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These curricular resources are designed to be customizable and fit into any classroom structre -- whether remote or in-class.

Lesson Sequence

Step 1: Have students read the Student Prompt and Project Guidelines and have parents/guardians sign the Materials Release Permission form (students must get parent signature to share work). Students can also follow this self-paced sequence self-paced sequence

Step 2: Have students view the Election 2020 showcase and complete the Analyze a Commentary worksheet

Step 3: Students pick an issue they care about. Students can use these resources if they are unsure what to write about.

Current Events and Debatable Resources Library (PBS Learning Media)
Top 5 Election 2020 Issues Teens Want to Talk About (According to Teens)
Issue Analysis Link Collection

Step 4: Writing -- Students can view this Example Script and use this Commentary Graphic Organizer to structure their writing (this is just a suggestion). Hand out this Journalistic Evidence Explainer to help students cite evidence like a journalist. Here is another graphic resource to help students understand the components of a commentary Commentary How To

Step 5: Feedback and Revision Peer-to-Peer Feedback Worksheet

Step 6: Get ready to record. Hand out these explainer worksheets to help students sound like a pro Mark Your Script for Narration, 6 Elements of Voicing a Script

Step 7: Recording -- Use these resources to help your students get their highest-level recordings Audio and Video Conventions, Video Styles With Myles
Audio Styles With Myles

Step 8: Have students submit a YouTube, Soundcloud, Vimeo or other streaming link into the submission portal on their dashboard. Make sure they add a unique title. Once they submit, you must approve the submission in your teacher dashboard under the Manage Submissions link. Only teacher-approved submissions can be published.

Other resources.

Teacher-Created Sample Materials
Sample Student Assignment Sequence (Samantha McMillan)
Sample Student One-Sheeter (Mia Gittlen)

Exemplars
Letters to the Next President Showcase (2016)
Selected Letters to the Next President (PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs)
More Resources
Program Information
Professional Development & Support
Sample Student Journey

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These curricular resources are designed to be customizable and fit into any classroom structre -- whether remote or in-class. Step 1: Have students read the Student Prompt and Project Guidelines and have parents/guardians sign the Materials Release Permission form (students must get parent signature to share work).

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Whether you're teaching online or in the classroom (or somewhere in the middle!), things can get pretty stressful-especially during a pandemic. Playing some relaxing music during learning breaks can help settle everyone's minds and refuel our reserves so we can tackle the rest of the day!

1. Happy Cute Relaxing Music for Children

Three hours of perfect for motivating, uplifting, and background music without ad breaks!

2. A Day of a Unicorn

An hour of colorful, relaxing music for your classroom.

3. Happy Ukulele Songs

Fun, calming music with great visuals.

4. Happy Background Music for Children

Peaceful tunes to give growing minds a well-deserved break.

5. Happy Relaxing Music for Children

This light instrumental hang-drum song is perfect after a stressful morning.

6. Relaxing Guitar Music

Let the strumming of this guitar take your worries away!

7. Instrumental Background Music for the Classroom

This is a nice selection of instrumental background music for the classroom.

8. Coral Reef Aquarium Music

This video features beautiful coral reef fish and relaxing music that is ideal for study and restoration.

9. Happy Music Beats to Relax, Work, Study

Bring some upbeat, good vibes to your classroom!

10. Relaxing Music for Stress Relief

The underwater sounds will wash your cares away.

11. Calming Music for Children in the Classroom

Create a positive learning environment for writing, studying, reading, or doing homework.

12. Be Calm and Focused

This video featuring cute animals is perfect for younger students.

13. Calm Piano Music 24/7

A 24/7 stream of relaxing melodies you can use as study or background music.

14. Fine Art Music and Paintings

The music of Debussy and more set to a slide show of beautiful paintings.

15. Relaxing Music & Ocean Waves

The calming and rhythmic sounds of the ocean can feel so soothing to busy minds.

16. Happy Relaxing Guitar Music for Children

The sweet plucking in this video feels so positive and refreshing.

17. Relaxing Nature Sounds

Mellow out to the sounds of birds chirping and water flowing.

18. Minecraft Soundtrack

Even if your students don't love Minecraft, this instrumental soundtrack is great for a break between lessons.

19. Instrumental Music to Relax

This relaxing video includes piano and guitar music.

20. Morning Relaxing Music For Children

A great mid-morning choice for relaxing music for the classroom.

21. Positive Background Music for Kids

A very uplifting and sweet video for a well-earned break or even for study time.

22. Classical Music for Kids in the Classroom

This video features a violin performance of Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons, Concerto No. 4 in F minor."

23. 3 Minute Timer with Music for Kids!

This plucky three minute timer video can help with time management. Check out this one for classical music. Also try the one minute, five minute, and 20 minute timers!

24. Relaxing Music for Children with Animals

Perfect for promoting calm and mindfulness as well as an appreciation for nature and the world around us.

25. Relaxing Music For Children with Dinosaurs

These cute dinosaurs make taking a break feel even better.
Do you use calming music in your classroom? Share your tips and ask questions on the WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook. Plus, How to Create and Use a Calm-Down Corner in Any Learning Environment.

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25 Relaxing Music Videos for Online and In-Person Classrooms

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Whether you're teaching online or in the classroom (or somewhere in the middle!), things can get pretty stressful-especially during a pandemic. Playing some relaxing music during learning breaks can help settle everyone's minds and refuel our reserves so we can tackle the rest of the day!

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Oakley recognizes that "many educators are not at all comfortable with or trained in neuroscience," so she breaks down a few key principles that teachers can use in the classroom and share with students to help them demystify the learning process.
1. The Hiker Brain vs. The Race Car Brain
Start by teaching students the difference between focused and diffused thinking, says Oakley. When the brain is in focused mode, you can get started on the task at hand. But deep understanding is not fully accomplished in this mode.

Diffused thinking occurs when you allow your mind to wander, to imagine and to daydream. In this mode, the brain is still working -- consolidating information and "making sense of what you are trying to learn," says Oakley. If a concept is easy for you to grasp right off, the focused mode might be sufficient, but if a new skill or concept "takes consideration, you have to toggle back and forth between these two modes of thinking as you get to true understanding of the material -- and this doesn't happen quickly."

Because toggling is essential to learning, teachers and students need to build downtime into their day -- time when learning can "happen on background" as you play a game, go on a walk or color a picture. It's also one reason why sleep is so vital to healthy cognitive development.

Since students tend to equate speed with smarts, Oakley suggests sharing this metaphor: "There's a race car brain and a hiker brain. They both get to the finish line, but not at the same time. The race car brain gets there really fast, but everything goes by in a blur. The hiker brain takes time. It hears birds singing, sees the rabbit trails, feels the leaves. It's a very different experience and, in some ways, much richer and deeper. You don't need to be a super swift learner. In fact, sometimes you can learn more deeply by going slowly."
2. Chains and Chunks
In cognitive psychology, "chunking" refers to the well-practiced mental patterns that are essential to developing expertise in a topic. Oakley prefers the image of a "chain" when she explains this to students.

Learning is all about developing strong chains. For example, says Oakley, when you are first learning how to back up a car, you have to consciously think about each step, from how to turn the steering wheel to how to use your mirrors. But "once that process is chained, it's easy" -- it becomes automatic. Similarly, once solving certain equations becomes automatic in math, students can apply these equations to more complex problems.

Teachers can help students identify the procedures in a unit of study that they to master in order to take their learning to the next level -- from the steps of the scientific method to fundamental drawing techniques.

"Any type of mastery involves the development of chains of procedural fluency. Then you can get into more complex areas of fluency," says Oakley. Here's another way to think about it. We all have about four slots of working memory that we can use to problem-solve in the moment. One of those slots can be filled with an procedural chain -- and then you can put new information in the other slots.
3. The Power of Metaphor
"Metaphor and analogy are extraordinarily powerful teaching tools and very often underused," says Oakley. "When you are trying to learn something new, the best way to learn it is to connect it with something you already know."

The formal term for this is " neural reuse " -- the idea that metaphors use the same neural pathways as the concept a metaphor is describing. So familiar metaphors allow a learner to draw on a concept they have already mastered and apply it to a new situation. Or as Oakley says, metaphors "rapidly on-board" new ideas. For example, says Oakley, comparing the flow of electrons to the flow of water is a way to "jump-start students' thinking."

As part of her research, Oakley reached out to thousands of professors who are considered top teachers in their fields. "Many of these professors had a secret that they used in their teaching: metaphor and analogy. It was like a secret shared handshake." Oakley encourages teachers to not only use metaphor but to challenge students to develop their own metaphors as a study strategy.
4. The Problem of Procrastination
Oakley says that procrastination is the number one challenge facing most learners. To train the brain to systematically focus and relax -- to -- she recommends the "Pomodoro Technique."

Developed by Francesco Cirillo, this strategy uses a timer to help the learner work and break at set intervals. First, choose a task to accomplish. Then, set a timer for 25 minutes and work until the timer goes off. At that point, take a five-minute break: stand up, walk around, take a drink of water, etc. After three or four 25-minute intervals, take a longer break (15 - 30 minutes) to recharge. This technique "trains your ability to focus and reinforces that relaxing at the end is critical to the process of learning," says Oakley. Teachers and administrators can build a similar rhythm into the schoolday, providing brain breaks and movement time to help students toggle between focused and diffused thinking.
5. Expanding Possibilities

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5 Strategies to Demystify the Learning Process for Struggling Students | KQED

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Oakley recognizes that "many educators are not at all comfortable with or trained in neuroscience," so she breaks down a few key principles that teachers can use in the classroom and share with students to help them demystify the learning process. 1. The Hiker Brain vs.

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Reflections, tips, and strategies for teaching "now"

The U.S. is not alone in experiencing disruptions in schooling related to the coronavirus pandemic. The UN has reported that at least 160 nations have had to close or reconfigure schooling. However, with the virus not yet under control in many places, our schools are reopening in a patchwork fashion, leading to a different mix of issues and concerns across communities. Throughout the summer, local sites and individual teachers launched local conversations about how to respond to the "now" of our teaching, so where better to continue that conversation nationally than a back-to-school conversation at Write Now on Medium.

Throughout August and September, Write Now will feature reflections, advice, and CoLabs focused on online, remote, hybrid, and distance learning with an emphasis on writing. This page serves as our table of contents (bookmark it!) and will be updated as new items are posted. You can also follow on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and share using the hashtags #nwp and #writenow. We hope you will amplify the posts and extend the content through your comments.

In this CoLab (our word for a recorded problem-solving session), Mike Caulfield, Director of Blended and Networked Learning at Washington State University Vancouver, will show us how faculty conceptualize course design for "hyflex" teaching: online, in person, synchronous, and asynchronous.

In this short NWP Radio episode, CSUWP Teacher-Consultant Bud Hunt, now a library administrator, describes how libraries can assist (and want to assist) teachers in the school year ahead.

Like many of us, Molly Leahy was able to experience online learning as a student over the summer. In this blog, she draws advice for herself from that experience. Perhaps we all should do that?

In this NWP Radio interview, Michigan teacher Jeremy Hyler provides a to-the-point overview of Hyperdocs, an approach to using simple tools (like Google docs, etc.) to make visible a learning pathway for students. Akin to WebQuests and LRNG Playlists, the Hyperdoc becomes particularly useful for students working through remote and asynchronous learning.

In the CoLab with Deanna Mascle, we hear how Deanne, an experienced online teacher, has further simplified and tidied her online approach during the time of the pandemic as a way to support students during this time of expanded pressures. Her approach also draws on the use of Hyperdocs, the topic of Jeremy Hyler's interview.

In this blog post full of practical strategies, Troy Hicks takes up the topic of designing tasks and protocols for breakout rooms-those potentially high-engagement smaller groups that can sometimes go awry or fall flat.

Blogging the details

In a series of blogs on the details of the going-back moment, hear from Matthew Johnson, author of Fast Feedback, on How Can We Connect with Students and Build Classroom Community from a Distance?and Tabitha Moses on 5 Reasons to Let Students Keep Their Cameras Off During Zoom Classes, and Lauren Heimlich Foley considers how Writing-Reading Workshop Blurs the Lines Between Asynchronous and Synchronous Learning.And Bob Zakrzewski makes a case to remember the importance of play and playfulness in the English classroom in Re-placing Play.

Through a series of short video interviews, Beth Rimer, Robert Rivera-Amezola, and Jessyca Mathews share how they are thinking about working with young writers in the year ahead.

In this CoLab, Kim Jaxon, Anna Smith, and Matthew Johnson examine the challenge of creating a writing-focused community in online instruction. Matthew raises the challenge of starting off a community new community online, and Kim and Anna suggest strategies that have worked for them.

In these two blog posts, teachers point to resources that might be immediately useful in planning. In Never the Tech; Always the Teaching, Kevin Hodgson reflects on the importance of putting pedagogy first and suggests four resources to help us make better choices when considering new technology tools. Then, in Giving Our Students, and Ourselves, Grace, Giving our students, and ourselves, grace, Chris Kehan lists a manageable set of picture books that strike the right themes for managing our collective lives at this stressful moment.

