Sunday, October 11, 2020

FIve Ways to Ground Your Teaching in Equity and Justice

From Facing History and Ourselves

https://facingtoday.facinghistory.org/5-ways-to-ground-your-teaching-in-equity-and-justice?utm_source=hootsuite&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=organic

5 Ways to Ground Your Teaching in Equity and Justice

Posted by Rose Sadler on October 7, 2020

Raised hands and forearms of different colorsAs many educators are teaching under extraordinarily challenging circumstances, we know that a central issue for educators is how to center equity and justice in their classrooms and schools. The long history of racism in education is still with us, and after a summer marked by racial violence, and an ongoing pandemic that is disproportionately impacting people of color, issues of equity and justice remain urgent and pressing.

If you are someone who is new to this work or if you are looking to recommit yourself to equity and justice, here are five ways to ground your teaching:


Start with yourself

When striving to teach for equity and justice, there can be a tendency to jump to action planning, figuring out which students need the most support, and trying to problem solve. However, the work of equity and justice requires deep critical reflection and introspection on the part of educators. It is important to begin with yourself, reflect on your own values, and examine how your identity and biases influence how you interact with and build relationships with your students. This self-examination will be different for white educators than it will be for educators of color. Regardless of one’s identity, this self-analysis is an important first step in understanding how you can be a co-conspirator for your most vulnerable students.

Center students on the margins

After critically reflecting on your own identity, it is important to shift your focus to students who are most experiencing inequity and injustice in your classroom or school. Educators must ask themselves: In my context, who is most in need of more equity and justice? This might look like working to disrupt deficit narratives about vulnerable students, asking these students what they most need, or questioning whose voices are currently being amplified in your school context and whose voices are being silenced. It is also crucial to attend to the social-emotional needs of your most vulnerable students with the ultimate goal of creating a sense of belonging and honoring each student’s humanity.  And while it is important to teach from a trauma-informed perspective, as Dr. Dena Simmons reminds us, if schools are not addressing racism, then they are not fully addressing trauma. 

Identify and examine your sphere of influence

Teaching for equity and justice is based on educators having a systemic and structural understanding of the inequities that exist in our society, a personal commitment to challenging these injustices, and a local response. Dr. Zachary Casey describes this tripartite approach through his work with white educators striving to be antiracist. When focusing on the local framework, educators must ask: When are there moments when I am in a position of relative power over the life chances of others? How might I use my relative power to work on the side of justice? Who are my allies, or better yet, my co-conspirators? Even though confronting structural inequities and the history of racism and oppression in this country can feel overwhelming, Dr. Deborah Lowenberg Ball points to the many “discretionary spaces” in which educators do have significant power in shaping and creating more positive experiences for their students.

Examine your curriculum

No matter what content area educators teach, it is important to examine your curriculum through an equity and justice lens. Historically, standard textbooks have failed to confront difficult histories and have reinforced dominant narratives that hurt students of color. To counter these false dominant narratives, educators must create more affirming and culturally responsive curricular experiences, without relying on stereotypes. They must ask: Where are students of color seeing themselves reflected in the curriculum? How does the curriculum give students frameworks for understanding how power operates in society? Where does your curriculum make connections between history and contemporary issues? Does your curriculum only tell a narrative of black marginalization and/or oppression? Where are the stories of upstanders, resisters, anti-racist changemakers? All students, especially historically marginalized students, need to see examples of people through history who stood up in the face of racism, sexism and other forms of oppression.

In addition to thinking critically about your curricular content, it is also important to probe your own approach to pedagogy in your classroom. Do you engage in co-constructing knowledge with your students? Do you have a classroom environment where students can demonstrate their learning in diverse ways? Does your curriculum affirm the diverse identities of all of the students in your classroom? This type of reflective and equitable learning space is crucial when trying to create a community that is grounded in equity and justice.

Commit to a lifelong journey of critical consciousness and action

Finally, teaching for equity and justice cannot be contained in a checklist, a single curriculum, or one way of approaching school discipline. Rather, it is a way of being, thinking and doing that centers historically marginalized students and asks educators and students to develop a critical consciousness about the world around them. Educators have to be willing to make mistakes, view constructive feedback as a learning opportunity, and commit to continuing the work in the face of resistance.  It also requires that educators move beyond the reflective phase, and instead put their new ideas, learnings and understandings into practice.  

