Our new neighbor: REALM Charter School

After many years, the BUSD buildings at the corner of University and Bonar are being renovated for occupancy. The site, which is called West Campus and was once a junior high and then the 9th grade of Berkeley High, has been vacant since the Berkeley Adult School moved to the former Franklin School on San Pablo at Virginia back in 2004. Much of the building will be used as the district headquarters of BUSD, which is leaving its current site at Old City Hall.

The West Campus site is also going to house a new charter school called REALM, which stands for Revolutionary Education and Learning Movement. The school has an admirable list of skills and outcomes, including intellectual openness, analysis, inquisitiveness, reasoning/argumentation, interpretation, problem solving, creativity and innovation, critical thinking, collaboration, ICT literacy (information, communications, and technology), and media literacy. The program will have four core elements; project-based learning, immersive technologies, Mindfulness in Education (transformative life skills), and participatory action research. They will open with 100 6th grade students and 100 9th grade students next fall, and grow to a full enrollment of 100 students per grades 6-12. We look forward to welcoming REALM to the neighborhood, and the opportunities for collaboration that may arise!

Planning for Child Visit Days

One of the most exciting parts of the year is when new applicants visit the school. It's incredible to meet the children (and their families), learn who they are as learners and people, and get a sense of how they will fit into our existing classroom populations. Holding these visits is a major project that involves all of our faculty and most of the administration in a variety of ways; at three grade levels we hold weekend events, and at three others we integrate children into the classrooms for a half day.

The three grade levels that have weekend visits are the Early Childhood Campus, the K/1 program, and the 6th grade program. At the Early Childhood Campus, families will be coming on Sunday the 13th, between 9-11. These young children, some of them new to school for the first time, are paired up 1:1 with a faculty member, who spends 20 minutes engaging with the child in carefully selected works and activities that provide data on the child's physical, cognitive, emotional, and social development. Parents and administrators have a chance to talk outside the classrooms during this time, and talk about everything from the child to the setting to the program, and more. At the K/1 level, students will visit campus on Saturday the 12th between 9-10:30. This year we are expecting 34 students; we'll split them into two equal groups and send them into the K/1 classrooms for a morning of activities and play that, like at the ECC, are designed to help us gather information about the children on areas such as their gross and fine motor control, collaborative play, and early literacy and academic skills such as letter recognition and pattern making. Julianne will be hosting an art making class for parents in the atelier during this time, and current parent ambassadors will be available in the Depot for conversation about their experiences at TBS. At the 6th grade level, our 4/5 and 6th teachers will lead the students through a 2.5 hour session on Saturday the 12th that includes a powerful self-image activity called Grow Your Garden from Positive Discipline, math and language arts classes that will engage the kids socially as well as intellectually, and artistic and team-building activities. As you can imagine, the time and energy put into designing these visits - and the process of discussing the data that we gather during them, as well as reviewing the files of all of the children - is a major undertaking for faculty.

Why do we hold weekend visits for ECC, K/1, and 6th? For the youngest students, because schooling can be so new, giving them time to have the space to themselves helps build a feeling of comfort. At the K/1 and 6th grade levels, it's simply a matter of pragmatics - the impact of 30 students visiting the class over the course of the nine days we do child visits would mean averaging more than 3 student applicant visitors a day for two school weeks! Because the 2/3, 4/5, and 7/8 levels are not natural transition points, we tend to have fewer applicants at those levels, so having students visit in the classrooms for half the day is much more manageable. Applicants not only get to experience life in a TBS classroom, they also eat snack and/or lunch, and begin to forge social connections through the structures of the work as well as time at lunch and recess with host "buddies".

At some schools, the teaching faculty do not participate in the admissions process in the deep way that they do at TBS. Instead, the administration hires outside teachers to come in and run the assessment day, and makes the admissions decisions without consulting teachers. We believe that by including teachers in every step of the process, from reading files to working 1:1 with student applicants, our faculty is empowered in the process, and thus feels ownership of the school in a unique way. They are also able to begin to form the teacher-student connections that are so important to the work that happens in the classrooms. When a child shows up at a new school in the fall, the presence of even one familiar face can make a world of difference in how s/he transitions into the day.