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The U.S. is not alone in experiencing disruptions in schooling related to the coronavirus pandemic. The UN has reported that at least 160 nations have had to close or reconfigure schooling. However, with the virus not yet under control in many places, our schools are reopening in a patchwork fashion, leading to a different mix of issues and concerns across communities.

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Conversation is a cornerstone of Cicely Woodard's classroom. Every day last spring, her eighth-graders at Freedom Middle School in Franklin, Tennessee posed questions , discussed math problems in small and large groups and responded to one another's ideas. Woodard wanted those experiences to continue when her school switched to distance learning during the coronavirus outbreak , but she knew that key elements would be missing. She wouldn't, for instance, be able to read body language or see students' work in real time. Like many teachers, those differences made her uncertain about what to expect . Once virtual classes got rolling, though, she was gratified to see that familiar classroom techniques worked to get kids talking online, too. "I was very intentional about continuing to use (these strategies), because I wanted to keep as much normalcy as possible," said Woodard, a former Tennessee Teacher of the Year . In an interview after her final virtual class this year, Woodard shared six strategies to generate student discussions online.

Woodard's students attended one live class per week during distance learning. Woodard opened each of these virtual classes with a question unrelated to math, such as "How are you feeling?" "What are you grateful for today?" or "What's bringing you joy?" The activity mirrored the "circle time" exercise that her classes usually did on the first day of the week in school. "I think this time at the beginning of our virtual sessions helped all of us to feel more connected and helped them to feel more comfortable talking about math in a virtual setting," Woodard said. She noted that students always had the option to pass, but they rarely did, and at the end of the year, many highlighted circle time as their favorite part of class.

Just as she would during in-person classes, Woodard chose problems for virtual classes carefully, selecting ones that had a real-world context and could be looked at in multiple ways. "I knew that I had to choose problems that were open to discussion," she said. Before getting to the discussion, though, Woodard gave students time to think and write down ideas. She would set up the problem with the full group, then set her timer for two minutes. That time allowed students to develop their reasoning and helped eliminate the anxiety caused when speed is prioritized in math. It also gave Woodard insights into student thinking. "I'm often surprised because there are things I think they might say, and they come up with something completely different," she said.

Drawing from her training in inquiry-based learning , Woodard often asks her students, "What do you notice?" in regard to a number, pattern or problem. When raising that question online, she shared her tablet screen and used a stylus to underline, make notes or add drawings as students commented. In one recent class, she showed a graph of two quadratic equations that she created with . Asked what they noticed, most students talked about the vertices, whether the parabolas opened up or down and other visual details . The last student who spoke pointed out something different, though: the equations used for the graph were written in standard form. Woodard said she didn't expect anyone to discuss the equations, which were written on the side of the graph. "They're looking at this entire screen and these pictures, and you don't know what they're noticing until you give them an opportunity to talk about it."

Woodard's use of her stylus to record student ideas had a purpose beyond note-taking. "When a student gave an idea it was powerful for the entire class to see that idea written...because it allowed the child to feel like their idea was validated," she said. That goes for ideas that are on the right track and ones that lead to incorrect solutions. Both enabled students to elucidate their mathematical thinking and help each other look at problems differently. And Woodard recommended another way to validate students that is easy to do online: thanking them every time they contribute.

Most of Woodard's classes included paraprofessionals, so she was able to take advantage of Zoom's breakout room feature to allow students to discuss problems in small groups. In advance of class, she sent her colleagues the problems and a list of questions they could ask to guide discussions. In the small groups, students had more opportunities to agree, disagree and try out ideas. Small groups can be employed without paraprofessionals, too. After his initial experiences with whole group live instruction, New York City math teacher José Vilson switched to meeting with subgroups. The change made virtual classes more manageable for him and more engaging for students. "The subgrouping has been very helpful because it's allowed for specific students to talk to each other about how they can do the work together, and I've seen some of them collaborate without me there," Vilson said.

During discussions, Woodard typically waits ten seconds after a student asks a question to allow other students to contribute. The silence can feel awkward, especially in a virtual session when not all students are using video. "Waiting is hard, period, for teachers, because sometimes we want to rescue them. We don't want that uncomfortable struggle ," Woodard said. But it's often at the last second when she is about to speak that a student chimes in. To be OK with wait time, Woodard said, "I have to remind myself that I want my students to think."

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6 Classroom Strategies that Work for Generating Student Discussions Online - MindShift

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Conversation is a cornerstone of Cicely Woodard's classroom. Every day last spring, her eighth-graders at Freedom Middle School in Franklin, Tennessee posed questions , discussed math problems in small and large groups and responded to one another's ideas.

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Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework that is based on a scientific understanding of how people learn. The goal of UDL is to design "barrier-free, instructionally rich learning environments and lessons that provide access to all students" (Nelson, 2). The UDL framework helps educators think about and design learning experiences that allow all students to be successful.

When I work with schools that have already adopted the UDL framework, they immediately recognize how blended learning can help teachers to implement many of the principles of UDL more effectively. Instead of thinking about UDL and blended learning as two separate disconnected approaches to teaching and learning, it is worth exploring the overlap between the two. I believe that blended learning models can make putting UDL into practice more manageable. When teachers shift from a one-size-all approach to differentiating and personalizing learning, it is natural to consider what individual learners need to make progress toward learning goals.

The UDL framework is grounded in three main principles: 1) engagement, 2) representation, and 3) action and expression.

Engagement

Active involvement in learning that is relevant, valuable, and interesting

Representation

Access to multiple ways to experience or receive information

Action and Expression

Set goals, monitor and track progress toward goals, engage in metacognitive skill-building through self-assessment and demonstrate knowledge in a variety of ways

Engagement

In this first of three blog posts focused on UDL and blended learning, I'll be focusing specifically on the first principle of engagement. Engagement is the students' active involvement in learning that they perceive as relevant, valuable, and interesting.

Within the principle of engagement there are three guidelines: 1) providing options for self-regulation, 2) providing options for sustaining effort and persistence, and 3) providing options for recruiting interest.
Self-Regulation
Teachers can use blended learning to create the time and space necessary for students to:

Set personal, academic, and behavioral goals.

Track and monitor their progress toward goals.

Bring their goals to conferencing sessions with their teachers.

These routines can help students to develop critical self-regulation skills necessary to succeed both in and beyond school.

In my last book, Balance with Blended Learning, I share a range of goal setting strategies and encourage teachers to build ongoing self-assessment routines into their classrooms that encourage students to think critically about their work and their progress. These routines shift students from a passive role in receiving learning objectives, academic goals, and assessment scores to generating their own.

One strategy I like for helping students think about goal setting is using the three-part progression of 1) Where am I going? 2) How will I get there? 3) When will I know I've arrived?

Once students have set their academic, personal, or behavior goals, they can revisit these goals to track their progress toward them. Teachers can use this goal-setting document to ground their conferences about student progress, anchoring the conversation in goals that the students have set for themselves.

In addition to revisiting and revising their goals, I encourage teachers to engage students in an ongoing process of self-assessment and reflection. Students need to get comfortable thinking about their learning and evaluating the development of specific skills. Creating an ongoing self-assessment document can help students regularly engage in this metacognitive skill-building.

Sustaining Effort and Persistence
Students are more likely to expend effort and remain persistent in the face of challenges if they feel they are part of a dynamic learning community. I have anchored my own research and work in the fields of blended and online learning in the Community of Inquiry theoretical framework because I appreciate the emphasis on the role of community in constructing and confirming meaning.

Teachers can create a support network for students if they design lessons that encourage communication and collaboration. For example, teachers using the station rotation model can effectively shift the focus from the teacher to the learners so that groups of students must negotiate tasks together. As pictured in the image below, stations can be used to engage students in small group discussions (face-to-face or online) and encourage collaboration by presenting the group with a shared task or challenge.

In addition to encouraging students to learn with and from each other, they need timely, mastery-oriented feedback from the teacher to continue making progress, appreciate the role the effort and practice play in improvement, and develop confidence in their abilities. I encourage teachers to design lessons that allow them to pull feedback into the classroom so that students received focused feedback while they are working. Building this into a station rotation lesson, as pictured above, it one strategy. Instead of focusing myopically on our role as "instructor" transferring information, I'd love to see teachers embrace their role as a coach in the classroom, helping students to develop specific skills. That is much easier to do when teachers are not shepherding an entire class through a single lesson.
Recruiting Interest
Different learners have different interests, strengths, and values. That's why teachers must prioritize student agency. Teachers will have more success in engaging students if they build "choice and voice" into the curriculum. What decisions can learners make about their learning?

In my research of teacher engagement in blended learning courses, teachers identified student agency as a significant benefit of blended learning. Teachers believed that moving away from a teacher-centered whole group lesson made it easier to provide students with choice and voice.

One of my favorite strategies for integrating student agency into a blended learning course is through the use of project choice boards that invite students to decide how they want to demonstrate their learning at the end of a unit of study.

Blended learning provides a pathway for teachers looking to plan and implement learning experiences that align with UDL principles. Teachers can use the time, space, and flexibility afforded by blended learning to increase student engagement by teaching self-regulation skills, fostering communication and collaboration among a community of learners, and prioritizing student agency. In my next blog, I will explore the UDL principle of representation using the lens of blended learning.

Nelson, L. (2014). Design and Deliver: Planning and Teaching Using Universal Design for Learning. Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing Company, Inc.

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Universal Design for Learning and Blended Learning: Engagement

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Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework that is based on a scientific understanding of how people learn. The goal of UDL is to design 'barrier-free, instructionally rich learning environments and lessons that provide access to all students' (Nelson,

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Here Is How I'm Assessing ELLs At The Beginning Of The School Year - What Are You Doing?

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Because of the pandemic, most schools in in California did not complete the annual language assessment for ELLs (called ELPAC). I've generally not found those assessments very helpful. This year, ELPAC scores are especially useless since they are more than fifteen months old.

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Great teachers need great content. Teach your best class every day with exceptional English lessons, flashcards, and resources from Ellii.

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Usa learns

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The USA Learns Citizenship course helps you complete your N-400 application online, prepare for your naturalization interview, and get ready for your new citizenship. The course has four units:

Unit 1: Steps to Becoming a U.S. Citizen

Unit 2: The N-400 Application and Naturalization Interview

Unit 3: Civics, Reading and Writing Practice

Unit 4: Your Interview and New Citizenship

USA Learns Citizenship will help you with the information and language you need to become a U.S. citizen.

Unit 1: Steps to Becoming a U.S. Citizen

In Unit 1, you will meet Jean, your video guide to the course, and you'll learn important information you need to know if you are thinking about becoming a U.S. Citizen. We'll help you answer these questions:

Who can become a U.S. Citizen? Can I become a U.S. Citizen? How do I start the application for U.S. Citizenship? Where can I get help with my application?

Unit 1 will also explain situations where you might need to ask for legal help before you apply for citizenship and recommend organizations that can help you.

Unit 2: N-400 Interview Practice

In Unit 2, you'll learn about what to expect at the naturalization interview at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) office. During the interview, the officer asks many questions about the application for U.S. Citizenship (the N-400 form). You will learn the key words and grammar you need to understand the questions.

You'll also listen to different ways that the officer might ask the questions and will practice giving different correct answers. At the end of every lesson, a video "officer" will ask you questions from the lesson and you can record yourself answering with your own information.

Unit 2 begins with a review of question words and short answers. It also introduces you to some questions that you may need to ask the officer if you don't understand something.

After that, each lesson is based on a part of the N-400 form. You'll listen to and practice answering questions about each part of the form, from basic information about your address and your employment, to questions about illegal activities you may have been involved in.

You'll learn about and practice the Oath of Allegiance, which each person must say to become a new U.S. Citizen.

Unit 3: Civics, Reading and Writing Practice

In Unit 3, you will learn about U.S. history and government. You'll learn important vocabulary and useful grammar, and then read, listen, and watch videos about the subjects covered in the U.S. Citizenship test.

In each lesson, you'll practice your pronunciation, and take practice quizzes to check your understanding. You'll also practice reading aloud and writing.

Unit 3 covers all of the "100 questions" that you need to practice to become a U.S. Citizen. The subjects covered are:

U.S. Geography

Early America

The Declaration of Independence

The Constitution

The Bill of Rights

The 1800s and Civil War

Difficult Times and Great Leaders Since 1900

Fighting for Equal Rights

Our System of Government

The Executive Branch

The Legislative Branch

The Judicial Branch

Participating in Your Government

Rights and Responsibilities

American Symbols and Holidays

Unit 4: Your Interview and New Citizenship

In Unit 4, you will learn what to expect from the moment you arrive at your interview. You will learn how to greet the officer and how to have a casual conversation or "small talk." You will also practice responding to some simple commands the officer may give you.

Unit 4 will show you what to expect the day of your interview and during your naturalization ceremony when you become a United States citizen. We will also give you some information about what to do after you have your new U.S. citizenship.

USA Learns Citizenship will provide you with the information, language practice, and resources you'll need to prepare for U.S. citizenship.

REGISTER NOW to use USA Learns!

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Study to become a U.S. citizen at USA Learns: USA Learns is a free website to help adults learn English online and prepare for the naturalization interview to become a U.S. citizen.

