Power Standards Protocol

"Without a definite process to prioritize standards, teachers will often "pick and choose" those standards to emphasize based on what they like to teach, what they have curriculum materials for, what they think students need to know and be able to do the following year, and/or those standards most likely to appear on the state test. But without using specific criteria for prioritization, everyone will most likely select different standards from their colleagues and then wonder why students come to them each year with such an inconsistent understanding of prior-grade standards."  -Larry Ainsworth, Ed Week Jan 2015

Last Friday the Literacy Coach meeting was expanded to include teachers from grades 2-12 to engage in a protocol around identifying ELA Power Standards in each of these grades.  To Ainsworth's point, since our adoption of the Common Core State Standards, we have never had the opportunity to work in vertical teams like this, discussing and selecting priority standards based on a shared set of criteria.  At the middle school level, I believe our extensive work in content PLGs and the collaboration among the coaches both here and in the 5DP have helped us think about the standards we prioritize, but that criteria on which to prioritize standards had been more implicit. Before jumping into the standards themselves, the protocol in which we engaged began with an explicit explanation of the criteria all grade-level teams would use to select power standards.

We discussed the standards using these four criteria:

• Endurance: extends beyond one year of learning. Applies to real-life concepts & skills students will need beyond your class/school 
• Leverage: Has application in contents disciplines other than yours 
Readiness for the next level of learning: contains the knowledge and skills students need in order to move onto the next level
• External Exams: will be assessed on standardized exams, i.e. Common Assessments, MCAS 2.0                                                (Criteria descriptions "Priority Standards: The Power of Focus" Ainsworth)

The Protocol 

With our shared understanding of the criteria by which we should be evaluating the standards, our director, Dr. Porter, charged us with the task of identifying just 10 priority standards for our grade level.  To organize this, she had placed chart paper around the room labeled with each of the 5 strands and how many standards we should prioritize per strand: Reading Literature(3-4), Reading Informational Text(3-4), Writing(3), Speaking & Listening(2), and Language (2).  

My grade-level team consisted of myself and Briana, a 6th grade ELA teacher at SBA. Each grade level team began by independently reading through all standards in the Reading Literature Strand and independently selecting 3-4 RL standards using the four criteria.  Once we had our agreed-upon standards we posted them on our grade level chart paper.  We then discussed our standards with the grade level team above and below us to see the connection or lack thereof in our standards selection.  There were certainly some differences, but often times when we looked at each particular grade's version of a standard, it helped us make sense of why they had been selected.  In a few cases, teams elected to remove or swap out a standard they had initially selected.

When Briana and I came together to discuss our selected standards we noticed a couple things. First, that we had each focused on many of the same standards and we only had to work to come to an agreement on the 4th of our 4 selected standards. Secondly, we had both used Endurance as our main lens for thinking about which standards to prioritize.  This big-picture thinking is essential, I think, but I also noticed as we moved through the strands and consulted with other grades that we had to adjust our standards at times when we incorporated more of the other criteria. Readiness, for example, was a criterion that we used more in our discussions with vertical teams about how the standards should build on each other.  

  

We repeated this same process of independent selection, grade-level team agreement, vertical team discussions for each of the remaining four strands.  The original parameters from Dr. Porter had given us the freedom to select up to 15 power standards over the strands, with the understanding that eventually we want to evaluate further to get our number as close to 10 as possible.  In our remaining time, we worked to see where we could make eliminations or consolidations in some cases.  Many grade level teams chose to view RL/RI standards 1 and/or 2 as the same general standard with different text-types.

