Helping Students Reach Their Potential

A Post on Student Achievement Best Practices

 By Monica Jones, ELA Consultant, Detroit Public Schools

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image courtesy of education-portal.com

“Why are you still here?”I asked him.

Bradford looks up at me with sad eyes, but his smile is magnetic. “I gotta pass this class.  Can I do some extra credit?”

His statement made the hair on my neck stick straight out. “Well I really don’t have any extra credit assignments that you could do. Perhaps if you came to my class every day you could catch up on all of your missed work.”

Bradford smiled again.  “I be tryin’, but I have to babysit.”

His statement gave a whole new ring to an age old problem; trying to meet the student where they are.  We don’t live in a perfect world, so as educators how can we expect perfect students? Student achievement relies on meeting the needs of each student which often times is difficult because the student isn’t there.  And after missing so many classes or days, it becomes impossible for the student to catch up.  This leads to everyone becoming dismayed and puts the student at risk for dropping out of school.  Excessive absenteeism can be the cause of why students are not reaching their full potential.

Now I’m not proposing that educators hold their heads and cast their eyes to the ground.  It can be done; but with patience and diligence. The 21st century student has evolved so that lecturing in front of a class for sixty to ninety minutes does not guarantee that loads of learning is taking place.  Educators must be cognizant of the various backgrounds  that are sitting in front of them and make strong efforts to ensure that lessons are being delivered that addresses  the needs of the students.   Lecturing, hands-on projects, student centered lessons are all pedagogies that can be used that have the potential of reaching each and every student across the academic spectrum.  But, of course, they have to be there in order to learn.

Getting back to Bradford, his problem was not that he needed academic or remedial help; he just needed a remedial attendance program.  I contacted his guardian, who happened to be his aunt, and explained the situation of why he was failing not only my class but two others.  Of course, she feinted shock and claimed to not realize that he was failing, but she was also not aware of our district’s attendance policy.  We met and she and Bradford verbally agreed that they would both make an effort to ensure that Bradford was in school and not at home babysitting.  Simple, right?  In this case it was.  Bradford and his aunt both kept their promises and by the end of the year Bradford went into his junior year with a 3.2 GPA.

The teaching profession, unfortunately, doesn’t always teeter on the norm.  Some days are better than others.   I once had an eighth grader who brought her three year old cousin to school because there was no one to babysit.  Am I a daycare now?  Because the last time I looked at my check I was not receiving daycare pay for each student.   I took a deep breath and gently nudged her and her toddler cousin towards the counseling suite.  “No sweety.  Your little cousin can’t stay with you while you’re in class today.”   Unfortunately, my student had to be sent home that day because why…she had to babysit.

From the ritzy suburban school of choice to the decaying urban school on the corner, there are going to be students who are at risk of failing because they just don’t come to school.  And often times, they want to, but they have other distractions that prevent them from being in a chair everyday that the school door opens.  As conscientious educators, we must carve out some time during our much needed prep and at least attempt to get to the root of why all the chairs are not filled in our classrooms.  It has often been said, that one of the perks of teaching is once the bell rings, you can close your door and do your thing.  But when the bell rings and your door is closed and you are looking at far too many empty seats, that is a sign of a serious gap. Those empty seats represent a person who is entitled to an education and unfortunately, they are not there to receive it.

I Taught ESL; They Learned Self-Confidence: A Job-Embedded PD Story

Hey there, readers. It's Jared Heath here, and I am going to talk to you about job-embedded professional development for teachers.

Job-Embedded PD for Teachers--I Had a Problem

Image courtesy of certificationmap.com

I loved teaching English as a second language. And as I've already discussed with you, my students loved it, too.

That's how, in the first few months as a teacher, I found myself delivering a professional development session at one of our training meetings. We typically had the same two coaches giving us work sheets and asking us self-answering questions that induced sleep more often than they encouraged improvement. You know the drill. If these job-embedded professional development sessions for our teachers weren't considered paid time, my attendance would have been highly questionable. Then one day I got a call from my department head asking me to teach at our next staff meeting.

Now my less-than-favorable attitude toward these PD sessions was coming back to haunt me, because I now had to teach these teachers--many of whom had been at the game much longer than me and were undoubtedly better at their jobs than I. So what do I, a green teacher full of ideas but little else, teach veteran ESL teachers that they will actually take back to their classroom? I had one wild card up my sleeve.

I Had to Take Them Out of Their Comfort Zones

Staff meetings had heretofore been filled with discussions about "the students," always referring to how "they" learn English, how "they" perceive teaching styles, etc. I had spent several years becoming conversational in French, Mandarin Chinese, and German, so I always felt more like "them" with the students than "we" with the teachers. If I had anything to teach these teachers, it was how the teachers themselves learn a second language.