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Teaching Writing Online: Here's what we've been learning together, Summer 2020

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Teaching Writing Online Some of what we have learned together this semester. Image found on Broad Street, Philadelphia; captured by @seecantrill Johns Hopkins University, Teaching Writing MA Summer 2020

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Everything you need is in this Hyperdoc. What you will find is a task sheet in small daily chunks that includes:

Pre-writing chart for brainstorming

3 mentor text poem with "lite" questions (click to see each poem's mini-Hyperdoc)

Free-write prompt for brainstorming

Rough drafting stages

Revision list

Final draft submission

Your students can work at their own pace to complete their final product. If we ever go back to school, we'll have a potluck party with all the foods we are inspired by!

NOTE: I can not allow edit access to the Hyperdoc so please don't request edit access. That will change it for everybody. What you need to do is Make a Copy of it in your Drive, rename the copy, then you make all the edits you want to your copy, and share it with your students. Please acknowledge your source for the assignment if you plan on using!

More food poems:

Thank you for reading! Do you have a story, lesson, activity, or something else to share with TeachLivingPoets.com? Be a guest author! Email me at msmith@lncharter.org.

If you want to order a #TeachLivingPoets shirt, check out my awesome sister-in-law's Facebook store Megan's Makes and support a small business owner! Shirt options are: gray/blue/black/white/red/green/purple unisex crew-neck S-XXXL and white/black women's v-neck S-XL. All shirts are $20, PayPal accepted.

You can follow me on Twitter at @MelAlterSmith and please tweet all the awesome things you are doing in your class with the #TeachLivingPoets hashtag!

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Everything you need is in this Hyperdoc. What you will find is a task sheet in small daily chunks that includes: Pre-writing chart for brainstorming 3 mentor text poem with "lite" questions (click to see each poem's mini-Hyperdoc) "Ode to Cheese Fries" by José Olivarez "In Praise of Okra" by January Gill O'Neil "Bliss Point...

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If you're anything like me, those few short weeks between fall and winter breaks are nothing short of an anxiety inducing shopping/baking/grading/wrapping/tying-up-loose-ends extravaganza. Each year, the time sandwiched between breaks seems like too little or not quite enough.

But a few years ago, I cooked up a new dish called Food Lit. Food Lit was inspired by the Navajo Kentuckians, one of the best sessions I've ever attended at NCTE . To offer you the Happy Meal version of this session, teachers in two regions educated their students on "good food." Students learned about topics such as food insecurity, obesity rates, and food integrity. Students grew gardens, educated their communities, and even prepared meals with food they harvested. Some even studied food and nature-centric literature like Mark Twain's "The Bee."

After attending this session, I began cultivating an inquiry into food in my own classroom and savoring the delicacy of "between breaks" learning.

One assignment that fires up my students' brains is the food memory narrative task. You can read more about what we've been up to in Food Lit here and from years past, here and here.

Food is such an important, driving force in our lives. We share and create some of our most important stories surrounded by food. It comforts us, nourishes us, and heals us. So far, I haven't met a student who didn't have one special dish or fond food memory to look back on.
That's what the food memory narrative is about.
I first ask students to examine these mentor texts:

Savoring Memories of Sunday Dinner from NPR

Memories of Meals Past from The N ew York Times
Jeruselem: A Love Letter to Food from NPR
I remind them that they are reading (and listening) to expand their understanding of "good food" but also to read as writers who are sharing their connections to a special dish.

This year, I asked students to share their mentor text noticings in a Google Form. Here's some of what they came up with:

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What I've found is that food is an easy sell with students - it is relatable, its appeal universal, and my students enjoy reflecting on their "memories of meals past." Here's an example of how one student made this writing her own:

But the cherry on top? Our Food Lit Family Dinner, the day everyone brings in their favorite, most meaningful dish to share with the class.

Some of the biggest hits this year? Pizelles (or as one student called them: "cookie waffles"), King's cake (somebody gifted me the baby), "brookies" (a delightful brownie/cookie duo), pepperoni rolls (a unique West Virginia snack and my contribution), tried and true homemade mac and cheese (what's not to love), and West Indian curry (which you can read about below).

For me, this assignment does at least two things: it encourages a different bite of the narrative apple, and most importantly it continues to build and strengthen classroom culture. And that's one recipe that can't go wrong.
What works for you in your classrooms in the weeks between breaks? What activities inspire student writing and build classroom culture? I'd love to hear from you! Leave a comment below, find me on Twitter @karlahilliard, or connect with us on Facebook!
-Karla

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If you're anything like me, those few short weeks between fall and winter breaks are nothing short of an anxiety inducing shopping/baking/grading/wrapping/tying-up-loose-ends extravaganza. Each year, the time sandwiched between breaks seems like too little or not quite enough. But a few years ago, I cooked up a new dish called Food Lit.

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I'm a big fan on Quizizz - I love how easy it is to create learning games, it's simple to add audio, a piece of cake to integrate with Google Classroom and, unlike Kahoot, it shows the question and answers in the same screen so students don't have split them (Kahoot is fine, too - to each their own).

Quizizz just added a new Lessons feature - the ability to create a slideshow that you can present to your students live or assign as homework. For those of you who are familiar with Nearpod (which has exploded in popularity this summer), it's basically a very simplified version of it, with far fewer bells and whistles.

Nearpod is really quite impressive and, in effect, functions as a one-stop shop for tons of interactives. And our district has purchased a license for its use.

But, to tell you the truth, I wasn't really planning on using many of its features and, even though I wish Quizizz had one or two more activities (It would be nice to have an EdPuzzle like activity that Neapod just added to its platform), it would work very well and my students are already quite familiar with it. So, I'm seriously considering using Quizizz instead of Nearpod.

But, who knows? I could easily change my mind in the coming days or weeks.

Here's a video about the new Lessons feature (and here's a simple lesson I created in three minutes with it):

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Quizizz Adds Features That Makes It A Simplified Nearpod

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I'm a big fan on Quizizz - I love how easy it is to create learning games, it's simple to add audio, a piece of cake to integrate with Google Classroom and, unlike Kahoot, it shows the question and answers in the same screen so students don't have split them (Kahoot is fine, too - to each their own).

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What Your Students Will Learn

Students will learn an interesting way to use descriptive language, and, for fiction writers, a way to build characters.

What You Will Do

Students will write a personal narrative where they describe themselves as a place. Not a specific place, but all the things a "place" consists of. What's the weather? What's the terrain? Is this a city or a suburb? A farm? A different planet? Are there lots of people there? What's it smell like? Is it loud? Is there traffic? Street vendors and hustlers? You get the point. Turn the body and mind into an environment through your writing.

This prompt also works in the inverse, where an environment can be described as a person.

Looking for more inspiration from Jason Reynolds?

Watch his video For Every One, now available on 826 Digital.

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Students will learn an interesting way to use descriptive language, and, for fiction writers, a way to build characters. Students will write a personal narrative where they describe themselves as a place. Not a specific place, but all the things a "place" consists of. What's the weather? What's the terrain?

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Twenty-eight middle and high school teachers from The New York Times Teaching Project tell us how they're navigating remote instruction this fall.

This July we hosted our first New York Times Teaching Project Summer Institute, bringing talented educators from around the country together virtually. But even as we assembled via Zoom panels, presentations and breakout sessions to create curriculum, the confusing news alerts about the 2020-21 school year just kept coming. To their immense credit, these teachers - from Los Angeles and St. Louis, Houston, Philadelphia, Miami and everywhere in between - didn't seem distracted. Instead, they rolled with the changes, continuing to come up with creative ways to reach their students, wherever and however they'd be working with them.

Below, 28 of those educators share their thoughts and ideas about what worked for them in the spring, what they're doing this fall, what worries them, what heartens them and what helps them.

We know that this post can't begin to address all the issues. Some teachers in the United States are going back in person, others will be working with a hybrid model, and some still don't know for sure. And though these tips focus on engaging middle and high school students online, most educators we know are chiefly worried about those students who don't have reliable internet at all.

That's why this is just a starting point. Teachers, we hope you'll help by posting your own comments, and sharing any experiences or tips you have. We hope it will be useful, too, to read the related Times articles that provide the illustrations throughout, such as the May piece "' I'm Teaching Into a Vacuum': 14 Educators on Quarantine Learning" linked from the drawing at the top of this post. In our experience as former teachers ourselves, having a wide network of like-minded fellow educators has always been key to making our work more powerful and rewarding. This year, it will be essential.

One of the starkest differences between remote learning last spring and remote learning this fall is that, now, teachers will have to try to build meaningful relationships with students they've never met. Many of the educators we quote below told us that making personal connections, creating a classroom community, managing cyberbullying and being able to read their students' moods through video are among their most significant concerns this school year. "My biggest struggle is not being physically present with my students. So much is lost through the screen. It is much harder to read their nonverbal cues. How do I connect through a screen?" said Kristina Harvey of Wilton High School in Wilton, Conn. There are no easy answers to that question, but here are some ideas from Teaching Project participants for ways to build relationships and stay connected to students and families throughout the school year.

1. Start off the year by calling every single parent. As a high school teacher with over 100 students, I know how much time that will take. In these strange times, parents and students are feeling uneasy about returning to school. A personal introduction will go a long way toward rebuilding school and class community. - Kristin Lawlor, the Young Women's Leadership School of the Bronx, Bronx, N.Y.

2. I often send welcome postcards to my students before the year starts. This year I am sending postcards to the parents of my students to set the scene for the year. I will thank them for the gift of teaching their child and ask them to email me three things that I should know about their child. - Jodi Ramos, Stevenson Middle School, San Antonio

3. Communicate well and communicate often, but be mindful of your communication practices. Education and school can be overwhelming. Even before the pandemic, parents often reported feeling "talked down" to when speaking with educators. Be mindful of the ways you are now entering families' lives and homes. - Sabrina Alicea, Cameron Elementary School, Chicago

5. Say their names! (Correctly.)

My school reflects students who speak more than 30 different languages and embodies a wealth of cultures. With a virtual school year start, one of my biggest concerns in building relationships with students was making sure I get their names right, but how to do that when I've never met them and they aren't right there to correct me if I don't?

I took a page from The New York Times Teaching Project and decided to use Flipgrid as the first assignment, where students post a video introducing themselves. The emphasis was placed on them telling me how to say their name, what other name they may prefer, along with a quick detail about them.

As I write this, I recall a former student who told me, "Out of all of my public school teachers, you were the first and only one to ever insist that I go by my full name and say it in the way my family would pronounce it ... your insight made me realize that my 'nontraditional' name is a part of my identity and is something to be proud of, and for that, I am sincerely grateful." - Kendra Radcliff, Druid Hills High School, Atlanta

6. Make a concerted effort to REALLY connect with students - fun questions, icebreakers, show and tell. Sprinkle them in weekly as an antidote to the otherwise impersonal nature of virtual learning. - Claudia Felske, East Troy High School, East Troy, Wis.

7. Icebreakers and silly games that get students engaged and feeling comfortable with each other are not wasted time. Students will perform better on the hard stuff if they feel invested in an online community.

Some games my kids have enjoyed on Zoom were a scavenger hunt (the teacher shouts out a common item, such as a penny, and the first student to get one and show it on-screen is the winner), Pictionary using the whiteboard feature, Taboo (type out the cards first on a document so they're ready to copy and paste in the chat, sending it to one student; their team types their answers into the chat to everyone), and trivia. My main icebreakers are concentric circles and speed dating. - Kim Butterfield, Central High School, La Crosse, Wis.

8. A few years ago, I adopted Smiles and Frowns, a routine from Monte Syrie, an English language arts teacher in Washington. Every Monday to kick off class, I give students a chance to share a positive (smile) or negative (frown) thing going on in their lives since we last shared out. When we went remote in March, we kept Smiles and Frowns by using the comments in Google Classroom. The end-of-year feedback from my kids was to always keep Smiles and Frowns. - Michael Potter, Hilton High School, Hilton, N.Y.

9. I send an emotional check-in Google Form every two weeks. Kids answer three questions: 1) How are you feeling this week? 2) Would you like a check-in from one of your teachers? 3) If so, how should we contact you?

It meant a lot to the kids to know that I cared. We had some nice conversations as a result of this simple form. Sometimes kids who hadn't turned in work for a few weeks would fill out this form and it became an opportunity to reconnect and bring them back in. - Kristin Lawlor

11. A routine that I established with my students each week was one aimed to help them feel connected and empowered during this time of uncertainty.

To that end, students and I shared pledges with each other to retain a sense of classroom community. Students created a "Self-Care Pledge" where they planned activities to help them stay centered, active and balanced in the midst of so much sudden change.

The second pledge each week was a "Citizenship Pledge" regarding how students could contribute to communities as an active citizen, whether that was on a micro level with their families or on a macro level with their local, state and national communities.

I shared my Self-Care and Citizenship Pledges each week as well, fostering a sense of whole class commitment to these goals. Students commented that they enjoyed feeling that we were all doing something together, as if part of our classroom family still transferred home during distance learning.

Students awed me with their pledges. They were considerate, empathetic and dedicated to helping themselves and others through this difficult and unique period. It was comforting and inspiring to witness student activism and resiliency. - Erin Pinsky, Joel Barlow High School, Redding, Conn.