Points to Consider

• These charts of selected standards are DRAFTS and remain open for revision and suggestions for other grade-level teachers who were not present during the protocol.  So please consider your grade level's draft and please feel free to send along feedback about the standards. 
• This does not change anything for the current school year. Once the Drafts are revised and finalized during Spring 2018. we will adopt the Power Standards beginning in the 2018-2019 school year.
• Selecting Power Standards does not mean all other standards are obsolete and can be ignored. The 10-ish standards that make it to the finalized Power Standards documents are the ones you will continue to teach and weave into your instruction on a year-long basis.  The remaining standards will be divided up into the Quarter Anchor Units based on where it makes sense to emphasize those particular standards.  This work begins October 27th.
• You'll notice Writing standards 1, 2, & 3 are absent from the posters. These writing standards are already emphasized in certain quarters of the year based on your anchor unit and the benchmark assessment.  Those writing standards remain where they are, emphasized in each particular quarter, but the Power Standards in the drafts reflect additional writing standards that meet the criteria for year-long priorities. 

Click Here to see a document I created to see the full chart pictured above.  I made a chart for grades 5-9 to give us a complete picture of where our students are coming from and where they are going.  I look forward to hearing your thoughts about this and to continue this work with anchor units.

Writing Center Observation

Last month I had the privilege to visit the Writing Center at Revere High School for the second time. During my first visit, I witnessed the tutors working with a History class full of students writing papers they had been assigned.  In that session I observed the Writing Tutors taking a variety of approaches.  A few tutors sat with groups of students with Chromebooks open, ready to provide feedback in real time, watch students' writing, processes, comment on students' feedback to each other, and also to ensure students understood the feedback given to them by peers. It was a student-driven, student-managed, highly productive environment. Watching the writing tutors in action sparked in me a desire to see the foundation of this work--to see the work they'd engaged in to become such effective tutors. So, over the summer I reached to the Writing Center Coordinator and she kindly invited me to visit the Center in September during her work with the tutors.

The group of six tutors, three male, three female, sat around a table joined by their teacher, Allison Casper, all holding copies of the same piece of narrative writing.  To practice this process of providing peers feedback on their writing, the tutors begin by offering their own writing to the group for analysis and feedback.  I joined the group as they were in the middle of sharing their feedback and questions about one of their fellow tutor's college essay.  They spoke about her piece with such respect as if they had read every line very carefully because, I sensed, they had.

"You have a lot of powerful phrases and words," one of her peers complimented.

Casper probed, "Can you give her an example?" Each of the tutors returned to the text and pulled out a few particularly powerful phrases to share with the writer.

The group talked about the different vignettes in her writing and a couple tutors shared how her piece reminded them of The House on Mango Street and wondered if she was in fact inspired by that text. As the tutors continued their discussion of the vignettes and ways to possibly reorder the stories for different effects, Ms. Casper jumped in to remind the writer about the importance of "following threads" that she has opened up for the reader.  The audience, the reader, was a constant part of the conversations as the tutors shared how certain aspects of the piece impacted them or drew them in.

When Casper moved the group to share what questions the piece raised for them, they asked, "What is the central theme?" "What were you trying to do in this paragraph?" This paragraph here, I wondered if you could elaborate on this type of  love?" "Which sickness do you think impacted you the most? Maybe you could write about that one?"   There was no expectation on the writer to have answers to these questions or even to share her thinking at the moment.  It was all very conversational as the group talked energetically about her writing and she absorbed their comments, sometimes jotting down notes in the margins of her copy of the piece.  To wrap up the feedback cycle, Ms. Casper reinforced for the writer just how much she had to think about as she moved into the revision stage of her writing.  On a practical note, she also reminded the writer to copy and paste into a new document before revising so she would never lose her original pieces.  Each of the tutors returned their copy of her writing back to her with all their notes for her to read later.

The group then moved onto another student whose narrative piece was also a college essay.  Casper began by asking the writer, "What were you trying to convey to the admissions board?" He responded easily, telling the group he was hoping to show that working during high school has made him a more patient person with better time management skills. Again, each member of the group had their own copy of the piece and followed along as the author read his piece aloud.  The group then engaged in a second, silent reading of the piece.

Ms. Casper moved the group from the individual reading into the feedback phase by, reminding them that they provide feedback in a particular order: "What works well in the piece? What questions do you have?"  The group praised his use of comedy and description of situations to which all shoppers could relate. He shared, somewhat nervously, that the chronology of his story probably wasn't accurate but that he had combined a bunch of memories.   One of his peers assured him, "I wouldn't worry about being totally truthful in your writing.  I had to fabricate a little because I couldn't remember all the details exactly."

