6! Six is the number of times I have walked out my office door straight into Shawna (Sory Shawna)….still working on getting used to the new office layout. Change is hard…especially when you hit your toes on those chair wheels!
MAC Day – Monday 2/24
Message from Eileen: Our Winter MAC survey day is scheduled for next Monday, February 24th. This is the day that your work with our students around any medical, mental health, dental, vision, substance abuse or connections to OHP can generate funds for our district. Please start thinking about any students that may need these connections or have had these connections, but need to be followed up on. More, lots more, tons more, you’ll be so tired of hearing about MAC more, later.
Welcome, Shahayla Evans!
Please join me in welcoming Shahayla Evans to our team. Shahayla will be leaving us for awhile to have her baby at some point in the spring, but we look forward to her being a part of the Highland family upon her return. Be sure to go downstairs and introduce yourself when you get an opportunity.
SIW and Staff Meetings
I made some adjustments to the staff meeting times so they did not fall on the Storyline SIWs. These are reflected on the master schedule document and calendar. The good news for those of you who prefer consistency is we are starting at 1:30 every Wednesday through the end of the year. I also need to point out that this format creates a long gap due to conferences, vacations, etc between meetings (similar to the gap in the fall). As always, I reserve the right to cancel if there is no pressing need to meet and give you that time back. If you feel there is something that needs to be on a staff meeting agenda, be sure to let me know.
Sibling Conferences – Due to this long gap we will not have a staff meeting at an ideal time to schedule sibling conferences. My suggestion is that you use some of the individual teacher prep day on Wednesday 3/18 to accomplish this task with each other. If anyone has a better idea, let me know, but if I don’t hear from anyone this will be our plan.
BrainPOP – Thanks to Cami and Evette Nishikawa our BrainPOP is back, baby! The account is reactivated for free for the rest of the year. Evette is working with the district and the hope is that this resource might get included in our apps next year, but for now, you have continued access for the remainder of the year. If you would like to meet with Evette and get a quick refresher, let me know and we’ll do our best to find the time to make this happen.
Core Effectiveness Meetings – thank you for taking the time on Tuesday to work on the core effectiveness documents. I did a quick read-through on each of them for my own learning. The following thoughts came to mind that I would like to share with the whole group;
- Don’t skip the celebrations. When you think of a graph of Performance versus Growth, our students are all in that upper-right quadrant with high performance and high growth.
- Keep the focus on the whole group. What’s working for everyone (students)? And what needs to be tweaked in order to work smarter, not harder? EBISS will focus on the interventions for the at-risk students, but this process is about what is working on a global scale.
- Be sure you share strategies that work. This is really your only apples-to-apples comparison between your classes. If one of you is struggling ask what your teammates are doing differently. If one of you is feeling particularly successful with a particular strategy, then share. It’s not a competition between classes, it’s a method to improve learning for the entire grade level. (I know you are pretty good at this, but just in case you need a little prompting….)
- Keep it simple and short. I did not use SIW time for these meetings for the very specific purpose of imposing a time limit. Don’t dwell on things too much. You have the skills and you are surrounded by supportive colleagues and you are already doing great work. If we use this process well, it will provide a support system for new team members in the future or some of those particularly challenging groups of students who come through from time to time.
- Learning is not a finite game. There is no finish line; in fact, the finish line keeps moving away. Because of this, it is often difficult to feel like you are “winning”, but if our job could ever be simplified to a win versus lose paradigm, know that you won. Even on the roughest day of the school year, you already won the moment you stepped out of bed to come here. Every now and then throw your arms up in the air (like you just don’t care) and claim it – you deserve it!
These meetings and the documents will be a topic at a future leadership meeting, so if you have some suggestions pass them along to your rep.
2020-2021 Master Schedule – Most feedback/questions/concerns with the schedule for next year seem to be centered on reading intervention timing. There might be some potential changes to intervention times for some, but this can likely be accomplished without major changes to the overall schedule. I have not heard from every grade level yet, so reps please be sure to check in with me if you have not already.
