Students and Achievement

My current obsession is about students, of course. But how do we get all students, black, white, special ed, ELL, to connect to the content meaningfully. Yes, cater to their individual strengths. But there is more to that. In a full classroom with 24 students, each with their own background baggage, current identity, strengths and weaknesses, how do we connect topics such as the Civil War to these diverse middle school students trying so hard to connect with their own identity, let alone a story about an actual soldier in the Union army, for example.

Why reinvent the wheel when people have done the research? Attempt a new pedagogical practice and reflect on the results I think that is the research that I am doing now: Do classrooms really need three teachers?I am beginning to understand, through my experince as a "third wheel" in the classroom, that it doesn't take more teachers in the classroom, it takes establishing well researched pedagogical practices and routines into your teaching ___.

How do you connect teaching with activism and social change? Expeditions! CCPCS is an Expeditionary Learning School where this should already be embedded in the teacher's pedagogy.

So, let's examine this relationship: teaching for social change and expeditions. When planning an expedition, the main question one asks after "What content will I need to teach?" is "How will my students have a puposeful audience for their projects that are a result of the expedition?" If my co-teacher's and I had really thought about this, (and we "thought" about it, but didn't really act on it) we should have related the expedition on Slavery and the Civil War on meaningfully connecting the content to current social conditions.

"Our goals for ourselves and for our students are as complex, dynamic, and contested as we hope their goals will be as teachers of children: to learn to see students fully and fairly, as threedimensional creatures much like ourselves; to see ourselves as active agents of change in our schools and in our worlds; and to find practical application in public school classrooms for our commitment to social justice and human freedom." (Ayers, W., Michie, G., Rome, A., "Embers of Hope: In Search of a Meaningful Critical Pedagogy", Teacher Education Quarterly, Winter 2004, online google article)

CREDE - Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence has 5 Standards that establish another set pf principles that should guide insturction to individuals who are "at risk of educational failure due to cultural, language, racial, geographic, or economic factors." They are:
Teachers and students work together (collaboration between students and teachers)
developing language and literacy across all curriculum (integrated curriculum),
connecting lessons to students lives (meaningful, authentic, relevant connections to curriculum),
engaging students with challenging lessons (complex, higher-order thinking)
emphasizing dialogue over lectures (critical pedagogy, student-as-worker, teacher-as-coach (CES principle))

http://crede.berkeley.edu/standards/standards.html