CAN I GET A LITTLE SUPPORT FOR THAT SUPPOSITION? – Dad Gone Wild

CAN I GET A LITTLE SUPPORT FOR THAT SUPPOSITION? – Dad Gone Wild

CAN I GET A LITTLE SUPPORT FOR THAT SUPPOSITION?

“We’re all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed

 

So riddle me this? I can shop at Publix without a mask, but I can’t get more than 4 tickets per student to a high school graduation ceremony, why? A graduation is a once-in-a-lifetime event and it appears we are erring on the side of caution. We are talking about robbing students and families of an event that was over a decade in the making without good cause.

Administrators talk about the need to make meaningful relationships and the importance of SEL. We want communities to celebrate and buy into the value of education. Yet here we are, a time for celebration and the reinforcing of bonds between communities and schools, and we are punting. For what? What is the possible upside of depriving students of the opportunity to share one of the most memorable moments of their life with their extended families?

At a time when people are re-emerging from their COVID cocoons, I would argue that it is more important than ever to reaffirm the touchstones of our lives. Graduation, marriage, the birth of children, are milestones that mark our journey through life. Yet, MNPS feels CONTINUE READING: CAN I GET A LITTLE SUPPORT FOR THAT SUPPOSITION? – Dad Gone Wild

SPI Visits San Diego County Schools - Year 2021 (CA Dept of Education)

SPI Visits San Diego County Schools - Year 2021 (CA Dept of Education)

State Superintendent Tony Thurmond Visits San Diego County Schools Open for In-Person Learning that Utilize Strong Safety Measures and Social-Emotional Supports

SACRAMENTO—State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond raised his hand and joined elementary students for class today on two campuses in San Diego County that have stayed open for safe, in-person learning by implementing comprehensive safety measures and offering wide-ranging, whole-child supports for students and families.

State Superintendent Thurmond visited Castle Park Elementary and Joseph Casillas Elementary, both located in Chula Vista, an area among the hardest hit by the pandemic. The schools are two out of 49 schools in the Chula Vista Elementary School District (CVESD), which serves nearly 30,000 students, with 68 percent identified as Hispanic and 36 percent as English learners. CVESD is the largest transitional kindergarten through sixth grade school district in California and is approximately five miles from the border of Mexico.

“These schools are a model for the state and nation in how we support students while recovering from this pandemic and preparing for a full return to in-person learning,” Thurmond said. “Through inspiring investments in school-based mental health support, comprehensive safety measures such as rapid COVID testing, and engaging instruction individualized to student needs, families should feel confident that schools like these are the safest, best places for their children.”

Throughout the day, Thurmond witnessed examples of whole-child support, with layers of physical safety measures combined with onsite mental health support, learning acceleration, and proactive family engagement strategies put in place to serve students and families. In addition, Thurmond learned about CVESD’s series developed for parents to provide ways to support their children’s social-emotional wellness at home as well as resources to enhance classroom practices, such as restorative circles, social-emotional lessons, and mindfulness.

CVESD has 53 school psychologists who support district schools, including charter schools. Every site has access to a school psychologist. In addition, as part of its reopening plans, CVESD is funding part-time mental health support professionals at each of its 41 non-charter school sites from April 12 to June 15, 2021. Highlights include:

• A minimum of two days of counseling support will be provided at each of the non-charter district schools.
• Key support responsibilities: High visibility at ingress/egress, readily available for crisis intervention (triage), 1:1 counseling.
• Site-based social workers/counselors will provide support at 11 sites.
• District social workers will provide support at nine sites.
• Partner organization South Bay Community Services (SBCS) will provide mental health support providers at the remaining 21 sites.
• SBCS’s Community Assessment Team will provide an additional one to two days of case management support to CVESD’s 10 highest unduplicated student sites to connect families with case management and wraparound services (e.g., family counseling, outside therapy, etc.).

CVESD Superintendent Francisco Escobedo, Ed.D., said it is more important than ever to attend to students’ social and emotional needs.

“We believe in educating the whole child through rigorous academic instruction but also with behavioral and social-emotional learning and support,” Dr. Escobedo said. “It was amazing to share with the State Superintendent how our schools are implementing safety measures, dealing with learning loss, dealing with the trauma that our students experienced—and how we are mitigating the effects. We are deploying what we call a strengths-based focus on trauma, where our counselors, social workers, principals, and teachers are utilizing social-emotional constructs, teaching emotional self-regulation, to empower students and parents to overcome the rigors and challenges they had to go through during the pandemic.”

Among the safety measures implemented by the district, CVESD is one of 79 school districts in California that are now offering free rapid antigen testing that can provide COVID-19 test results in as little as 15 minutes. This antigen testing, made available because of a partnership with the County of San Diego, the State of California, and Primary Health and facilitated by Thurmond and the California Department of Education, is available to all staff and students throughout the school district. In addition, CVESD is hosting family vaccination clinics on a weekly basis.