Their exchange reminded me vividly of something Lucy Calkins had said when I heard her speak at the 2016 Don Graves Write Now! Conference. Calkins talked about the role of memory in narrative writing and she said just what this writing tutor said, you can't get stuck on being 100% truthful in narrative writing.  You may have a strong memory from childhood and you also remember outfits you wore as a child.  In narrative writing, you combine all the little details you remember with the larger memories that you can't forget.  It was beautiful to witness a writer who understood this about narrative assuage her peer's fear that his writing wasn't quite real simply because he'd played with a few details.

At some point, the conversation among the tutors and teacher began to sound a little like listening in on a book club.  They spoke about the details they appreciated and connected with as readers.  They wondered if the writer inserted a little more dialogue into a certain passage if it would help them understand another character more. They shared their confusion at certain parts and wondered at the writer's intentions.  Again, the writer remained fairly quiet during their conversation, soaking in their feedback and reflecting on the changes he will make when revising.

For homework, the students were assigned an article titled, "Minimalist Tutoring: Making Students Do All the Work" by Jeff Brooks. Intrigued by everything I had observed in their feedback session, I sought out and read the article myself. Brooks says, "We ought to encourage students to treat their own writings as texts that deserve the same kind of close attention we usually reserve for literary text." Brooks has many more concrete strategies and specifics on how to be a minimalist tutor, but this one quote sums up for me what I saw in the Writing Center.  There was such respect for each writer and their piece.  Everyone in the circle was giving equal attention, reverence, and reflective consideration to their own and each other's writing.  Again, their discussions brought me back to something Calkins said about the discussion around writing or finding a topic.  When a writer shares their ideas for a piece of writing with you, it is the listener's job to ask questions that increase the writer's energy to talk about and eventually write about their topic.

At the end of the session, Ms. Casper asked for my thoughts and energy was the only word I could think of to appropriately describe my experience there.  It was so clear to me that the constructive feedback and discussions around their pieces left each writer buzzing with energy to revisit their pieces and revise with a purpose. Just as the ideas for writing center has trickled down from college writing centers, I continue to think about what we can do for middle school students to recreate these thoughtful and powerful discussions about writing amongst peers.

UDL Virtual Tours: Environment Design

The start of the school year is often the time when teachers put into place the new decorating ides they've been thinking about over the summer.  It can be really tempting, especially if you've ever fallen into a Pinterest black hole or two, to add details to make your room look cool. An aesthetically pleasing classroom may look great, but it's important to also think about the users.  A universally designed classroom thinks first about its users--the learners--and the cool factor is an added benefit to all users.


Over the summer I watched a live-streamed video from the UDL-IRN that specifically spoke about the intentional environment designs in a classroom to make the room accessible and comfortable for all learners.  7th Grade ELA teacher Tanya Leon let us into her classroom and explicitly talked through the design decisions she had made.  Given that UDL is a problem-solving, solution-oriented framework, Tanya talked about the barriers she had encountered over the years with her writing workshop.  To minimize this barrier she included some small tables for writing groups and small group conferences.  She also appealed to her students to ask what they would like to see in their classroom.  Some students requested high-top cafe tables because it made them feel older.  This is a great example of a design decision she never would have made without asking for students' feedback.  I imagine students probably take pride in their classroom when they've had a say in how it's designed.  It's certainly not realistic or necessary for teachers to purchase furniture like this on their own.  Finding furniture that friends/family are looking to get rid of and using it in your classroom is one way to work on your design.  DonorsChoose.org is also a way for teachers to receive donations from others to benefit their students.  To listen to and see Tanya's portion of the webinar click the link here. http://tinyurl.com/T-L-classdesign

