Welcome to Teachers At Risk
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Sep
30
What is a teacher?
Filed Under The Way I See It | Leave a Comment
When I think of a metaphor to explain my teaching style, I think of gardening or training horses. In my earlier posts Don’t blame the lettuce and Training Horses and Teaching Students I discussed why an effective teacher is like an effective gardener or an effective horse trainer. I like using metaphors to explain things so I was delighted when Senia sent me this quotation
“What is a Teacher? A Teacher is the special person who has the responsibility to provide the “Eyes” for a student, and helps the student to “See”. A good Teacher directs the student’s eyes to the simple parts first, and slowly, bit by bit, gently guides the seeking hands along a proven path. He carefully points out the next bits of knowledge, skillfully combining the simplicities, until the top of the mountain unfolds, not as a “complexity of facts”, but as a workable system, perfectly understood and usable by the student.”
~ Violin method book by Eden Vaning-Rosen
Senia notes
I also like that the end result is not a “complexity of facts.” By the time you get there, you’re not memorizing facts; you’re using parts you understand. This is how I want to be as a teacher.
I agree with Senia. I don’t want to be a teacher who is only concerned with a “complexity of facts”. I hear so much from teachers who feel pressured to teach kids all the facts about their subject before the end of the semester. These teachers are upset if anything takes time away from their class time- announcements, silent sustained school wide reading, field trips etc.
While learning facts is important, I feel it’s equally important for students to learn systems that can help them navigate through their world and help them get the results they need or want. For me learning to learn is important; learning to think critically is important; learning to solve a problem is important. Life is a journey that we need to know how to navigate. The Learning Strategy Class I teach is all about that, all about teaching processes and strategies that can help students succeed in school and beyond. I guess that’s why I enjoy teaching it so much. I’m really more of a process person I guess. The journey is important for me, not just the destination.
Sep
23
Paraprofessionals and teachers work together as a team for the benefit of students
Filed Under Special Education, The Way I See It | 9 Comments
I’ve been really fortunate to have worked with some wonderful paraprofessions at different times in my teaching career. These men and women made a huge a difference to the lives of the students in my class. For that matter, they’ve made a huge difference to my life as well.
Early in my career I worked with a para-educator whom I’ll call Linda. Linda’s assignment was to give support to a handicapped student who was integrated into one of my grade twelve class. The student whom I’ll call Christine was so severely handicapped by cerebral palsy that she had to be strapped into her electric wheel chair for her own safety. Christine could barely move her hand to guide the small joy stick that let her operate her wheelchair, and she communicated mostly by pointing her hand to the appropriate Bliss symbol that was printed on a board in front of her. Linda cared for Christine through out the day from the time she arrived in the morning before school started to when she left at the end of the day when school was over. At lunch time , Linda fed Christine and helped her with her with personal hygiene.
At the beginning of the school year when I first met Christine, I was at a loss what to do. To be honest, I panicked. How could I teach Christine in a regular classroom. I ‘d never taught a student with Christine’s challenges. I’d never taught a student who communicated using Bliss symbols. But, I had taught lots of student’s with a smile like Christine’s. Christine’s smile told me a lot, and Linda told me the rest. Linda taught me which accommodations to use to help Christine be as successful as possible in class. Really thanks to Linda, both Christine and I were able to do the best we could in that class.
Most of the para-educators I’ve worked with recently have been trained as child care workers and have extensive experience working in group homes with various troubled, troublesome and troubling kids before working in schools. Most teachers receive different training than child care workers. A teacher’s training has to do with getting the subject matter across to students. Oh, sure we have to know how to use strategies that will engage the students in our classrooms and maintain an environment that is conducive to learning , but mostly we’re taught how to teach kids who are coping fairly well in the classroom. Special education teachers like me , who specialize in behaviour do get additional training on how to deal with students who need more support. But the training is different.
