By Liz Fox, HS ELA and Collaborative Teacher I know many of us are immersed in researching ways to alleviate stress in our students’ lives. Recently I had the opportunity to participate in a round table discussion with other certified facilitators of Real Colors® about stress related to our current challenges. (Real Colors® is a company that uses temperament theory to help people learn about themselves and learn how to apply their strengths to real life situations.)
I came away from our discussion realizing that it’s important for us adults to consider the toll this new reality is having on us. Here’s some of what we talked about; I hope some of it will be of use to you. We are absolutely leading lives differently as our country has come to a virtual halt. We are dealing with, working with, living with, and even loving others in ways that may be foreign to us. According to one of the staff of Real Colors®, the four main reasons people experience stress are as follows:
This person continued with what I took away as a huge a-ha moment: **Perception plays a big part in how we personally process stress. What is a big deal to someone may not be to someone else. We cannot discount how someone is feeling just because it doesn’t match our own reality. Doing so brings disconnect. It’s important to get to the root of what’s going on with that other person without judgment. So what can we do to mitigate stress in these inherently stressful times? Well, that may depend on your temperament.
Everyone is an amalgam of all four temperaments (of different degrees), so perhaps something from each temperament resonates with you. And remember your students will have different needs based on their temperaments as well. Finally, when we serve others, we release chemicals, including oxytocin, which help us feel better. That alone might help us survive these challenging times! None of this is earth-shattering news, but maybe something here will be of help to some of you. Hang in there and be assured you are doing the best you can dealing with our new reality. Here are some memes and quotes that may help you destress: Words to help center teachers.
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By: Allysen Lovstuen and Erik Dutcher There are many technology based options available for collecting, assessing, and providing feedback on student work (especially important while working remotely) that are supposed to help us work smarter. But it requires a lot of hard work to sort through them all! Those that I have tried all have strengths and weaknesses. Ease for students, options available, workflow to provide individualized feedback from the teacher, providing a summary of results, compatibility with PowerSchool/Canvas, ... these are all considerations that may come into play. Learning every tool and analyzing it ourselves quickly becomes overwhelming, yet some of those factors are district specific and it is difficult to research online and know you are getting valid information and not a sales pitch. Let's help each other to work smarter, not harder. Erik Dutcher and I will start by sharing our thoughts on some tools we have tried over the past few weeks. We welcome you to expand on our entries (we know some of you have much more experience using Google than us) or provide information on other tools you have used in the comments. The top entry under each tool is that thing that most makes it stand out from our perspective.
New Canvas Quizzes* (reviewed by Allysen Lovstuen) There is a new option in Canvas to create a New Canvas Quiz when you click to add a quiz. I have not had a chance to try this with a class yet. So far these are my observations.
If you have questions on any of the tools above, feel free to contact Erik or Allysen. We look forward to hearing about what is working/not working for you in the comments!
* - integrates with Canvas to the point where scores are published directly into Canvas and can therefore be synced to PowerSchool. By Denise Lee, Jennifer Larson, & Carrie Reed As DMS continues its SBE journey, teachers shared what they learned through their own process. The following three presentations helped us envision the possibilities:
Jennifer Larson: Feedback (7:00 min) Mrs. Larson shares how she gives video feedback through Canvas. https://eduvision.tv/l?RygALe Carrie Reed: Assessment/3 Point Rubrics (6:28 min) Mrs. Reed shares how she assesses students using a 3-point rubric along with the assessment device in her Social Studies class. https://eduvision.tv/l?RygDLe Denise Lee: Unit Design (8:35 min) Mrs. Lee shares how she develops units based on the standards. https://eduvision.tv/l?RygAAm The journey continues, and each teacher has been working to find a niche under the SBE umbrella of learning. What have you tried when working with SBE that has worked in your classroom? by Michaela Seeman, K-4 Librarian and JCE Collaborative Teacher During the Fall Tech Academy, I attended the session on SMART Learning Suite Online. At this session, I learned about this amazing tool that can be used many different ways. It’s an easy, interactive way to teach or assess. You can create a collaborative work space, share handouts that students can individually respond to, and many more activities. You can build a small activity or your entire lesson within this tool, and you have the option of making it teacher-paced or student-paced. A few of the activity and assessment options include:
While the website had a few technical hiccups as we were using it, I was very impressed with the level of student engagement and I loved being able to see what each student was thinking. I used this tool with elementary students, but I can easily see students labeling parts of a plant, putting historical events in order, or using the tool to review for an assessment. With all of the options for activities, responses, brainstorming, and game-based activities, I am very excited to explore this tool even more!
By Gabe Twedt, JCE Collaborative Teacher Part five in a series on inclusive language and representation in the classroom. Click here to read the first in the series, "My Life as Gaybe." Click here to read the second in the series, "Not the LGBT Lorax." Click here to read the third in the series, "Being Intentionally Inclusive." Click here to read the fourth in the series, "Mark McGwire and The Importance of Challenging Stereotypes.” If you’re anything like me, you have been feeling a bit lost recently. It is difficult to make sense of everything that is happening in our current situation. In many ways, it feels like the only thing we can do is focus on ourselves and the few people around us.