Parenting Styles and Children’s Emotional Intelligence

An interesting article from the most recent issue of The Family Journal: Counseling and Therapy for Couples and Families. Come see me for a copy!

Parenting Styles and Children’s Emotional Intelligence: What Do We Know?

By Alberto Alegre

Abstract

The theory of emotional intelligence has elicited great interest both in the academic and the nonacademic world. Therapists, educators, and parents want to know what they can do to help children develop their emotional intelligence. However, most of the research in this field has investigated adults’ emotional intelligence. This study reviews the scarce research literature in the area of children’s emotional intelligence. It also reviews the way in which parenting styles and practices predict children’s emotional intelligence in similar or different ways that they predict other developmental outcomes. Based on the parenting literature, four main dimensions of parenting are identified that are relevant to the study of emotional intelligence: parental responsiveness, parental positive demandingness, parental negative demandingness, and parental emotion-related coaching. Parental responsiveness, parental emotion-related coaching, and parental positive demandingness are related to children’s higher emotional intelligence, while parental negative demandingness is related to children’s lower emotional intelligence. Additionally, social–emotional intervention programs used in schools have succeeded in improving children’s emotional skills. Implications for practitioners are discussed.

The Power of Music

A very interesting article, published in the August edition of The International Journal of Music Education. If you want to read it, send me an email or stop by to say hi, and I'll give you a copy.


The power of music: its impact on the intellectual, social, and personal development of children and young people.


1. By Susan Hallam
2. Institute of Education, University of London, UK,

Abstract

This paper reviews the empirical evidence relating to the effects of active engagement with music on the intellectual, social and personal development of children and young people. It draws on research using the most advanced technologies to study the brain, in addition to quantitative and qualitative psychological and educational studies. It explains how musical skills may transfer to other activities if the processes involved are similar. It explores the evidence relating to the impact of musical skills on language development, literacy, numeracy, measures of intelligence, general attainment, creativity, fine motor co-ordination, concentration, self-confidence, emotional sensitivity, social skills, team work, self-discipline, and relaxation. It suggests that the positive effects of engagement with music on personal and social development only occur if it is an enjoyable and rewarding experience. This has implications for the quality of the teaching.

More on play; white privilege

We'll be hosting a dozen early childhood directors and teachers at this week's Preschool Director Luncheon, In an earlier post I wrote about the book "Play" that we've been reading in preparation for this month's topic. Here's another recent piece on the same topic, this one from some folks from Harvard. EDIT: And here's another, this time on CNN.

Right now I'm also reading White Like Me, a provocative book by Tim Wise that breaks down white privilege into seven component pieces: belonging, privilege, denial, resistance, collaboration, loss, and redemption. He doesn't do himself any favors (in my view) with an overly casual style embedded with sarcasm, but he does hit all the important parts of how to recognize the ways in which white privilege has defined society, and our responsibility to continue working on the problem without being overly academic. This of course has me thinking about TBS; how can we become an anti-racist institution? The TBS middle school has done some important work around "othering" in the last few years - by race, gender, language, and a number of other ways people create "others" - and we've even had teachers publish about this work, and we provide financial aid to a number of students via the A Better Chance program, but are we educating our students to become anti-racist activists? This does remind me of a story told to me by one alum, now a junior at a local Catholic high school; when he complained to the head coach of his football team about an assistant coach's use of homophobic language during drills, the coach refused to address the issue, and so the student quit the team. I admire his stance and his willingness to take direct action, but that action was also limited to himself, rather than societal change. And, the TBS mission specifically charges us "to engage a changing world." So, where are we doing it intentionally, and where are we not, and can we make this one of the defining aspects of the TBS program?

On a tangent but related, just in case you've never seen it, please watch A Class Divided.

Progress Reports Terms

Here at TBS, we are proud to have made the decision four years ago to stop giving letter grades in our Middle School. Grades are intellectually dishonest artifacts designed for adult consumption instead of furthering student learning, serve to judge students solely on the product they produce rather than provide insight into the ongoing process of their learning and understanding, and are well researched to have negative consequences for both high and low achieving students, around motivation and self-esteem, respectively. At TBS, we don't judge students based on how much raw information they can memorize and recall (though we want to know that, too); we want to understand how a child takes in new ideas, analyzes them for their component parts, synthesizes them with what s/he already knew, and then applies them in the context of new and novel situations that speak to the child's motivation and interest.