How often do we as teachers forget that we are students? We have to be students. The learning process never ends, and we (should) always push forward in our fields. I had a very solid academic background in phonology, syntax, and lexicon of the English language, but these teachers didn't need a lecture. They needed an experience.

So I Taught Them Mandarin

Most of our teachers had learned a second language, typically Spanish, but it had been a long time since they had lived the excruciating experiences of translating every sentence in their heads before spitting it out in an awful accent.

I took 30 minutes and taught the teachers to count to 10, introduce themselves, ask for directions to the bathroom, write a few Chinese characters, and more. We had so much fun, and the teachers were amazed at what they were able to pick up and retain. These teachers remembered what it was like to be the students again--and in the process, I demonstrated some of my strategies for helping students feel comfortable in the very awkward setting of trying something new.

The next 15 minutes, we discussed the mechanics of the lesson--the kind of questions the audience had, the explanations I gave that helped them see things a little differently, and the strategies that didn't work in that setting or maybe wouldn't work for one of their classrooms.

In that setting, we became the classroom example. But we could never imitate every classroom setting, and we certainly had more questions than an 45-minute session twice a month could answer. We needed something on-demand to carry us through.

I Taught ESL. They Learned Self-Confidence.

I realized that the same self-confidence that I wanted my students to gain was exactly what my co-workers needed in a job-embedded professional development session for teachers. Sometimes we need to be reminded that we can do hard things. Successful PD sessions aren't sessions that teach us lock-step drills for grammar, history, math, or science instruction. We as teachers are trying to change a student's way of thinking about the world and about themselves, and we can't do that until we learn to change our own perspective. Sometimes we forget that this is the most important lesson of all.

Cincinnati Closing Achievement Gap and Increasing Graduation Rates

For years, leaders in education have worked hard to close the achievement gap between white students and African American students. While many schools and districts are still pushing forward in this effort, Cincinnati, Ohio Public Schools (CPS) has managed to close the gap with their high school graduation rates.

For over a decade, CPS has involved coordinated, research-based strategies towards closing the gap, but without the creative and courageous work by those actually in the schools, such an ambitious goal could not have been realized. So how did they do it? Is there a way other districts can repeat such success?

Cincinnati, Ohio Public Schools used several strategies including:

• Focusing on just a few goals (increasing overall graduation rates and reducing the high school graduation gap).

• Taking educators, parents, community leaders and students to visit some of the nation’s most effective urban district and charter public schools.

• Focusing staff development on a few key areas: literacy, numeracy and learning to work more effectively with today’s urban youth.

• Increasing youth/community service so students learned they are capable of more than they thought.

• Positive ongoing leadership from the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers

• Holding principals accountable and replacing some in schools where there was not much progress.

To read the full article and see the full list of strategies, click here.

100% of Urban Prep Academy Students College Bound

Few students can say that every single senior at their high school was accepted to college, but for the students at Chicago’s Urban Prep Academy for Young Men this is the second year the seniors there can make such a claim. The 104 members of the graduating class of 2011 have been accepted to 103 colleges, with more letters on the way. With a 60 percent high school dropout rate for African-American males in Chicago Public Schools, this all-male, all-African-American high school is doing something right.

To learn more about the success at Urban Prep Academy for Men Click Here

Arne Duncan On a Journey to Bring More Black Men to America's Classrooms

One in 50 teachers is a black male. According to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, “This is a national problem...when the nation’s teacher workforce does not reflect the diversity of its students." So what is Duncan doing about it? He is traveling the nation to appeal to students of color at colleges and universities to come make a difference in their communities through teaching.

Duncan said that if schools could increase the pool of mentors, drawing from the community as a whole, “mentors who could really get behind that child not at age 15, but at age 5, the impact could be powerful. We know in kindergarten which students are struggling. We don’t have to wait for high school.”  

Read the full article HERE

Virginia School District Attributes 80% of Equity Gains to Use of PD 360

PD 360 is the leading on-demand professional learning resource for schools and districts. After two years with PD 360 Loudoun County Virginia Schools English achievement among economically disadvantaged students improved 15%, raising them from the 68th percentile to the 81st percentile. Among ESL students, scores improved by 18%, taking them from the 61st percentile to the 79th percentile.

To find out more about how Loudoun's economically disadvantaged students also saw improved math scores read the full article HERE.

Closing the Achievement Gap in Santa Clara County

According to test scores released today in California, the achievement gap is starting to narrow in Santa Clara County between Latino students and white students. Despite staff cuts and other adverse economic times, the achievement gap narrowed in English, Math, and Science.



Full Article at Mercury News



To learn more about closing the achievement gap see Equity 101 Session 5