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Reducing Chronic Absenteeism

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Using our Restorative Justice Lense

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The matter of police brutality has returned to the center of U.S. politics in historic proportions following the police killing of George Floyd. And one demand of the growing movement for Black lives has generated more controversy than any of the others: defund the police.

Both conservatives and liberals worry that defunding the police goes too far, punishing all officers for the bad actions of a few. But good people do bad things, or allow bad things to happen, when the institutions that employ them target Black, Brown and queer people with more suspicion and violence than Whites. That's true right here in San Diego as well.

To understand systemic racism, we look not to the good intentions of its members, but the mission and culture of the organization they work within. As noted sociologist Rashawn Ray puts it, bad apples come from rotten trees.

In 2012 and 2013, we conducted a study of police stop and frisk tactics, involving months of ride-alongs with multiple police units in one medium-size California city. During these ride-alongs, we witnessed officers stop the same Latino man on two separate occasions: the first time while driving his family home from his son's haircut in a dark SUV and the second time while riding his bike on the sidewalk. On the second occasion, the man initially drew the officers' attention because he was large, Brown and tattooed, with a shaved head and baggy clothes. The officers, as per usual, were polite at the start of the interaction, asking to "just talk" or "check in." But the man was agitated. He remembered the officers from the prior encounter, before the officers remembered him. He'd seen the officers following him. He repeated again and again, "You're labeling me."

As far as we could tell, the officers were decent guys: devoted to their families, professing a desire to do good in the community. But the man wasn't responding to who the officers were, he was angry about what they were doing. Not receiving the compliance that the officers expected, they pivoted from courteous to commanding, detaining and searching him on the sidewalk. Nothing came of the search and the man was released without citation or apology.

This type of proactive or investigatory policing is the bread and butter of modern police departments: stop as many people as possible under the pretext of a minor infraction in order to uncover guns, drugs and information. And when officers do not receive ready compliance, courtesy goes out the window.

Police practices, such as stop and frisk and hot spot policing, combine with policing policy, like " broken windows" policing and militarization, and a police culture that demands loyalty and distrusts residents. Together, practice, policy and culture create a theater for racial bias, at best, and racial violence, at worst.

San Diego is no exception to these patterns of racial disproportionality in stops, use of force and shootings. The San Diego police killings of Alfred Olango, Aleah Jenkins, Nicholas Bils, Raymond Goodlow and others echo national disparities. This violence is discriminatory, erodes public trust and makes it hard to breathe.

The fact of the matter is police are not trained to handle most of what police actually do in the line of duty. Police academies prioritize tactical training and emphasize compliance. But responding to violent crime is the tiny minority of what police do on a daily basis. Instead, they spend the bulk of patrol responding to the symptoms of an unequal society - domestic violence, illicit drug use, homelessness, mental illness and property crime.

"Defund the police" calls for the restructuring of police institutions by shrinking their role in addressing the problems of poverty and segregation: a call long made by Black women abolitionists.

In San Diego, Defund Police SD and the Community Budget Alliance have taken a critical look at city and county budgets, while the Coalition for Police Accountability and Transparency has called on city and county elected officials to end investigatory stops, divest from the police, and implement civilian oversight and robust use of force and de-escalation policies in line with the vision of the California Act to Save Lives. By shifting taxpayer funds away from law enforcement, we free up resources to build new institutions and to refund poor communities so they can address public safety effectively and nonviolently.

Policing will only be changed by limiting the scope of officers' mission, not reforming their mindset. It's time to fund poor communities of color and lay the foundation of opportunity that they have too long been denied.
Prieto Read more views on the future of policing: is an associate professor of sociology at the University of San Diego who lives in Hillcrest. Rios is associate dean of social sciences at the University of California Santa Barbara and an expert on gang-involved youth who lives in Goleta.

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Commentary: Defunding the police means refunding poor communities

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The matter of police brutality has returned to the center of U.S. politics in historic proportions following the police killing of George Floyd. And one demand of the growing movement for Black lives has generated more controversy than any of the others: defund the police.

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Providing insightful feedback that builds confidence for our ELL's.

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Providing insightful feedback that builds confidence for our ELL's.

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Strategies for RCLA Teachers

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English Language Learners

Using sentence frames and explicit feedback thoughtfully can provide the right balance of structure and scaffolding for English language learners.

monkeybusinessimages / iStock

When I started teaching English language learners, I avoided addressing my students' language errors in class because I was just grateful that they volunteered to speak at all. I was also unsure how to provide feedback in the moment. On top of that, I thought that I simply lacked the time to address all the errors that students were making.

