(Estoy republicando mis mejores publicaciones del primer semestre del año. Puedes ver la lista completa aquí)
thisisprabha / Pixabay
Earlier today, an old organizer friend from my previous life (I was a community organizer for nineteen years prior to becoming a high school teacher twenty-two years ago) asked me to share what I thought were urban districts doing great work.
I replied that I wasn’t sure I could point to any district I would hold up as an exemplar, but I’m sure there were plenty of schools that could fit the bill.
His follow-up question was asking what I thought were “best practices” that could be found at what I considered great schools.
Here are some practices I think you’ll see at schools doing great work – not that you’ll necessarily see all them present at the same level. However, I certainly think you’ll find the majority of them very visible at the best ones.
Let me know if you agree/disagree, and/or what you think I’m missing. Here are my choices (not listed in any order of importance):
Collaborative (Not Top-Down) Staffing That Promotes Teacher Leadership
It’s trite, but true – “The smartest person in the room is the room.” In organizing, everything is about leadership development. We were much more effective in getting affordable housing built than single-issue affordable housing groups; we were much more effective in getting additional child care than single-issue child care advocacy groups; and we were much more effective in people in good-paying jobs than job training organizations because we used all those campaigns as tools for leadership development.
The same thing, I believe, holds true in schools. As Larry Cuban writes, “The teacher is the policy gatekeeper.” If administrators want their schools to be successful over the long-term, they need to promote teacher leadership (see The Best Posts, Articles & Videos On “Teacher Leadership” — Contribute More!).
It’s fine for principals to have ideas and plans but, like organizers, they have to present them, get reactions to them, and then make adjustments so that everyone has a sense of ownership.
Culturally Responsive (Not “I Don’t See Color”) And Trauma-Informed Teaching
I don’t really have time tonight to detail the importance of these two interconnecting strategies. However, I would recommend three related resources:
Antoine Germany, one of our school’s very talented Vice-Principal, wrote an excellent guest post for my Ed Week column, How to Support Students Afflicted by Trauma.
The Best Ways For Responding To Student Trauma – Help Me Find More
The Best Resources About “Culturally Responsive Teaching” & “Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy” – Please Share More!
Data-Informed (Not Data-Driven) Instruction
I’ve written a lot about this topic – basically, one, data is a lot more than numbers and, two, numbers are just one piece of the puzzle.
You can read a lot more at The Best Resources Showing Why We Need To Be “Data-Informed” & Not “Data-Driven.”
Here’s an excerpt from that post (originally based on conversations with two of my mentors, Ted Appel and Kelly Young):
If schools are data-driven, they might make decisions like keeping students who are “borderline” between algebra and a higher-level of math in algebra so that they do well in the algebra state test. Or, in English, teachers might focus a lot of energy on teaching a “strand” that is heavy on the tests — even though it might not help the student become a life-long reader. In other words, the school can tend to focus on its institutional self-interest instead of what’s best for the students.
In schools that are data-informed, test results are just one more piece of information that can be helpful in determining future directions.
Reflective (& Not Reactive) Culture
As Dylan Wiliam says, “Everything works somewhere, nothing works everywhere.” Effective schools, I believe, recognize that truism and don’t immediately react to the latest big pushes on instruction or school governance. I know, for example, some districts introduced entirely new reading curricula to teachers a month before school began this year, and included very few – if any – active teachers in the decision-making process leading up to that change.
Effective schools, I believe, actively listen, learn and consider many of the available options, and make collective decisions about the paths forward.
See The Best Resources For Understanding How To Interpret Education Research for more related info.
Asset-Based Perspective (Not Deficit-Based) Inclusion Looking Towards Accelerated Learning
Effective schools, I believe, build on what students can do, not what they can’t. Though I’m obviously somewhat biased, I believe good teachers of English Language Learners, especially on the secondary level, are experts on this perspective and on accelerated learning. After all, we’ve always had to do accelerated learning, even before it became a buzzword. Many of our students come to us with limited schooling, and we have to prepare them for high school graduation in a few years!
See THE BEST RESOURCES ABOUT ACCELERATED LEARNING for more info, and especially my Washington Post column on the topic, The kind of teaching kids need right now.
In addition, check out The Best Posts On Looking At Our Students Through The Lens Of Assets & Not Deficits and THE BEST RESOURCES ON PEER TUTORS.
Restorative Practices PLUS Relational Discipline (In Other Words, “The Baby Has Not Been Thrown Out With The Bathwater)
I’m a big believer in, and practitioner of, restorative practices – in my own classroom and schoolwide. Our school organizes many conflict resolution conferences between students, and most are successful.
At the same time, our school suspends students who put others in danger and teachers are supported when students are disruptive of others learning.
These practices are not mutually exclusive.
See The Best Resources For Learning About Restorative Practices – Help Me Find More.
An Emphasis On Building A Community Of Learners & Not Just A School That Students Attend
Plenty of research has found that students having a sense of belonging at school is critical to academic success.
There are many ways to promote it – if it’s made a priority.
For nearly twenty years, our school did it through having Small Learning Communities (The Best Resources For Learning About Small Learning Communities), where groups of three hundred students shared the same fifteen or twenty teachers during their high school career and met in their own sections of the school. In effect, students were “cohorted” with one another. Unfortunately, organizing a school this way is very expensive, and we had to limit this idea of cohorting only to ninth-graders this year.
But, as I mentioned, there are also many other ways to promote a sense of belonging – among parents, too. One way my IB Theory of Knowledge students do it is by being mentors to ninth-grade students.
Learn more ideas at THE BEST RESOURCES FOR LEARNING HOW TO PROMOTE A SENSE OF “BELONGING” AT SCHOOL and at The Best Resources On The Value & Practice Of Having Older Students Mentoring Younger Ones.
What do you think?