“No academic goal is worth the soul of a child.” – Carol Ann Tomlinson
SEL/Culture of Care: First of all, I want to acknowledge all the HARD work you are all putting into creating a culture of care during CDL. I know that this is really difficult but your students feel safe and loved by you and that is what is important. I am going to start giving little tips and tricks to creating a culture of care. Some of it you may already be doing and some may be something you want to consider trying. Tip number one: Set and stick to a routine schedule. Students do best when they know what to expect. If you can, send out your schedule weekly.
We had our first Culture of Care (formally Thriving Citizens, formally PBIS) team meeting. We came up with some fantastic ideas that I cannot wait to implement! One of them is this staff shout out form! If you see or hear something wonderful that any of our staff members are doing, please let us know by filling out the form. We want to recognize all the hard work that is happening at our school during our staff meetings.
One more thing, I need you to send me three interesting and unique things about you for a little staff quiz. There may even be prizes involved! Please send your three amazing things about you to me by Monday, October 19th. I know, that’s soon! Thank you so much!!! 3 Unique Things
Link to SEL menus are here!
Lexia Update – As a whole school, we are doing a great job on usage and there’s a lot to celebrate. Our school-wide usage is about 76%, with every grade level well over 50%. Your usage as a staff member is being tracked as well and we have several of you showing weekly usage which is the expectation.
Data coaching is our next step, so to support this process we will adjust our meeting schedule just a bit. Wednesday 10/28 will be dedicated to strengthening our use with this tool. Please mark your calendars with the times below. This will take the place of our instructional team meeting for that day.
11:30-12:15 All staff Lexia
12:15-1 Kinder
1-1:15 break
1:15-2 1st
2-2:45 2/3
2:45-3:30 4/5
Knee Surgery – I currently have a knee replacement surgery scheduled for Monday 11/16 (We’ll call this my birthday gift for turning 50!). I will actually go out on the 9th as I will have to self-isolate for a COVID test as a pre-op requirement. I will work from home that week. Regardless of whether we are in CDL or Hybrid I intend to get everything set up so that you will hardly even know I am missing. Heidi Thomas will be able to manage things in my absence and we’ll have an administrator (most likely Paul Dean) on site or on call if needed. I know this is not the ideal timing and I am sorry for that, but it’s something I’ve put off for too long and I really need to get it done.
Meeting Schedule – Hopefully you’ve had a chance to check this out. If you notice anything problematic, please let me know.
Family Connections Team – The first thing to acknowledge is the great job you all do to make this one of our easiest meetings. So many of our families are connected and thriving even in these difficult times and that’s huge testament to your work behind and in front of the scenes. For the future this team will be ready to brainstorm ways to support our families struggling to stay connected with whatever model exists. Although our over all attendance is great, we realize there might be some other types of attendance concerns we might want to address. For example, a student who signs in but rarely contributes video or audio to a webex meeting or maybe signs in to start and disappears part way into the meeting. For these, we will likely want to encourage stronger engagement. We will soon roll out a Social and Emotional Learning Concerns Help Ticket and I’d like you to use this tool to ask for help with these students.
Tech
- Webex Tip
Are you sharing videos from your laptop during your Webex meetings? Be sure to optimize your sharing for Motion & Video. View the attached screenshot to see how. - Supplemental Science Lessons
We now have a district trial for Mystery Science thanks to your requests! This trial is good for the entire year and can be used to supplement our Amplify science curriculum. Mystery Science has made some of their activities “distance learning friendly” and can easily be assigned in Seesaw or Google Classroom. To get set up with our trial license, click here. This link works for both existing and new users of Mystery Science. Here’s a quick tutorial video on assigning mini-lessons to your students for both Seesaw and Google Classroom. - Archived Tech in Two
For those who are interested, we’ve archived all Tech in Two emails/tips here.
Questions/Concerns about COVID-19 related matters?… Please see this flowchart.
First Aid
Due to COVID-19 we will again be offering a blended model for the First Aid/CPR class. The class will be done online with a hands-on skills assessment to follow. The online portion of the class should take about four (4) hours with the skills assessment to follow with a first aid/CPR trainer that will take about 20 minutes. Each section of the course can be done to fit your schedule. Your First Aid/CPR card will not be issued until all portions of class are completed.
The process will be as follows:
1 . You will sign up for the class in Performance Matters
2. Stephanie Bent will send you a link to get started. This does not happen instantaneously!
Please check your Junk Mail if it does not appear in your regular inbox.
3. You will have until Monday, October 26th to complete the online portion.
4. After each section of the online session, there will be a one or two question quiz.
5. If you have completed the online portion, Friday, October 23rd the hands-on skills assessment schedule will be emailed to you to register. You can only do the in-person skills assessment when you have completed to online portion of the class.
6. The in-person skills assessment will be done in 30-minute increments with 1 to 4 person ratio.
20 minutes for the class and 10 minutes to clean and sanitize equipment.
The class currently in Performance Matters opens today, 10/9/2020 with a completion date of 10/26/2020. If interested, please sign up now.
Developing and Fine-Tuning Empathy
In this New York Times article, Emma Pattee interviews five people on ways we can improve our ability to empathize – that is, care for others by trying to understand and share their perspectives, feelings, and experiences from their point of view versus our own. Pattee contrasts empathy with sympathy, which is caring about others by feeling sorry for or concerned about them.