When I taught young offenders in the open custody facility I worked with child care workers, and they did have a different focus . It seemed to me that for child care workers it wasn’t all about the three R’s, it was about supporting kids while they learned to make better choices for better outcomes in their lives. The 3 R’s was only one aspect of a kid’s life. Teachers on the other hand are trained to be concerned primarily with the 3 R’s and are encouraged to set boundaries that limit their concern to the 3 R’s and not to the student’s life outside of school. Now of course I’m generalizing here. There’s always the exception. I know that. The point I want to make here is that the teacher and the para-educator can work together as a team so that the student can be successful in and out of the classroom.
At our school the para-educators whom I’ll call Jack and Jill are not necessarily assigned to a particular student, although they could be. That was the case last year. Jack was assigned to be with a particular student for the entire school day. But, that’s unusual. There were some pretty heavy duty concerns regarding this student, and Jack was there to see that all went well. Jack and Jill also go into classrooms from time to time to support students who need additional support to get over a particularly bumping time in their lives. The support is usually to help students deal with the stress of their lives in a more appropriate ways. Believe, some of these kids have huge issues in their lives, many of which are not of their own making. Jack or Jill will also escort students from one class to the next, if that support is needed. Occasionally, students new to the school are just overwhelmed by the size of the building and have difficulty finding their classes. I have a student like that this year in one of my classes. He just can’t seem to find his way around. I’m sure that will change as the semester progresses, but right now he’s very grateful for Jack’s support.Jack and Jill have their own room, the Contact Room where teachers can send students who choose to act inappropriately despite the repeated interventions by the teacher. Jack and Jill help these students learn to accept responsibility for their behaviours and help them set goals for the future. They involve the parents of these students as well. In the Contact Room model, the classroom teachers and Jack and Jill are still a team working together for the benefit of students. They’re just in different locations and communicate via the telephone.
I’ve been using the term para-educators to refer to Teaching Assistants or Educational Assistants. Teaching Assistants or Educational Assistants are the terms I’m familiar with, and ones we still use in our board, as far as I know. I have to thank Christopher Phillips for sending me the link to the National Resource Centre for Paraprofessionals where I learned about the term Para-educators. I guess the language in education is changing in order to be more precise. The term “at-risk student” has been replaced by the term “student in need of additional support”. Although, I have to confess that sometimes I still use the term “at-risk kids”. Old habits die hard, but they do die.
I encourage you to go to the NRCP web site even if you aren’t a para-educator because there’s lots of interesting information there. I was intrigued by the slide presentation from last year’s conference. There’s lots to be learned from exploring the site. I’ve been only able to skim the surface thus far, but I intend to take the time and explore the site in more depth, and I’ m certainly going to share it with Jack and Jill when I get to school tomorrow.
Paraprofessionals and teachers work together as a team [7:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (888)
Sep
19
The unexpected consequences of writing a blog
Filed Under Blogging in and out of the Classroom | 4 Comments
I’m always asking my students to reflect upon different aspects of their lives by writing a journal. I ask them to reflect on things like the goals they have set for themselves, their assigments they do for me or other teachers, their report card marks, the most surprizing shopping trip etc. Although many of my students do not generally like writing, they like writing the brief five minute reflections I ask them to do at the beginning of class. I think it’s important to reflect upon what we do in life. By reflecting upon what we do, we can decide if what we are doing is giving us the desired result. If what we’re are doing isn’t giving us what we want, then we need to change what we are doing. I’m forever telling my students that better choices will lead to better outcomes.
Sometimes when you do something , you really have no idea what the outcome will be. What I mean is that usually when you start to do something you have an outcome in mind, but there are all kinds of other surprising things happen that you never expected or dreamed of . That’s what happened to me. I started writing this blog because I wanted to share with others what I ‘ve learned about teaching. My goal was to write some thing that some people would find useful. that was it!
