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I want to give you a special welcome to our Esperanza Elementary blog as we take our journey to found the school of our dreams. I invite you to visit us often and offer any ideas, thoughts, suggestions, questions, comments, etc. you might have.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

The Most Powerful Predictor For Success

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700138197/Teachers-at-top-schools-cite-collaborative-efforts.html?s_cid=fb_share

The above is a link to an article published by the Deseret News on May 23, 2011 about the top ten and lowest ten performing schools in Utah. The schools that performed the worst attributed their scores to high poverty, high mobility, high percentage of minority students (mostly Hispanic), high numbers of students who are English Language Learners. Five of these schools came from the same school district. The Executive of Curriculum and Instruction of this district said that no other district that even comes close to the demographics of their district.

We at Esperanza will be intentionally addressing similar issues because of the population we want to serve. It is extremely important that we not blame the victim which has become an accupational disease of education according to Dr. Martin Haberman in his book Star Teachers: the Ideology and Best Practice of Effective Teachers of Diverse Children and Youth in Poverty.

The most important reason, according to Haberman, that STARs want to learn more about their students' out-of-school lives is they want to make learning more meaningful and relevant rather than a reason as to why they can't teach them. How a teacher explains and thinks about these issues is the most powerful predictor of his/her success in teaching diverse children.

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