ROUGHLY EDITED FILE
WRIGHT & ASSOCIATES
ENGAGING THE ARTS AS CULTURAL STRATEGIES AND PRODUCTS FOR ISSUES OF EQUITY WEBINAR
MAY 9, 2013, 3:00 P.M.
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Alternative Communication Services, LLC
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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication access realtime translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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> Good afternoon and welcome to the next webinar which is part of the series of Department of Education webinars for the community of practice initiative. My name is Jerry Kyle and I'm a project officer for the professional development of arts for art educators program. On behalf of the arts in education team, I would like to thank you for joining us.
It is a pleasure to have our guests from Alameda county office of education and we are grateful for their participation. They will be telling the story of how teachers in the school district of San Leandro, California, address the racial predictability of student success in elementary and middle school classrooms? They focused on teacher and arts and culturally sensitive teaching strategies. At the end of each discussion, we will allow time for questions and answers. Please submit any questions that you have in the chat box available via the WebEx system.
If you would like your question answered by a specific speaker, please direct who your question is directed to. Now I will turn it over to Ray and Tana Johnson.
> RAY: Hi, everybody, my name is Ray Kagan. I'm the Arts Learning Educator for the Alameda County Office of Education.
> And I'm Tana Johnson. I'm with the arts learning leadership here at the Alameda County Office of Education.
> RAY: So we will go through the story of the Teacher Action Research Initiative Institute, and we're going to be taking you through a PowerPoint today, hopefully at the end we will have some time for questions and we would be happy to answer them.
> TANA: Right so we always guide our research here at the Alameda county with inquiry questions and this question, how can teacher professional development in arts integration and equity positively impact the educational outcomes in an urban school district? How can this question be a guide and a lever for how we work.? This is a story of how the school district of San Leandro focused on culturally responsive teaching as three key strategies to improve the learning of students performing at below basic levels in California standardized tests.
And to really address the school district's program improvement status and in relation to no child left behind. So through rigorous professional development, action research, and arts integration, the teachers we worked with learned to value reflection about their own teaching practice and instill studio habits of mind to learn more about their own learning.
Next slide, please.
> Ray: So as far as the context that this work is happening in, San Leandro is a small city of about 85,000 people and it's located just southeast of Oakland in the San Francisco Bay area. The city school district serves close to 9,000K through 12 students in 12 schools and as of many urban districts, San Leandro Unified is serving a disproportionate of black and Latino students relative to the city as a whole. One of the things that sets San Leandro apart. They have an amazing are linguistic and cultural diversity. There are 37 languages spoken in the homes of the students in the district. 28% are classified as English language learners and more than half of the district students and families participate in the free and reduced lunch program.
Next slide.
So this project targets the lowest performing students. And it does so by improving the quality of teaching in the classroom and that's the objective, through arts integration and collaborative teacher action research.
The district has a districtwide equity team, which has gone through beyond diversity training, focusing on raising the achievement of all students, while narrowing the gap between the highest and lowest performing students and eliminating the racial predictability and disproportion of which students occupy the highest and the lowest achievement categories.
So really, we're trying to use the arts as the lever to really intentionally look at problems that have been persistent and not just in San Leandro, but in many of our districts. And really focusing on the ways that the arts and the arts integration can be the change maker in addressing those issues. So in 2009, San Leandro Unified partners with the Alameda County Office of Education to create the Teacher Action Research Institute, which we'll be calling TARI throughout the presentation.
The focus is teacher integration as a part of the work.
Next slide.
So here you can see these are the four elements that we are going to be talking about that really make up the TARI project. So you have your professional learning community and there are different elements that we'll be addressing individually that go into developing and maintaining this professional learning community. And then we're looking at the culturally relevant teaching strategies that are being implemented by teachers and principals and site leads throughout the participating schools and in the district.
Then we'll talk a little bit about the thinking frames that are used. These are really ways to make to build reflective muscles and to think about the ways that teachers are teaching and students are learning.