School districts that are interested in enrolling in the state’s rapid antigen testing program are asked to complete this no-commitment interest form. For questions on rapid COVID testing, email RapidTesting@cde.ca.gov.

Note to editors and reporters: For photos and footage of the State Superintendent’s visit to Chula Vista schools, please contact Anthony Millican, CVESD Director of Communications, at Anthony.Millican@cvesd.org.

# # # #

Tony Thurmond — State Superintendent of Public Instruction
Communications Division, Room 5602, 916-319-0818, Fax 916-319-0100

SPI Visits San Diego County Schools - Year 2021 (CA Dept of Education)

NANCY BAILEY: Researching DeVos’s $185 Million School Funding Plan During a Pandemic

Researching DeVos’s $185 Million School Funding Plan During a Pandemic  

Researching DeVos’s $185 Million School Funding Plan During a Pandemic 

During this pandemic, public school funding is critical. The American public deserves to know as best as possible how their tax dollars are being spent on education and every area for that matter. That’s why it’s disappointing to review Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s recent spending of $185 million on education innovation and acceleration.

Program emphasis is on STEM, social-emotional learning, and teacher professional development. There’s no mention of reading, geography, the arts, or child-find programs to locate children who did not sign up for school due to the virus.

A teacher’s needs when it comes to remote learning are not well addressed. Nor is there specific attention to math, aside from STEM. It has been stated that students are behind in math, although those reports seem faulty.

Mental health is vaguely addressed by SEL programs, but not necessarily by school psychologists, social workers, or professionals at the school level. More local outreach is needed.

I asked her this question on Twitter, and am still waiting for an answer. I will likely wait CONTINUE READING: Researching DeVos’s $185 Million School Funding Plan During a Pandemic  

New Grants and Training to Address Learning Gaps - Year 2020 (CA Dept of Education)

New Grants and Training to Address Learning Gaps - Year 2020 (CA Dept of Education)

State Superintendent Tony Thurmond Announces Additional Educator Trainings and Grants to Address Equity and Learning Gaps

SACRAMENTO—State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond announced Tuesday that the California Department of Education (CDE) is launching additional virtual educator trainings and mini-grants designed to accelerate ongoing efforts to address equity gaps, strengthen distance learning, and support students’ social emotional wellness during the pandemic.

The latest professional development webinars and the new grant opportunities are the latest efforts to build on the CDE’s training, guidance, and direct assistance provided to schools and educators throughout the months-long pandemic.

“Like all educators, I am concerned about the pandemic’s continued impact on our students, especially those students already pushed to the margins by historic and systemic inequities that have existed for generations and created persistent barriers to educational opportunity,” Thurmond said. “We know that until we eradicate the COVID-19 virus, some forms of remote learning will remain necessary in the weeks and months ahead for our schools to continue safe teaching and learning. That means we must continue putting resources into supporting our educators who are going above and beyond to engage all students.”

The upcoming professional development webinars include:

SEL Workshop for School Well-Being: Monday, December 14, 2020, 3:30-4:30 p.m. via Zoom and CDE Facebook Live. Coordinated in partnership with Beyond Differences and the Social Emotional Learning Alliance for California, this interactive professional development webinar for educators will provide resources and strategies for building supportive connections with students in the virtual world across K–12 grade levels.

Effective Distance Learning Practices and Home-School Connections: Wednesday, December 16, 2020, 3:30-5 p.m., via Zoom and CDE Facebook Live. Coordinated in partnership with leading equity groups the California Association of Bilingual Education and the Parent Institute for Quality Education, this webinar will highlight evidence-based distance learning strategies that are working for students, with an emphasis on reaching and supporting students who are historically underserved in public schools.

Mini-Grants for Equity: Funded through a $200,000 contribution from the Stuart Foundation, the CDE will award grants of up to $20,000 each to schools, districts, and charter schools that can demonstrate how they will address equity and opportunity gaps by utilizing the funds to target educators’ or students’ needs in distance learning, in-person instruction, or hybrid models. Funds can be used for a variety of purposes including professional development, family engagement, or other activities that strengthen student learning and connections. More details, grant criteria, and the application process will be issued in the coming days.

The resources announced are a continuation of the CDE’s ongoing professional development for educators during this pandemic, including dozens of webinars on the CDE Coronavirus Webinars web page, on the CDE Facebook page, the CDE YouTube channel, published guidance, the distribution of weekly resources to school districts, and more.

# # # #

Tony Thurmond — State Superintendent of Public Instruction
Communications Division, Room 5602, 916-319-0818, Fax 916-319-0100

New Grants and Training to Address Learning Gaps - Year 2020 (CA Dept of Education)

CURMUDGUCATION: What Is The Actual Purpose of Social and Emotional Learning

CURMUDGUCATION: What Is The Actual Purpose of Social and Emotional Learning

What Is The Actual Purpose of Social and Emotional Learning

I'm increasingly convinced that one of the reasons social and emotional learning (SEL) is such a matter of contention in education (and it has been, every time it has been it has been brought up under one guise or another) is that it requires us to look at the places where education bumps up against the really big questions-- what is the purpose of education? why are we here? what is our purpose? what is the meaning of life? That stuff.

