Two Ways to Build Comaraderie in Your School

 By Jill Jenkins

Most schools today need to collaborate in departments to cover the new curriculum of the common core, they need to collaborate as a school to make certain computer labs, library and other resources are shared by all equally, and they need to collaborate as a school to make sure that students needs and problems are properly addressed.  Since teachers often are highly independent with strong personalities, they are attracted to teaching because the concept of running their own class appeals to them.  To command thirty to forty students requires an assertive personality.  The task of the administration is to take these strong willed individuals and help them work collaborative in teams.  How do they do this?

One more technique is to take all of your staff to a lodge in the mountains and give them in-services classes at a retreat.  It is highly effective because away from the day-to-day problems in a school, teachers can renew their dedication with a new vision. Furthermore, the retreat can serve to improve the school. If that is your goal have the faculty identify five to ten areas that school needs to improve upon: attendance, test scores, morale, etc. Divide the faculty into task force teams comprised of teachers from a variety of disciplines who identify and suggest an action plan to solve a problem or improve a situation.  They present their suggestions to the entire staff who vote on implementation of the their solution.  The staff then has ownership of the problems and solutions in the school and can not blame the administration.  Throughout the school year, the task force teams meet to evaluate progress and make adjustments to the implemented programs  The advantage of taking your team off campus is when the staff is not working on solving problems, they should be enjoying social activities together like dining or taking a dip in the pool. Playing and working together helps create a team. The positive side of this solution is it forces the school to work collaboratively to solve problems; thereby, the entire school takes ownership of the problems and the solutions.  This should reduce blaming the administration for problems in the school.  The downside is it is expensive.  If you have a large corporation or a benefactor who is willing to flip the bill, go for it, but for most schools that is far beyond the means.  What is a cheaper alternative?

One method is to create a faculty assembly.  Any coach will tell you that having a common goal that requires the cooperative effort of all of the players does more than win a game; it creates a family.  When the success of the project requires the interactive cooperation of all team, everyone benefits.  I know that it is possible to throw together an assembly with individual acts of the five faculty members who really have talent: singing, dancing, and playing a musical instrument.  That is not the kind of assembly that building cooperative attitudes. 

  Silly acting scenes and musical numbers that involve as many teachers, counselors and administrators as possible will earn more bang for the buck.  First, if the teachers are having fun together, they will enjoy working together.  Second, if the teachers are being silly, the students will have an opportunity to see their teachers as people. That will improve their relationship with their teachers.  Third, working under a deadline, will demonstrate to the staff that they can create something as a team. For example, the two pictures above and below depict a scene of an unruly classroom and an incompetent substitute teacher. The cast is comprised of teachers from a variety of departments, counselors and administrators. Working outside the comfort of the individual departments builds cooperative attitudes.

If you want to build cooperation within each department, have each department create a presentation. Some example include: by the Language Arts Department: "Lame Excuses", and "Accelerated Reading in Rap" and from the Counseling Department: "Planking".  One year the Language Arts teachers collected excuses that their students had used during the year.  Then, three teachers wearing black clothing and black berets read the excuses like Poets of the Beat Generation:

LAME EXCUSES

 

 

Megan: Our lives are so busy; our lives are so full

Is it any wonder we have time for assignments or school.

Becca: It wasn’t my fault.

Jill: I didn’t know we turned it in.

  Megan: I finished a few days ago, but I forgot to turn it in.

  Becca: I am not sure why, but please, I need the credit.

  Jill: I completely forgot because I was absent way back when we did this.

  Megan: Mi es mui perezosa.

  Becca: I didn’t want to do it. Much rather read.

  Jill: I didn’t know it was missing.

  Megan: My mom grounded me from doing homework!

  Becca: It wasn’t finished when it was due
Jill: I was a slacker.

  Megan: I suck and will end up flipping burgers.

  Becca: Well, my dog ate it.

  Jill: I lost it, and then I found it!

  Megan: I was booked this weekend.

  Becca: I got mauled by a zebra while on an African Safari.

  Jill: I am a very lazy person.

  Megan: I left it to the last day.

  Becca: I lost my paper in my backpack.

  Jill: You didn’t tell me I had to have my reading chart signed.

  Megan: My printer wasn’t working.

  Becca: My computer crashed.

  Jill: Don’t know.

  Megan: I got into a ninja fight with Chuck Norris, and I won!

  Becca: It caught me off guard.

  Jill: I forgot about it, and I hardly had time because of football.

  Megan: Just plain late!