One day, I had the chance to explain to a student why he needed the article a before certain nouns. He told me this was an "aha" moment for him, and I was reminded of the value of corrective feedback.

Here are some ways to address students' language errors in class while also building their confidence with spoken and written academic language.

How to Give Corrective Feedback That Builds Confidence

Teach and practice how a vocabulary word is used in different situations: When introducing a new vocabulary word, I also teach the correct conjugations, prepositions, parts of speech, and collocations of the word when used in different contexts. (A collocation is a series of words that are often found together. For example, after defining the word indicate, I explain that it's typically paired with that, why, or how.)

If the word is a verb, we practice using it in different tenses and paired with different subjects. I include the correct prepositions alongside the vocabulary word on our class word wall. If students use the word with an incorrect preposition, I direct them to the word wall and ask them to choose one of the correct pairings.

Explicitly model how to correctly complete a response frame: Language teachers commonly use response frames to model the academic language their students need to practice. For example, to practice using the word persuade, we might use this frame: "Citizens can persuade political leaders to _____."

I improve the quality of students' shared responses when I demonstrate how to generate the correct language in the blank. In this example, first I clarify the meaning of the word citizens. Then I highlight the word to as a grammar clue in the sentence. When paired with persuade, the word to signals that next we need a base verb (an action word with no changed endings). I write improve public transportation in the blank as I think aloud, "People are late to work because the buses don't arrive on time. Many people want to persuade our mayor to improve public transportation."

I recite the completed sentence aloud, modeling the correct pronunciation and emphasis. I prompt students to repeat out loud together so they will be more comfortable sharing their own examples. With this added step, students build fluency.

Provide word banks for a response frame: A word bank is a list of possible words or phrases that correctly complete a sentence frame. For the example above, I post additional base verbs (like repair, build, and fund) and define each one. I also invite suggestions from the class, helping students phrase their choices as base verbs.

When students share completed sentences aloud that do not use base verbs, I either ask them to choose a base verb from the word bank or remind them how to change their word into a base verb.

Use response frames with the same grammatical structures over several lessons: To reinforce the grammatical structures I teach, I review additional frames with the same structure both throughout one lesson and across several days. I do this until students demonstrate more independence with the structure.

Ask students to explain their choices: When I provide explicit guidance on how to complete a particular response frame, my students become more prepared to justify their own language choices. While explaining, they often self-correct or ask for assistance.

Provide corrective feedback to all students: Since I don't have time to check each student's response to every frame, I have them share their examples with a partner or group. I circulate while listening for mistakes and strong examples. When I notice common errors, I redirect students' attention to the front and provide corrective feedback to everyone at once, often drawing their attention back to the grammar clue embedded in the response frame. I might also share a strong example from a student and ask them to explain why it works.

Create regular opportunities for students to improve their responses: I often ask students to review their written examples after receiving feedback. Students can then edit their sentences. If they used the target language correctly, I invite them to improve the rest of the sentence with more precise language. When students regularly improve their work, they come to see the value of receiving corrective feedback.

Model a growth mindset: As teachers, we can model how to learn from our mistakes. Maybe we had no backup plan when our technology failed, or we didn't catch the typos on a handout. I invite students to correct my mistakes using the same respectful tone that I use when giving them feedback. I acknowledge the error, thank them for the feedback, and commit to fixing it.

Our learning environments are stronger when our students are empowered to participate, make mistakes, and use feedback to improve. English language learners are working to understand how to use a language fluently, which means learning the nuances of how the language works at the sentence level. With a classroom culture of targeted instruction with corrective feedback, not only will our students learn English-they'll learn how to learn.

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A Strategy for Giving Corrective Feedback to ELLs

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English Language Learners Using sentence frames and explicit feedback thoughtfully can provide the right balance of structure and scaffolding for English language learners. monkeybusinessimages / iStock When I started teaching English language learners, I avoided addressing my students' language errors in class because I was just grateful that they volunteered to speak at all.

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5 Effective Modeling Strategies for English Learners

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5 Effective Modeling Strategies for English Learners

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Underutilized yet effective ..

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English Language Learners

Providing English learners-and all students-with examples of how to do learning tasks is particularly useful during distance learning.

