I don’t know if we should trust that clown.
Strategic Coherence
One of the first texts given to students each year is Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on educational paradigms. It introduces one of the animating beliefs of this makerspace, which is that traditional education does not prepare students for the world they will join after high school. That world demands a different kind of intelligence, and it’s a far cry from the “model of the mind” that Robinson criticizes.
Watch the whole thing periodically to remind yourself why we’re here.
For most students, what the “world” demands is less pressing than what it will take to get into college and/or start a career, which is why we need to look specifically at what colleges and careers value. That list always starts with empathy, but it also always includes the rest of the nontraditional skills and traits we centralize in this course.
Two of those skill and traits are self-awareness and self-efficacy, which we loop together like so:
Student learning depends on an understanding of why we do what we do. As that post on empathy and college readiness notes, we need an answer to the question, “When am I ever going to have to use this?”
That’s what we have here. These explicit connections to college-, career-, and world-relevance break the strange geometry of traditional education. We’re after a sense of purpose.
Part of that is our focus on metacognition and reflection. Tracking the arc of learning over time grants us self-efficacy, and that applies to all stakeholders: My teaching takes shape through the same rigorous metacognition and reflection required of students, and Brewster, as a district, has always reflected on its progress.
Which brings us to the BCSD Strategic Coherence Plan:
This Strategic Coherence Plan has been available to the public for a while, but January 11 saw the formal release through that post. This is, in part, because of an upcoming event: On January 24, 2018, the Tri-State Consortium1 will visit the district for three days to evaluate the SCP.
I want us to help Brewster’s Tri-State efforts by showcasing the extent to which our Humanities makerspace fits the Strategic Coherence Plan. Through the support of district- and building-level administration, we’ve been able to develop a unique and uniquely nontraditional learning environment, and it aligns perfectly with the SCP:
Load a PDF explaing how by clicking here.
Our particular innovations beyond the SCP are just that: innovations particular to our classroom. We have a unique assessment model, grade abatement, based on growth in universal skills and traits; an interstitial model of instruction that improves on the flipped classroom; and makerspace-inspired assignments that reframe the important work of the Humanities.
Students in this course can speak specifically to the district’s vision. It’s why feedback and advocacy are essential. The district values that perspective as much as I do, and a sense of how this SCP is enacted on the frontlines will help to shape what happens next.
That’s something to keep in mind as you complete this Google Form, which you can also access through Google Classroom or the version embedded below:
Fill that form out as completely as you can, paying attention to the framing assignment below and on Google Classroom.
First, recognize this as an opportunity for self-awareness and self-efficacy. It requires the most critical kind of reflection and metacognition, which is why it’s being folded into our work week.
There is also an extrinsic motivation: This form will generate evidence for the top tiers of grade abatement, including the use of “inquiry-based tools and structures” in an attempt to “demonstrably improve the learning environment.” See the fourth tier’s specific language:
This is also an opportunity to “do more than just what is required,” since no one is required to respond. For those of you take advantage of this opportunity, we will set aside time in class over the next few days to reflect and be metacognitive. That will let us finish by the end of the next GAP panel (which is this Friday, January 19) and leave time for organizing and submitting the responses to administration and the Tri-State Consortium.
Look over the questions first, and try to write your responses separately from the form itself. You can answer as many or as few as you like, submit responses at different times, and edit your answers. Like everything else in here, this is about looped feedback and shared understanding.
Ask any questions about this below.
Learn more about this organization here. I’ve been involved as a team member for eight years now, and many of the innovations of this course started with Tri-State. I first heard of Alfie Kohn’s essay on de-grading through one of their study groups, for instance. ↩
How well do you guys think most teachers recognize and deal with students who show signs of mental issues? I wasn’t sure where to mention this, but it’s been bothering me for a while. At the end of my 8th grade year, I took a medication that made me severely depressed for about 2 months. My behavior ended up getting me detention, sent to the office, and watched closely — as if I was just suddenly being a bad student and misbehaving, not someone who might have a problem. I was suicidal and these punishments made the situation much worse. If these major signs aren’t recognized, especially in middle school, the time many people may become unstable (during their adolescent years), I imagine minor signs are completely unnoticed. This is something I want changed, because for people who don’t have a medication-caused problem, it can last years, or even decades.