  Becca: I forgot it was due, so I hurried and tried to finish it…but I didn’t.

  Jill: Abducted by aliens.

  Megan: I.D.K.

  Becca: I had to help Batman save the world.

  Jill: I was really busy this week.

  Megan: No idea.

  Becca: Shrug

  Jill: Stolen notebook.

  Megan: Bahhh!!

  Becca: I wanted to!

  Jill: I think I forgot to turn it in.

  Megan: I turned it in, and now it’s gone!

  Becca: I was helping my mom with the dishes.

  Jill: Didn’t work hard enough to finish.

  Megan: I don’t even know! It was an off day.

  Becca: My locker won’t open.

  Jill: My mom lost my reading log.

  Megan: But my mother signed this reading chart.

  Becca: My mom cleaned out my backpack.

  Jill: I left it in my locker.

  Megan: Was I suppose to have this signed?

  Becca: My locker is broken.

  Jill: Last night, I couldn’t do it because I’m really busy.  I had to go to practice.  I had to eat dinner.  I had LaCrosse and . . .

  Megan: I don’t know.

  Becca: Your web pages says it isn’t due until tomorrow.

  Jill: But I felt sick yesterday.

  Megan: My clothes got stolen.

  Becca: Someone jacked my folder.

  Jill: I forgot.   Can I have another day?

  Megan: I put it in my binder and now its not there.

  Becca: It’s because we can’t have backpacks.

  Jill: My grandmother is in the hospital.  Can I have another day?

  Megan: It is due today?

  Becca: There was a football game on T.V. last year.

  Jill: I don’t have to do this because I was at Mesa.

  Megan: I don’t have to do this because I was at orchestra…so I’m excused.

  Becca: My printer was out of ink.

  Jill: My internet was down.

  Megan: I forgot my my-access username.

  Becca: I’m not allowed to use my computer at my home.

   Jill: It won’t work on my computer.

  Mega: I turned it in and you lost it.

  Becca: It’s March Madness.

  Jill: Do you have any no name?

  Megan: I was absent and you didn’t give it to me.

  Becca: You gave the assignment a month ago, but I was absent yesterday.

  Jill: I know I was absent one of those days.

  Megan: I didn’t know.  You didn’t tell me. 

  Becca: So, I can’t see the board from my desk.

  Jill: You didn’t tell us when it was due.

  Megan: You didn’t remind me yesterday.

  Becca: Why do we have to do this anyway?

  Jill: I lost my book?

  Mega: It wasn’t my phone.

  Becca: My third period teacher took it.

Jill: Is there any extra credit I can do?

Megan: How can I get my C to an A?

Becca: I didn’t know it was a test.

Jill: Can we retake this test?

Megan: I am really sad that I can’t make it to class, but can I still take the AR test.

Megan, Becca and Jill: What assignment?

Caleb:  Suck it up, Princess.

     Students love hearing their own words recited as poetry by their-not-so-shy teachers.  However, it is even better if all of the members of the department take an active part in the production as in the next two creations.

Another successful creation was "Accelerated Reading in Rap."  This was written by one of the teachers, Mrs. Larsen and her brother who recorded the lyrics.  The rest of department participated in the filming and I edited it together. 

 

 Capitalizing on what is trending is another way to increase your students' interest in the assembly and can be fun for the staff members.  The following movie was created by the counseling staff at my school with their secretaries: "Planking"

     Whether your school decides to use technology to enhance your assembly or present it on stage, the students will love it and the faculty and staff will develop a strong bond.  This spring before you begin your testing, you might want to give your students and staff a chance to bond by creating a faculty assembly.

     If you want to increase your staff's social interaction at a retreat or something as silly as a faculty assembly, you will increase their ability to be an effective team. If you have the time and the money to do more than one kind of teaming activity, the effect will even be greater.  These types of activities may seem like a huge waste of time to some teachers, but the reality is that a school that does not function as a team will pull itself apart.  Teachers will transfer to other school because they are not happy. The academic program will not be as strong as it could be when teachers are sharing and cooperating with each other. Try building your school community through activities that require the entire staff to cooperate with each other.  