Despite the huge shifts in pedagogical practice caused by the move to online learning, some tried-and-true strategies, such as modeling for English learners, remain crucial. Since teachers often can't intervene in real time these days, effective modeling-in which the teacher's expectations for student performance are made explicit through an example-is a lifeline for English learners because of the clarity they provide.

In our experience observing K-12 classrooms-including classrooms with only English learners as well as classrooms that contain a mix of ELs and fluent English speakers-modeling is consistently underutilized despite being an easy, high-leverage strategy. It's helpful to remember that providing effective models saves time in the end, since it both provides clear examples of expectations for a given assignment and reduces the verbiage a teacher needs to explain a task.

5 Types of Effective Models

Effective modeling can take many different forms. In all cases, modeling should clarify the expectations of the task without giving away the answer, and should remain available for students to access throughout the task. The following are examples of effective models.

1. Completing the first one in a set as an example: This is the simplest form of modeling, yet we've found that it's not used enough. Click here to see an example. In any kind of exercise in which students are working through multiple examples of the same type of question or problem, it's helpful to model one or two examples so students see exactly what is expected of them.

2. Providing explicit guidance on the expectations of the assignment through visual models: Click here for a humanities example and here for a math one. These embedded models clearly show the teacher's expectations for performance with visuals instead of many words, without giving away the answers.

3. Using language frames as models for conversational moves: Providing sentence frames models the kinds of conversations students should be having. ELs can engage in conversations more fluidly when they can focus on what they want to express instead of how to express it. See a See Think Wonder activity with language frames and contrast it with a standard version of this same activity.

4. Demonstrating how to complete the steps of the task through video: This video example by Megan Berdugo at Brooklyn International High School models how to solve an equation by showing students each step with an analogous problem. Students can rewatch it as many times as they want and pause where necessary to catch words and ideas they missed.

5. Chunking the steps of a complex process and using a corresponding template for students to complete: ELs can easily get overwhelmed by models of a paragraph, essay, or solution when there is a lot of language to wade through and it's unclear which part of the model corresponds to which part of the assignment. Breaking the model into smaller chunks, and providing space next to each chunk, enables students to focus on one aspect at a time, reducing the cognitive and linguistic loads. Click here for a writing example and here for a math example.

We've heard concerns that providing a model reduces the rigor of an assignment. We would counter that while demystifying a teacher's expectations does make the task less difficult for a student, it in no way makes it less complex as long as the model cannot be copied. In fact, great models enable students to jump to the heart of the work instead of spending precious mental energy and time on figuring out what a teacher is asking them to do.

Effective modeling is arguably the most straightforward of scaffolds and requires the least amount of customization for individual students. And like many scaffolds, effective modeling helps all students-not just ELs. For any students who struggle, it provides crucial access that can make the difference between frustration and success.

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5 Effective Modeling Strategies for English Learners

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Providing English learners-and all students-with examples of how to do learning tasks is particularly useful during distance learning.

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De-escalation spaces allow students to leave stressful situations or interactions so they can process their emotions and then return to learning.

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Small suggestions.

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Onward: Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators

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A practical framework to avoid burnout and keep great teachers teaching Onward tackles the problem of educator stress, and provides a practical framework for taking the burnout out of teaching. Stress is part of the job, but when 70 percent of teachers quit within their first five years because the stress is making them physically and mentally ill, things have gone too far.

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High school teacher Grace Dearborn says students don't all respond to consequences in the same way, so teachers need a full toolbox of options.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach for classroom management; the methods for discipline need to be as diverse and unique as the students themselves. But according to Grace Dearborn-a high school teacher and the author of the books Picture This! and Conscious Classroom Management -a common thread should run through them all: compassion.

In a recent piece on Mindshift, editor Ki Sung provides Dearborn's tips on compassion-based classroom behavior management. Infusing discipline with compassion means considering not only what consequence to impose, Dearborn says, but rethinking some of our assumptions about how, why, and when we discipline students.
Conscious Teaching
To give students more autonomy, Dearborn presents a series of tiered choices framed "as consequences, not punishments." Even if the student's choice doesn't yield the outcome a teacher wanted, the process reinforces that the "teacher cares enough to hold her accountable."

Dearborn, who engaged in frustrated exchanges with students as a young educator, advises teachers to be vigilant about "tone, posture, and volume, to avoid standoffs"-and to consider disciplining privately when appropriate. Teachers should be mindful that high school students often act out because they "feel shame when they are called out in front of the entire class."