With the importance of intentional environment design and the help of our school's Technology Specialist (@j3dupuis), I recently put together something I'd been thinking about for a quite a while.   Several years ago at the UDL Summer Institute, I  saw a virtual tour of an empty classroom in a district that had been implementing UDL for a few years. Though the classroom had no students or teacher in it, there was still a lot to learn from the environment and materials themselves.  As visitors "toured" the classroom, we were able to click on magnifying glass shaped hot-spots that provided information about what intentional decisions the teacher had made concerning the physical space and available resources in the classroom.  I loved the idea of these virtual tours  but I wanted to recreate this with classrooms from our school to help SBA staff members see the purposeful environment designs their colleagues make to help them think about their students and their classrooms. A quick conversation with the tech teacher helped us stumble upon Roundme.

SBA UDL Virtual Tours
Take a step inside the a few SBA classrooms and see how they've designed their environments thinking about their learners.

360 Virtual Tour of SBA Classrooms
Grade 6  Classroom	http://tinyurl.com/UDL6-360
Grade 7  Classroom	http://tinyurl.com/UDL7-360
Grade 8  Classroom	http://tinyurl.com/UDL8-360

Roundme  
Roundme is a website and an app that allows you to easily create virtual reality tours from your personal photos.

Signing up for a Roundme account is free and allows you to create up to 15 tours a week.  There is a paid version available with additional capabilities and educators are entitled to a 50% discount if you provide the school's Tax Id. For the purposes I needed, the free account was more than enough.

Creating a Tour

Once you've signed into the site, click Create Tour in the upper right-hand corner. 

You can upload one of your own photos or you can browse from a bank of photos available. I used the Panoramic setting on my phone to take pictures of the classrooms I wanted and then uploaded these.  While the photo is being uploaded, it is stretched to created a 360 view of the space, so you want to avoid using a photo of a very small space. 

After selecting the photo, click upload and wait as the photo is turned into a moving 360 tour.

 

Your photo will now appear as a moving photo, giving the view a 360 degree view of the space. 

Creating Info Hot-Spots

The hot-spot element was essential for me when creating these virtual tours because I wanted to encourage thinking beyond "looks awesome" toward "oh, that's why he/she put that in her classroom." Creating hot-spots on Roundme proved to be extremely simple!

Click and drag the round white circle with the "i" and place it on the area of the photo you want to highlight. 

Release the hots spot and these boxes will appear.  Title your hot spot whatever you want users to see when they hover off the "i" circle during their tour.

In the description you can write what you'd like visitors to know and/or add a more zoomed in image of the details you want to share more information about.  Click "Create Hotspot" and it's saved.

Saving & Sharing Your Tour

Click on the settings wheel in the upper right-hand corner and enter the details of your tour and click save.

To Publish and Share your tour, switch the green pencil in the upper right-hand corner from right to left and it will turn to a blue and white eye.  When you click on the three white dots, click Share & Export and you will generate a link to invite visitors to your tour.  

                     

 

Roundme in the Classroom 

Using Roundme to create tours of classrooms prompted me to think about how this tool could be used by students.

One idea I had was a for Getting to Know You purposes: Students take a photo of a space that is important to them and insert hotspots to help teacher and peers gain more insight into their important space.  Possible spaces might be their bedrooms, a park they visit often, a church, a grandparents' house, or many more.  It's an easy way to learn more about students by seeing into their home world--where you will likely never visit.

There are many other ways to use this, I'm sure, and I'd love to hear how others would use Roundme with their students.

Reflections on Write Beside Them

Since becoming a coach a couple years ago, I have had the privilege and pleasure to spend more time in my colleagues' classrooms than I had ever been able to before.  Being welcomed into classrooms from all over the school definitely helps me observe patterns and trends.  One such trend I noticed was the students' enthusiasm and excitement I often witnessed during my visits to ELA theme classes. I saw students writing, reading, and discussing each others' blogs, in Books, Blogs, and Beyond.  Students in Speak Your Mind were presenting animatedly on topics they were passionate about.  And, as seen below, students literally jumping for joy when they published their Journalism podcast in the SBA Freedom student newspaper!