As a white woman, my perspective on what it means to teach for equity and justice is shaped by my own identity and experience. What questions does this framework spark for you about how to show up as an educator grounded in equity and justice? What would you add to this? How does your own identity influence how you think about what it means to teach for equity and justice?

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Facing History and Ourselves invites educators to access our free, on-demand webinar, Working for Justice, Equity, and Civic Agency in Our Schools: A Conversation with Clint Smith.

Access Webinar

 

Topics: Equity in Education

At Facing History and Ourselves, we value conversation—in classrooms, in our professional development for educators, and online. When you comment on Facing Today, you're engaging with our worldwide community of learners, so please take care that your contributions are constructive, civil, and advance the conversation.

Friday, October 9, 2020

Lesley's Nancy Carlsson-Paige: Why Schools---Now More Than Ever---Should Let Young Kids Learn Through Play (Not Worksheets)

 On the Lesley website: https://lesley.edu/news/why-schools-now-more-than-ever-should-let-young-kids-learn-through-play?fbclid=IwAR226cRCeA3c3k9yo7UZubczV7Tp2UU4Po5LpZN8g4Q5_WJAVsIbUPEmKjA

And also: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/09/17/why-schools-now-more-than-ever-should-let-young-kids-learn-through-play-not-worksheets/

Why schools — now more than ever — 

should let young kids learn through play (not worksheets)

Children learn while they play in a sandbox on a playground at school. (iStock)
September 17, 2020 at 8:47 a.m. EDT

Nancy Carlsson-Paige is an early-childhood development expert who has been at the forefront of the debate on how best to educate very young students. She is a professor emerita of education at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., where she taught teachers for more than 30 years and was a founder of the university’s Center for Peaceable Schools. She is also a founding member of a nonprofit organization called Defending the Early Years, which commissions research about early-childhood education and advocates for sane policies for young children.

Carlsson-Paige is author of “Taking Back Childhood.” The mother of two artist sons, Matt and Kyle Damon, she is also the recipient of numerous awards, including the Legacy Award from the Robert F. Kennedy Children’s Action Corps for work over several decades on behalf of children and families.

She has written before on this blog about how young children learn through play and how early-childhood education has been twisted over the past few decades by policies that focused on raising standardized test scores and pushed academic work into preschool.

Here is her new piece about reimagining early-childhood education, followed by links to some of her earlier essays on this blog.

By Nancy Carlsson-Paige

Two children, ages 4 and 6, are coping with the covid-19 pandemic in their playroom. They are zapping bad germs away with outstretched arms and hissing sounds and using magic wands to bring dead people back to life. These two kids are using the most important natural resource children have for coping with their sometimes scary and confusing world: play.

Decades of research and theory tell us that play is the primary way that young children make sense of their world. Play is how children maintain emotional balance; it’s how they cope. Play is such a driving force in children’s lives that it is sometimes called the engine of their development. No one teaches children how to play, yet they all know how to do it.

Hardly a frivolous activity, play is not only the vehicle children use to cope, it’s also how they learn — how they build concepts, invent ideas and learn to think for themselves.

There are many accounts of children playing out challenges and traumas they have faced in different life experiences. Children today who are experiencing the coronavirus pandemic need lots of imaginative play opportunities to help them make sense of the radical changes that have affected so many aspects of their lives.

And once kids do return to in-person school, they are going to need a lot of time to play to process all the changes they’ve been through. This is what will help them regain a sense of security for going forward.

Ever since the passage of the No Child Left Behind legislation in 2001, we’ve seen play disappearing from classrooms for young kids, replaced by an overemphasis on academic standards and testing. This approach is wrongheaded and goes against everything early-childhood professionals know about what children need and how they learn in the early years.

Research on kindergarten programs has shown that the greatest of these changes occurred in programs serving children of color from low-income communities. Their classrooms have been the ones that most overemphasized academic skills, worksheets and drills, and pushed out opportunities for play.

But the play disparity in school begins well before kindergarten. Because we don’t provide high-quality preschool to all children in the nation, parents are on their own to try to find prekindergarten programs for their kids.

Children from families with means typically attend private preschools, the vast majority of which offer play-based, experiential, activity-centered learning — the best that money can buy. But children who attend preschool programs receiving public funds get a much different kind of education. Their programs require that they learn discrete academic skills delivered through direct instruction and measured by tests.