When students are defiant or openly angry, she encourages educators to look for the "subtitles" of the behavior. The focus is less about the action and more about the "why" behind it. "When kids are acting in a confrontational, dismissive or volatile way," according to the article, "Dearborn suggests looking for the deeper message the student is communicating, whether they know it or not. She imagines an invisible subtitle running in front of the student that communicates what she really needs." The approach has been revelatory, allowing Dearborn "to stop perceiving misbehavior as disrespect."

Another method she developed is called "drive-by discipline." Instead of engaging in a battle over a small behavioral issue, she cautions, "Say the kid's name superfast and then move on. "Sometimes it's the right thing to do. It startles her, and then I move on before she can bait me into an argument."

Dearborn acknowledges there are no simple solutions to classroom management: "changing behavior comes down to hard work." Choosing compassion over knee-jerk punitive approaches builds relationships and, she contends, does a better job of improving engagement and behavior in the long term.

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Managing Your High School Classroom with Compassion

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High school teacher Grace Dearborn says students don't all respond to consequences in the same way, so teachers need a full toolbox of options.

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A-Ha, Apology and Appreciation Moments. 

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A-Ha, Apology and Appreciation Moments. 

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George Lucas Educational Foundation

Explore and share tips, strategies, and resources for helping students develop in grades 9-12.

Sort by:

Strategies for fostering relationships with middle and high school students starting on the first day of the school year and then growing them all year long.

Teachers can rethink their grading practices to make them more mathematically fair for students and allow for redemption for a missed assignment.

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George Lucas Educational Foundation Explore and share tips, strategies, and resources for helping students develop in grades 9-12. Sort by: Strategies for fostering relationships with middle and high school students starting on the first day of the school year and then growing them all year long.

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There’s a Cell Phone in Your Student’s Head

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A 2017 study found that cell phones that were turned off and stashed away silently reasserted themselves—distracting working students anyway.

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Mastering the subject has become less about learning and more about performance.

Why do so many students hate math, fear it, or both?

If you ask most students what they think their role is in math classrooms, they will tell you it is to get questions right. Students rarely think that they are in math classrooms to appreciate the beauty of mathematics, to ask deep questions, to explore the rich set of connections that make up the subject, or even to learn about the applicability of the subject; they think they are in math classrooms to perform. This was brought home to me recently when a colleague, Rachel Lambert, told me that her 6-year-old son had come home saying he didn't like math; when she asked him why, he said that math was "too much answer time and not enough learning time."

Students from an early age realize that math is different from other subjects. In many schools across the U.S., math is less about learning than it is about answering questions and taking tests-performing.

More From The Hechinger Report

The testing culture in the U.S., which is more pervasive in math than other subjects, is a large part of the problem. When sixth-graders in my local district came home saying that they had a test on the first day of middle school, it was in one subject only: math. Most students and parents didn't question whether a test was the right way to introduce a new year of mathematics. As one girl said to me, "Well, the teacher was just finding out what we know." But why does this only happen in math? Teachers in history or English don't give tests on the first day to find out what students know. And why do so many math teachers boil the subject down to producing short answers to narrow questions under pressure? It is no wonder that so many students decide mathematics is not for them.

In fact, it is not surprising that teachers test math all the time-in the last decade teachers' jobs have come to depend on student performance on narrow state tests. The Common Core promises an improvement in the types of tests used-with questions that are less narrow and require thinking, instead of choosing a letter (A, B, C or D)-but the bigger problem is the testing culture in classrooms. It is not unusual for high-school math teachers to test children every week, communicating to students that they are constantly being evaluated.
If you ask most students what they think their role is in math classrooms, they will tell you it is to get questions right.
Educators know that the most productive math-learning environments are those in which students receive positive messages about their unlimited potential and work on interesting and complex problems; in which they feel free to try ideas, fail, and revise their thinking. Students with a "growth" mindset are those who believe that their ability is not "fixed" and that failure is a natural part of learning. These are the students who perform at higher levels in math and in life. But students don't get the opportunity to see math as a growth subject if they mainly work on short, closed questions accompanied by frequent tests that communicate to them that math is all about performance and there is no room for failure. When students inevitably struggle, most decide they are not a "math person." The last decade has seen a nation of children emerge from our schools terrified of failing in math and believing that only some students can be good at it-those who can effortlessly achieve on narrow tests.

