. At the K-5 level, we spent most of the time continuing our (re)training on the DRA2 reading assessment that we implement. While this is our third year using the DRA2, we believe it's important to regularly retrain all faculty in how to use the tool to ensure that the assessment data is reliable and valid (and, we have new faculty this year who have not used the DRA2 before!). This was the second half of our training (at Wednesday's division meeting, we reviewed all of the materials and procedures): we watched video of an assessment given last week, and each faculty member scored the oral reading fluency of the student reader, after which we compared and discussed our results in pairs and as a whole group.

The goal of this activity is to both give faculty practice taking oral reading records (which use specific notation to indicate miscues, omissions, repetitions, etc), and to develop inter-rater reliability (thereby improving our reliable and valid use of the assessment). Faculty then looked through the folders of their current students to review assessments from prior years, and, combined with their understanding of the students in the last month, determine the level of text on which to assess each student during the upcoming assessment window.

Booklists!

Nancy Nash (Temescal, 2/3) and Kellyne Darrow (Strawberry, 4/5) went to a literacy workshop put on by the Bay Area Teacher Development Collaborative yesterday, and this morning sent out this link of good booklists to faculty, which they learned about at the training.