12. Create as many opportunities to be someone more than the assigner of work and the giver of grades. Do not rush to begin the rat race to curriculum completion. Give lots of individual feedback. Ask lots of individual questions. Send lots of individual emails. Make a lot of videos. Include your family in those videos. Show that you are a genuine human being who is interested in young learners as human beings. - Michael Potter

13. This past school year, I liked to personally share things that I was doing outside of online learning. This included what book I was reading, which Ina Garten recipe I made, or what (appropriate) TV show I was binging. - Andrew Kollen

14. Bitmoji classrooms are the rage, and I love them for engaging my students, but making a GIF of yourself and putting it on your signature line or in your virtual classroom allows the students to see your face. - Jodi Ramos

The No. 1 challenge these teachers said they were trying to navigate this school year was encouraging student participation in live sessions without mandating it - whether that means getting students to simply show up, or to turn on their cameras and be willing to share. "Moving online brought a lot of challenges because not all students were comfortable having their video on during live learning opportunities. That reduced lively discussion and made it harder for me as a teacher to read the facial expressions and body language that provide me feedback about how students are progressing in the lesson objectives outside of their academic work," wrote Erin Pinsky of Joel Barlow High School in Redding, Conn.

It's an issue many of these educators are still working through, but below they offer a few suggestions for how to create rituals and routines that motivate and empower students, as well as ease their anxiety in the virtual environment.
16. Make expectations and norms for video meetings clear and revisit them often. - Gabriel Graña, Smith Middle School, Chapel Hill, N.C.

17. The structure of my class is the same every day: Bell work (a quiz, writing activity or Learning Network contest) followed by an instructional activity where I walk students step-by-step through the accomplishment of the task, and then a preview of the asynchronous activity, which involves much of the same skill learned and demonstrated in the previous activity.

Students always know what to expect, and they know that they will practice during class, with the guidance of a teacher before they're released to complete anything on their own. This significantly reduces the anxiety of learning something new. - Diane Boyd, Mesa Verde High School, Citrus Heights, Calif.

21. I am still required to enter attendance through our district's attendance system, so I need an accurate account of students who attend. At the conclusion of our Zoom meetings, Zoom will generate a report that tells me who attended and for how long (some students log in multiple times, and I can see that, too, which tells me they are experiencing connectivity issues).

However, it made much more sense to me to keep an attendance log so that I could see at a glance who was and was not attending. This made it easier to identify students who had not logged in for more than two days, so I could reach out to them. So, I printed out a roster and put a check next to names as students entered. This also allowed me to quickly identify any "Zoom bombers" who were attempting to log in using another student's name. - Diane Boyd

22. While students are logging in and joining your synchronous sessions, have some kind of game or introduction that encourages students to be on time and not want to miss it. You could have a meme, a riddle, a would-you-rather or some kind of guessing game. This strategy is most effective when students can enter their guess or reaction into the chat.

Since my last name is Price I would sometimes play The Price Is Right. I would also sometimes use memes that showed varying moods that were numbered and ask them which number they were at that moment. It can be good for morale and helps you gauge how students are doing emotionally so you can follow up with those who need support. - Jeanette Price, Columbia Falls High School, Columbia Falls, Mont.

23. Thirty-two sleepy teens in hoodies online at 8 a.m. doesn't lend itself to robust discussion. I have started asking them to arrive on the video call with one specific thing to share or ask. This appears to work better than open-ended discussion. - Kathleen Mills, Bloomington High School South, Bloomington, Ind.

24. Have a check-in and a checkout, so that students reconvene after working in breakout rooms. My check-ins are quick and playful: Pick a meme to show how you feel about X, or one word to describe your favorite TV show. My checkouts are much more content related: One word that came up in today's discussion, the name of a peer who said something that changed your thinking. - Kathryn Gullo

26. A lot of videos were off in my breakout rooms last year so I am trying to come up with an activity that requires the video to be on. This can look like design challenges that students need to collaborate on or mini-labs that they do to share results. Of course, some students have reasons for turning off the video and this should always be an option, but providing a picture of what students are building or drawing is always presented as an alternative. - Sohum Bhatt, Wallenberg High School, San Francisco

27. To help facilitate routines and organization while learning at home, my students set up a plan each week for their "Environment for Learning." This asked them to write down where, when and how they would approach their studies with the aim that they would create a routine and series of structures for themselves in the absence of the normal school day. Students worked on their skills of organization, time management and focused time on task.

Feedback from students was very positive! They felt more aware of their learning styles and what systems worked for them. Owning their learning in this way helped them feel more capable of managing all of their classes, and they remarked that they also felt better prepared for college as they eventually will need to implement these skills even more independently in a few years. - Erin Pinsky

28. I'm using a weekly planner slide deck - the same theme and layout every week - that has all the relevant information that students need in one place, and I link to it in my instructional slides. It has links to the Zoom meeting, my email, office hours and learning targets.

I record my Zoom meetings and post the video in the weekly planner on the appropriate day. If a student missed something or got confused, he or she could rewatch the instruction there.

It helps keep me organized, and once I set up the slide deck, I just make a copy and change what needs to be changed each week. It also eliminates the need for a calendar or agenda to be posted elsewhere, and is a good way for absent students, instructional assistants, parents and administrators to see exactly what is happening from day to day. - Diane Boyd

29. Assign a "catch-up" person to fill in latecomers with directions. Using the chat, this classroom assistant will fill in any latecomers with directions and relevant information so that the teacher doesn't have to stop midstream. It empowers students, too! - Gabriel Graña

30. Affirm students' right and obligation to learn, but stay generous. This is not comfortable for many students. Allow them to opt out, give them lots of chances, appoint a buddy to affirm a shy student and shower students with compliments however they succeed. - Sam Kohn, Campus International High School, Cleveland

31. Encourage a schedule, but be open. Remember, students are no longer in our building and under our systems of structure. Sometimes family emergencies may require students to leave the home or care for others in the home. Be open-minded and conscious of this. - Sabrina Alicea

How do I create lessons that are rigorous, engaging and different every day? How do I differentiate my content for all learners? What's the right balance between asynchronous and synchronous learning? How do I encourage high-quality work when the grading system has turned to pass/fail? How do I keep up with the demand for written feedback and grades? These are all questions educators have right now about navigating the world of remote instruction. Not all of them can be answered so simply, but here are some tips for adapting your curriculum, texts, learning protocols and assessments for the virtual classroom.
32. I've created categories of assignments that are "should do," "must do," "may do." The "should do" assignments are formative, building blocks necessary to complete the "must do." I will say the work is completed or not, but it doesn't count toward your grade. The "must do" work applies what students learn and is given extensive feedback; revisions are mandatory. "May do" work is work that is more creative and asks students to transform their knowledge, but it is largely above and beyond. - Kathryn Gullo

33. At the beginning of a synchronous class session, create a poll to get student feedback on how to prioritize your valuable time together. For example, when asking students to analyze different elements of a film, I asked them via Poll Everywhere to select one specific element they wanted to cover in that class session. Typically, we were able to cover the top three choices. As we progressed through the film, I would edit the list of elements in the poll so we made sure to cover everything from lighting to music to costumes.

Having students in real time needs to feel engaging, and they were more likely to jump in and present or contribute when we gave time to what interested them most. - Jeanette Price

35. Let them lead. Our students were born into technology. They breathe it and find it effortless to navigate. Let them design assignments and assessments. - Kristina Harvey

36. Mix it up! For a unit on developing writer's voice, I started a class with all of us listening to an episode of The Daily called " I Forgive You, New York." Immediately after listening to the podcast, I asked students to write down words, phrases or lines that resonated with them. I then put them in breakout rooms where they could discuss the piece and share their notes. We came back as a class and debriefed. Their assignment was to write their own "I Forgive You, Wilton High School" poems. They produced exceptionally poignant and honest pieces. - Kristina Harvey

40. I found that providing creative options for students was more successful than traditional assignments. I used Google Slides and created graphic organizers to have students complete virtual gallery walks, or use graphic design tools like Canva to create theme parks, fliers, brochures and more. - Alyssa Anderson, Burlington City High School, Burlington, N.J.

41. Many of my students benefited from adapting discussions for a written format. Students who struggled to speak up during conversations in class, or only offered canned responses when compelled to participate, flourished when the discussion was spread out over a day or two and they had time to deliberate their and their peers' ideas without the pressure of being in class. - Anonymous Teacher

43. I have a few big student-centered discussion formats that I use, and I'm working on creating guidelines for a digital environment. One is Philosophical Chairs. Students get a graphic organizer that contains three hot-button statements, and they have to fill out arguments and evidence for both sides of each debate. Then, we review the guidelines and I (the moderator) read one of the statements. Students will use the "yes/no" buttons on Zoom to indicate which side they're on, and they will use the "raise your hand" button to speak. I will call on them, alternating sides, and they will have one minute to speak.

When the discussion slows down, I'll send the two sides into breakout sessions to choose a spokesperson and go over their strongest arguments. When we come back, we'll flip a coin, and spokespeople will take one or two minutes to give their closing arguments. I give feedback on strong points I heard, good debate tactics I witnessed, and other thoughts to consider before declaring a winning side. - Kim Butterfield

44. Use breakout rooms for things like writing workshops, check-ins and project planning. My co-teacher and I would meet with groups of four so that they could brainstorm ideas for a paper or project. This is also a great way to check in to see how kids are doing emotionally and with understanding content. - Karen Gold

45. Troy Hicks of the Chippewa River Writing Project recommends online conferencing time as time when teachers talk with students not at them. This has been guiding me to think about making videos of anything operational and to leave conferring to creating situations where students work in groups, discuss with each other or participate in Socratic seminars. - Kathryn Gullo

46. I ask students to save any big questions or concerns they may have until the end of class. I get through all of my material and synchronous activities, explain the asynchronous work, and release students. Any student who has a question or needs further assistance or explanation remains in the video meeting while others exit. After a minute, I un-mute everyone and allow them to ask their questions.

Sometimes I just repeat the instruction from earlier in the meeting for students who may have been distracted or missed it because something came up in their home to which they had to attend. This also helps alleviate the pressure for students of having to ask their questions in the larger group setting, which can be intimidating and embarrassing. It also keeps the flow of information smooth and class time valuable. - Diane Boyd

47. Many of my students were dealing with compounding challenges at home during the spring. Providing them with larger, long-term assignments, rather than daily activities, helped many of them to tailor their work schedule to their needs. - Anonymous Teacher

48. Assign a project on Monday that's due Friday. Make sure the project has enough work and moving parts that will keep students busy throughout the week. You can even assign parts of the project for each day. For example, work on Part 1 on Monday, Part 2 on Tuesday, Part 3 on Wednesday and so on. Then make the final project due Friday. This gives kids the ability to manage their time throughout the week and work as much or as little as they want each day as long as it's done by the end of the week. During the week, for your video lesson or conferences with students, you can do mini-lessons on the requirements for each part of the project, model the tasks, or check in and see how they're doing. - Jessica Hunter, Northport, N.Y.

50. What I found to be a successful tool during remote teaching was the National Constitution Center's Scholar Exchange Program for students. The topics they covered were always relatable and engaging while also addressing curriculum. I would attend the sessions with my students and have a Google Hangout to discuss while they attended the session. Students also asked questions directly in the video chats where the conversations took place. Some of the programs included Landmark Supreme Court Cases, Foundations of American Democracy, Federalism and Slavery in America. And, because it was a scheduled event, it helped ensure the students attended and kept them on a schedule. - Alyssa Anderson

52. Where am I? Another game my students love is using their background on Zoom to share clues about a particular place they are now in the world. For example, a student can share five clues, including a local dish, the national flag, the front page of a major newspaper and so on. Students earn points by guessing correctly. Take the activity a step further by following up with students about why they chose their place and what political issue they can explore more in depth to share with the class the next day. - Michael Kokozos

53. Good news: We all need a little good news especially in a course like global politics. Students can start or end the class by locating and then sharing uplifting and inspiring stories to cut through these uncertain times. This task can be organized around themes or disciplines or values, such as compassion or stewardship. Take the activity a step further by having students demonstrate how they can further spread the good news! - Michael Kokozos

54. For one project this school year, my students will use Padlet to capture current events tied to the use of the term "fear" in media. I'm also planning a sort of scavenger hunt using Padlet as the weekly virtual bulletin board. - Judi Freeman, Boston Latin School, Boston

Kathleen Mills of Bloomington High School South in Bloomington, Ind., said one of her struggles in the transition to online teaching was "just mastering so many new things at once: Microsoft Teams, a new Canvas format, recording audio over existing PowerPoints, etc."