And then we have collaborative teaching are action research. So the ways that the teachers are working together to discuss their practice and to refine their practice through inquiry and documentation.
Next slide.
We have an image for that slide or it's not showing up?
It looks like the image is not showing up. What you would be looking at is a board with notes that are talking about no, go ahead and yeah.
So the notes on the board are showing throughlines. So what we are talking about when we talk about throughlines is these big themes that will run through the entire work at every level. So on all of those different in all of those different elements, you are going to see those throughlines. So in the teaching for understanding framework, which we'll be talking about in a little bit, every classroom has a throughline that it follows throughout the year.
So for the first part of this project, our throughlines were what and how are students learning in the arts? How can arts support learning in other subjects and how can we see and track learning over time?
And this year's throughlines is in which ways will studios habits of mind help deepen content knowledge in order to meet the learning goals of each and every child in every classroom.
So next slide.
So the first element, professional learning communities. One of the things that we know is that schools are hectic places with something going on all the time and so in this project we want to be very intentional about bringing teachers together. So through the TARI project, there are many opportunities for teachers and principals to grow and develop through gathering, discussing work, problem solving together.
From's a focus on opportunities to grow as there's a focus on opportunities to grow as teachers, to share work, to grow through presentation and to give teachers arts experiences. So you can see in these pictures we have teachers working together, sharing their own work, looking at each other's work through protocols, and this actually the way that this actually happens is in quarterly professional development days, so the district has committed to bringing teachers together. We have onsite coaching, where subject area coaches are meeting with teachers and giving direct coaching and instruction. We have site leads from each school who are gathering, who are meeting together, and then we have the principals which is a really key piece.
We have principals doing professional development and meeting together.
Next slide.
> TANA: So Ray mentioned we have these quarterly professional development days. These are very near and dear to my heart. What usually kicks off the professional development days is a threeday summer institute which brings all of our constituents together for three whole days where we really do a deep dive on what is arts integration and what does it mean to be doing your own action research in your classroom?
So what does it mean to be an investigator?
So every professional development then after that and we do them quarterly really, really hones in on the arts integrated, so in science, history and language arts, primarily, what are the skills in the arts and the exposure to artists that we can gain?
What are the thinking frames that we'll talk about later? And how do we reflect and really sharpen our lens on our teaching practice?
So in these images on the left, you will see teachers collaborating. They are really tackling a wonderful generative topic of selfgenerating closed systems and they are mapping cell organelles and then the next phase of the project on the right is when they map a social system that has analogous traits and they really have to collaborate. They really have to wrestle with what is an analogous social system and what traits map the cells, map directly to the cell organelles and why and then we connect it to the common core and we ask them to reflect in writing, in an expository way and where they explain why they chose their maps.
Oh, before you advance the slide, I would like to read a quote from a TARI teacher, who said, "in person sharing student work created action to the project. I replicated some of the items shared by other teachers in my own classroom."
Now you can advance to the next slide, please.
So teachers are learning a new thinking frame that we have mentioned and we will get into more deeply later in the presentation. And that thinking frame is the studio thinking framework or the studio habits of mind, and in every professional development, we ask teachers to reflect on their own practice and their own process, using the studio habits of mind with themselves so that they can start to understand how these studio habits of mind translate to not only artists but to other disciplinarians, scientists, historians, mathematicians, etcetera so that they can bring these habits back into their communities.
And they also assess each other's work in the image here, the slide you are looking at, the lower slide is an assessment tool that we designed where they actually observe the student work or their own work, depending on what we are doing in the professional development and then they really articulate what habits of mind were used in that work.
So another teacher quote that I would like to share with you right now, said "TARI is one of the only opportunities to have regular grade level collaboration amongst schools in the district. I appreciate the ideas and perspectives of the fourth and fifth grade teachers from the other schools, especially as the district tries to develop a cohesive approach to accelerate student learning. This opportunity to collaborate is valuable."