Teachers see some of the damage caused by our nation's procedural and over-tested math classrooms in the ideas students hold about math. When asked what math is, students typically give descriptions that are very different from those given by experts in the field. Mathematicians define their subject as the study of patterns. They say it is an aesthetic, creative, and beautiful subject (for example, Keith Devlin, " Mathematics: The Science of Patterns"; and Steven Strogatz, " The Joy of x "). Knowledge of mathematical patterns has helped people navigate oceans, chart missions to space, develop technology that powers cellphones and social networks, and create new scientific and medical knowledge. But students will typically say that math is a subject of calculations, procedures, and rules. They believe that the best mathematical thinkers are those who calculate the fastest-that you have to be fast at math to be good at math. Yet mathematicians are often slow with math. I work with many mathematicians and they are simply not fast math thinkers. I don't say this to be disrespectful to mathematicians. They are slow because they think carefully and deeply about mathematics.

Laurent Schwartz won the Fields Medal in mathematics and was one of the greatest mathematicians of his time. But when he was in school he was one of the slowest in his class. In his autobiography, A Mathematician Grappling with His Century, he reflects on his school days and how he felt "stupid" because his school valued fast thinking:

I was always deeply uncertain about my own intellectual capacity; I thought I was unintelligent. And it is true that I was, and still am, rather slow. I need time to seize things because I always need to understand them fully. Towards the end of the eleventh grade, I secretly thought of myself as stupid. I worried about this for a long time.

I'm still just as slow.... At the end of the eleventh grade, I took the measure of the situation, and came to the conclusion that rapidity doesn't have a precise relation to intelligence. What is important is to deeply understand things and their relations to each other. This is where intelligence lies. The fact of being quick or slow isn't really relevant.

Yet, more than any other subject, mathematics continues to be presented as a speed race: Teachers take answers from the first student to shoot up their hand in class, parents and teachers give timed math tests and drill with flash cards, and math apps race against the clock. It is no wonder that students who think slowly and deeply are put off by mathematics.
When students inevitably struggle, most decide they are not a "math person."
The fact that a narrow and impoverished version of mathematics is taught in many school classrooms cannot be blamed on teachers. Teachers are usually given long lists of content to teach, with hundreds of topics and no time to go into depth on any ideas. When teachers are given these lists, they see a subject that has been stripped down to its bare parts-like a dismantled bike-a collection of nuts and bolts that students are meant to shine and polish all year. Such lists not only take away the connections that weave all through mathematics, but present math as though the connections do not even exist.

I don't want students polishing disconnected bike parts all day. I want them to get onto the bikes and ride freely, experiencing the pleasure of math, the joy of making connections, the euphoria of real mathematical thinking.

When teachers open up mathematics and teach broad, visual, creative math, then they teach math as a learning subject, instead of a performance subject. It is very hard for students to develop a growth mindset if they are only ever answering short questions with right and wrong answers. Such questions themselves transmit fixed messages about math: that you can do it or you cannot. When educators teach open math and ask questions that have many solutions or pathways through them, and give students the opportunity to discuss different mathematical ideas, then students see that learning is possible. To put it simply, math questions should have space inside them for learning, for students to discuss and think about ideas; questions should not simply ask for answers that often require calculations or procedures with no encouragement for broader, engaging thought.

Teachers can see the difference between fixed-math and growth-math questions with elementary- and secondary-school mathematics content. For example, they could ask elementary students to calculate one divided by two-thirds-a fixed question. Or they could encourage them to think creatively and ask them to visually represent one divided by two-thirds and then convince each other why their solution works. Teachers could ask students to find the area of a 12 x 2 rectangle. Or they could pose a more growth-oriented question, asking them to find and draw as many rectangles as you can with an area of 24, which encourages students to think about the relationships between length and width, and represent them visually, instead of simply performing a calculation. At the secondary level, teachers could ask students to prove that the sum of the first n-positive integer cube numbers is the square of the sum of the first n-positive integer numbers. Or they would ask students to make sense of the visual below.

In the first, fixed version of each of these examples, students perform a calculation or move around algebraic symbols. In the second, they are using their own ideas, thinking deeply about math. One version is about performance, the other is about learning.

