Please comment on how we can address at Esperanza the following school factors that affect achievement, especially for our Hispanic learners.
Factor #8: Reciprocal relationships/"family ethos": Research has shown this is even more important for Hispanic learners and their families. A great resource on the importance of and how to create a caring school environment is Nel Noddings.
Factor #9: High expectations: All students need to receive a gifted/talented curriculum and instruction. Ron Clark, a nationally known excellent teacher, suggests that we teach to the highest level students and scaffold the others.
Factor #10: Summer loss: We can address this not only with finding ways to get our Esperanza scholars to read during the summer but also through enticing after school programs, longer days, and Saturday classes.
Factor #11: Content is presented in a thematic manner
Factor #12: Whole language literacy approach and explicit vocabulary development
Factor #13: Identifiable learning priorities: Some great resources for this are the books Focus, Results Now, Champion Teachers, and Molasses Classes.
Factor #14: Peer tutoring: Latinos in Action is a great program to involve with Esperanza.
2 comments:
This is just a check to see what works
I am glad that we are talking about this. It is one thing that is very important to me. Many of these issues can be solved by the teacher. A teacher who carefully crafts a lesson will do so where there are multiple entry points as well as multiple exit points.
I think about Krashen's theory of teaching to the i+1 level. But as all students are at their own unique posirion in learning the crafting becomes important. I think that as teachers strive to use higher level thinking skills in discussions and activities as Bloom's taxonomy suggests and teachers plan with the end in mind offering students plenty of scaffolding, differentiated options, and include them in rich discussions full of language they can be easily pushed to higher levels.
The other day I watched a teacher set up a simple center for a group of Kindergartners. She asked them to identify a pattern in bugs, glue the correct bug at the end of the row and then color the pictures. I wanted to see what they could do. So I watched a group, then I sat down with them to "push" them a little. They were able to identify more patterns than just bumble bee, lady bug, bumble bee lady bug, and then glue on a bee. I was not so surprised to see that when asked they could identify patterns in their antenaes, legs, eyes, and so on. After the first couple of questions they continued on their own. And then drew their own bug patterns. What else I wanted to know was if they could then identify non-alternating patterns. But alas, the rotation time came to soon.
In conclusion, I think that if we believe that a child can do more, that they generally will. And that it is not a bad thing to push a little if it jas been crafted the right way and with the right intentions.
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