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Edublog AwardsJul
19
Don’t tell me anything more about students in Finland and how great the education system is there.
Filed Under "At-risk" students, Behaviour Management, Learning Strategies, motivating students, underachieving students | 9 Comments
I don’t want to read another thing about how successful the education system is in Finland . I congratulate Finland for their fine education system, but I don’t want my school in Mississauga to be compared to schools in Finland because doing that is like comparing apples to oranges. Mississauga is not the same as Finland. Finland has 2.5 % foreign citizens. Mississauga has many more. 46.62% of residents in Mississauga (almost 700 oo0 ) were not born in Canada. Apples to oranges. Apples to oranges for Pete’s sake.
Mississauga has one of the largest, if not the largest, cluster of ethnic groups in Canada. At my school, the student body speaks over 60 languages. All this diversity is what makes Mississauga so great. I love it. But, all this diversity brings with it challenges that a more homogeneous country like Finland doesn’t experience.
I don’t want to write a post outlining all the challenges new immigrants face that can affect the them as they enter our schools. But, some students who are immigrants come to grade 9 illiterate in their mother tongue, and we are expected to teach them so they will pass and earn 16 credits by the time they are 16 years old. Some parents are struggling to learn English themselves and can’t support their kids and help with homework or assignments. Some parents work at two jobs to put a roof over their children’s heads and food on the table and aren’t there for there for their kids after school.
O.K., O.K. I’m going to stop now because I’m starting to write a post about the challenges of being an immigrant living in Mississauga and that’s just what I didn’t want to do. I just don’t want apples to be compared to oranges.
photo thanks to Dano
Jul
16
Are you frustrated and stressed in your teaching practice because you have to spend more and more time doing things you don’t value?
Filed Under Goals, SOS for Teachers, Teacher Support, The way I see it, The Way I See It | 4 Comments
“So much of our frustrations and stress arise from incongruity- incongruity between what we think, feel or say is important and how we actually spend our time” (Cirocco, p. 52)
Isn’t that the truth. I don’t know about you, but in my teaching practice I seem to be spending more and more time doing what I think isn’t important and less and less time doing what I think is important. That’s so frustrating. I don’t want my teaching practice to be distracted by the frustrations of having to do things that I don’t value, so I plan to find a way to match my values to more of my actions in my teaching practice.
I have to be realistic. There’ll be forms I have to complete, meetings I’ll have to attend, and PD sessions that aren’t optional. Oh yes, there’ll be hall supervisions I can’t escape . But, I think I can find a way to spend most of my time doing what I actually think, feel and say is important.
The first thing I have to do is clarify what I value as a teacher and decide how these values can inform my teaching practice so that I’m not stressed and frustrated. Now, I remember doing value clarification exercises years ago when I was a newbie teacher or more likely during teacher training, but I haven’t really sat down and made a list of what I value as a teacher in a long, long time. I think I know, but maybe there’ll be surprises. Maybe I can’t walk my talk in the classroom anymore because of all the changes and the directives from the-powers-that- be . What do I do then? Any ideas?
Cirocco’s book Take the Step: The Bridge Will Be There offers guidance on how you can eliminate or more realistically reduce the incongruity between what you say you believe and what you do. I find it ironic just as I was thinking about refining my teaching practice to avoid frustration and stress as much as possible, I find a book just lying on a table at my local bookstore that I can use to help me do this. I’m just reading the part near the beginning of the book about choosing core values and using them to create a compass to guide your actions.
Usually, there’s more than one way to do anything. Have you found a way to avoid frustration and stress at work that allows you to remain true to your values? I’d love to know if you have or are in the process of finding a way that lets you walk your talk at work.
Resource:
Cirocco, Grace. (2001) Take the Step: The Bridge Will Be There. Toronto. On: HarperCollins Publishers LTD.
Photo by oddstock
Jul
8
You don’t have to be a superhero to teach kids who are academically at-risk
Filed Under "At-risk" students, Behaviour Management, Dealing With Stress, motivating students, positive climate, SOS for Teachers, Special Education, Teacher Support, underachieving students | 5 Comments
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Sometimes we can get the wrong idea about what it takes to successfully teach kids who are academically at-risk. You don’t have to be a superhero like Erin Gruwell in Freedom Writers. You just have to be “good enough”. I’ll explain what I mean by “good enough” in a minute.
For those of you who have seen the movie Freedom Writers, you’ll know what I mean when I say Erin, the teacher in the movie, is a superhero. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, I’ve embedded a trailer here so you can have a better idea of what I’m talking about.
I mean no disrespect to Erin Gruwell, the teacher Freedom Writers is based on. What she did with her students was truly extraordinary. I’m in awe of her. But I think because she’s a superhero, teachers who watch the movie might get the mistaken notion you have to have super-teacher powers to teach students who are academically at-risk. You don’t. You don’t have to be a super-teacher. You only have to be “good enough”.