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Student Support System for Emotional Stability

Student Support System for Emotional Stability

By Jill Jenkins

                Students’ emotional development is key to their academic development.  Although schools provide academic support for all students and a systematic system of support for special education students and students with a 504 designation, it does not provide a systematic support system for all students.   Many students who could qualify for additional support don’t receive it because their parents are not informed about the procedures or the services available.  Many students don’t receive support because they appear to be doing satisfactory in school.  Schools need a systematic method to help young teachers identify students who need additional academic or emotional support. According to “Witnessing Violence Fact Sheet” by Joanne Davis Ph.D., and Ernestine Briggs Ph.D 3.3 million to ten million children have witnessed domestic violence.    According to the C.D.C.,  “in 2012, a total of 305,388 babies were born to women aged 15–19 years .” Likewise, according to Teen-Help.com, 20% of all teens will suffer depression.  All of these students are at-risk; yet we fail to offer the support most of them need.  How do we provide all students the support they need to function both emotionally and academically?

                Some students who need assistance have the wherewithal to simply ask for it.  For example, Sara, a former students told me that she had been sexually abused by her father and had been removed from her home and placed in a foster home.  She didn’t want help for herself --even though I am sure she needed it-- but for a sister who was still living with her biological parents.  Students never approach a stranger about something this delicate.  They will ask a trusted educator, so it becomes the job of that educator to become a liaison between them and the social worker or counselor.  That was the role I played.  In another similar instance, LaDetra, a student in one of my A.V.I.D. classes, told me about how her biological mother had forced her to perform sexual acts with strange men at age eleven to enhance her mother’s ability to get illegal drugs.  Later, her mother had abandoned her and three younger siblings for a month.  With no food in the house, and no money to pay the rent, this young girl had called an aunt who had located each of the children’s biological fathers and placed them in homes across the county.  LaDetra was concerned for the welfare of her siblings.  I introduced her to a counselor who contacted her family and together they were able to get her counseling and help contacting each of her siblings.  Another student, Brian, told me that he had no friends, and was planning to kill himself.  I wasted no time in calling his mother.  Thirty years later, he called me at home and thanked me for saving his life because he was planning to kill himself after school that day.  Because his mother took him to counseling, he hadn’t.  His life turned out to be wonderful after he had gotten through that dark period.   Take students seriously and do not waste time getting them help. 

                Sometimes as an educator, you just need to be sounding board for a student.  For example, Denise, a student whose parents had recently divorced was upset that she still loved her father and his wife even though she knew her father was having an affair with his current wife which caused her parents’ divorce.  Relationships are confusing to adults, so imagine what they are like to children.  Children who feel comfortable with a teacher often use them as a support system to work out problems, but teachers need training to know what to say to students who come to them for help and lists of professionals to connect students with for the professional help they need.  Students who have witnessed gang violence are often like soldiers who are haunted by their war experiences.  For example, Dashawn, a former student, described his horror as he watched his brother shot down in the streets.  He wanted to leave his life in gangs, but feared for his own life and the lives of his other family members.  Suffering this kind of duress can make it difficult for a student to perform well in school, but it is a reality that many students face every day.   

                Most students do not have the skill or the self-assurance to ask for help directly, so teachers need to be aware of signs that they are asking for help.  Often students will write about a problem in their journal writing or in an assignment.  For instance, I had asked my student to write a letter saying goodbye to someone or something in their life, an assignment connected to a chapter in Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine.  One of my students, Anita, wrote a goodbye letter to her parents who had recently died from A.I.D.S..  The letter was so touching that I contacted her family.  She was living with her God-Parents who had only met her a few months earlier.  Her new mother told me that the letter had opened up a flood of emotions and she was glad that Anita had an opportunity to let some of her emotions free.  In another instance, I had given my classes an assignment to write a short story, the culminating activity of our Short Story Unit.  Benita, a student in my class, produced a story filled with violence directed inward and at others.  I took the story to our school counselor who shared it with her parents.  Benita was suicidal and they found her appropriate counseling.   Other students demonstrate their emotional instability by acting out or withdrawing.  Students who teacher might perceive as discipline problems are actually crying out for help.  Others may dress in large coats and pull their heads in like turtles disappearing from the world.  This is also a cry for help.

                Still when I reflect on my early days of teaching, I realize there were a lot of red flags that I missed.  Take Hector who in 7^th grade was willfully disobedient of rules.  In 8^th grade he brought a gun and bullets to school and was expelled.  At twenty-one he brought another gun into a pub and killed six people.  Maybe if the school had given him counseling when he was just willfully disobedient he could have been saved a life spent in prison and six lives might have been saved.  In another instance, Joey, who could act the most believable scenes of spousal abuse in my improvisational theater class, may not have strangled his wife and one other woman if I had recognized that his talent for creating believable improvisational scenes about domestic violence was actually a cry for help. Students with shattered emotional lives need teachers to recognize their cries and help them.