And she's not alone. Several teachers told us that they were overwhelmed by all the new technology they were expected to learn in such a short time. Many students are probably feeling that way, too. Below, they offer a variety of digital tools for you to pick and choose from, as well as strategies for streamlining their use in your virtual classroom.
56. Realize the difference between the "user" experience and the "maker" experience. Less is more, and the more organized and streamlined the information provided by leaders and teachers is to the parent and student community, the better it is for everyone. - Kendra Radcliff

57. Prioritize community and connection over content for the first two weeks. Get to know the students while practicing classroom and digital protocols. I plan to show them how to maneuver through my Google Classroom by making brief assignments. - Karen Gold

58. The first time students get placed in breakout rooms, it needs to be low stakes. From there you can build up academic conversation and discussions. Creating low-stakes opportunities for interaction is a good focal point for a couple of weeks. This could be sharing how someone feels about distant learning so far or something fun they did the day before class. - Sohum Bhatt

60. I use an interactive notebook with my students. My colleague, Alysha Feldkamp, created this template on Google Slides with inspiration from SlidesMania, and I'm turning it into a digital interactive notebook. Students will only use this for notes they will come back to (exit tickets, for example, are handed in separately). They will put notes - a screenshot, a downloaded image that I share, or typed notes from a video or presentation - on the right side, and practice on the left. This format reminds me to have students apply what they've learned right away and then come back to it, rather than writing it down and immediately forgetting about it. - Kim Butterfield

62. I'm now rethinking Zoom vs. Google Meet for synchronous meetings. I was a Zoom aficionado last spring, but Google Meet has added a whole bunch of new features to be more seamless with Google Classroom (the platform our school uses). The jury is still out. - Judi Freeman

69. Try teacher video responses to student questions. Instead of emailing many times (often in response to the same question), I make short videos (using Google Meet or the Canvas video tool) that I send straight to their email. It's efficient and really cuts down on all the emailing. - Kathleen Mills

70. When developing asynchronous curriculum for the English as a Second Language or world language classroom try to incorporate listening as much as possible. It can take extra time but it is worth it, and once it is set up students will practice and benefit from it in the future.

There are many applications that allow teachers to record their voice speaking in the target language, which reinforces text and speech comprehension development. For example, Quizizz has the ability to practice and assess student listening comprehension of a question or statement you have recorded in the target language. Quizlet has a feature where you can record pronunciations of words for flash cards, and Edpuzzle has the ability to record and embed spoken comments with videos. - Jeanette Price

Teachers are no strangers to long hours, hard work and emotional exhaustion. But working from home comes with its own set of challenges. Our Teaching Project participants told us about trying to do their jobs with babies and toddlers underfoot; supervising their older children's online schooling; not being able to collaborate with colleagues; keeping up with the ever-changing demands of their districts and administrations; and taking care of their own mental health.

"My struggle is my own time management. If given my druthers, I will be online working from when I roll out of bed until I go back to sleep. This is not a sustainable workload model," wrote Kathryn Gullo of North Hollywood High School in North Hollywood, Calif. While none of these problems will be completely solved in the foreseeable future, these educators told us how they're managing the social, emotional and physical workload in this school year unlike any other.
71. Join Facebook groups such as those for Schoology, HyperDocs and Pear Deck for Educators. There is a group for almost every platform or grade that you teach. - Jodi Ramos

73. Lean on your librarians! - Gabriel Graña

74. If you are at home, treat the day as if you are at school. Find a place to teach and make the rest of the house off-limits during work time. - Claudia Felske

75. Shut the computer off at 3 p.m. or whenever the school day is over. Online teaching requires so much more interaction with our laptops and screens and while there is always more to be done (more emails, more grading, more planning), you need to create healthy boundaries or you will burn out. Give yourself an hour after the day is done to tie up loose ends. After that, log out, turn off the screen and do something else. - Jessica Hunter

76. Teachers are stressed. Students are stressed. Parents are stressed. Take time out each day and definitely on the weekend to recharge and practice self care in whatever way is meaningful to you, whether that is watching Netflix, bike riding, meditation, seeing friends, watching the sun rise or anything else that brings you joy. - Jessica Hunter

77. Find your teaching venting partner. This is not a "normal" year and we must remain positive. However, find one person - be it an educator, friend or relative - with whom you can let your guard down a bit. - Jodi Ramos

78. Normally I walk 10,000 steps a day as a teacher, but I went down to less than 1,000 in the first days of remote schooling. So, I bought an under desk pedal machine to help me become more active again. - Jodi Ramos

79. Not everything needs to be graded. Focus on meaningful feedback. Give yourself and your students a break, and only grade what is absolutely necessary to establish mastery of content. - Sharon Murchie, Bath High School, Bath, Mich.

80. One of the things I've been thinking since the onset of this pandemic in March is what a great opportunity not only we as educators have, but that the entire American education system has for innovation and restructuring. I've seen signs of this at times, but as I was personally revamping lessons and activities that didn't always translate from traditional to virtual settings, there was a need to let things go. This isn't to say that some of our classroom routines and methods lack value, they just don't translate, and we need to be willing to modify or eliminate. We try to teach students to grow and change, but we need to be willing and able to do the same. - Kendra Radcliff

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80 Tips for Remote Learning From Seasoned Educators (Published 2020)

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Twenty-eight middle and high school teachers from The New York Times Teaching Project tell us how they're navigating remote instruction this fall. This July we hosted our first New York Times Teaching Project Summer Institute, bringing talented educators from around the country together virtually.

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In every classroom, there are students who always have their hand raised to participate, and those who are hesitant to engage. Whether they're introverted, tend to think awhile before they contribute, or are just having a bad day, it can be hard to bring kids into discussions who are reluctant to add their voices.

The challenges of getting students to participate have intensified during remote learning, we've heard from many teachers. Digital platforms can create added communication barriers by making it hard to know when to talk, for example, or how to read subtle but important elements of discourse like a person's body language and facial expressions. Additionally, online discussions are often hindered by variability in students' access to technology and by privacy concerns, and consequently many teachers have had to rely on students' submitting work over isolated channels like email, which can leave back-and-forth between peers (and between students and the teacher) by the wayside.

Getting kids to contribute in virtual classrooms takes some work, it turns out. "We keep calling this generation digital natives as if they are simply whizzes at everything computerized. They aren't," wrote Tim O'Brien on Facebook. "They need personal support, scaffolding, and reassurance that technology does not provide. It is simply a tool, not a teacher."

To find out how to improve student discussions and participation in online learning, we culled through hundreds of comments on social media and followed up with more than 20 educators to see how they tackled the challenge last spring. Teachers offered a range of smart strategies, both synchronous and asynchronous, to integrate the values and the voices of all kids-even the quietest or those with disrupted schedules-into their classes this fall.

Synchronous Strategies

For synchronous learning, some teachers said they translated traditional discussion strategies from the classroom to live video chats, while others found that digital tools helped boost classroom participation.

1. Spider web discussion: During remote learning this spring, students in Shai Klima's high school class led their own discussions over Google Meet. Before the live class, students answered questions independently, and then shared their responses at the start of the meeting as a jumping-off point for a broader class discussion.

While students conversed on video, Klima listened and drew lines on a sheet of paper tracking the flow of the conversation, resulting in a spider web. At the end of the discussion, Klima shared the drawing over video, and then asked students to reflect on the experience and what they learned about who talked, who listened, and who built on the ideas of others.

"It has been successful as a means to get kids to credit their peers with helping them come up with new ideas, which helps build rapport," said Klima, who let students struggling with bandwidth call in to the meetings.

2. Using chat to check for understanding: After giving lessons last spring, Paul France had his third-grade students use the Google Chat feature to ask and answer questions or type in emojis, like a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, to show whether they understood a concept. To create structure around the responses, he guided his students in creating norms around using the chat feature-they decided as a group to use only one emoji at a time, for example. France said the practice helped him check for student understanding and pushed students to engage more with the content.

Kindergarten teacher Ruth Calkins, meanwhile, used Zoom chat when holding live lessons with her kindergarten students. She said they enjoyed typing "T" or "F" for true and false questions while answering math problems in the chat box, and some even attempted to write sentences in response to her questions. Typing responses also provided a lot of keyboard practice for her young students.

3. Flip your classroom to stimulate deeper discussion: Forrest Hinton, a high school math teacher, says he found that a blend of asynchronous and synchronous instruction worked well to stimulate student discussion during remote learning.

First, he taught new content asynchronously through recorded videos and online activities. At the start of his live class, students briefly summarized the concepts they had learned together and then divided into breakout rooms to solve related problems in small groups. Flipping his classroom allowed Hinton to spend less class time in direct instruction-and listening to students at the start of class and in small groups helped him identify, and then address, where his students were struggling. "This has allowed me to clarify concepts in a more targeted way and better assist students," said Hinton.

4. Adapting think-pair-share to Zoom: Ryan Tahmaseb, director of library services, says he found that giving more project-based learning activities to his elementary and middle school students-and allowing them more autonomy over assignments-naturally encouraged richer discussions in virtual learning. "If we give students as much freedom as possible to experiment, research, and pursue interests within our content area, then they inevitably have a lot more to say," said Tahmaseb.

When it came to class discussions, Tahmaseb adapted think-pair-share to Zoom. Students were given a prompt, broken into groups, and then placed into breakout rooms to discuss and record their answers on a shared Google doc, which allowed students to share their thinking in writing or read aloud. Since Tahmaseb wasn't in each breakout room to listen to the conversations, the Google doc kept students accountable. Once they returned to the whole class, volunteers from each group shared their answers with everyone.

5. A new twist on show-and-tell: To get students comfortable with online participation, Brittany Collins, the teaching and learning coordinator at Write the World, a global online writing community for middle and high school students, converted the familiar show-and-tell activity into "think, write, share."

In one activity, Collins asked middle and high school students to find a photo, painting, or drawing that represented intergenerational connection and independently respond by writing to the following questions from the Making Thinking Visible Framework before discussing them over video as a class: What are we looking at? What makes you say that? What do you notice (see, feel, know)? What more can we uncover? What do you wonder? "It helps to break the ice in a virtual learning setting where unplanned participation can prove challenging for some students," said Collins.

Asynchronous Strategies

Although some teachers-and students-said that synchronous discussions were more engaging because they resembled a traditional classroom, many educators found that asynchronous discussions were more equitable because they opened up participation to students with low bandwidth, who had schedule limitations, or who were uncomfortable engaging with the full class.

6. Online forums create back-and-forth dialogue: Angelina Murphy, a high school English teacher, said she used Google Classroom's question feature to get her class to respond to readings and discussion prompts during remote learning this past spring. When each student commented, Murphy replied with clarifying questions to create a back-and-forth dialogue and also asked every student to respond to at least two of their peers' comments to create a broader base of discussion.

Fifth-grade teacher Raquel Linares said she used Nearpod Collaborate (Apple, Android), a virtual collaboration board, to get students to share images or write a response to show what they had learned about an article they read. To inspire connection and reflection among classmates, Linares also used Flipgrid (Apple, Android), so that students could hear their peers' voices even though they were remote.

7. Seeing and critiquing peer work through virtual gallery walks: Virtual "gallery walks" give students an opportunity to view their classmates' projects while learning from each other, according to Joe Marangell, a high school social studies teacher. After his students presented their own projects through five-minute screencasts, they were then required to give feedback to at least two other students on theirs.

Using Google Sheets, students provided feedback to their peers by answering the following prompts: What's something new I learned about this topic?; What's something that surprised me about this topic?; What's something I liked about this presentation? The online format gave every student the opportunity to see their peers' work and their assessment on theirs for deeper reflection, Marangell said.

8. Moving station brainstorming online: When carousel or station brainstorming activities are conducted in traditional classroom environments, small groups of students rotate around the room to different stations to answer prompts-and view and add to each groups' responses.

To translate this online, Marangell divided his students into groups online and created shared Google docs-or a series of Google slides-for the prompts/questions. Each group left their thoughts under the questions by the assigned date and then followed up by commenting on the other groups' responses the next day. "The strategy still allows them to maintain a sense of classroom community [in a virtual setting]," said Marangell.

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8 Strategies to Improve Participation in Your Virtual Classroom

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Educators share their best synchronous and asynchronous strategies to boost student participation during online learning.

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Requirements for Data Share Agreements and Supported Applications_Aug 2022

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Jamboard for looking back, looking ahead

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Jamboard for looking back, looking ahead

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“Night Before First Day of School” from The Poet X  Elizabeth Acevedo Live Performance.mp4

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Dana's kid...

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I want them reading and writing daily. Where will that happen?
I want them to be able to find materials in one place. How do I organize that?
I want a focus on my instruction to be engaging, relevant, and identity affirming. How do I put that into all lessons?
I want to recognize that students are going to be asked to do more with less. How will I be mindful of bandwidth? How do I support choice?
I want students to feel a part of a positive, safe learning community. How will I do this in every lesson? Is everything stemming from a place of love? Is love a verb in my classroom?

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Step into the shoes of dancers from across the country who dare to imagine what it would look like if their city could dance.

The Webby Award-winning series If Cities Could Dance features dancers from Minneapolis, Memphis, Seattle, Chicago, Fresno, Miami, Oakland and many other cities across the United States.

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Step into the shoes of dancers from across the country who dare to imagine what it would look like if their city could dance. The Webby Award-winning series If Cities Could Dance features dancers from Minneapolis, Memphis, Seattle, Chicago, Fresno, Miami, Oakland and many other cities across the United States.