When I say teachers of students who are academically at-risk don’t have to be superheros they only have to be “good enough”, I don’t mean they can be mediocre. Far from it. Let me explain what I mean by “good enough” teachers. ”Good enough” teachers
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- have good emotional intelligence
- establish inviting student centered classrooms;
- have excellent listening skills;
- willingly treat their students with respect and demand the same from their students ;
- have expertise in the teaching subject;
- can differentiate teaching, assessment and evaluation strategies to suit students;
- help students be successful using the students’ strengths;
- are firm but fair;
- are creative;
- are life-long learners;
- are flexible;
- are skilled at teaching and assessment;
- realize and accept they’re not perfect;
- realize tomorrow is another day and another opportunity to get it right.
“Good enough” teachers realize it’s not their job to “fix” students who are academically at-risk; it’s their job to help students realize better choices will lead to better outcomes and help them develop their critical thinking skills so they can make better choices.
Erin Gruwell did all this and more. She is a superhero who teaches, but we can be just “good enough” and still be successful at teaching students who are academically at-risk. We don’t need to be superheros ; we can just be humans who teach. I want teachers to realize that.
If you’ve been teaching academically at-risk students, what do you think it takes. How would you define “good enough”?
Jul
3
Passing kids along who fail is being disrespectful of them
Filed Under Behaviour Management, Evaluation, positive climate, questions teachers need to ask, The way I see it, underachieving students | 5 Comments
What are we to do about high school kids who fail courses in grades nine and ten and don’t seem to care? We are being told if a student doesn’t earn 16 credits by the time he is 16 years old, there is an excellent chance the student will drop out of school and not graduate. In the province of Ontario where I teach, high school students are expected to earn eight credits in grade nine and another eight credits in grade 10 for a total of 16 credits.
There’s so much pressure on teachers to do what it takes to get these kids to pass courses. At the end of the semester when teachers are writing report cards, sometimes teachers are called down to the office and told strongly encouraged by the administration to change a failing mark to a passing mark. The word rigor seems to have no place in these conversations. Small wonder teachers are disillusioned and discouraged.
High school teachers are always complaining about the social promotion that goes on in the elementary schools where students who fail subjects in a grade still get to go (are socially promoted) to the next grade even though they’ve failed . These students come to grade 9 with huge gaps in their knowledge and skill sets. These gaps set students up for failure. I think socially promoting students is morally wrong. We’re not doing students any favors by passing them now when they haven’t mastered course content just to fail them later because the gaps in their knowledge prevent them from mastering the next grade’s content. That’s not being respectful of our students.
I know, I know there’s a huge debate about social promotion, about a kid’s self-esteem etc. I actually haven’t seen any studies on the topic of social promotion. I can only tell you what I know from my own personal professional experience. Maybe this summer I’ll search the literature to see what research says and share my findings here.
I teach students who have been socially promoted, and I see many of these students continue to fail and be at-risk academically in grades nine and ten. They often do not earn 16 credits by the time they are 16. Academically at-risk students who continually fail courses are kicked out of regular high school when they reach 18 (legally they have to stay in school until 18) and sent to alternative schools to continue their education. Some of my students have come back to visit me and have told me that the alternative schools didn’t work for them either. Some students admit it’s their fault they didn’t succeed in high school, but some students blame the school system and certain teachers for their lack of success. They may have a point, but that’s a whole other can of worms.
I’ve been meaning to read Alexander Russo’s Stray Dogs, Saints, and Saviors for some time now and since school is out for the summer, I can. I’m enjoying it immensely as well as learning a lot about the challenges of school reform. Russo’s book is about school reform- a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot lately given my frustrations with 16 by 16. Specifically, Russo’s book is the story about the challenges Green Dot and its founder Steve Barr encounter while trying to reform Locke High School in South Central Los Angeles. Surprisingly, I hadn’t heard about the Green Dot story. It must have been on the news and in the papers. I don’t know how I missed it, but I did. I’m certainly going online to see what I can find to fill in my gaps about Green Dot and Barr.
While reading Stray Dogs, Saints and Saviors, I came across this passage that really spoke to me.
Letting a kid pass a class in which he’d barely learned anything, in the hopes that he’s catch up later and benefit from having moved along, or flunking a kid and making him dig in at least a bit, with the knowledge that such a might not happen? It was a difficult call- and an age-old question. Teachers-and schools-have been passing kids along for decades.( Russo, p. 93).
I naively thought this problem of passing kids along was a problem just in Ontario, Canada. I hadn’t realized that teachers in other jurisdictions are having to make the same difficult calls about passing or not passing academically at-risk students. What happens in schools in other countries like Japan, France, Germany, China, Scotland? What do they do with kids who really don’t pass? I’d like to know.
photo thanks to dullhunk
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