                To help all of our students to learn and function in school, teachers must be aware of their cries for help. Training must be provided for teachers to be able to recognize the signs.  Furthermore, we need to open communication between teachers, parents, counselors, and the school administration.  Teachers will be the first to notice problems so they need to know the signs of depression and anxiety.  They need to know who they should contact to best help the child and they need to understand that seeking the help of a counselor, a parent, or an administrator is not demonstrating their ignorance; it is demonstrating their strength. 

The Double-Edged Sword of Success

The Double-Edged Sword of Success

By Jill Jenkins

                When assessment is used effectively, it can dramatically improve students’ learning; however, when it is used incorrectly, it obstructs students’ learning.  Backward design offers educators the best alternative to improving student performance.  First, teachers should ask what learning goal is to be taught.  Since the Common Core has 37 Learning goals in Language Arts alone with additional subordinate learning goals under many of them, a teacher has many to select from.  Second, determine how the student will demonstrate mastery of the goal. That means design an assessment that will demonstrate that the child has learned the goal.  Third, design a variety of methods to teach the goal. Keep in mind that students learn in different ways, so each learning goal must be approached using multiple learning styles.  Finally, what will the teacher do when for the students who do not demonstrate mastery of the learning goal? Remember, summer school is not an option because school districts don’t have the capital. Surprise we aren’t finished yet.  After the students complete the assessment, the data from the test needs to be evaluated.  All of the teachers in the school should have given the same assessment, but they may not have taught the learning goal in the same way.  To be effective, the scores of all of the teachers should be compared.  The techniques of the teachers who were the most successful should be shared with those who are less successful.  If there is a teacher who is continually less successful, the administrator needs to evaluate the teacher’s effectiveness and offer either support or terminate the teacher.  

                This all sounds very logical and effective to math and science teachers; however, if you teach English Language Arts, teaching one learning goal and never returning to it, does not make sense.  Writing and reading skills need to be revisited again and again with more difficult reading and writing assignments for the learner to master it.  The learning pattern is more of a spiral than a straight line.  However, if teachers look at the fundamental data on writing assignments and see trends where students are weaker, it can be used to bolster weaker areas of instruction.  For example, if teachers ask all of the students to compose the same essay and after the writing samples are graded, they should compare students’ use of the six traits: idea development, organization, appropriate voice, word choice, sentence fluency and conventions.  Perhaps students are not using appropriate detail in their writing, so the teachers determine that will be their goal on the next writing assignment and develop a variety of activities both reading and writing to help students become more aware what good writing should look like and how they can apply that to their writing. Perhaps students are not using correct M.L.A. documentation, so that should be the focus of upcoming assignments.  Conventions, however, need to be taught daily to ensure that students master them and apply them in their writing.  Often time, failure to proof-read is the reason for deficiency in that area. Determining why students are struggling will improve instruction. Teaching reading and writing needs to be more product-oriented than many other subjects, especially because that is how the Common Core will be evaluated them. 

                Many of the less effective teachers take a different approach to planning learning experiences for their students.  Activities that seem fun but are really not based on a particular learning objective seem to be the major focus of their teaching.  Even school districts often take their focus off the objective and promote this because they get more P.R. for the district.  Public support is important for a district so giving an award to the best six word poem, may seem productive, but is it really?  I am not saying that activities that are entertaining to students are not productive.  Many of them are highly effectively.  I am saying that it is important to carefully select the activities to will give students the biggest bang for the buck.  What are they learning?  What makes this activity effective?  Teachers have to continually analyze and ask questions.  Districts should be doing the same thing?  Make sure the activities that your class, your school and your school district will actually improve the education of your students.  If it is not a productive activity, eliminate it.  Time is more important than money.  These students have a mammoth job to effectively master every learning goal in The Common Core. 

                It is difficult for teachers to clinically, and coldly analyze the results of their teaching, but it is imperative if they are going to be highly effective in the 21^st Century.  Older teacher with decades of experience and new teachers fresh out of college, all have to sit down together and share teaching ideas and approaches based on student performance on assessments.  The problems that are created by a strong willed teacher who refuses to be part of the group can destroy any change of a successful team emerging.  Administrators who insist that teacher present material precisely the same like robots can also destroy a team’s effectiveness.  Teachers need to be able to experiment with the presentation of material while being held accountable to the assessment.  Open discussions about how to approach students who are struggling will be more effective in groups if the team can brainstorm a variety of different methods. Furthermore, open discussions bring insight into particular problems an individual student is facing or his family is facing.  Divorce, financial difficulties, a death in the family and a myriad of other problems can negatively impact a child’s ability to concentrate in school.  If the teacher can learn from other educators about the child’s situation, it can become a tool to help connect with the child and improve that child’s ability to learn. Successful techniques used by other teachers to connect with a particular student can become an invaluable asset to another teacher.  Sharing information and teaching ideas can improve teaching and learning.