That did happen. I’ve gotten feedback from all kinds of people to that effect and I’m really pleased about that. But all kinds of other unexpected things happened – positive things. Here’s a list of some of them:
-Teachers At Risk is read in over 80 countries
-I’ve met some wonderful people from all over the globe through my blog
-I’ve written over 175 posts in a little over a year and haven’t run out of things to say
-Akismet has blocked 11,844 spam comments
-I’ve had a wonderfully positive review by David Synder of ASCD
-A book publisher purchased two of the articles that I wrote for my blog
- A large school board in the US asked if they could reproduce one of my posts Nine things that my students taught me about classroom management and teaching and distribute it to their new teachers
- I’ve started to podcast as well as blog and am listed in Itunes where people can subscribe to Teachers At Risk
- The opening of one of my podcasts was used as an exemplar at an international conference on podcasting
Honestly, it just blows me away. Who knew what the outcome from taking that first step back in August of 2006 would be. I certainly didn’t. I just wanted to pay it forward and mentor other teachers. I encourage all of you to try something new and see what happens. Take a risk. You just never know.
I’d love to hear other people’s experiences about something they did and the unexpected consequences that happened. If you have time, please share your experience with us.
Sep
17
At-risk students- from time to time I’ve wonder who coined the term at-risk students to identify kids who are in danger of academic failure. Where did that term come from? Well, I don’t have to wonder any longer because just last week as I was browsing through the shelves of our professional library at school, I came across Pamela N. Mueller’s book Lifers-Learning from At-Risk Adolescent Readers . When I first saw the title I thought “learning from at-risk students” . I’ve learned lots from my students and most of it invaluable to me as a teacher. So of course I had to check it out. I recommend that you check it out too. Its excellent, well worth reading and having in your own professional library.
Where does the term at-risk come from? Mueller suggests
At-risk is a term borrowed from the insurance industry to describe students judged to be highly probable to become a “loss” in terms of school success and achievement. They hover on the precipice of academic failure. Lacking the literacy and learning skills to succeed in the traditional secondary classroom, they generally get poor grades, have negative relationships with teachers, and feel alienated from a a place they see as unfair and a “boring waste of time”. (p.XIV)
She’s has hit the nail right on the head when she describes these kids. They do see school as a boring waste of time. They do lack the literacy and learning skills to succeed in the traditional classroom. They do get poor grades and have negative relationships with teachers.
Mueller continues
Acting out a particular role in the culture of failure in which they have cast themselves, these student “performers” do all in their power to live up to the low expectations that others have for them-and, indeed, that they have for themselves. Many are living in fractured homes that have victimized them emotionally and intellectually. Because their work and family often take precedence over a high school diploma, the idea of dropping out of school is never far away. (p. XIV)
Mueller has really captured the essence of at-risk students here. These kids see themselves as failures .Their families see them as failures. Last year I had a student tell me that his dad told him that the only thing he would be good for when he grew up was a door stop. Imagine-a door stop. Not even a person, but an inanimate object like a door stop. Talk about dehumanizing. How can an fourteen year old boy who has probably heard this for who knows how long overcome this negative role his dad cast for him. It wasn’t surprising that when his parents’ marriage finally broke down during the time he was in my class, school was the last thing on this kids mind. It’s so sad that kids have to deal with the negative fallout when adults can’t manage their own lives and continue to make one unfortunate choice after another.
I teach students from grades nine to twelve and know that many of the at-risk students have been identified before I ever see them sitting in front of me in my classroom. I’ve read countless school records of students dating way back to kindergarten and have often been impressed by how accurately the kindergarten teacher identified kids who were having difficulties. Often it seemed from those early comments not much had change. Those kids having difficulty in kindergarten were still having difficulty in my class ingrade nine. Now of course that’s probably not 100 % true because I don’t work with kids who don’t need support so I’m not really sure how many kids catch up to their peers. If anyone knows of a study that looked at this statistic, I would really appreciate hearing about it because the next thing I’m going to share with you is so depressing.