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PONTIAC, Mich. - One afternoon in mid-June, Charisse* drove up to the checkpoint at the Children's Village juvenile detention center in suburban Detroit, desperate to be near her daughter. It had been a month since she had last seen her, when a judge found the girl had violated probation and sent her to the facility during the pandemic.

The girl, Grace, hadn't broken the law again. The 15-year-old wasn't in trouble for fighting with her mother or stealing, the issues that had gotten her placed on probation in the first place.

She was incarcerated in May for violating her probation by not completing her online coursework when her school in Beverly Hills switched to remote learning.

Because of the confidentiality of juvenile court cases, it's impossible to determine how unusual Grace's situation is. But attorneys and advocates in Michigan and elsewhere say they are unaware of any other case involving the detention of a child for failing to meet academic requirements after schools closed to help stop the spread of COVID-19.

The decision, they say, flies in the face of recommendations from the legal and education communities that have urged leniency and a prioritization of children's health and safety amid the crisis. The case may also reflect, some experts and Grace's mother believe, systemic racial bias. Grace is Black in a predominantly white community and in a county where a disproportionate percentage of Black youth are involved with the juvenile justice system.

Across the country, teachers, parents and students have struggled with the upheaval caused by monthslong school closures. School districts have documented tens of thousands of students who failed to log in or complete their schoolwork: 15,000 high school students in Los Angeles, one-third of the students in Minneapolis Public Schools and about a quarter of Chicago Public Schools students.

Students with special needs are especially vulnerable without the face-to-face guidance from teachers, social workers and others. Grace, who has ADHD, said she felt unmotivated and overwhelmed when online learning began April 15, about a month after schools closed. Without much live instruction or structure, she got easily distracted and had difficulty keeping herself on track, she said.

"Who can even be a good student right now?" said Ricky Watson Jr., executive director of the National Juvenile Justice Network. "Unless there is an urgent need, I don't understand why you would be sending a kid to any facility right now and taking them away from their families with all that we are dealing with right now."

In many places, juvenile courts have attempted to keep children out of detention except in the most serious cases, and they have worked to release those who were already there, experts say. A survey of juvenile justice agencies in 30 states found that the number of youths in secure detention fell by 24% in March, largely due to a steep decline in placements.

In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued an executive order in March that temporarily suspended the confinement of juveniles who violate probation unless directed by a court order and encouraged eliminating any form of detention or residential placement unless a young person posed a "substantial and immediate safety risk to others." Acting on Whitmer's order, which was extended until late May, the Michigan Supreme Court told juvenile court judges to determine which juveniles could be returned home.

Judge Mary Ellen Brennan, the presiding judge of the Oakland County Family Court Division, declined through a court administrator to comment on Grace's case. In her ruling, she found Grace "guilty on failure to submit to any schoolwork and getting up for school" and called Grace a "threat to (the) community," citing the assault and theft charges that led to her probation.

"She hasn't fulfilled the expectation with regard to school performance," Brennan said as she sentenced Grace. "I told her she was on thin ice and I told her that I was going to hold her to the letter, to the order, of the probation."

That June afternoon, a month after the sentencing, Charisse left Children's Village without seeing Grace, but she did pick up a shopping bag of clothes and toiletries she had delivered days earlier. She said officials had rejected them because they violated facility rules: underwear that wasn't briefs; face wipes that contained alcohol; a pair of jeans deemed too tight.

Charisse counts each day they're apart, and that was day No. 33. Another month has since passed, and there could still be months to go before they are at home together again.

Driving home, Charisse had to pull over soon after she turned onto the road leading away from the complex. She sat in a parking lot, sobbing.

"It just doesn't make any sense," she said. She shook her head as tears dampened the disposable blue face mask pulled down to her chin.

"Every day I go to bed thinking, and wake up thinking, 'How is this a better situation for her?'"

It has always been just the two of them, Charisse and Grace.

Told by doctors that she would be unable to have children, Charisse, a consultant to nonprofit organizations, was shocked when she became pregnant at 44. She has raised Grace on her own after the girl's father did not want to be involved, she said.

They did everything together: winter sports throughout Michigan, rounds of golf, going to the opera, singing to Tony Bennett on road trips. They even appeared in a "Pure Michigan" tourism ad. As a child, Grace wanted so much to be like her mother that she asked to be called Charisse No. 2.

When Grace hit her preteen years, however, their relationship became rocky. They argued about Grace keeping her room clean and doing schoolwork and regularly battled over her use of the phone, social media and other technology.

By the time Grace turned 13, the arguments had escalated to the point that Charisse turned to the police for help several times when Grace yelled at or pushed her. She said she didn't know about other social services to call instead. In one incident, they argued over Grace taking her mother's iPhone charger; when police arrived, they discovered she had taken an iPad from her middle school without permission. At her mother's request, Grace entered a court diversion program in 2018 for "incorrigibility" and agreed to participate in counseling and not use electronic devices. She was released from the program early, her mother said.

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While there was periodic family conflict, Grace has always had strong friendships and is active in her school and community, her mother said. She has helped run programs at church, played saxophone in the school band and composed music, and regularly participated in service projects.

The incident that led to her current situation happened Nov. 6, when someone called the police after hearing Charisse crying "Help me!" and honking her car's horn. Grace, upset she couldn't go to a friend's house, had reached inside the car to try to get her mother's phone and had bitten her mother's finger and pulled her hair, according to the police report.

Police released Grace to a family friend to let the two cool down and referred the case to Oakland County court, where an assault charge was filed against her.

Weeks later, she picked up another charge, for larceny, after she was caught on surveillance video stealing another student's cellphone from a school locker room.

"After I was caught, I felt instant remorse and guilt. I wanted to take back everything I had done," Grace wrote in a statement to police. She said she had questioned herself even as she took the phone but wanted one after her mother took hers away.

The other student's mother, who declined to comment for this story, told police she wanted to press charges, although the phone had been returned to her son soon after Grace took it. "My sincere hope is that any punitive action taken in this case be grounded in the goal of providing this student with opportunities for growth, change and future success," she wrote in a statement to police.

In the months following the two incidents, Grace and her mother participated in individual and family therapy and Grace stayed out of trouble.

Charisse told a court caseworker assigned to the case that other than being irritable and getting "cabin fever" from being shut at home during the pandemic, "nothing significant" had taken place between the mother and daughter. There was no police contact after the November incidents, records show.

The April 21 juvenile court hearing on the larceny and assault charges against Grace was conducted via Zoom since the courts had shut down, with everyone calling in from their homes. Grace connected from her bedroom, her mother from their living room.

It had the familiar awkwardness of many online meetings: dropped audio; a dog barking in the background; participants swivelling in their chairs; the prosecutor losing his connection. (This hearing and others in the case were recorded, and a ProPublica reporter watched them at the Oakland County courthouse last month.)

Ashley Bishop, a youth and family caseworker for the court, told the judge she thought Grace would be best served by getting mental health and anger management treatment in a residential facility. The prosecutor, Justin Chmielewski, said he agreed. Grace's court-appointed attorney, Elliot Parnes, said little but asked that she be given probation because she had committed no new offenses and because of the risk of COVID-19 in congregate facilities.

Parnes and Bishop declined to comment for this story and Chmielewski did not respond to calls.

Throughout the hearing, Grace took her glasses off to brush away tears and wiped her nose with her sleeve. She shook her head, which the judge later criticized as a sign of disagreement but which Grace told ProPublica signaled her disappointment in her past behavior. She raised her hand a couple times and asked, in a small voice, "Can I just say something please?"

"My mom and I do get into a lot of arguments, but with each one I learn something and try to analyze why it happened," she said. "My mom and I are working each day to better ourselves and our relationship, and I think that the removal from my home would be an intrusion on our progress."

Brennan admonished Grace for the fights with her mother, her thefts at school and behaving in a way that required police to come to their home. "Police," she said. "Most people go through their entire youth without having the cops have to come to their house because they can't get themselves together."

But, citing the pandemic, Brennan decided not to remove Grace from her home and instead sentenced her to "intensive probation." The terms of the probation included a GPS tether, regular check-ins with a court caseworker, counseling, no phone and the use of the school laptop for educational purposes only. Grace also was required to do her schoolwork.

"I hope that she upholds her end of the bargain," Brennan said at the end of the hearing.

Schools across the country weren't prepared for the abrupt turn to remote learning. Grace's school, Groves High School, in one of the most well-regarded districts in the state, was no different.

In mid-March, thinking the closures might last for only a month, the district initially offered optional online activities and then recessed for an already-scheduled weeklong spring break. Soon after, Whitmer announced that schools would end face-to-face instruction for the rest of the year. The Birmingham Public Schools superintendent asked families for patience as schools moved to an online curriculum in mid-April and promised flexibility in their support. Officials said student work would be evaluated as credit/no-credit.

The initial days of remote school coincided with the start of Grace's probation. Charisse was concerned that her daughter, who was a high school sophomore and had nearly perfect attendance, would have trouble without in-person support from teachers. Grace gets distracted easily and abandons her work, symptoms of her ADHD and a mood disorder, records show. Her Individualized Education Plan, which spelled out the school supports she should receive, required teachers to periodically check in to make sure she was on task and clarify the material, and it allowed her extra time to complete assignments and tests. When remote learning began, she did not get those supports, her mother said.

Days after the court hearing, on April 24, Grace's new caseworker, Rachel Giroux, made notes in her file that she was doing well: Grace had called to check in at 8:57 a.m.; she reported no issues at home and was getting ready to log in to do her schoolwork.

But by the start of the following week, Grace told Giroux she felt overwhelmed. She had forgotten to plug in her computer and her alarm didn't go off, so she overslept. She felt anxious about the probation requirements. Charisse, feeling overwhelmed as well, confided in the caseworker that Grace had been staying up late to make food and going on the internet, then sleeping in. She said she was setting up a schedule for Grace and putting a desk in the living room where she could watch her work.

"Worker told mother that child is not going to be perfect and that teenagers aren't always easy to work with but you have to give them the opportunity to change," according to the case progress notes. "Child needs time to adjust to this new normal of being on probation and doing work from home."

Five days later, after calling Charisse and learning that Grace had fallen back to sleep after her morning caseworker check-in, Giroux filed a violation of probation against her for not doing her schoolwork.

Giroux told the prosecutor she planned to ask the judge to detain Grace because she "clearly doesn't want to abide by the rules in the community," according to the case notes.

Grace has said in court and in answers to questions from ProPublica that she was trying to do what was asked of her. She had checked in with her caseworker every day and complied with the other requirements of intensive probation, including staying at home and obeying all laws. She had told her special education teacher that she needed one-on-one help and began receiving daily tutoring the day after the probation violation was filed.

Giroux filed the violation of probation before confirming whether Grace was meeting her academic requirements. She emailed Grace's teacher three days later, asking, "Is there a certain percentage of a class she is supposed to be completing a day/week?"

Grace's teacher, Katherine Tarpeh, responded in an email to Giroux that the teenager was "not out of alignment with most of my other students."

"Let me be clear that this is no one's fault because we did not see this unprecedented global pandemic coming," she wrote. Grace, she wrote, "has a strong desire to do well." She "is trying to get to the other side of a steep learning curve mountain and we have a plan for her to get there."

Giroux declined to comment. Tarpeh told a reporter she was not allowed to discuss Grace's case.

The May 14 hearing to decide whether Grace had violated her probation, and what would happen if she had, took place at the Oakland County courthouse when the Family Division was hearing only "essential emergency matters."

Grace's case was the only one heard in person in the courthouse that day.

On May 14, Judge Mary Ellen Brennan found that Grace was in violation of probation for not submitting schoolwork and ordered that she be detained at Children's Village in Oakland County, Michigan. (Records provided by Grace's Family)

Grace's attorney, concerned about his health, participated by Zoom, though he told the judge it was difficult to represent her without being there. He told the judge he decided not to request a postponement because the family was worried she would detain Grace if they waited for a later court date.

The prosecution called Giroux, the caseworker, as its only witness. In response to questions from Grace's attorney, she acknowledged she did not know what type of educational disabilities Grace had and did not answer a question about what accommodations those disabilities might require. Her assessment that Grace hadn't done her schoolwork was based on a comment her mother made to her teacher, which Charisse testified she said in a moment of frustration and was untrue.

Grace's special education teacher, Tarpeh, could have provided more information and planned to testify but had to leave the hearing to teach a class, according to the prosecutor.

Grace and her mother testified that she was handling her schoolwork more responsibly - and that she had permission to turn in her assignments at her own pace, as long as she finished by the end of the semester. And, Charisse said, Grace was behaving and not causing her any physical harm.

The transition to virtual school had been difficult, Grace testified, but she said she was making progress. "I just needed time to adjust to the schedule that my mom had prepared for me," she said.

Brennan was unconvinced. Grace's probation, she told her, was "zero tolerance, for lack of a better term."

She sent her to detention. Grace was taken out of the courtroom in handcuffs.

From March 16, when Michigan courts began limiting operations to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, to June 29, at least 24 delinquency cases involving youth in Oakland County court resulted in placements to juvenile facilities. Of those, more than half involved young people who are Black, like Grace.