                Most teachers have limited time to find all of the resources available on the internet or application. As a result, it would be extremely useful for districts to provide workshops and specialists who can share with various teaching teams this new technology.  Demonstrating to teachers how to implement these resources could greatly enhance their presentation of materials.  Students retain more if the environment is rich with variety.  Videos, projects, games, reading assignments and writing assignments should all be used to improve their retention.  This means that teachers must work together to determine what learning goal they are teaching. Design an assessment that all of the teachers in that group are using.  Identify a variety of instructional techniques.  Evaluate the results of the assessment and prepare a plan for improving instruction for the individual students who did not pass and for the teachers who also seem to be struggling: the double edged sword of success.  If this method is used well, students’ learning will increase and ineffective teachers will be more easily identified and eliminated.

               

The Gift of a Dream

The Gift of a Dream

By Jill Jenkins

“Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.”
 Jonah Salk

                The news broadcasts are filled with stories of how unprepared graduating students are to take jobs in the engineering and technology industries.  Some corporations are offering a $10,000.00 bonus to their employees who bring them programmers who know java.  Other corporations are importing programmers from Russia and China and engineers from Pakistan to fill the unfilled positions.  They blame the shortcoming in the schools in America.  Is our education program really to blame?

                It is easy to point fingers and blame schools that have been underfunded for decades.  Most teachers have not seen a salary increase in more than a decade and many have had their salaries cut.  School districts are finding it difficult to find teachers to fill positions in technology, math and science because candidates can make so much more money in industry.  Many school districts dramatically reduced their staffs leaving many educators unemployed.  To add to the teachers’ frustration the media slams their results without understanding the challenges. 

                 Schools in the United States do not just teach the best of the best.  They teach everyone.  Classes are mainstreamed with special education students, students who do not speak English, and students who have both behavior problems, but emotional problems.  All of the students need to be prepared for end of the year tests while crowded into classes of forty or more students. The countries that are often compared to the United States do not teach everyone. They continually separate students into separate learning environments until only the brightest and the best receive an academic education.  Every new idea the universities developed are laid across and overwhelming list of learning goals making actual instructional time a dwindling commodity. Still, most teachers use all of their effort to help these students attain their goals.  Yes, there are teachers who do not teach the new core.  Yes, there are teachers who do not push students, but they are the minority.  Most teachers would be happy if administrators actually took actions against the few bad apples who attacks by the media ought to be directed.  Furthermore, most of the technology careers require post-high school education which is a luxury that many students cannot afford.  In other countries that the United States is compared to higher education is often provided by the state. 

                What could large corporations do to help?  Obviously Bill and Melissa Gates have put their money where their mouths are and so has Warren Buffett.  Other corporations could help as well.  Many of our brightest and best students feel hopeless.  College tuition has become so outrageously expensive that they idea of pursuing a college degree seem unreachable.  Taking out a student loan seems frightening during these difficult economic times.  Despite the fact that with a college education, American students could be filling those programming and engineering jobs, these students settle for a minimum wage job with not future, because they lack hope.  Instead of complaining about finding appropriately skilled jobs, if these same corporations offered $10,000.00 scholarships to American teenagers who show both a strong work ethic and an aptitude, there would be no need to import talent to fill those positions.  If these corporations offered to pay for the students’ Bachelor’s Degree in exchange for five years of employment, the American student would have hope and the corporations would have a large tax break, so everyone would win.  In the past, many corporations invested in the education of their workers who in exchange worked 30 or 40 years for the company.  Companies paid for insurance, and retirement and workers dedicated their lives to them.  Maybe it is time for corporations to give back to America instead of just complaining about it.

                If American students knew that there was a bright future and path to get to that future, they would follow it.  Students from other countries are shown that path and they are taking the opportunities.  If the corporations of American were not so short-sighted, they would see that instead of importing workers or sending jobs to off shore locations, they invested in education of Americans the benefits would not only increase the power of the corporation, but the nation as a whole.  During the industrial revolution, many manufacturers exploited their workers to reap a profit; however, Ford paid his workers a working wage. He invested in his workers.  The Ford Company became stronger and a world leader.  I challenge American Corporation to invest in the future of America.  Give the gift of hope and it will shine for you too.