I was absolutely shocked to read that” Rist(1970) points out that a young reader’s journey through school is essentially pre-ordained by day eight of kindergarten! “
Oh my goodness! That is so disturbing. Apparently “the kindergarten teacher’s initial expectations, which are based on family history, physical appearance, and classroom behaviour rather than academic potential or performance,accurately forecasts a child’s future academic career.
It seems from this that once a student is cast as a member of the slow learning group, that’s it: he’s doomed to be in the slow reading group all through school. With all due respect to Mueller and Rist, I hope that’s not the case and maybe it isn’t the case in 100% of the time. I wonder what my kindergarten teacher thought of me, a rambunctious tomboy who lived on a farm in a home with no books to mention, just the weekly community newspaper. My family’s connection to the world came through our radio and our TV. I don’t know where my love of books and reading came from. Reading certainly wasn’t fostered in my home. In fact, it was considered a waste of time. I remember as a kid getting heck all the time because I would be reading instead of doing my kitchen chores. I had to smile when as an adult, I read a novel set in the prairies, or maybe it was a short story, it doesn’t really matter where a character had the sympathy of his neighbours because his farm wife read surreptitiously and hid books all over the place so she could read whenever no one was around. What was the problem with reading? Of course, when she was reading she wasn’t working. working was valued; reading wasn’t. The whole thing made me think of an alcoholic who hides her bottles all over the place so she could drink in secret. I certainly could identify with that bookaholic.
Ok, enough about me. Lets get back to Mueller’s research about kids and how they become at-risk of academic failure. She notes “Allington and Cunningham(1996) list four basic factors that early on put an elementary student at-risk of academic failure, factors over which a child has no control: family poverty, parental education attainment, gender, and perceived immaturity. ” (p. XV) I think this is really important to keep in mind before judging a student harshly. Kids don’t choose the family they are born into. Kids don’t choose how much formal education their parents have. Kids don’t choose their gender.
So what are we going to do to help these kids achieve better educational outcomes. Because my training and experience is with high school students, my solutions would speak to that age group. I’ve thought a lot about how to help my students get reconnected to school so that they can develop their potential to the utmost. When I’ve played the ” if I ruled the education world game”, my solutions for my at-risk students are mostly outside the box. Obviously, if something isn’t working, it needs to be changed. If the education system isn’t working for some students, it needs to be changed for those students. I read some where that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. What would you change? What would you do?
You know , that isn’t just a rhetorical question I’m please to say. Corrie Henegan, Chief Operating Officer of The Mind Trust, a non-profit organization got in touch with me to tell me about an exciting new initiative . The Mind Trust is offering educational entrepreneur fellowships to people who believe they have the answers to stop the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
What exactly is an educational entrepreneur
Education entrepreneurs are individuals who develop new approaches to tackle society’s greatest challenges in radically new ways. They are driving some of the most compelling improvements in educational outcomes for chronically underserved students. Ventures like Teach For America, College Summit, New Leaders for New Schools, The New Teacher Project and the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) are prime examples. The leaders of these organizations have transformed education for thousands of children and have changed our very ideas about what is possible in public schools. To access resources on education entrepreneurship .
You can check out the Mind Trust’s FAQ link here. Nicole Wiltrout was kind enough to forward it to me.
Offering these education entrepreneurial fellowships is a huge initiative for the village to take. I hope other organizations in other places will take the lead from the Mind Trust and find creative ways to enable positive change to happen so that students who are at-risk academically can get re-connected to school and develop to their fullest potential. Students will benefit by these initiatives because the new programs will be tailored to meet their needs; the village will benefit by these initiatives because its citizens will be able to contribute to their fullest. It will be a win-win situation. At least, the way I see it.
I want to thank B. Ziegier, Mathew, Joel, Craig, Jane, Liz, Ms. Whatsit, and Sukhdeep for their feedback. I really appreciate it. I think we all benefit from the input readers take the time to give. I know I do. It’s great that the technology allows us to develop into a community that shares and supports one another. So please, lets continue to develop this community by commenting, questioning and sharing. I think it exciting.
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