Fortunately, as educators, we are in a unique position to advocate for those individuals that have historically been marginalized. When considering the work that we do, the content we create, and the instructional choices we make, I would challenge you to think about those people that are not like you. Traditionally speaking, I am quite privileged. I am white, middle class, and a cisgender man. As Dolly Chugh from the Harvard Business Review puts it, “each of us have some part of our identity which requires little attention to protecting oneself from danger, discrimination, or doltish humor.” Most of my identity allows for a sense of privilege because I blend in with most of the people in my community. For most of my life, I didn’t truly understand how fortunate I was. To be honest, I still don’t know if I understand how privileged I am. I have endured some hardships but I have not walked a mile in the shoes of any other person. So, I have taken it upon myself to try to be an advocate for others while also not speaking for the communities I am not personally a part of. That is a difficult, but a very important balance to strike. Recently in my teaching career, one of my first graders announced to the class that they “do not like black people.” I was stunned by the admission and felt paralyzed by my lack of preparedness for such a comment. I tried to diffuse the situation and get to the bottom of the remark, but I still felt lost with how to make a difference moving forward. Over the past couple of years, I have taken some steps to hopefully use my privilege to advocate for others. Idea 3: Be authentic and use your privilege. (Ideas 1 & 2 were shared in the last two blog posts listed at the top of this post.) Reasoning: As a member of the queer community, I know how amazing it feels to watch straight and cisgender allies support me and those like me. Many reports exist that support the concept that people in a place of privilege are better able to persuade and change the mind of others when it comes to bias. For example, a straight person confronting another straight person about the importance of gay rights can work better than a gay person confronting a straight person on the same topic. It is a flawed and confusing way of thinking, but ultimately important to understand. We have an opportunity to help others by using the parts of ourselves that we typically don’t give much thought to. It may be difficult to digest but our society is set up to support those that identify as straight, white, middle class, Christian, and/or male. In Decorah, a large percentage of our population falls under most, if not all, of those categories. We need to open our students' hearts, as well as their minds to those that may appear different. What can I try:
It can be quite intimidating to put yourself out there in order to make a change, but that change is necessary for everyone to succeed and be seen. We need to look out for each other. Be helpful, stay healthy, and chase happy. I’m writing to share a feedback technique Carole Sand and I tried recently in a writing class. It used a technique from the art world – a Gallery Walk – to improve feedback and mentoring for students’ work. The specific goal of this assignment was to provide feedback on student writing in real-time and offer supportive and critical feedback on early paragraph writing that used a claim - evidence - reasoning (CER) format. This is more formal writing than fifth-graders are used to doing, so it is a bit more challenging for them to do. Also, it is less creative and more analytical, which is another barrier. Frankly, it’s less exciting to write this way than to write creatively. BACKGROUND Students had already begun to draft a short analysis of a character in the story, Voices in the Park, as seen through author/illustrator craft choices. As they wrote, we could see uneven paragraph development using the CER format. Rather than give each student individual feedback (which would have taken too long and broken our rhythm) we decided to create a gallery walk; students copied a single paragraph and placed it on a slide in a Google Presentation. ASSIGNMENT SPECIFICS Here are the directions for this assignment: I pushed a blank presentation out to students as “Can Edit” collaborators. I called this a Gallery Walk, meaning it was a place to show our work for critique. After students posted their drafts, they were encouraged to analyze their own work using the highlighter tool and to read and notice and provide comments on what others were doing. Below are some of the slides after 30 minutes of work. STUDENT WORK AS MENTORS As students posted, they noticed things that others were doing. Sometimes they would pause to comment as in these examples below: REVISING USING STUDENT MENTORS Often students used what they noticed in other’s writing to improve their own work. Here is one example of a first draft and a draft after about 20 minutes after reading how others were crafting their work: First Draft About 20 minutes later. I see much more attention to incorporating simple in-text citations of evidence and to providing reasoning that connects evidence back to the claim, a crucial and difficult step.
TEACHER ROLE Our role as teachers was to strategically “seed” comments to bring out some of the things that we noticed and to write things we noticed on the class (analog) whiteboard. Items that emerged were in-text citations, claims (what required evidence for support, what did not), and how to transition into reasoning from evidence. All of this feedback happened in class over the space of 30-35 minutes. Student interest in each other’s writing seemed to increase the amount of feedback per student. SUMMARY THOUGHTS We noticed several things over the course of the class period:
This process also gave students A LOT of comments and models to use on a single paragraph without requiring a lot of teacher-time (30-35 minutes of class time.) The work students did on the Presentation could be brought back and applied to the other paragraphs in their persuasive writing. I’m thinking of doing this kind of gallery walk with my science students as they craft explanations for phenomena or argue from evidence. I think it would work well whenever students are trying to hone already taught work (but not clearly understood), or as a way to critique and expand thinking. |
AuthorsDCSD Teachers, Instructional Coaches, Learner Advocate, and Collaborative Teachers Archives
April 2024
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