SBAC Training Modules –
- Module 2 – Test Administrators
- Module 3 – Accessibility Supports
- Module 4 – Test Security
- Module 5 – ELA and Mathematics
- Module 5A – Text-to-speech
- Module 6 – Science and Social Sciences
Upcoming Meetings/Events:
- Monday – 2:45-3:30 EBISS 2/3 – Michele & Marieka
- Tuesday – 2:45-3:30 EBISS 2/3 – JJ, Misha, & Marina
- Wednesday – 1:30-3:30 – SIW – Individual Teacher Prep
- Thursday – 2:45-3:30 Leadership
Upcoming Field Trips:
NONE
Assessments
- Spring easyCBM Window – 5/11/20-6/12/20
- Spring Dibels Day – 5/14*/20 (*Revised as of 1/13/20)
- Naglieri – all 2nd graders and any new-to-district students – Window 3/2/20-3/13/20. Letters went out to all families this week.
- SBAC – 5/11*/20-5/29/20 – (We may want to consider starting some groups in the middle of the first week of May to help with working around field trips, school-wide SL incidents, etc.)
Resiliency Survey- survey occurs on March 4th. This will be similar to the Dibels day when we have a team come in to help us administer the survey. We will be sending a letter out to families and there will likely be a couple families opting out.
Exploring Bias
I am including this article summary in the interest of growth and learning (and it reminded me of the Taking It Up training provided each year). Bias in schools is incredibly difficult to address. The Taking It Up training provided by our district each year tackles this subject with racial bias first, because it tends to be the most difficult to address, however, similar messages apply to gender, culture, socioeconomic status, etc. It’s good to read, reflect and talk about it. It’s difficult, but it is incredibly necessary. It’s also a mistake to think that because we are not a racially diverse school in terms of skin color, we don’t need to think about it. Please take the time to read this and give it some thought. If you are feeling up to writing a response or asking questions, please feel free to email me. This is totally optional, but I would love to hear from you on this topic – no deadline.
Addressing Unconscious Racial Bias in Schools
In this article in School Administrator, leadership consultant Sarah Fiarman and Tracey Benson (University of North Carolina/Charlotte) share uncomfortable moments they experienced as school leaders. Benson, who is African-American, got pushback from an all-white middle-school staff when he presented data showing stark racial disparities in student achievement. “Are you saying we’re racist?” one educator asked, leading Benson to back off and adopt an indirect approach on racial issues in the school. Fiarman describes avoiding discussions about race and racism as a new principal, worried that she would make a mistake and lose credibility “as a good white person fighting for social justice.”
After leaving school leadership positions and beginning to consult in schools, Fiarman and Benson found that uncomfortable moments like these are quite common. “White people fear being called racist and education leaders fear the consequences of that reaction,” they say. “Most of us are stuck in what we’ve come to understand as a binary view of racism… On one side are racists who are bad people with malicious feelings toward people of color, and on the other side are people with good intentions who are therefore nonracists. Within this bad racist/good nonracist binary mindset, racism is something you can choose to be exempt from.”
But research has established that almost all Americans have unconscious racial bias, say Fiarman and Benson, and it influences daily interactions in schools: “who gets called on or gets probed for deeper thinking, who is chosen for a special job or recommended for honors or pushed to improve further in written and oral responses. Bias also influences who is reprimanded more often and who is denied empathetic listening or a second chance.” These small daily events accumulate over weeks, months, and years, profoundly affecting the experience of students of color and also perpetuating biases in white students.
Understanding the pervasiveness of unconscious bias – often counter to our espoused values – is key to reducing racial disparities in schools, say Fiarman and Benson: “Once educators are freed from defensiveness and realize that no one is questioning their intentions, they can engage in the daily work necessary to ensure students of color are consistently treated fairly and with respect, high expectations, and dignity.” They believe that two high-leverage steps by school leaders can make all the difference:
• Normalizing conversations about race and bias. “Few educators in the United States have experience talking about race and racial bias in mixed-race settings,” say Fiarman and Benson. “Many white people don’t have experience talking about or recognizing the impact of their racial identity at all, and some white people still mistakenly subscribe to a colorblind approach.” Everyone needs practice, and leaders should work to create a safe space for these conversations. One caution: too often educators of color are called on to lead this work, which is unfair and emotionally taxing for them.
• Gathering evidence of impact. Effective school leaders “understand that the issue is not whether racial bias impacts their students but where and how,” say Fiarman and Benson. “As a result, they regularly collect, disaggregate, and analyze data. They model taking responsibility for results by asking, ‘What is the learning experience of students of color in my district? How do I know? What do we need to change in our practice in order to get better results? How will we know whether the change is an improvement?’”
“The Reality of Unconscious Racial Bias” by Sarah Fiarman and Tracey Benson in School Administrator, February 2020 (Vol. 77, #2, pp. 20-25), https://bit.ly/31XxxjU; the authors can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].