When educators teach real mathematics-a growth subject of depth and connections-the opportunities for learning increase and classrooms become filled with happy, excited, and engaged math students. Although news sites are filled with opposition to the Common Core, the new curriculum is at least a step in the right direction, as it asks students to engage in in the most mathematical of acts-reasoning. Mathematicians prove ideas by reasoning and justifying their thinking. Those who oppose the Common Core often do so because they want to keep the traditional mathematics approach in classrooms, even though this has turned off millions of students.

Changing classrooms to teach growth-mindset mathematics has a transformative effect on students. Society urgently needs to free our young people from the crippling ideas that they cannot fail, that they cannot mess up, that only some students can be good at math, and that success should be easy and fast, and not involve effort. School teachers and leaders need to introduce students to creative, beautiful mathematics that allows them to ask questions that have not been asked, and to think of ideas that go against traditional and imaginary boundaries.

When instructors encourage open, growth mathematics and the learning messages that support it, they develop our own intellectual freedom, as teachers and parents, and inspire that freedom in others. Now is the time to invite young people onto growth mindset pathways, encouraging them to be the people they should be, free from artificial rules and inspired by the knowledge that they have unlimited mathematics potential. For when school systems open mathematics, and give students the chance to ask their own questions and bring their own natural creativity and curiosity to the foreground as they learn, then they change them as people and the ways they interact with the world. When teachers set students free, beautiful mathematics follows.
This post appears courtesy of The Hechinger Report. It has been excerpted from Jo Boaler's new book, Mathematical Mindsets.

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Why Do Students Struggle So Much in Math Class?

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Mastering the subject has become less about learning and more about performance.

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Possibilities for RCLA

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And gay students needed them. Middle- and high-school experiences are formative in part because these years are marked by puberty and, often, one's earliest romantic relationships; it's a time when young people might engage in their first sexual encounters too. These experiences are also formative because of how dramatically the brain grows during adolescence, developing a propensity toward risk taking and self-awareness. Without the right guidance and support, such instincts can result in interpersonal conflict and self-hatred. Collectively, these characteristics make adolescence an especially vulnerable and volatile chapter-and, Jennings and others suggest, are why GSAs are so crucial.

The clubs worked; in a way, they worked magic. Research shows that GSAs can have a sizable positive impact on campus climate for gay students, correlating with a reduced prevalence of anti-LGBTQ remarks and reduced harassment of gender nonconforming teens. Catherine Lugg, an education professor at Rutgers who studies LGBTQ issues, has described GSAs as "the most potent forces for institutional change" at schools.
Watch: Bridging the LGBTQ generation gap
The challenge is that access to GSAs has always been uneven. That the GSA movement grew largely out of America's most prominent, and elite, boarding schools is noteworthy, as is Lane's observation that the LGBTQ movement owed much of its initial success to "white, largely male, largely affluent communities." "That foundation of privilege," Lane suggests, probably helped normalize the LGBTQ cause. There are regional disparities too. While widespread in some parts of the country, they're rare in large swaths of the Midwest and the South. Today more high schools do not have GSAs than do.

This unevenness is part of why, despite all the change of the past 30 years, GSAs are still working to save lives in America's high schools. A recent study found that lesbian and bisexual adolescents ages 12 through 14 were four times as likely as their straight, male peers to have previously attempted suicide. LGBTQ youth accounted for one in every four youth suicides from 2013 to 2015, the study found. Most at risk of suicide are trans youth.

Lane, who's straight, began researching GSAs in the early 2000s as part of his thesis for his master's degree in education. When I asked him what drew him to the topic in the first place, he recounted something a fellow teacher had told him a few years earlier, when a "Don't ask, don't tell"-type culture still prevailed in schools. The colleague, debating whether to come out to her students and colleagues, told Lane that she'd consulted with the head of their teachers' union, who happened to be an LGBTQ-rights activist.

The union leader's response clinched the teacher's decision to come out. "If you do this," the leader told the educator, "you will be saving kids' lives." Embedded in this verdict was the same objective that drove people such as Lipkin, Jennings, and Tentarelli to found the GSA movement, decades ago, and not a moment too soon.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Alia Wong is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers education and families.

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How Schools Reinvigorated the Stonewall Revolution

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And gay students needed them. Middle- and high-school experiences are formative in part because these years are marked by puberty and, often, one's earliest romantic relationships; it's a time when young people might engage in their first sexual encounters too.