I had seen bits and pieces of this type of enthusiasm in my own classroom, but not on a regular basis, so I wondered: What is so different about writing in theme classes versus ELA class? In and out of PLG we began talking about this idea of "Real World" vs. "School Writing" and trying to connect with our most positive experiences teaching writing.  With this in mind, I set out to read a collection of professional books about writing instruction that would help breathe more "Real World" writing opportunities into school.    

 

Write Beside Them by Penny Kittle

I began this book mid-school year and honestly had a difficult time getting into it, so I just finished it at the start of the summer.  Kelly Gallagher's Write Like This had hooked me immediately and because I found practical practices for implementation it was a book I read quickly but definitely need to reread.  Whereas I  could pull a chapter or couple pages from Gallagher's book and say I'm going to try "this," I think Kittle's book reads better as a whole book.  It's a mix of theory, personal experience, and specific classroom practice that I appreciated once I'd finished it.  Without necessarily using the terms "Real World" vs "School Writing,"  Write Beside Them certainly focuses on the "personal investment," "choice of topic," and "authentic audiences," we'd been working to infuse into our "school writing."  

Ideas to Consider 

• Teacher as Writer: I read an excerpt from Gretechen Owocki's The Common Core Writing Book, where she says being a writing teacher who does not write is like being a piano teacher who does not play. Kelly Gallagher believes that the teacher is and must continue to be the strongest writer in the class by writing.  Write Beside Them is no exception as Kittle describes what a big role her own life as a writer plays in her classroom.  She talks about the challenges she found with using literature from her shelves or other published pieces as mentor texts.  Because these pieces were polished and published, she felt her students were missing out on seeing the messy and non-linear process that writing often is.  Instead, she shares messy drafts and unfinished pieces, writes in front of them with her writing projected, and makes her thinking visible and audible as she talks out her decisions. Regardless of how you share your writing with students, for me it comes back to Owocki's point that if we are not practicing the skill and art we're teaching, we will have nothing to share.
• Organization: A few years ago I watched an interview with Nancie Atwell where she talked about her writing workshop and a time when Don Graves visited her classroom.  Initially she was disappointed when his observation was "You're so organized" because she had wanted him to notice something that felt much more profound to her. She realizes that his comment did get to a central element of the writing workshop and she writes more about that here.  Kittle says, "Organization leads struggling writers to competence." (p.8).  It is the way she intentionally designs structures to organizes notebooks, writing groups, workshop time frames, furniture, reading & writing conferences, and more that provides Kittle's students the conditions to succeed and grow as writers.  
• Writers Notebook: Of course the idea of a writer's notebook is not groundbreaking, but I love what she says about why students need one: "The notebook is a place for all that bad writing that is essential to uncover good writing." (p.26). Quick Writes, for which Kittle shares many ideas, are the starting point for students' notebook writing.  The three step Quick Write process is to write, reread the writing to find places where you have more to say, take that idea from the quick write and write more.  "Rereading is an essential and often overlooked part of teaching writing."(p.51). This quote strikes me because I realize that in order for students to reread their work so they can write more they must have a large volume of writing as well as topics they care enough about to go deeper.
• Topics & Choice:  Kittle reflects on an experience she had years ago where she told her students they could write about anything they wanted.  Unsurprisingly, many students responded that they had nothing or didn't know what to write about, which helped her realize that "choice needs to be taught." (p.33).  The teacher's role is not to tell students what to write about, but rather provide students exercises and opportunities that help students figure out their topics themselves. Teachers' must support students affective networks by balancing the demands of the task--writing--and the resources--quick writing & talking with peers--available to students. Quick Writes are one way to help students uncover writing topics and the rereading is a huge part of this process. Kittle cites Lucy Calkins, "Children will never write well if they are accustomed to writing briefly.  Elaboration is one of the very first and most fundamental qualities of good writing," when she emphasizes the importance of rereading your own writing to notice " themes in thinking."  These themes often become the topic for our writing and students need a lot of time to make this happen.  They need time to write, time to talk and flesh out their ideas, time to read, and write again.  
• Response Groups: "Writers need lots of readers" (p.91).  Kittle's Response Groups are comprised of three students who remain together through a couple units of study.  They begin with a teacher-assigned task to examine a mentor texts together and eventually move on to share their own writing.  I LOVE this idea! Like many of the practices in her book, this reminds me of the way many of my creative writing courses in colleges were organized.  These groups are a much more efficient way to get a students' writing exposed to multiple readers before the teacher reads it.  They are also a beautiful way to foster community and collaboration among students because they are depending on each other to provide timely and thoughtful feedback.  It also makes me rethink the idea of authentic audiences that we've been discussing for the last year.  Although these groups are technically in the classroom, it is still a way to extend a student's audience beyond just the teacher.

