Storypath Project to Better the Community

Poster by a group of four 2nd graders at Cherry Crest Elementary.

This was a poster from the final assessment of a Social Studies unit about how people use the environment. This was the most modification I had done to a curriculum thus far as a teacher to make sure that students truly understood the effects of pollution, not just from their point of view, but from all points of view. This was a project that required a lot from students putting me in a position of being a warm demander, like Gay describes in their book. I asked my students to research how to fix pollution problems, to design posters with a group, and to make a display for the whole school to see. This connects to Gay’s framework because caring is more than just wanting them to succeed, it is an action. Caring is giving the students the tools and the space to succeed. Caring is knowing that the student can achieve highly rigorous content!

Not only does this showcase an example of being a war demander, but it also keeps Banks’ model in mind when thinking about putting students and lessons at the center of enacting change. They had the opportunity to show the whole School community how to be Climate Change Warriors at the school and what others could do to make change! The students not only were proud of the work they did for the project but were equally excited to put their poster in a place where everyone might see it!

Strand I - Social Justice Identity

1.5 TCs understand how historical and institutional structures create and maintain racial and other
inequities and oppressions in education

1.6 TCs develop the skills to reimagine and enact solutions to the inequities within schools,
specifically focused on students who are disproportionately harmed on a micro or macro level,
based on their various identities (racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, etc.).


1.7 TCs demonstrate the expectations and requirements of the teaching profession and engage
with all stakeholders in humanizing ways

 

Newsletter to Families

A weekly newsletter written by myself for eight weeks

The newsletter was something I saw my mentor teacher and many other teachers at Cherry Crest do as a way to show families what their students were learning about in school. This was also a place for announcements for future events that would be important to the student's time in the classroom. I learned a lot from this experience writing the newsletter every week. One is that it’s important to show families what the students are working on because the students might not tell them at home. This connects to Baglieri’s book, Disability Studies and the Inclusive Classroom Critical Practices for Embracing Diversity in Education. In this book, while it mostly talks about the importance of communication between teachers, administration, and families for families who have students who are impacted by disabilities, equity, and communication are important for all families and students. 

This newsletter also showed me how interconnected specialists and staff, like the music teacher and the librarian, are with the whole school. This created a very clear and easy way for families to view information from the whole school in one location. I also felt that I was building a relationship every week when I sent the newsletter out to families. Showcasing not only what their students were learning, but also being able to show how I as a student teacher was excited about the lessons and proud of the work the students were putting in each week.

Strand II - Authentic Partnership

2.2 TCs value the partnerships with families, communities and other school personnel as a
necessity in educating the whole person.


2.3 TCs understand the purposes and principles behind developing and maintaining authentic
partnerships

2.5 TCs demonstrate accountability to the community through cycles of feedback, action, and co-
reflection with families, school personnel and community partners

 
 

Arab American Heritage Month

Along side another 2nd Grade teacher

Strand II - Authentic Partnership

2.2 TCs value the partnerships with families, communities and other school personnel as a
necessity in educating the whole person.


2.3 TCs understand the purposes and principles behind developing and maintaining authentic
partnerships

This was a very fun activity and a great way to strengthen bonds with the other second-grade teachers. During my time at Cherry Crest, I was lucky enough to not only know all the second-grade teachers at the school but also many teachers outside my grade during my time student teaching. When I started my full-time student teaching the other second-grader teacher reached out about collaborating with my class to make posters and biographies for Arab American Heritage Month. These posters would be displayed next to the office alongside books from the library and a flag made by another class.

This goes with the article A Matter of Trust. During this activity, we built trust between the two classes and helped some of the students in the general education classroom have more scaffolding for the project. Just like in the Article A Matter of Trust, these students rose to the occasion and as a team, we were able to have all the posters finished with more than a few sentences about each person. It was creative teamwork and each student left feeling like they accomplished something 

Ms. Sabreena and I grouped our students up and gave the biographies of twelve different Arab Americans who accomplished great things throughout their lives. Students got to not only learn about amazing people, like Tony Shalhoub and Paula Abdul. We also got to prepare a few students to speak at an assembly showcasing a few Arab Americans they did their posters on for the school.

Group chart from Literacy Activity

Word Map as a whole class after reading THis is the Rope: A Story from the Great Migration

Strand IV - Planning, Instruction, and Assessment

4.3 TCs design and enact meaningful and responsive instruction in which alignment exists between content goals, assessment and students' identity development, assets and diverse learning needs.

4.6 TCs design and enact instruction and assessment in which students can develop academic language and literacy skills to engage with content and represent their ideas in a range of modalities

4.9 TCs enact assessment strategies to adjust and differentiate instruction and to support students in monitoring their own learning

This lesson was a lesson I reframed and reworked based on a previous lesson in their literacy unit. This unit focused on symbols and personification within texts. Since I had a gifted class I wanted to make sure the lesson was challenging enough without confusing them. In the previous lesson, they had worked in teams at the desks trying to work through the different categories: keywords, symbols, images, and main ideas from the text. When they did this the first time, they struggled a lot. This was not a productive struggle way either, I saw a few students getting frustrated because they did not have more people to bounce their ideas off to complete the lesson. 

When I taught this lesson I decided that I needed to change it up and saw that my students needed this to be a whole group activity. I thought about the framework from Acosta and Ray. The Chapter Using Multiple Sources of Information to Develop a Comprehensive Understanding of a Student's Strengths and Needs, talks about developing a whole learning profile for the single student, this could also be taken as the classroom is seen as one learner and realizing they need a different form of instruction. It was really important for me as a teacher to use the formative assessment and reflection from the first lesson to help me plan for the next one. The reworked lesson produced more ideas than the first and many of the students were able to participate more. I also saw the student’s body language shift from the first lesson, it went from stressed and rigid to engaged and leaning in. Even after the reworked lesson, I saw ways that I could improve this to be better for my students. Learning never stops as a teacher, and this lesson really showed me that clearly.

Sources

Acosta, K., & Ray, J. (2022). Chapter 4: Using Multiple Sources of Information to Develop a Comprehensive Understanding of a Student's Strengths and Needs.

Baglieri, S. (2023). Disability Studies and the Inclusive Classroom Critical Practices for Embracing Diversity in Education (third). Routledge.

Banks, J.A. & McGee Banks, C.A. (2016). Levels of integration of multicultural content (pp. 155-167). Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives (9th edition). Wiley.

Berg, J.H. et. al. (2018, March). A matter of trust. Educational Leadership. 75(6), 56-61. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/a-matter-of-trust