• Roman Krznaric, Australian philosopher, author of The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World – “We are facing a chronic and growing empathy deficit,” he says. The best way to develop empathy, he believes, is by talking with people we otherwise might not interact with and being curious about what makes them tick. Have a conversation with a stranger once a week, urges Krznaric.
• Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams – “Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us,” she says, “– a meteor shower of synapse firing across the brain – it’s also a choice we make to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it’s asked for, but this doesn’t make our caring hollow.”
• Brené Brown, University of Houston professor and author of Daring Greatly – She cautions against taking on another’s burdens and trauma. “What’s the use of both of us being in that dark place?” she asks. “There’s no help there.” Better to communicate that they are not alone and you are with them as they wrestle with the problem. And know that we won’t get it right all the time: “Circling back and cleaning up an empathic miss is as powerful, if not more powerful, than getting it right the first time,” says Brown.
• Karamo Brown, former social worker, one of the Fab Five on the Netflix makeover show, Queer Eye – “Working in social services,” he says, “you learn to remove yourself, and learn to say: ‘You’re not the same as the last child who was in here. You have your own story.’” He quotes his grandmother: “You have two ears and one mouth, so you can listen twice as much as you speak.”
• Nedra Tawwab, a therapist and the voice behind a popular Instagram account – “People have a full story,” she says, “and just because they did something bad or unfavorable, they probably have also done so many kind and good things in their life, too… Like if your grandfather grew up in 1937, he may be using language that is appropriate for when he grew up. Is it serving him now? Absolutely not. Can you set boundaries? Yes.” But you can understand.
“How to Improve Your Ability to Empathize with Others” by Emma Pattee in The New York Times, October 5, 2020
Carol Ann Tomlinson on Working with Students Experiencing Trauma
(Originally titled “Learning from Kids Who Hurt”)
In this article in Educational Leadership, Carol Ann Tomlinson (University of Virginia) says that as a K-12 teacher, she had a number of students who were dealing with abuse, the death of a parent, war-related incidents, bullying, or other forms of trauma. “Those were the stressors I know existed and could label,” says Tomlinson. “There were doubtless others my students faced that never surfaced but were no less real and damaging.” She describes three particularly vivid stories, and what she learned:
• Reading a story to her primary-grade class, Tomlinson walked around the room, paused briefly behind four-year-old Franklin, and rested her arm on the back of his chair. Suddenly he started screaming and running around the room, arms flailing. Tomlinson left the class in the care of her teaching assistant and took the boy outside, and he gradually calmed down and took her hand. Back in the classroom, she got students working on a free-choice activity and made a point of checking in with each child. A four-year-old girl looked her in the eye and said, “Ms. T, you shoulda figured out by now, ya can’t sneak up on Franklin!” That was his trigger.
• The mother of an eighth grader about to enroll in Tomlinson’s class described how every summer the boy put on plays to the delight of audiences in their neighborhood, doing casting, costumes, and directing. But he had a serious learning disability, constantly failed spelling and writing in school, and felt worthless. One more year of failure, said his mother, and he would be lost. “Trauma often accompanies long struggles with disabilities,” says Tomlinson. Determined to avoid setting him up for failure with conventional spelling instruction and tests, she told herself, “No academic goal is worth the soul of a child.” She worked around his disability, got other students to help him with spelling, and gave him opportunities to create stories and cartoons with advanced vocabulary. The class was transformational for him, and years later the student earned a master’s degree.
• One morning Tomlinson found a note on her desk that one of her best-behaved and highest-achieving students had left on her desk the afternoon before: I wanted you to know I won’t be in class tomorrow. I thought you might worry. As Tomlinson read the note, she looked up and saw a police officer standing in the door. It turned out the girl had run away from home; her mother was in the hospital with a terminal illness, and her father was abusing her every night. “I should have known more than I did,” says Tomlinson, “or should at least have been more watchful than I was.”The girl was located, spent time with a foster family, and returned to the class. Soon afterward Tomlinson found her in the hallway in tears; she had learned by chance (not from her estranged father) that her mother had died.
Thinking back on these three students, and others with different forms of trauma, Tomlinson wishes that as a young teacher she’d had professional development and done more reading on trauma. As it was, she learned on the job, with students her most important teachers. “Here’s the most powerful lesson I took from them,” she says: “Empathy is the great healer. To the degree that we were able, together, to take steps forward, empathy was the reason.” Her other takeaways:
– There’s wide variation in how young people respond to trauma, “from almost complete withdrawal to atomic explosion.”
– Teachers need to know more about kids than their grades and attendance records.
– A teacher can’t always figure out how to make things better, but should be able to avoid making them worse.
– There’s almost always someone who can help – perhaps last year’s teacher, a counselor, a family member – and a teacher should never try to deal with a crisis alone.
– Students need to know that their worth as humans is not tied up in academic skills and grades.
“Don’t ever assume that a student’s behavior is about you,” Tomlinson concludes. “As long as that’s your frame, a student’s worth is somehow an indication of your own worth.”
“Learning from Kids Who Hurt” by Carol Ann Tomlinson in Educational Leadership, October 2020 (Vol. 78, #2, pp. 28-33); Tomlinson can be reached at [email protected].