This marked-up page looks like most of the pages in my copy of the book, but this one connects the most to our continued struggle with Real World vs School Writing.  We can't ignore the type of writing our students are often asked to do as part of their academic careers, but as Kittle's chapter is aptly titled, we must continue "Seeking Balance" in the types of writing opportunities we offer our students. 

Flipgrid Video Discussion

Before I explain how I created my Flipgrid, I want to note that creating a video to be shared widely is way outside my comfort zone.  I was nervous to do it, I doubted whether I should, and I subjected my kids to being my dry-run audience before I actually posted.  I mention this only because this did feel like taking a risk and one I wouldn't have taken if I didn't see all the possible ways students could benefit. If I had the opportunity to share this with students I would certainly start by acknowledging how I struggled to make this and how unsure I felt posting it to help ease their discomfort and hopefully encourage them to take risks.

Flipgrid
When I first came across Flipgrid, it  instantly prompted me to think about all the ways I would love to try integrating this with students.  Flipdgrid is both a website and an app that can be downloaded on iPads and phones.  Basically, Flipgrid is a tool where you pose a question, either through video or typing, to a community of learners.  Those who've viewed your Flipgrid then have the opportunity to respond to your prompt by creating their own short  response. It took me about 3 minutes to create a teacher/admin account using my email and a password and within 10 minutes I was creating my Flipgrid video!

Groups 

Groups are basically the classes or communities of viewers you want to reach. You might create Groups for each of your class periods, or create one grid for all your students.  Since I don't have any particular classes, I created a Group called ELA PLG.  To create a grid you just click the +New Group, give the Group a name, and upload a picture if you choose. 

Privacy: You can choose who can access your group and how. If you select Student Email, simply input @_____(your students' address) and this will require students to enter their school email to access and participate in the group.  

Topics

Once you've created your GROUP, you can think about creating Topics--the questions you want to pose to generate video responses from your learning community.  I created the ELA PLG GROUP as a way for our PLG to stay in contact during this time.  I added a Topic titled "Idle Hands..." to hopefully start a discussion and for us to share some personal victories in the midst of such uncertainty.

I made this Topic Active so people who have the code are able to view and respond.  You can also set your topic to FROZEN (view only) or HIDDEN (won't be visible or open for responses until you change the setting). Another feature is that you can create a topic and then "set a launch date" to Activate your topic and accept responses. 

Setting for Student Response:

There are many settings you can use to control what students can share, whether or not you moderate and see videos before they are posted, whether or not students can respond to peers, and other responsible use parameters you might consider putting in place depending on the ages of your students.

Alternative to Video:

Students can also respond using the WHITE BOARD feature (visible when they add to the dicussion) which allows them to write with a voice over explanation. This is similar to Explain Everything but will also appear in the grid response.  