I think it varies from teacher to teacher. Many of the teachers that I’ve had were, in my opinion, receptive to their students’ issues. I remember I had a death in the family last year, and Mrs. Cassells went out of her way to give her condolences. But I have also heard of teachers who don’t seem to care, or at least don’t notice problems with their students. I agree that these situations should be dealt with differently. It certainly seems counterintuitive to punish someone who is already facing severe personal problems. It’s possible that these signs, as you said, are minor, and teachers don’t notice them. If this is the case, there should be a greater effort to assure students that it’s safe to entrust teachers with their issues.
I have actually wondered this many times too, but been cautious to bring it up. I think many teachers in our school punish kids repeatedly without ever seeing if there is a bigger issue going on. I also think because we are kids, many adults think we just act out to be “rebellious” or something like that, without giving us the benefit of the doubt, or even asking us if we are okay. I think the guidance department is so laid back, I have had experiences with deaths in my family and not one guidance or teacher personnel has asked if I was okay, instead I was reprimanded for missing too much school.
I empathize with your story a lot. My attendance has always been a little iffy because of problems with depression, I ended up getting in school suspension about a month ago. Throughout the day, teachers would come in and out to monitor us. Several of them made comments about how “if we didn’t want to be there we shouldn’t have made such ‘poor decisions.'” (We were all there for cutting class.) They even felt it necessary to have Officer what’s his face in the room, as if we were super misbehaved, bad kids. I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone else was skipping class for the same reason I was.
This is a really interesting perspective and I think you should write something more about your experience.
I too have had family deaths and issues in the past years that I had to make my teachers aware of and few of them responded sympathetically. Some chose to ignore it and not say anything, which had a negative effect on me because I felt like I wasn’t getting the academic support I needed in getting extensions and extra help because of the emotional time I was going through. Just like how we are taught that we don’t know everyones stories, it’s the same thing for teachers. In middle school, our guidance counsellors were who we turned to when we had issues going on in or out of school and they would help us find solutions and get through things. In high school things are very different; we only see our guidance counsellors for college things and most of us don’t feel close enough to them to talk about personal things which is why teachers who we see everyday are better at reading us as students because they have the ability to notice changes in a student. Many teachers aren’t aware what negative things go on in some students’ lives and those negative things are most likely reflected in behavior or the work that students hand in. Some teachers just assume that the student just isn’t trying when there is most likely a reason, whether it be due to mental, familial or personal issues, that they are not being successful in the class. Most teachers will not take it upon themselves to pull a student aside and genuinely ask them if things are okay and if there is anything they can do to help and make things easier. Actions like this create a support system tied into the school that some kids might not have at home. Even if its just one teacher that takes it upon him/herself to help a student if they are struggling, it gives that student someone to go to in times of conflict.
I completely agree, you have to be a special kind of selfless and aware person to recognize when someone may be bottling something up inside themselves, and I think that BHS actually does have a lot of teachers that are amazing at telling when something is off with a student, and I’m sure many of us could think of at least one teacher that has gone out of their way to make sure a student is okay, even when it’s not even ourselves. Ms.McLeod will often just go up to students as their working in class and just look at them and say, “how have you been doing”, with the most genuine tone I’ve ever heard from any human. There is a difference between asking how someone is within casual conversation and actually looking them in the eyes and saying it from the part of your heart that really really cares about others. I never knew how appreciative I was of people like that until Ms.McLeod asked me how I was doing, and it is those small gestures that impact students lives, because that’s all we really want from our teachers: just a few words to show that we are not just a part of your salary. But yes, unfortunately there are teachers out there that care so much about deadlines and due dates that they forget the reason why they because a teacher in the first place, and it is so easy for us students to tell when a teacher just sees students as another problem in their busy lives.