Leading Toward an Equity Pedagogy

1
Leading Toward an Equity Pedagogy

• Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools

2
Equity

• The work of eliminating systemic barriers to
  learning
• Eliminating the predictability of success or
  failures that currently correlates with any
  social or cultural factor, especially race, class
  and primary language
• Discovering and cultivating the unique gifts,
  talents and interests that every human being
  possesses

3
A Partnership for Learning
4
High Achieving Schools What do they look like?

• Teachers who refuse to make excuses for students
  who were not learning.
• There is an expectation that students would take
  challenging classes such as advanced math,
  science, and literature.
• Students are grouped in small classes and
  heterogeneously.
• Teachers who work with students to master a core
  curriculum and who matched teaching styles with
  learning needs.

5
The Challenges toHigh Student Achievement

• Underestimating what disadvantaged students are
  capable of doing.
• Organizing instruction around the belief that
  basic skills must be mastered before advanced
  skills can be taught.
• Failing to provide adequate support for learning
  new material.

6

• Postponing more challenging and interesting work
  for too long -- some times forever.
• Depriving students of a meaningful or motivating
  context for learning or using skills that are
  taught.

7

• Smallwill produce a sense of belonging almost
  immediately, but hugging is not the same as
  algebra. Rigor and care must be braided
  together, or we run the risk of creating small,
  nurturing environments that arent schools.
• Gerwetz, 2001

8
Small School Literature Shows That...

• 7 Attributes of
• High Achieving
• Schools
• Common Focus
• Personalization
• Respect Responsibility
• Time to Collaborate
• Performance-based
• Technology as tool

• Essential Components of Learning
• In-depth learning
• Performance assessments
• Active Inquiry

Student Achievement
Source Bill Melinda Gates Foundation
9
To Get to High and EQUITABLE Achievement the
Literature Adds that...
7 Attributes of High Achieving Schools
Essential Components of Learning

• Equity Pedagogy
• Learning to learn
• Appreciation and respect
• Building on strengths
• Recognizing building on home culture
• Inquiry as a strategy for continuous improvement
  (race, culture, language and power)

Student Achievement
Source Banks, DelPitt, and others.
10
What is equity pedagogy?

• Focuses on instructional tools that facilitate
  deep learning.
• Highlights an appreciation for the intellectual
  accomplishments all young learners bring to
  school.
• Emphasizes building on student strengths rather
  than remediating deficits.
• Recognizes a students culture as an important
  element in teaching and learning.
• Uses inquiry as a strategy for continuous
  improvement in how teachers teach and how
  students learn

11
What to Look for in a Classroom

• 1. In his article, What to Look for in a
  Classroom, Alfie Kohn describes 2 types of
  settings. He identifies the working with
  classroom as the one we are striving for.
• Describe a working with classroom youve
  recently visited.
• What teacher and student behaviors did you see
  that supported student learning?
• 2. In groups share your vision. Individuals
  should think about what descriptors they hear
  from colleagues. Capture your descriptors on
  poster paper

12
Six Instructional Tools

• Information Retention and Retrieval
• Scaffolding
• Meta-cognition and Self-Regulation

• Student Discourse and Talk Structures
• Reciprocal Teaching
• Cultural Competence

13
Meta-cognition

• The primary goal is helping low performing
  students learn how to learn.
• It centers on developing an awareness of the
  demands of a given task and the strategies that
  we employ to complete it.
• It also requires us to monitor and regulate
  learning, emotions, attention.

14
Student Discourse

• Student-to-student discussions should be the
  centerpiece of learning in the classroom.
• Learning is socially mediated consequently
  students need ample opportunities to talk to the
  teacher and to each other in order to make
  sense of what they are learning.
• Talk also reveals the ways students are making
  meaning of information or developing
  misunderstandings about key concepts.

15
Cultural Competence

• Involves teachers understanding the
  socio-political context students exist in and how
  it shapes them as learners.
• Requires teachers have the ability to use
  students cultural capital as an instructional
  aid (how students make meaning).
• Requires teachers to facilitate the creation of a
  cross-racial, cross-cultural learning community
  in the classroom.

16
Reciprocal Teaching

• RT highlights four key strategies
  Questioning,Clarifying,Summarizing,Predicting.
• Builds students capacity to know a subject deeply
  by teaching it to others.
• Capitalizes on the collective expertise of the
  group.
• Promotes authentic student discourse.

17
Information Retention

• Learning environments must feel emotionally safe
  for learning to take place.
• Cognitive growth occurs when students experience
  appropriate challenge and immediate feedback.
• Each student makes meaning of key ideas and
  skills based on experience, culture, sense and
  relevance.
• The brain has three stages of memory short term,
  working memory, and long term memory. Helping
  students know how to use each is essential for
  learning.

18
Scaffolds

• Scaffolds are forms of support provided be the
  teacher (or another student) to help students
  bridge the gap between their current abilities
  and the intended goal

19
Scaffolding and ZPD

• Learning only occurs when students are
  stretched beyond their current competency.
• The metaphor of scaffolding has been used to
  describe the support that enables a learner to
  complete a task that would otherwise be
  unattainable without assistance.
• Social interaction between a learner and an
  individual with additional expertise are
  necessary.

20
Zone of Proximal Development

• The task must have the right level of difficulty
  to promote learning.
• Too difficult a task will frustrate the learner
  and make learning impossible.
• Too easy a task results in not enough productive
  work to build dendrites.

21
Types of Scaffolding

• Modeling
• Give clear examples
• Show finished work
• Walk your students through a process

• Bridging
• Connect ideas and show inter-relationships
• Activate prior knowledge and experience

22
Types of Scaffolding

• Contextualization
• Provide environments your students are familiar
  with that will help illuminate and clarify new
  concepts for them
• Use analogies and metaphors

• Questioning
• Ask higher order questions (why? How? So what?)
• Open a window of doubt and possibility
• Ask leading questions to stretch thinking

23
Types of Scaffolding

• Metacognitive Development
• Plan how to tackle problems
• Be consciously aware of processes
• Teach self-assessment strategies
• Decide on steps in solving problems

• Text Presentation
• Ask students to present learned concepts in an
  alternative format

24
The Bottom Line on Small Schools

• If all these new schools are is small and
  humane, that will not be enough. And if the
  opportunity to develop close relationships with
  students and know them well is not leveraged on
  behalf of improving opportunities for their
  intellectual development, achievement, and
  success, the promise of these new small school
  will be squandered.
• 
  Ancess, 1997

25
The Work of Instructional Leaders

• Instructional leaders focus on standards of
  practice and standards of performance.
• Instructional leaders ask hard questions about
  culture and practice.
• Instructional leaders foster ongoing
  opportunities for the collaboration, practice,
  and feedback that teachers need.

26

• Instructional leaders respond in productive ways
  to persistent practices and behaviors that raise
  concerns. They need the skill and fortitude to
  confront unproductive practice.
• Instructional leaders seek to develop the
  knowledge, skills, and competencies needed to
  contribute to teacher learning.

27

• I learned that it was easy to enough to say,
  when the rest of the work is done, well focus
  on instructionI learned from hard experience
  that the moment when everything is under
  control just does not arrive. Knowing this,
  there has to be a constant balance between
  tending to the schools maintenance and focusing
  on instruction. It cannot be one first and then
  the other, and it cannot be that instruction just
  has to wait.
• Mohr, 2000