Flipgrid in the Classroom

Whether you're already using this or are just hearing about it now, I'm positive you have many creative ways to use this with your students.  Here are just a few I've thought about. :

• Book Talk/Review: Create a Topic(s) dedicated solely to reading and ask your students to post a Book Talk/Review for a book they've recently read or even just make a quick post about a book they are currently reading.  Again, ask students to reply to peers to expand students' exposure to different books and learn from classmates.
• Answer Explanations: This could probably be for any subject but I was thinking about a different way to "show your work" and make students' thinking visible in math.  Pose a question to students and ask them to respond with their answer and explanation.  If it were a HW assignment the first to reply with correct answers could be rewarded.  With the moderate tool, you could wait to post students' videos to the Grid until you've received many answers to avoid "giving away" the answer. 
• Getting to Know You: As a beginning of the year activity pose a question (nothing intensely personal) to your students and ask them to share their responses.  Additionally, have them watch at least two of their peers' videos and respond.  You get to know your students but they get to know each other.
• Read Aloud: Students could record themselves reading aloud sections of a book they are enjoying or the text you've assigned and share their response to the text. One of the challenges with incorporating the reading standards into remote learning is that we're often assessing students' reading through writing.  While writing is often a solid measure of a students' comprehension, it sometimes creates more barriers for students who struggle to write.

These are just a few of the ideas that have surfaced for me since learning about this tool.  If you are interested in learning more I highly suggest following @Flipgrid and checking out the hashtag #FlipgridFever. Both will provide you with many ideas for how teachers all over the world are integrating Flipgrid into their classrooms. There are also a number of articles and other posts about Flipgrid in the classroom.  I recently read one titled, "5 Strategies for Using Flipgrid in the Language Learner Classroom," in which a Language Learner shares his successes and struggles using Flipgrid with his students.

Summer Reading

Summer Reading! 

My Summer Goal: read as many diverse books as I possibly could in effort to add more "mirrors & windows" to our SBA student library.  Some of the books I read, particularly the ones I couldn't see myself in at all, caused me to think about our diverse student population and how often they come to the library and can't find a book that feels like a mirror to them.  Or, maybe they don't come at all because they just assume they won't one.  Either way, I intentionally sought out books with diverse characters and stories and I'm happy to say that the books I read and more have already been purchased for the SBA Library.  I'd love your thoughts for titles and authors we should add.  

LGBTQ Books

• George by Alex Gino 
• Gracefully Grayson by Amy Polinski​ (A middle school boy, Grayson, only sees a girl when he looks in the mirror and knows he should have been born female.  The book is his story of playing the female lead in the school and all that comes with.)
• The Pants Project by Cat Clarke (Liv knows she's really a boy and hates that she's forced to wear a skirt as part of her school's uniform.  What I really liked about this book is that there is a lot of diversity-Liv has two moms and her friend at school has a physical disability).
• Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan (Paul is an openly gay high school student in what seems like a pretty progressive high school-many openly gay students, the quarterback of the football team is also the homecoming Queen, named Infinite Darlene.  *mature, probably for 8th grade)
• So Hard to Say by Alex Sanchez 

Culturally Diverse Books

• If I Ever Get Out of Here by Eric Gansworth​ (Lewis, lives in poverty on a Native American reservation while going to a primarily white school and the discrimination and challenges he faced.  )
• Somewhere Among by Annie Donwerth-Chikamatsu 
•  The Whole Story of Half a Girl by Veera Hiranandani (Nadia is half Indian and half Jewish dealing with some seriously life changing events.) 
• 
  

Additional Books I read and enjoyed

• The Fourteenth Goldfish by Jennifer Holm
• Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan
• Raymie Nightingale by Katie DiCamillo
• Just Another Girl by Elizabeth Eulberg
• Worthy by Donna Cooner

Summer Learnin', Had Me a Blast

I remember reaching the mid-point of the summer and thinking, there's still plenty of time left.  But, with the start of the school year just a few short days away, it certainly feels as if "all at once summer collapsed into fall."  It's the perfect time, then, to reflect on all the reading and learning I did over the summer and think about what impact this might have on the upcoming school year. 