For early-childhood educators who understand the importance and necessity of play in the early years, these disparities in both preschool and kindergarten programs disadvantage children of color and begin a racial play/learning gap that starts with the first days of preschool.

The pandemic has disproportionately impacted young children from low-income Black and Latino communities. They have paid the biggest price in terms of family illness, loss of loved ones, uncertainty and disruption. Children who experience difficulty and trauma in their lives need play as a critically important vehicle for adapting to stress.

A recent survey found that 60 percent of licensed child-care providers have closed and many of those that have remained open have reduced spaces or hours. To prevent the decimation of the child-care industry, there will need to be a big influx of money to shore up programs and make them safe to reopen, when that becomes possible.

But this is a time to commit even more than increased resources to programs for young children. It’s a time to reimagine how to best care for and educate children equitably and in ways compatible with their developmental needs.

It’s our moment to take stock of what schools have been doing to young children for the last 20 years and ask if we are helping or harming them. It’s our moment to reimagine what optimal education for every young child in the nation could look like.

We need universal, high-quality pre-K for every child in the country. High quality means an experiential, play-based program with skilled teachers who know child development.

We need to face and correct the inequalities in early education that have unfairly advantaged the haves. This is the moment when policymakers need to listen to the voices of early-childhood educators who have been crying out for years about the developmentally inappropriate standards being pushed on young kids.

When we send young children back to school buildings, there may have to be limitations on some kinds of play, but we must be prepared to provide more holistic classrooms that meet the needs of all children.

We can’t go back to an approach to education that has drifted so far away from what we know is best for young children, one that became completely unmoored from the knowledge we have about how they learn, one that has caused a racial play/learning gap that starts on the first day of preschool.

More to read:

Valerie Strauss is an education writer who authors The Answer Sheet blog. She came to The Washington Post as an assistant foreign editor for Asia in 1987 and weekend foreign desk editor after working for Reuters as national security editor and a military/foreign affairs reporter on Capitol Hill. She also previously worked at UPI and the LA Times. Follow




Monday, October 5, 2020

15 Frustrating Extra Things Teachers Have to Deal With This School Year (From Bored Teachers)

 

 

15 Frustrating Extra Things Teachers Have to Deal With This School Year


15 Frustrating Extra Things Teachers Have to Deal With This School Year

Saying that a teacher’s life is a busy one is redundant on every level. We are a permanently exhausted group of people that can never seem to catch up on anything: sleep, lesson plans, grading… you name it. Well, along 2020 has come and somehow made our difficult lives even more so. Just in case you have friends that might not realize what you’re dealing with these days, here’s just a brief list of what has landed on our already-crowded plates this year.

1. Learning to talk with a mask on

Mask-wearing in schools is here, and it probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. While we all got used to popping a mask on while cruising the grocery store for 30 or 40 minutes, teachers have quickly realized that teaching while masked is an entirely different animal. For starters, talking through your mask so that everyone can hear and understand you is a chore. Our lungs have never gotten such a thorough workout. Then there’s the issue of breathing. We, teachers, are big fans of breathing, but doing so with a mask on 8 hours straight is irritating at best and dizzying at worst.

2. Becoming the mask police

Here’s what’s been added to a teacher’s already crowded plate in 2020

As if wearing a mask all day wasn’t challenging enough, we have also now become the gestapo of mask wearing in our hallways and classrooms. We’re constantly stressing to students the importance of keeping it on, all while our glasses are fogging up and we’re close to keeling over. For teachers that constantly struggle to get students to put their phones away and stay in dress code, this is just another battle we need to fight daily.

3. An ever-changing class roster

One of the secrets to teaching success is continuity. Children crave routine because it makes them feel comfortable. Well so much for that! Parents have been continually changing their mind about whether or not to send their children to school, so your classroom has 18 kids in it one day, then 12 the next and maybe 21 the day after that. Teachers across the country have been setting fire to carefully crafted seating charts for weeks now.

4. Somehow providing in-person level instruction… virtually 

Keeping students engaged and involved is a tricky business, but teachers have a few tricks up their sleeves. Unfortunately, a lot of those tricks work a lot better when students are in the same room as you. Transporting a brilliant face-to-face lesson plan to online doesn’t always go so well, and usually involves a lot of extra tweaking. 