Those numbers, obtained by ProPublica from the Oakland County Circuit Court, reflect long-standing racial disparities in the state and county's juvenile justice system. From January 2016 through June 2020, about 4,800 juvenile cases were referred to the Oakland court. Of those, 42% involved Black youth even though only about 15% of the county's youth are Black.

A report released last month, which found inadequate legal representation for juveniles in Michigan, noted that research has shown a disproportionate number of youth of color are incarcerated in Michigan overall. Black youth in the state are incarcerated more than four times as often as their white peers, according to an analysis of federal government data by The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit that addresses racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

"It is clear that kids of color are disproportionately involved and impacted by the system across the board," said Jason Smith of the nonprofit Michigan Center for Youth Justice, which works to reduce the confinement of youth. "They are more likely to be arrested, less likely to be offered any kind of diversion, more likely to be removed out of the home and placed in some sort of confinement situation."

In Grace's case, too, she was sent to a facility at a time when the governor had encouraged courts to send children home.

At the county-run Children's Village, which has space for 216 youth in secure and residential settings, the population was down to 80 last week, according to the facility manager. There have been no COVID-19 cases in the youth population and four workers have tested positive from contacts outside Children's Village, she said.

During March and April, 97 juveniles were released from Children's Village by court order, said Pamela Monville, the Oakland County deputy court administrator. "We understood the orders and the concerns to stop the spread," she said. Judges, caseworkers and attorneys worked together to determine "who could go back to the community," she added.

Juvenile justice experts and disability advocates decried the decision to remove Grace from her home, particularly when "the state gave clear directives that children, and all people, unless it was a dire emergency, were to be kept out of detention," said Kristen Staley, co-director of the Midwest Juvenile Defender Center, which works to improve juvenile defense across eight states.

Terri Gilbert, a former supervisor for juvenile justice programming in Michigan and a high-profile advocate, said the system suffers from inconsistencies in treatment and sentencing, aggravated by a lack of public information.

"This is too harsh of a sentence for a kid who didn't do their homework. ... There is so much research that points to the fact that this is not the right response for this crime," said Gilbert, a member of a governor-appointed committee that focuses on juvenile justice. "Teenage girls act out. They get mouthy. They get into fights with her mothers. They don't want to get up until noon. This is normal stuff."

Monville said Brennan, a judge since 2008, "made the decision she made based on what she heard and her experience on the bench."

But officials at the Michigan Protection & Advocacy Service, the state disabilities watchdog organization, said they were especially troubled that a student with special needs - one of the most vulnerable populations - was punished when students and teachers everywhere couldn't adjust to online learning.

"It is inconceivable that, given the utterly unprecedented situation, a court would enforce expectations about what student participation in school means that was not tied to the reality of education during a pandemic," said Kris Keranen, who oversees education for the group.

Charisse says the "greatest pain and devastation" of her life was watching Grace handcuffed in the courtroom. She got a letter in the mail a few days later:

In the first letter to her mother while in detention, Grace wrote, "I want to be a better person." (Records provided by Grace's Family)

"I want to change. I want to be a better person. Here I've realized how much you care and love me. I'm sorry I took that for granted. Please continue to send me pictures of me and you or just with anyone. I love you mommy and I miss you."

On Juneteenth, the day that commemorates the end of slavery, Charisse sat alone at her kitchen table, the wall behind her covered with Grace's childhood artwork. As the country faced a reckoning over systemic racism, the day had taken on increased recognition and Charisse lamented she and Grace couldn't mark it together as they usually did, attending programs at church or at the Museum of African American History in Detroit.

Charisse made strawberry lemonade with fresh watermelon, a variation on the traditional red Juneteenth drink, and talked to Grace the only way she could, through a video call monitored by a Children's Village case coordinator. The longest they had ever been separated before was when Grace attended a leadership sleepaway camp for six weeks over the summer.

"Juneteenth is all about freedom and you can't even celebrate. What do you have? It has been taken away," she said to her daughter.

Other than three recent visits, they have seen each other only on screen, including during a court status hearing in early June. On that day, Charisse watched as Grace walked into a room at Children's Village handcuffed and with her ankles shackled, her mother said.

"For us and our culture, that for me was the knife stuck in my stomach and turning," Charisse said. "That is our history, being shackled. And she didn't deserve that."

Students in Illinois schools said "I can't breathe" while being restrained at least 30 times over the time period we investigated, according to our analysis of the records. The practice of face-down restraint is still legal in Illinois.

At the hearing, both Grace and her mother pleaded with the judge to return her home. "I will be respectful and obedient to my mom and all other people with authority," Grace said. "I beg for your mercy to return me home to my mom and my responsibilities."

The judge, however, sided with the caseworker and prosecutor. They agreed that Grace should stay at the Children's Village not as punishment, but to get treatment and services. She ordered her to remain there and set a hearing to review the case for Sept. 8. By then, it will be a week into the new school year.

On Juneteenth, Charisse and Grace spoke for their full allotted 45 minutes. Grace wore a light blue polo shirt her mother had dropped off a few days earlier. Her hair was pushed back with a Lululemon headband.

Their conversation began with the mundane: Charisse reminded Grace to use her deodorant, and Grace said she needed to get her glasses fixed. But it landed, inevitably, at the frustration they both feel.

"I want you to write in your journal," Charisse told Grace. She urged her "not to get too comfortable" in detention. "I want you to do what you are supposed to do, but I don't want you to feel like this is your new norm."

Grace's initial weeks in detention were "repetitive and depressing," she recently told ProPublica in response to written questions.

Grace was required to stay in her locked room from 8:30 p.m. to 8:30 a.m. She couldn't turn the lights on and off herself and she slept on a mattress on a concrete slab, she said. She passed the time by reading, drawing and watching some TV.

The local school district provided packets of material but no classes. She said that she has not yet worked with a teacher in person or online, and that she meets less regularly with a therapist at Children's Village than she did at home.

She has since been transferred to a long-term treatment program at Children's Village, where she has a bit more freedom. Still, she tells her mother, it's difficult to think about what she's missing. "Everyone is moving past me now and I'm just here," she said during the Zoom call.

A Children's Village case coordinator, listening, tried to be encouraging. "You are doing very well right now," she said. "Whatever happens, it looks good. You are respectful, you are following the rules."

Then she told them their time was up.

"Stay strong," Grace told her mom.

"You stay strong, too," her mother replied. "I love you."

"I love you, too."

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Jodi S. Cohen is a reporter for ProPublica Illinois, where she has revealed misconduct in a psychiatric research study at the University of Illinois at Chicago, exposed a college financial aid scam and uncovered flaws in the Chicago Police Department's disciplinary system. Previously, Jodi worked at the Chicago Tribune for 14 years, where she covered higher education and helped expose a secret admissions system at the University of Illinois, among other investigations. Contact Jodi by email and on Twitter.

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A Teenager Didn't Do Her Online Schoolwork. So a Judge Sent Her to Juvenile Detention.

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PONTIAC, Mich. - One afternoon in mid-June, Charisse* drove up to the checkpoint at the Children's Village juvenile detention center in suburban Detroit, desperate to be near her daughter. It had been a month since she had last seen her, when a judge found the girl had violated probation and sent her to the facility during the pandemic.

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A trip down memory lane with Harry Potter At Home | Wizarding World

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This year, we brought Hogwarts to you with a very special campaign called Harry Potter At Home. As the year comes to a close, we take a look back at some of our favourite moments.

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Amazon.com: There There: A novel (9780525520375): Orange, Tommy: Books

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From art and editorials to personal narratives and podcasts, a list of the 10 contests and challenges for young people we're running this school year.

Images that illustrated winning editorials, STEM essays and reviews from our 2019-20 contests. Credit... Clockwise, from top left: Gary Mueller, Macaulay Library at Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Amy Sussman/Getty Images for Warner Music; Stephen Crowley/The New York Times; Steve Gschmeissner/Science Source; Mark Bourdillon/Love Productions, via Channel 4; Hilary Swift for The New York Times

Note: Sign up for our free webinar about teaching with our contests.
Tens of thousands of students from around the world participate in our contests each year,creating podcasts, writing editorials, telling stories, documenting their lives, and responding to the news.

To recognize just how tumultuous this year has been - and how disproportionately young people have been impacted - we are running a special challenge this fall to invite teenagers to document and respond to the earthshaking events they are living through.

By popular demand, we're bringing back our 2016 Civil Conversation Challenge, updated for Election 2020. The challenge encourages teenagers to think deeply about the divisive issues of our day and then have meaningful discussions across those divisions.

Finally, we have updated our eligibility requirements. For most contests, we now allow middle school as well as high school students to participate.

Teachers tell us they appreciate how these contests invite students to compose for an "authentic audience" and motivate them to produce their best work. Students tell us they like the variety of ways they can express themselves - and the confidence boost when their writing and art are recognized. For us, these contests offer more formal opportunities to do what we try to do every day: show students that their voices and ideas matter.

Almost all of our usual annual contests are back this year, but here is what's new for 2020-21:

As each contest goes live, we will add a link here, on this page. For those contests that have run in the past, you can learn more now by clicking on the related "Rules and Guidelines" for each, and taking a look at the work of previous student winners.

To learn more about our contests in general, scroll to the bottom of this post. If you have any other questions, please write to us at LNFeedback@nytimes.com or post a comment.

Sept 10-Nov. 12, 2020

This extraordinary year has changed all of us, but perhaps no generation has been more impacted than Gen Z - the young adults experiencing their formative years trapped inside and missing (or reinventing) milestones while a global pandemic rages, a recession ramps up, the 2020 election looms, and civics lessons in books have shifted to " civics lessons in the streets."

Full details for this contest are currently being developed. For now, students might think of it as a challenge to document what they're living through, and express themselves creatively on any aspect, large or small, of being a teenager in these tumultuous times.

Sept. 22-Oct. 30, 2020

Back in 2016 we invited teenagers to weigh in on some of the most divisive issues of that year's presidential election, and challenged them to use our comment system to have the kinds of respectful, productive discussions across ideological divides that, it seemed, many adults were unable to.

We'll be running a new and improved version of this challenge again this year. Before it goes live, we are asking teenagers to tell us what topics they'd like to discuss.

Oct. 13-Nov. 17, 2020

Write a short, powerful story about a meaningful experience from your life. We'll publish this year's rules soon; here are last year's. You might also take a look at the work of the 2019-20 winners.

Nov. 10-Dec. 15, 2020

Produce a 15-second video about the meaning of one of our Words of the Day. We'll publish this year's rules soon; here are last year's. You might also take a look at the work of the 2019-20 winners.

Dec. 8, 2020-Jan. 26, 2021

Review a book, movie, restaurant, album, theatrical production, video game, dance, TV show, art exhibition or any other kind of work The Times critiques. We'll publish this year's rules soon; here are last year's.You might also take a look at the work of the 2019-20 winners.

JUNE 10-AUG. 19, 2021

We ask, "What interested you most in The Times this week?" each Friday for 10 weeks. In a short comment, tell us what you're reading and why. We'll publish the 2021 rules soon; here are last year's.You might also take a look at the work of the 2019-20 winners.

All School Year Long

We invite students to react to the news via our daily writing prompts, and each week we publish a selection of their comments in a roundup for the world to read. Plus, we give a shout-out to new schools that join the conversation.

Why do we run so many contests? We believe in student voice. We want young people to be active content creators, not just consumers. And we're proud to offer places where they can create for an authentic audience of students, teachers, parents and other readers from around the world.

Here's how our contests work:

With the exception of our special "Coming of Age in 2020" contest, our Civil Conversation Challenge, our Summer Reading Contest and our Current Events Conversation, all our contests are open to students in both middle school and high school. In the United States, students who attend sixth through twelfth grades can participate - or they can have a teacher or parent submit on their behalf. Students who have graduated from high school in the year (12 months) before the start of the contest, and who have not yet begun taking college or university classes, can also participate, as long as they are 18 or younger at the time of submission. Anywhere else in the world, students must be ages 13-18. (The four challenges that do not follow this pattern will be open to teenagers only; we will post specific parameters for them soon.)

On the day each contest begins, we will add a link here, on this page, to the contest announcement so students and teachers can submit entries.

The work students send us is always considered by our staff and other experts, whether Times journalists, outside educators from partner organizations, or professional practitioners in a related field. For example, we have members of the Times podcast team help judge our podcast contest and Opinion writers and editors help judge our editorial contest. Judging for our contests is blind. That means we see only the entries themselves, and not student names or schools when we make our decisions.

About a month after the contest closes, we'll announce the winners, runners-up and honorable mentions. We usually celebrate dozens of students for each contest.

Winners get their work published on The Learning Network. Somemay also be featured in a special section of the print New York Times.

Our contests are also an integral component of our free school-year writing curriculum, which offers daily writing activities, mentor texts, and related lesson plans to prepare students for each contest. Learn more here.

Want to make sure you don't miss a contest announcement? Sign up for our free weekly newsletter or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

We can't wait to see what students create this school year!

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From art and editorials to personal narratives and podcasts, a list of the 10 contests and challenges for young people we're running this school year. Note: Sign up for our free webinar about teaching with our contests.

