KARCHER STAFF BLOG
2019-2020 Karcher Calendar
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/KarcherMiddleSchool/
BASD Staff Blog: https://basdstaffnews.blogspot.com/
2019-2020 Karcher Calendar
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/KarcherMiddleSchool/
BASD Staff Blog: https://basdstaffnews.blogspot.com/
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Kudos
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- As we continue to support the efforts and growth of the educational profession we will be welcoming Jason Schielke, student teacher with Hans Block and Jon Nelson starting this Wednesday! If you see him please make him welcome! Thank you Hans Block and Jon Nelson for your service to our profession.
- Speaking of student teachers, thank you to Stacy Stoughton for your efforts and time working with student teacher, Matt Nelson. Matt will be transitioning to 7th grade math with Patti Tenhagen and Jeri Nettesheim starting Monday, November 4 to continue his student teaching placement.
- Kudos to Brad Ferstenou and Stephanie Rummler for your efforts with facilitating and supporting our student council as they did a fabulous job with the "trick or treat" idea for the school on Thursday! It was great to see students be excited and enjoy the "treat" or the "trick'.
Article this week:
As Diversity Grows, So Must We
Schools that experience rapid demographic shifts can meet the challenge by implementing five phases of professional development.
Many school districts nationwide are experiencing rapid growth in the number of students of color, culturally and linguistically diverse students, and students from low-income families. From my work with education leaders in some of these diversity-enhanced school districts, I know they are places of vibrant opportunity—places that call us to meaningful and exciting work. In these “welcome-to-America” schools, the global community shows up in our classrooms every day, inviting us—even requiring us—to grow as we learn from and with our students and their families.
The Need for Growth
All is not well, however, in these rapidly transitioning schools. Some teachers, administrators, and parents view their schools' increasing diversity as a problem rather than an opportunity. For example, in a school district on the West Coast where the number of Latino students has quadrupled in the past 10 years, a teacher recently asked me, “Why are they sending these kids to our school?” In another district outside New York City—where the student population was once predominantly rich, white, and Jewish but is now about 90 percent low-income kids of color, mostly from the Caribbean and Latin America—a principal remarked in one workshop, “These kids don't value education, and their parents aren't helping either. They don't seem to care about their children's future.” In a school district near Minneapolis with a rapidly increasing black population, a white parent remarked, “Students who are coming here now don't have much respect for authority. That's why we have so many discipline problems.”
Other educators and parents, although less negative, still feel uneasy about their schools' new demographics. In a high school outside Washington, D.C., where the Latino immigrant population is increasing rapidly, a teacher told me that he was disappointed in himself for not feeling comfortable engaging his students in a discussion of immigration issues, a hot topic in the community in spring 2006. “I knew the kids needed to talk, but I just couldn't go there.” And a black teacher who taught French successfully for many years in predominantly white suburban schools told me recently, “When I first found myself teaching classes of mostly black kids, I went home frustrated every night because I knew I wasn't getting through to them, and they were giving me a hard time. It only started getting better when I finally figured out that I had to reexamine everything I was doing.”
This teacher has it right. As educators in rapidly transitioning schools, we need to reexamine everything we're doing. Continuing with business as usual will mean failure or mediocrity for too many of our students, as the data related to racial, cultural, linguistic, and economic achievement gaps demonstrate (National Center for Education Statistics, 2005). Rapidly changing demographics demand that we engage in a vigorous, ongoing, and systemic process of professional development to prepare all educators in the school to function effectively in a highly diverse environment.
Many education leaders in diversity-enhanced schools are moving beyond blame and befuddlement and working to transform themselves and their schools to serve all their students well. From observing and collaborating with them, I have learned that this transformative work proceeds best in five phases: (1) building trust, (2) engaging personal culture, (3) confronting issues of social dominance and social justice, (4) transforming instructional practices, and (5) engaging the entire school community.
Phase 1: Building Trust
Ninety percent of U.S. public school teachers are white; most grew up and attended school in middle-class, English-speaking, predominantly white communities and received their teacher preparation in predominantly white colleges and universities (Gay, Dingus, & Jackson, 2003). Thus, many white educators simply have not acquired the experiential and education background that would prepare them for the growing diversity of their students (Ladson-Billings, 2002; Vavrus, 2002).
The first priority in the trust phase is to acknowledge this challenge in a positive, inclusive, and honest way. School leaders should base initial discussions on the following assumptions:
- Inequities in diverse schools are not, for the most part, a function of intentional discrimination.
- Educators of all racial and cultural groups need to develop new competencies and pedagogies to successfully engage our changing populations.
- White teachers have their own cultural connections and unique personal narratives that are legitimate aspects of the overall mix of school diversity.
School leaders should also model for their colleagues inclusive and nonjudgmental discussion, reflection, and engagement strategies that teachers can use to establish positive learning communities in their classrooms.
For example, school leaders in the Apple Valley Unified School District in Southern California, where racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity is rapidly increasing, have invested considerable time and resources in creating a climate of openness and trust. They recently implemented four days of intensive work with teams from each school, including principals, teacher leaders, union representatives, parents, clergy, business leaders, and community activists from the NAACP and other organizations.
One essential outcome in this initial phase of the conversation is to establish that racial, cultural, and economic differences are real—and that they make a difference in education outcomes. Said one Apple Valley participant, “I have become aware that the issue of race needs to be dealt with, not minimized.” Said another, “I need to move beyond being color-blind.” A second key outcome is to establish the need for a personal and professional journey toward greater awareness. As an Apple Valley educator noted, “There were a lot of different stories and viewpoints shared at this inservice, but the one thing we can agree on is that everyone needs to improve in certain areas.” A third key outcome in the trust phase is to demonstrate that difficult topics can be discussed in an environment that is honest, safe, and productive. One Apple Valley teacher commented, “We were able to talk about all of the issues and not worry about being politically correct.”