SEL advocates generally back away from that, and it leads to discussions of SEL that are ridiculous. 

Here's CASEL, the big mac daddy of the SEL biz, listing the benefits of SEL, in order: academic outcomes and improved behaviors, long-term improvement in academics and conduct problems, 11;1 return on investment, reduce poverty (as in the poverty of individuals as in you'll make more money), improves life outcomes (eg not being on waiting list for public housing).

Lots of folks like to cite a research finding that SEL "improves achievement by an average of 11 percentile points, which is an odd thing to tout; since percentiles are rankings, if everybody received this benefit, nobody would receive this benefit. 

Even when research is more well-balanced, many folks writing about that research tend to focus on things like how SEL will "have long-term academic benefits on students' reading and vocabulary" and CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: What Is The Actual Purpose of Social and Emotional Learning

Teacher Tom: Where Our Focus Ought to Be Right Now . . . And Always

Teacher Tom: Where Our Focus Ought to Be Right Now . . . And Always

Where Our Focus Ought to Be Right Now . . . And Always

Most of us take it for granted that human beings are smarter than other animals. After all, we have by far the largest brains compared to our body size of any other species, comprising, on average, two percent of our body weight. But when scientists in Germany used a series of thirty-eight tests designed to compare our innate intelligence with animals we assume are pretty smart, such as orangutans and chimpanzees, on things like spatial awareness, calculation, and causality, we performed about the same. This doesn't surprise me, actually. Having lived with a series of dogs over the course of the past three decades, I'm convinced there are times that they've pitied me as a sweet little puddin' head, lovable, but not that bright, especially when it comes to things like being aware of a rabbit hiding in the shrubbery or understanding what they want or need when they could not be communicating more clearly. 

The only area of intelligence in which the researchers found that humans surpass our ape cousins is when it comes to social learning: the ability to learn from others. As Rutger Bregman writes in his book Humankind:

Human beings, it turns out, are ultra social learning machines. We're born to learn, to bond and to play. Maybe it's not so strange, then, that blushing is the only human expression that's uniquely human. blushing, after all, is quintessentially social -- it's people showing they care what others think, which fosters trust and enables cooperation. 

That we need one another in order to take advantage of our great big brains, shouldn't surprise any early childhood educators. 

Other research, and most significantly, the Perry School Project, the longest running study of the impact of high CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: Where Our Focus Ought to Be Right Now . . . And Always

Shanker Blog: We Choose to Reimagine Education: Centering on Love and Emotionally Responsive Teaching and Learning | National Education Policy Center

Shanker Blog: We Choose to Reimagine Education: Centering on Love and Emotionally Responsive Teaching and Learning | National Education Policy Center

Shanker Blog: We Choose to Reimagine Education: Centering on Love and Emotionally Responsive Teaching and Learning

This post is part of our series entitled Teaching and Learning During a Pandemic, in which we invite guest authors to reflect on the challenges of the Coronavirus pandemic for teaching and learning. Our guest authors today are Tia C. Madkins, assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin, and Alexis Patterson Williams, assistant professor in science education at the University of California Davis. Other posts in the series are compiled here.

Receiving new and conflicting information about COVID-19 is sending families, educators, and communities into a tailspin. Schools remain closed, students and their families are frustrated with remote schooling (RS), and school reopening plans are being revealed slowly—if at all. Many conversations about the upcoming school year have been rooted in fear of  what could go wrong. We argue that it is critical to start our conversation from a place of hope and reimagine what could go well in PK-12 education. This requires reimagining PK-12 education through the lens of love. If we don’t use this moment to reimagine education, we are missing an incredible opportunity, which will leave our children wondering why we didn’t work harder to leverage the moment to make their lives and schools better.

What does it look like to center love as we prepare to reopen US schools? When we say love, we mean a commitment to making each other better. Educators commit to being responsible for and to each other, to students, and to families. This is accomplished by having explicit high expectations and demonstrating care through both actions and words. At a time when schools are incredibly unequal, it is really important to show love and uplift the experiences of Black and Brown students. Thus, educators in PK-12 classrooms, both in and outside of schools, must engage in humanizing pedagogies that 1) foster emotionally responsive classroom environments; 2) support students’ critical consciousness development; and 3) co-construct curricula and knowledge with their students. Here is how educators can enact these practices.

Foster emotionally responsive classroom environments. When we center love, we create emotionally responsive learning environments. Educators who see their students as fully human and as children provide meaningful and robust instructional experiences. This requires examining, confronting, and rejecting deficit views of students, families, and communities CONTINUE READING: Shanker Blog: We Choose to Reimagine Education: Centering on Love and Emotionally Responsive Teaching and Learning | National Education Policy Center