5. Teaching virtually and in-person at the same time

Of all the insane things you can ask a teacher to do, it is this. Teach a group of face-to-face students while also holding a Zoom meeting for at-home students and making sure they all get the same level of instruction. Just figuring out the sheer mechanics of it takes a while, and it takes even longer to get it right. Most of us still haven’t gotten to that second part yet.

6. Cleaning all the things

Yes teachers are well-versed in the art of cleaning up their classrooms, but now? Sanitization has become priority number 1 all day long. If you have classes of students moving through your room throughout the day, you likely have to spray, wipe and sanitize every single surface those students have touched before the new group comes in. 

7. Somehow becoming a tech wizard overnight 

While some teachers are very good at using technology, others tend to lag behind the curve. Well no matter how you feel about technology, you weren’t given a choice this year. Suddenly we all had to get real familiar with a whole bunch of apps and online learning programs whether you wanted to or not. And while we keep getting told this is the future of education, we weren’t expecting the future to happen so soon.

8. Becoming every student’s personal IT genius

Yes, not only did teachers have to become knowledgeable with all of this wonderful new technology, we had to become expert enough to troubleshoot our students’ problems as well. Untold class time has been lost this year while a teacher desperately tries to figure out why Johnny’s computer screen isn’t working like it should. And no, we don’t get paid extra for becoming IT professionals overnight.

9. Doing things in groups… separately

Teachers love having students work in groups. It’s a great way for them to learn problem-solving and teamwork skills. Then along came COVID-19 and put the kibosh on that pretty quick. Now teachers have been tasked with finding a way to let students work together without actually being together. And if you teach an online class that issue gets multiplied. Breakout rooms are fine and all until you realize you can’t monitor all of them at once.

10. Providing a hands-on experience, without using your hands

The best way to learn a skill is to experience it and play with it yourself. Experiments, projects, and other creative assignments are some of the most rewarding and successful lessons we teach. And yet this year we’re specifically telling everybody to keep their hands to themselves. It’s yet another hurdle teachers have to figure out a workaround to. 

11. Monitoring students who aren’t sitting in front of you

Keeping students focused and on track is a never-ending battle for teachers. We’re constantly walking around the classroom monitoring our students to make sure everyone is on the same page. But if your class is zooming in from their bedrooms, that gets a lot harder all of a sudden. What if they’re on their phones? What if they’re surfing the web? What if their parents are just off-screen giving them the answers? If anyone knows how to handle that issue, please tell us all!

12. Trying to avoid everyone’s germs on an epic scale

Getting sick in the first month of the school year is one of the “joys” of teaching. It happens to a lot of us: students pile into your room, they cough, they sneeze, they expel germs every which way. In the past, that was just part of the job, but this year it’s become something else entirely. Now we need to worry about students bringing a sickness in with them that you might not recover from. Teaching is hard enough without having to dodge germs like a ninja all day.

13. Planning to be your own substitute teacher 

As many administrations have told us, one of the “joys” of utilizing zoom is the ability to continue to meet with your class, even if you’re sick and laying in bed. As hard as this is to believe, many of us have been told to prepare to essentially become our own substitutes just in case we get sent home for a couple weeks (or longer). That means coming up with an extra set of plans that could be carried out while you’re coughing up a lung from the “comfort” of your very own home.

14. Preparing for every conceivable disaster scenario  

As we got closer to the start of this school year it became pretty obvious that no one had a clue what was going to happen. And because of that, we all had to spend a lot of time worrying and planning for anything that could potentially happen. We all had to sit down and plan for situations like, what if a student shows COVID symptoms in the middle of class? What if students refuse to wear their masks? What if you test positive? What if an entire class tests positive? These were questions we all had to answer for ourselves because no one was answering them for us.

15. Being an emotional rock for your students during the most turbulent time in their life

It’s easy to forget sometimes that our students are… kids. They’ve never gone through anything like this before (granted, neither have we), so you can imagine they’re scared, worried and concerned… just like us. Thankfully for them, they have us to lean on and talk to. Teachers however aren’t so lucky. We have to be there for our students to keep them from falling apart, while at the same time keeping ourselves from doing the same thing. 

That is one tricky balancing act that may leave our already-full plates crashing to the floor.