So I think what we are seeing and I know from reading the evaluations and talking to the teachers, is that they really, really value this time to come together and reflect on their work, to share their student data, and to really, really make changes to their practice, for the better for their students.
Next slide.
> RAY: Okay. So another element in this project is onsite coaching. So you can see some of our coaches here. We have science, English language arts and arts coaches, meeting with teachers in between these professional development meetings in order to look at student work and sharpen the arts integration lens.
So this is really about when I say sharpening the arts integration lens, it's talking about looking deeply into a particular project that teachers have done, looking at all the different stages they have done and getting feedback from their colleagues, as well as coaches.
So coaches have developing a sharing protocol for teachers to look at student work and reflect on student learning. And this is this is a really valuable time for teachers to slow down, do some ongoing assessment of their and a reflection of their own work and to get feedback from outside eyes, where coaches can really be looking at can be showing them some areas that they may have missed when they were going through their lessons or even when they were evaluating or assessing their lessons. So it's an opportunity to sit down after school and talk with colleagues and talk with coaches who are trained in this and hopefully refine not just this project for the future, but but other projects that they will be doing with their students and other curriculums they will be developing so that they really keep this arts integration focused on everything that they are creating.
So coaches meet every other week to share what they are learning from visiting their teachers and plan PDs and to refine assessment tools. So it's really important that the coaches are also are modeling and following this same reflective stance where they are working together to understand their own work through coaching each other, working with each other, and sharing their work.
Next slide.
> TANA: So the site leads component was added after the first year of the program and we realized soon that the interest was growing very, very quickly in the program. It doubled in size in two years and then it tripled in size in the third year. And we really realized that in order to go deeply, we would have to employ teachers from each school site to take back what they were learning from the professional developments and help their teachers at their sites see the value, learn the frameworks, experience kind of magic of arts integration because the magic was happening. We just needed it to go further than the core teachers.
So what we did is we identified people who were early adopters and very enthusiastic and showed teacher leadership and we invited them to become a site lead, which means that we pay them for their time. They meet with us in between every professional development. They bring ideas for the profession development, they bring feedback, how they thought the meetings are going, and most importantly, they actually plan professional developments that they administer with their own staff back at their school sites.
So this image that you are seeing here is a staff meeting that just happened at Jefferson Elementary School, where the site lead developed compassion, and they are using the lines of communication to learn what does compassionate teaching look like? How does it tie to our antibullying curriculum? How can we really model compassion in our daily lives in school?
So this, I I would have to say this site lead component is just proving to be such an amazing benefit to our program, because teachers, they share, and they really inspire each other, and they are really stepping up to be leaders. The other thing I wanted to mention was that many of our site leads present outside of their school context at conferences or at the California county superintendents educational services association conference. So it's really exciting to see them out in the world sharing the work and really, really rising up as professionals. Next slide, please.
So Ray mentioned that we do principal professional development and I can't emphasize enough how important this is to the program and to our success. We realized early on the list program Ray mentioned was was begun. It was a dream of the superintendent of the school district. So it came from the top, which I think is really a wonderful thing. However, eastbound if it starts at the top, it's you still need to work on all levels, you know from teachers to, you know, site administrators to curriculum and instruction to superintendents and all of you know, data people all the way to the school board.
So what we do is we go to the principal meetings twice yearly. We often engage them in an arts exercise. We also engage them in looking at the student work, what the teachers are producing and we ask them to use the studio habits of mind to discuss and assess the work. We do walk throughs of the TARI teachers classrooms and help them see how a TARI classroom is different than a regular classroom.
So we really help them to sharpen their own integration lens to name what is happening in the arts integration classroom. Now, I would like to share a quote with you from a principal. She says I have seen more students take ownership of their work, sustain ownership, and connect their work to any of the studio habits. The difference is huge, especially for my English language learners and especially for my eyerisk students. Their faces light up with any academics which is coupled with the studio habits and the arts.