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How Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are - TED Talk

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How Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are - TED Talk

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Your body language may shape who you are

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(NOTE: Some of the findings presented in this talk have been referenced in an ongoing debate among social scientists about robustness and reproducibility. Read “Corrections & Updates” below for more details as well as Amy Cuddy’s response.) Body language affects how others see us, but it may also change how we see ourselves. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy argues that “power posing” -- standing in a posture of confidence, even when we don’t feel confident -- can boost feelings of confidence, and might have an impact on our chances for success.

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The genre of Instapoetry can be a useful tool for engaging students and improving their literacy and media literacy skills.

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Social & Emotional Learning (SEL)

Getting students back in the building is just step one-next comes fostering a positive school climate so that they want to stay.

Chronic absenteeism-defined as students missing 10 percent or more of school days-is a target area for many school districts for improving student achievement. This makes sense: Students who are chronically absent are more likely to lack reading skills, have lower test scores, and receive exclusionary school discipline, and they are in higher jeopardy of not graduating. And it's a big problem: Chronic absenteeism affects one in seven students nationwide.

Typically, schools try to identify who is chronically absent and determine if there are cohesive subgroups of children most affected (recent immigrants, households with single parents, or caregivers with economic or health challenges). Sometimes the conditions that lead to absenteeism have more to do with family circumstances than student motivation. This is valuable and important information for school staff to have when deciding necessary supports for an individual child.

But it's not enough to simply get a student back on track with school attendance. Teachers, faculty, and staff need to continue their work in making all students feel welcomed at school. Finding ways to get students back into the building is step one, while continuously finding ways to let them know that they have genuinely been missed and are valuable to the community is the second-order change we need. Empty seats may have economic ramifications for a school, but continually filling the hearts and minds and raising the spirits of our students can have major social, emotional, and educational benefits.

According to the National School Climate Center, creating a positive climate is the basis for academic success, social-emotional and character development, and the prevention of harassment, intimidation, bullying, and other problem behaviors. And studies show a relationship between school climate and attendance in general-though so far this knowledge has not been directly extended to discussions of chronic absenteeism. But when we think of chronic absenteeism, an essential part of the long-term solution most likely involves getting all students to feel engaged in school so that they will want to be present.

Inspiring: Schools should connect to students' aspirations and actively encourage them to reach for the stars. Students should be asked to set specific goals for the school year and for each subject or class period. Goal-setting should be a school-wide practice.

Supportive: Challenge must be accompanied by support; schools benefit from collective efficacy, where students are encouraged to help one another. In CASEL's Social Decision Making/Problem Solving program, for example, elementary students are encouraged to set individual, ongoing character improvement and study skills goals and to buddy up with classmates to help in this process-improvement is not seen as an individual task, and setbacks are seen as a normal part of learning.

Safe and Healthy: A supportive SEL culture needs to be developed throughout the school, and in every classroom. Ultimately, we are each others' keepers, and so students must be upstanders for all classmates. They need support in learning how best to respect themselves by attending to their own good physical and social-emotional health, as well as others'.

Respectful: Respect for others is an important expectation in a school building, and its modeling is essential-student to student, student to adult, and adult to adult-including parents and caregivers. Schools must be especially attuned to how intimidating and unfamiliar school can be for some family members, such as those who are recent immigrants or those families struggling economically.

Engaging:Learning defined as "engaging" is active and problem-focused, and it leads learners to create meaningful products. Classroom communities should set and pursue goals for learning together, and so should adults in the building-this includes teacher groups, student support staff, security personnel and school resource officers, office staff, grounds and maintenance personnel, and school administrators. All school members should have ongoing goals for improving themselves and their contributions to their schools, and work together to overcome roadblocks they meet on the way.

As schools attempt to identify and bring back individual students with frequent absences, it is essential that the affected students feel as if the school is their oasis, not their holding cell. Schools must have a culture and climate that embraces all students and families. Kids have exquisite fairness detectors and know when they have been treated more punitively than another child.

Creating a Welcoming and Positive School Climate

Public education is about opening the doors to learning and citizenship for all. Meeting this sacred responsibility is possible when our schools work to have a positive school culture and climate. If we build this, kids will come. And when they can't, once we help them with family and related hurdles and they do come, they are more likely to stay.

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A Two-Step Process for Reducing Chronic Absenteeism

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Getting students back in the building is just step one-next comes fostering a positive school climate so that they want to stay.