Through this work, Apple Valley educators and community leaders established a climate of constructive collaboration that can be directed toward addressing the district's new challenges. From the perspective of the school superintendent, “This is a conversation our community is not used to having, so we had to build a positive climate before moving to the harder questions of action.”
Phase 2: Engaging Personal Culture
Change has to start with educators before it can realistically begin to take place with students. The central aim of the second phase of the work is building educators' cultural competence—their ability to form authentic and effective relationships across differences.
Young people, particularly those from historically marginalized groups, have sensitive antennae for authenticity. I recently asked a group of racially and culturally diverse high school students to name the teachers in their school who really cared about them, respected them, and enjoyed getting to know them as people. Forty students pooling their answers could name only 10 teachers from a faculty of 120, which may be one reason this high school has a 50 percent dropout rate for students of color.
Aronson and Steele's (2005) work on stereotype threat demonstrates that intellectual performance, rather than being a fixed and constant quality, is quite fragile and can vary greatly depending on the social and interpersonal context of learning. In repeated studies, these researchers found that three factors have a major effect on students' motivation and performance: their feelings of belonging, their trust in the people around them, and their belief that teachers value their intellectual competence. This research suggests that the capacity of adults in the school to form trusting relationships with and supportive learning environments for their students can greatly influence achievement outcomes.
Leaders in the Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township, outside Indianapolis, have taken this perspective seriously. Clear data showed gaps among ethnic groups in achievement, participation in higher-level courses, discipline referrals, and dropout rates. In response, district teachers and administrators engaged in a vigorous and ongoing process of self-examination and personal growth related to cultural competence.
Central-office and building administrators started with themselves. Along with selected teachers from each school, they engaged in a multiyear program of shared reading, reflective conversations, professional development activities, and joint planning to increase their own and their colleagues' levels of cultural competence. They studied and practiced Margaret Wheatley's (2002) principles of conversation, with particular emphasis on her admonitions to expect things to be messy and to be willing to be disturbed. They designed their own Socratic seminars using chapters from We Can't Teach What We Don't Know (Howard, 2006) and used the stages of personal identity development model from that book as a foundation for ongoing reflective conversations about their own journeys toward cultural competence.
As this work among leaders began to be applied in various school buildings, one principal observed, “We are talking about things that we were afraid to talk about before—like our own prejudices and the biases in some of our curriculum materials.” In another school, educators' discussions led to a decision to move parent-teacher conferences out of the school building and into the apartment complexes where their black and Latino students live.
This article will continue next week with phases 3, 4, & 5
Information/Reminders
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- Monday, November 4 - BLT Meeting in the large conference room.
- Our focus for our time will be on some drilled down Forward Data along with a conversation and update regarding furniture exploration for the new middle school.
- Tuesday, November 5 - End of term 1... can you believe that!!!
- Grades need to be posted in Skyward by 3:00pm on Friday, November 8.
- Tuesday, November 5 - Scott Christensen, Ruth Shenning and myself will be in a meeting in the afternoon with a consulting company for some of our AV needs for the new middle school. Focusing on the large group areas (commons and gym) to ensure the projections in those areas are sufficient for the space.
- Wednesday, November 6 - Our YAR students will be meeting from 12:50 - 1:50!
- Wednesday, November 6 - PLC in the library focusing on some self reflection, thinking like a penguin, after Dr. Luis Cruz.
- Thursday, November 7 - Leading with Equity training
- Annie and I will be attending a Leading with Equity training as part of a four part series over the course of he's school year with the rest of the leadership team. With Universal Access as one of our Big Three we will be learning together and working to continually meet the needs of all of our students and their parents/guardian.
- We will be leaving around 11:00.
Looking ahead:
- Monday, November 11 - Staff Meeting from 2:40 - 3:00
- All staff are encouraged to attend!
- Monday, November 11 - District Essential Skills Committee from 3:45-5:15 in our Karcher library.
- Tuesday, November 12 - Onyx House field trip to the Field Museum in Chicago.
- Questions see Katherine Botsford.
- Leaving around 8:00 and returning around 3:30.
- Tuesday, November 12 - Special Education department meeting from 2:40-3:15 in our small conference room.
- Wednesday, November 13 - District Inservice Day from 8:00 - 4:00
- We will start in the library at 8:00 where our morning will be focused on Essential Skills with almost all of the time for teams to work. We just want to start in the library to touch base, reiterate a few things, etc.
- Essential Skills time will be from 8:00 - 11:30
- 11:30 - 12:00 - time to purge our storage areas.
- 1:00-4:00 - teacher work time.
- Thursday, November 14 - We will be holding sport team pictures with Interstate Studios.
- We, for the first time in I don't know how long, will be holding team and individual photos. Our fall sports teams will be called out of class to take their photos as we wanted to start this year versus next year. We are still working on logistics, time, etc and will update everyone when we know more. Students will be called out of class to take their pictures.
- Our winter sports will then also have their team and individual pictures taken after school once practices start.
- Moving forward all team and individual pictures will take place after school. Only the fall teams will be during school to "catch" up and have all team photos taken.
- Friday, November 15 - Diamond House field trip to the Field Museum in Chicago.
- Questions see Brad Ferstenou.
- Leaving around 8:00 and returning around 3:30.
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Pictures from the week
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