CAST UDL Symposium

If you followed the #UDL4Justice hashtag at all over the summer, you may have seen some of the conversations and ideas being exchanged at CAST's 3rd annual symposium.  I was fortunate enough to attend and present again this year and it was a powerful experience all around. At the most basic level, it's just so energizing to be surrounded by such dedicated educators from all over the globe and from all roles within schools.  While I wish I could have bottled up the whole symposium to bring back to school, I will share just a few of points that have kept me thinking all summer.

In her Day 1 keynote speech, Katie Novak encouraged us to look closely at our curriculum and be honest about whether it offers both "mirrors and windows" for our students.  Mirrors, where they see themselves reflected in the curriculum, and windows that give them views of worlds different from their own.  Katie urged us also to look at ourselves and our own beliefs and attitude towards groups so we are more aware of how our beliefs are reflected in our actions toward our students.  Her whole speech was riveting, but what really connected with me was her distinction between "options & choice" in terms of UDL.  As a parent, I think about when I say things like, "You can clean your room before breakfast OR you can clean your room after breakfast." I have may have presented an option, but I definitely haven't given my kids the choice to not clean their room.  In the classroom if I say, you can "Write an essay about why cell phones should be allowed in school OR why they shouldn't be allowed in school," I've given my students an option but I haven't given them a choice to argue something that matters to them.   Katie's comment, "I can't make authentic choices for you. Students must and can make authentic choices for themselves." is one I will continue thinking about and working toward.

Kristina and I also had the opportunity to present some of the work SBA has done around UDL and as I think it usually happens, the best part of the presentation was in actually reflecting on our work in order to put the slides together.  We focus on how we, the SBA staff, have found ways to infuse student voice into our school and how this can positively impact engagement. Reflecting on the work we've done over the last 5 plus years really encouraged me to continue finding ways to bring student voice into the school and community. If you are interested in seeing what we shared at the symposium, here is a link to our presentation. 

 

   

Session Summaries in Quotes

• "The work is not about intentions. It's about the impact on the the lives of our students." ~Mirko Chardin (@MirkoMilk)
• "Stand up for what you believe in. Do what's right in the face of adversity." ~Elizabeth Stein (@ElizabethLStein)
• "When we make our thinking as expert learners explicit, our dialogue eventually becomes students' inner monologues." ~Lisa Beth Carey (@EquitableAccess)
• "Make one point of contact beyond "hi" each day and you invest in students' emotional bank accounts." ~Matt Bergman (@mattbergman14)
• "We know one size fits all doesn't work for our students so why would we expect it does for our adults?!" ~Liz Berquist (@Liz_Berquist)

MCIEA Cohort 2 

In late August, I joined the 7-Blue Team members at the Massachusetts Consortium of Innovative Education & Assessment (MCIEA) to "begin" the work of creating Quality Performance Assessments.  Although the PD itself definitely fell a bit short, the idea behind the MCIEA and QPAs is founded in the principles of UDL, so we've been moving in this direction for years!  The consortium's goal is to "reclaim the term assessment" and to bring it back into the hands' of teachers.  We were presented with some studies findings that show for all the focus on standardized assessments, we have done little to actually close the gaps we so often hear about.  

For me, the standout "new" idea of the two-day session was Accountability vs. Responsibility. MCAS and other such standardized tests were created in an effort to hold schools accountable for their students' performance and growth over time. This system made schools accountable to external forces.  I can't think of a single teacher I know who would say they didn't want their students to grow and improve after spending a year learning together.  We've also all had a student who we knew made great strides over the year, but for whom the standardized tests didn't offer the opportunity to convey that.  If we think about our responsibility to our students, we begin thinking about holding ourselves accountable.  However subtle this difference may seem, it feels empowering to me.  In "tested" subjects there is often that emotional struggle between what teachers "know is right" and what teachers "feel obligated to do because of testing."  Focusing on our responsibility to our students rather than our accountability to an external force, allows us to see our students as they are--individual and varied learners and not test scores.

It was energizing to be a small part of the team's brainstorming about what kind of Quality Performance Assessment they could create for their shared group of students. The UDL framework was everywhere in their discussion about embedding true choice, seeking authentic audiences, and offering multiple representation of student knowledge!