In turning away from letter grades, we took guidance from the work of Project Zero to help us begin to consider what thorough and rigorous assessment of a student should look like, and how to communicate that to families. Our faculty has done - and continues to do - extensive professional development in using various forms of assessments that range from summative to formative in nature, including standardized tests, teacher-generated exams, portfolios and rubrics, and peer and narrative self-assessments. And in our progress reports, we have used a set of terms that communicate the in-process development of each child, rather than summative judgments of their products or efforts: Emerging, Developing, and Mastering.

In the progress reports that faculty have begun to write for the first semester of the current school year, we have made an adjustment to the terms (and their definitions) we present on the progress reports, in response to parent and faculty feedback that we needed to be more precise in how the reports communicated our evaluations of student learning. This is the first adjustment we have made to these terms since introducing them four years ago, and it comes after significant research into the terms and definitions used by other programs both locally and nationally, as well as reflection on the strengths and weaknesses of our own system. We have revised our scale to use a six-point frame with the terms Not Observed, Emerging, Developing, Competent, Effective, and Mastering. The definitions are as follows:

Not Observed: Student has not yet demonstrated the skill, awareness or understanding in the school learning environment.

Emerging: Student sporadically demonstrates the skill, awareness, or understanding in learning environments both inside and outside the classroom, and rarely makes use of peer or teacher feedback.

Developing: Student sometimes demonstrates the skill, awareness, or understanding, applies the skill or awareness with contextual accuracy only in structured, teacher-created settings, occasionally makes use of feedback, and usually relies on external guidance to self-correct.

Competent: Student consistently demonstrates the skill, awareness, or understanding when working in structured classroom learning contexts, and occasionally in other settings. Student makes appropriate use of peer or teacher feedback and occasionally self-corrects with some guidance and direction.

Effective: Student almost always demonstrates the skill, awareness, or understanding in structured and emergent learning environments inside the classroom, and at times outside the classroom, relying on minimal feedback from others.

Mastering: Student always demonstrates the skill, awareness, or understanding in all learning environments, inside and outside the classroom, with independence and confidence.

Each of these definitions is written to include frequency of demonstration, the context of demonstration, and the role of feedback, in that order. They do not correspond with letter grades of A, B, C, D, and F, nor with judgement-laden terms like Excellent, Good, Satisfactory, and Poor. They are attempts at value-neutral descriptors of how a child is demonstrating his/her grasp of the skill, awareness, or understanding that is named in the assessment, and provide a data point for continuing the ongoing dialogue between teachers, students, and parents about what each child knows, and how each child learns. For this reason, we hope that parents do not respond with negative emotion to assessments that are identified as emerging or developing, though we know that some may have those feelings; to honor the development of each child, we must recognize that we all move through these stages of mastery on our educational path.

I'll close by saying that there are at least two small ironies in the school's shift away from grades that do not escape my notice. First, the process of truly coming to understand a child's understanding via rigorous assessment, and then expressing that through a report via the application of assessment terms to a dozen or so skill areas and a short personalized narrative, is exceedingly difficult for even the most skilled and conscientious teacher. Grades were far easier for faculty to give, and learning how to provide and then communicate authentic assessment is much harder. Second, adolescents are at a point in the developmental arc in which they are constantly comparing themselves to their peers, and thus interested in knowing how they did in their work compared to their peers. So, the lack of grades can become a point of tension, as we push them to engage in the more difficult work of active self-reflection and meta-cognition around their own work. In both cases, we are guiding our faculty and students to behave in ways that are intellectually and philosophically honest and in line with our school philosophy, and that is an essential step in our program's success.

Look for a letter from Head of School Mitch Bostian about the upcoming progess reports, as well as a yet-to-be-scheduled evening Parent Education event on assessment at TBS sometime in the next few weeks.

Is Technology Wiring Teens to Have Better Brains?

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/jan-june11/digitalbrain_01-05.html

This is a PBS Newshour piece on how teen brains are being literally rewired in response to living in the digital realm. Worth a watch, perhaps in series with this RSA Animate from Philip Zimbardo about time, which speaks to the digital rewiring of teen brains:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg