How to Close The Gap For Students By Changing How You Perceive Yourself

I have always been a dog person. Until this summer, when a cat showed up at our backdoor one night. For three weeks our family took care of this cat, while she lived in first a box, and then a homemade Rubbermaid tote house, complete with a golf umbrella awning.  I started worrying about this cat at night and through storms, and looking forward to seeing her at the end of the day. I started to ask my “cat friends” for advice on how to best take care of this cat. Long story short, the cat is now sitting next to me on the couch as I put together Talk-Oh-Tuesday. The dog is sitting on the other side.  So often as teachers we catch ourselves saying “I am a math person, or I work best with __________ kinds of kids”. As you start to dig into your District Report cards, look closely at what role you can play in Gap Closing. How can you go outside your comfort zone to support students who challenge you as a teacher or administrator? Who might be a resource that you can reach out to?

One good starting point for gap closing is to look at the connections between standards aligned resources, assessments that have enough stretch to allow all students  to show where they are in their mastery, and Performance Level Descriptors. Performance Level Descriptors are a great starting point to plan how you will stretch or support students. They are also great if you are not a “math person” or “ELA person” or a "Gifted person" or a "Special Ed person" and need to figure out what student work needs to look like or sound like as they build their own competency.  Are your lessons or assessments giving students the opportunity to show you that evidence? If not, what can you do to tweak them? Who might you reach out to?

Find all of the Ohio Performance Level Descriptors here.

https://oh.portal.airast.org/resources/reporting-resources/

Opportunities:

If you have never joined in on #OHedchat Weds. nights at 9:00 EST on Twitter, this is the week to join in.  David Liben, one of my literacy superheroes and a Senior Fellow in Literacy at Student Achievement Partners (achievethecore.org) will be the special guest moderator this week.

Draft Ohio Model Curriculum - Science, The Nature of Science, Content Elaboration for ODE Science - take time to read through this and make comments by Sept 28….get some great resource ideas and progression of learning connections in the process!

Draft Ohio Model Curriculum - Social Studies  and Draft Ohio Model Curriculum - Financial Literacy  - take time to read through these and make comments by Sept. 28...great way to see that vertical alignment and help kids connect to prior learning.  

Building Bridges To Connect Prior Knowledge

Hi All, 

I had a chance to be a “new learner” this summer! I am learning how to play Ukulele.  I play violin, so when I learned how to play mandolin it was easy - the same strings and the same fingering.  Ukulele has different strings and fingering and it took awhile to get my fingers to make new shapes. What made the most difference for me was finding a note chart that I could use to play scales. That one piece of information helped bridge what I already knew with what I was learning.  At the beginning of the year, it is important to find those bridges for all the learners in your room. Here are some resources that might make bridge building easier!

• ELL Supports For Writing and Discussions From Achievethecore.org
• Making Math Visible - Interactive Modeling Tools K-12 From Illuminations (NCTM)
• The Painted Essay - Making Writing Visible  From the Vermont Writing Collaborative
• Draft Ohio Model Curriculum - Science, The Nature of Science, Content Elaboration for ODE Science - take time to read through this and make comments by Sept 28….get some great resource ideas and progression of learning connections in the process!
• Draft Ohio Model Curriculum - Social Studies  and Draft Ohio Model Curriculum - Financial Literacy  - take time to read through these and make comments by Sept. 28...great way to see that vertical alignment and help kids connect to prior learning.
• INFOhio.org Spotlight Resources:
• Explora - search engine by topic, includes lexile levels on all the resources included in the search including books,articles and primary source documents. Great for creating text sets to build vocab or content knowledge. Available in PreK-5, 6-8, and 9-12 INFOhio.org resources.
• Kids Infobits - searches across major K-5 magazines including Scholastic, CNN Newswire, Boys Life, Nat Geo, Discover for Kids, Dig, Ladybug and more.  Because this is a Gale product, once the articles are opened, there is a read aloud function, a highlight function, you can save to Google Drive or assign in Google Classroom.  Has visual and audio search support built in.
• NEA Arts Across the Curriculum - K-5 Resources (I found the dancing across the number line activity to be pretty cool!)
• Top 10 Ukulele Tips for Beginners (In case you want to learn how to play Ukulele too!)

Don’t forget to join in the CenterPoint Teaching & Learning Advisors –  #CurriculumMatters Twitter Chat about the Importance of High Quality, Content Rich Curriculum Thursday Sept. 6  4-5:00 PM EST

Read the blog posts at https://centerpointeducation.org/blog and follow #CurriculumMatters on Twitter to follow the conversation.  Please feel free to share this information with your colleagues, too. Looking forward to a lively discussion on this timely topic.

Working With ELL Students

Over the past week, a number of excellent ELL resources came through my inbox.  Being mindful of strategies to support ELL students can elevate the supports and instruction for all the students in your room or school! This is the time of year when schedules are finalized for the coming year.  Will you be working with ELLs? Here are some good starting points.

If you don’t regularly use ALL of the amazing resource on Colorin Colorado, now is the time to visit the site and bookmark your favorites! http://www.colorincolorado.org/teaching-english-language-learners

Reading Rockets groups resources by themes and keywords.  Follow this link to see all of their resources specific to ELLs. http://www.readingrockets.org/reading-topics/english-language-learners

Stanford has assembled a set of high quality, research based tools for ELLs. http://ell.stanford.edu/teaching_resources   My favorite Venn diagram is based on the Mathematical Practices, ELA practices and Science practices  and can be found here http://ell.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/VennDiagram_practices_v11%208-30-13%20color.pdf

CCSSO created a framework for ELLs to support the Common Core Standards and NGSS. There is a LOT of helpful information for tiering/scaffolding work in ELA, math and science within this framework document.  The FLARE, formative language section, that begins on p 72 is a start point for identifying vocab, tiering instruction and designing scaffolds. https://www.ccsso.org/sites/default/files/2017-11/ELPD%20Framework%20Booklet-Final%20for%20web.pdf

Great research article on effective math instruction for ELLs http://laschoolreport.com/new-ways-of-teaching-math-to-californias-english-learners-are-getting-results-report-says/

Resources and ideas for ELLs shared out by Student Achievement Partners (achievethecore.org)

• Written work and classroom discussions are a critical part of college- and career-ready instruction and your English Language Learners CAN participate in these rich learning opportunities with the right support. Try some of these scaffolding techniques to support ELLs in accessing grade-level writing and discussion activities.
• Written language is different than everyday spoken English, and can pose comprehension challenges for all students, but especially English Language Learners. Structure classroom discussions focused on helping students take apart a sentence to discover how vocabulary, syntax, and grammatical choices convey meaning. This new protocol helps teachers identify "juicy sentences," provides a 10-step protocol for conducting a classroom discussion, and includes video examples. Special thanks for Core Advocate Aaron Grossman who helped design the protocol!