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Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream

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Are you, or do you know, a rising high school senior? Do you imagine that no matter who you are or where you come from, the American Dream is for everyone? And, have ideas that will make the American Dream real? Do you want an opportunity to win $5,000 to use toward achieving your dreams?

The first ever I, Too, Am the Dream Contest seeks to engage high school seniors in describing dynamic stories that have propelled themselves and others to pursue and achieve their own American Dream. It empowers students to reimagine an inclusive and evolving vision of opportunity and access and to drive a bold national conversation about how to advance and grow the American Dream, now and into the future.

Submit an essay, poem, spoken word, or short story of 1,000 words or fewer using the following prompt:

The story of the American Dream is one of aspiration, potential, hope, and dynamic tensions - opportunity and injustice, achievement and inequity, and triumph and challenge. Some have argued that the Dream is more of a myth than a reality. Many, who challenge the conventional understanding of the American Dream, cultivate a more inclusive and expansive vision of the Dream. They embrace the invitation to be ambassadors for advancing the American Dream, securing the Dream for future generations. Drawing on your own personal experience and/or the experiences of others, describe your vision for a reimagined American Dream and how you envision advancing it for yourself and others.

Submissions must be written and may be in the form of an essay, poetry, spoken word, or short story.

Submissions must be the original work of the student.

Submissions can be no more than 1,000 words. Citations and bibliography are not included in the word count.

One submission per student only.

The contest is open to rising United States high school seniors in the 2020-21 school year, including students attending public, private, parochial, or home schools in any of the fifty states, the District of Columbia, or the U.S. territories, and attending U.S. schools overseas.
Employees and affiliates of the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, the Milken Institute, and The Milken Family Foundation are not eligible to participate.

Two winners each receive:

A $5,000 cash award.

A mentor to provide consultation, guidance and counsel for their senior year and beyond.

Professional coaching to create a video of their submission.

An invitation to Washington, DC for the opening of the Center for Advancing the American Dream for them and their families.

Winners and 15 finalists will receive:

The opportunity to serve on panels and meet with education leaders to discuss their submission about advancing the American Dream.

The opportunity to have their submissions featured on the Center's website and publications, and in its Visitor Center when open.

By entering, you agree that your submission will become the property of the Center for Advancing the American Dream and will not be returned. The Center for Advancing the American Dream reserves the right to print, display, and publicize all submissions and photographs of the contest winners.

A team of judges will evaluate the submissions against a standardized rubric, which aims to help anchor the subjective interpretations of judges, and emotional impact of submissions, in a common language. Judges will grade submissions in the following five categories equally:

Development & Communication of Ideas

Perspective & Voice

Originality & Quality of Ideas

Inclusive & Compelling Call-to-Action

Overall Impact

Decisions of the I, Too, Am the Dream Contest judges are final. Finalists will be announced by October 19, 2020 and winners will be notified by email by October 26, 2020.

Download a PDF of the detailed contest rubric here.

DEADLINE IS SEPTEMBER 14, 2020 at 3:00PM EST.

ALL ENTRIES MUST BE SUBMITTED ONLINE THROUGH SUBMITTABLE.COM. All submissions must adhere to the contest requirements.
Enter the contest
Submissions will be accepted beginning June 2, 2020 until September 14, 2020 at 3:00pm (EST).
Download full submission rules and requirements here.

Stay up to date

We'll send you details and remind you of important contest deadlines.

Thank you for your interest in the I, Too, Am The Dream Contest!

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Are you, or do you know, a rising high school senior? Do you want to get a head start on your college application essay? Do you imagine that no matter who you are or where you come from, the American dream is for everyone? And, have ideas that will make the American dream real?

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What School Doesn't Teach Us About Slavery

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Pointless reaources

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From the Foreword by Cris Tovani:

"Sarah Zerwin has written the book I desperately needed to help my beliefs about learning match my assessment practices. In Point-Less, she nudges teachers to consider how traditional forms of grading get in the way of student growth. Her pioneering ways of marking, collecting, and sharing student work shows teachers how to assess with fidelity and in ways that serve student learning. Instead of assigning random points to student tasks, she demonstrates how teachers can provide students with concise, descriptive data that serves as meaningful and specific feedback.

'Inside this book, teachers will find:

* online resources rife with tools and examples to manage feedback
* ways to harness the electronic grade book as a useful instructional tool
* frameworks that guide student and teacher feedback
* checklists to simplify convoluted rubrics.

'Sarah addresses every grading obstacle one could think of. She provides ways to navigate objections that parents, athletic directors, administrators, colleagues, colleges, and even students might have with this innovative way of reporting grades.

'It's exciting to think how instruction could change if teachers weren't compelled to evaluate everything students did for the mere purpose of putting points in the grade book. Are you ready to find your path to a better way of grading? Are you ready to lead students on this journey to becoming better readers, writers, and thinkers? If so, you are going to love Point-Less!"--Cris Tovani

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How a single teacher can "go gradeless" in ways that lead students to becoming better readers, writers, and thinkers. - Heinemann

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This start-of-the-school year reflection invites students to connect to their natural surroundings. With a focus on gratitude, students explore how nature influences and positively impacts them.

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A young adult anthology featuring fictional stories of everyday resistance.
You might be the kind of person who stands up to online trolls.
Or who marches to protest injustice.

Perhaps you are #DisabledAndCute and dancing around your living room, alive and proud.

Or perhaps you are the trans mentor that you wish you had when you were younger.

Maybe you call out false allies, or stand up to loved ones.

Maybe you speak your truth and drop the mic, or maybe you take it with you when you leave.

This anthology features fictional stories--in poems, prose, and art--that reflect a slice of the varied and limitless ways that readers like you resist every day. TAKE THE MIC's powerful collection of stories features work by literary luminaries and emerging talent alike, including Newbery-winner Jason Reynolds, New York Times bestseller Samira Ahmed, anthologist and contributor Bethany C. Morrow, Darcie Little Badger, Jem Yoshioka, Keah Brown, Laura Silverman, L.D. Lewis, Sofia Quintero, Ray Stoeve, Yamile Mendez, and Connie Sun, with cover and interior art by Richie Pope.

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take the mic fictional stories of everyday resistance

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Take the Mic: Fictional Stories of Everyday Resistance by Bethany Morrow and Bethany C. Morrow and Jason Reynolds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A young adult anthology featuring fictional stories of everyday resistance.You might be the kind of person who stands up to online trolls.Or who marches to protest injustice. Perhaps you are #DisabledAndCute and dancing around your living room, alive and proud. Or perhaps you are the trans mentor that you wish you had when you were younger.

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SEL 3 Signature Practices Playbook - Casel Schoolguide

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These three signature practices can help integrate SEL practices into any classroom, meeting or youth-serving agency to promote community-building and deeper engagement.

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Reunite, Renew, and Thrive: Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Roadmap for Reopening School - CASEL

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As educators across the country prepared to welcome students and adults back to school in Fall 2020, they faced the layered impact of school closures, the COVID-19 pandemic, and racial inequities exacerbated by the pandemic and amplified by the nationwide mobilization for racial justice.

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Rosa is a young journalist. One typical workday, a few months into her position, Rosa was instructed by Jeremy to go and "stake out" the home of a family whose child had, a few hours beforehand, been injured in a collision with an automobile while riding a bicycle. Rosa faced a dilemma. On the one hand, she felt that, as a reporter, it was sometimes her job to report tough or tragic stories, and that she needed to uphold expectations as a journalist for The Daily by trying to get all the information she could. On the other hand, she felt that she would be "crossing a line" to try to get a family statement immediately after they had been notified of the child's death, likely their "worst nightmare."

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Dilemmas for Teenagers - The Good Project

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Rosa is a young journalist. One typical workday, a few months into her position, Rosa was instructed by Jeremy to go and "stake out" the home of a family whose child had, a few hours beforehand, been injured in a collision with an automobile while riding a bicycle. Rosa faced a dilemma.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Ninety-four years after his birth (and more than thirty since his death) James Baldwin remains an intellectual, moral, and creative touchstone for many Americans-whether writers, critics, or simply people trying to live well in the world. Baldwin was an accomplished novelist, a legendary essayist, and an important civil rights activist-and most importantly for our purposes here, the man knew how to write a great sentence. His birthday is as good an excuse as any to revisit some of his teachings about the craft, and to that end, I've collected some of his best literary bon mots from essays and interviews below.
Write to find out.
When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know, what you don't want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

-in a 1984 interview with The Paris Review
Spurn self-delusion.
I still believe that the unexamined life is not worth living: and I know that self-delusion, in the service of no matter what small or lofty cause, is a price no writer can afford. His subject is himself and the world and it requires every ounce of stamina he can summon to attempt to look on himself and the world as they are.

-from the introduction to Nobody Knows My Name
Use every experience.
One writes out of one thing only-one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

-from " Autobiographical Notes," in the Collected Essays from Library of America
Read as much as you can.
I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing this way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns the less one knows. I'm still learning how to write. I don't know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it. This I learned from Dostoyevsky, from Balzac.

-in a 1984 interview with The Paris Review
Travel.
The story of what can happen to an American Negro writer in Europe simply illustrates, in some relief, what can happen to any American writer there. It is not meant, of course, to imply that it happens to them all, for Europe can be very crippling, too; and, anyway, a writer, when he has made his first breakthrough, has simply won a crucial skirmish in a dangerous, unending and unpredictable battle. Still, the breakthrough is important, and the point is that an American writer, in order to achieve it, very often has to leave this country.

-from "The Discovery of What It Means To Be an American"
Write with recklessness.
I find writing gets harder as time goes on. I'm speaking of the working process, which demands a certain amount of energy and courage (though I dislike using the word), and a certain amount of recklessness.

-in a 1984 interview with The Paris Review
Trust the editing process.
Sometimes it comes very quickly. Seems almost to come from the top of my head. But in fact, it's been gestating for a long, long time. Most of the time it's not like that. Usually it's a matter of writing, recognizing it ain't right or it won't move. You tear it up and do it again and again. And then one day something happens-it works.

-in a 1976 interview with Jewell Handy Gresham
But know when to stop.
When you've finished a novel it means, "The train stops here, you have to get off here." You never get the book you wanted, you settle for the book you get. I've always felt that when a book ended there was something I didn't see, and usually when I remark the discovery it's too late to do anything about it.

-in a 1984 interview with The Paris Review
Fight the conspiracy against you.
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent-which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important. So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next-one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next.

-from " Autobiographical Notes," in the Collected Essays from Library of America
Writing is hard.
Every form is difficult, no one is easier than another. They all kick your ass. None of it comes easy.

-in a 1984 interview with The Paris Review
Don't be too ironic.
You are speaking to an old rat. I find much of so‐called avant‐garde writing utterly trivial. If there is no moral question, there is no reason to write. I'm an old‐fashioned writer and, despite the odds, I want to change the world. What I hope to convey? Well, joy, love, the passion to feel how our choices affect the world . . . that's all.

-from a 1979 interview published in The New York Times
Don't describe it, show it.
[My first drafts] are overwritten. Most of the rewrite, then, is cleaning. Don't describe it, show it. That's what I try to teach all young writers-take it out! Don't describe a purple sunset, make me see that it is purple.

-in a 1984 interview with The Paris Review
Look deeply.
It is part of the business of the writer-as I see it-to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source.

-from " Autobiographical Notes," in the Collected Essays from Library of America
Simplicity is king.
You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

-in a 1984 interview with The Paris Review
Write towards truth.
I certainly can't imagine art for art's sake . . . that's a European approach, which never made any sense to me. I think what you have to do, which is the difficult thing about a writer, is avoid slogans. You have to have the [guts] to protest the slogan, no matter how noble it may sound. It always hides something else; the writer should try to expose what it hides.

-from a 1979 interview published in The New York Times
Talent is less important than diligence.
Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

-in a 1984 interview with The Paris Review
Keep your distance.
Social affairs are not generally speaking the writer's prime concern, whether they ought to be or not; it is absolutely necessary that he establish between himself and these affairs a distance which will allow, at least, for clarity, so that before he can look forward in any meaningful sense, he must first be allowed to take a long look back.

-from " Autobiographical Notes," in the Collected Essays from Library of America
Write what you see.
I don't try to be prophetic, as I don't sit down to write literature. It is simply this: a writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, "I don't look like that." And Picasso replied, "You will." And he was right.

-in a 1984 interview with The Paris Review
Remember why you write.
The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. In some way, your aspirations and concern for a single man in fact do begin to change the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it.

-from a 1979 interview published in The New York Times
Just keep writing.
Write. Find a way to keep alive and write. There is nothing else to say. If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.

-in a 1984 interview with The Paris Review

I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.

-from " Autobiographical Notes," in the Collected Essays from Library of America

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"Write a Sentence as Clean as a Bone" And Other Advice from James Baldwin

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Ninety-four years after his birth (and more than thirty since his death) James Baldwin remains an intellectual, moral, and creative touchstone for many Americans-whether writers, critics, or simply people trying to live well in the world.

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young adult fiction / people & places / united states / hispanic & latino

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young adult fiction / social themes / death

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young adult fiction/family - general (see also headings under social themes)

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young adult fiction/people & places - united states - hispanic & latino

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teen own voices; teen poetry; #ownvoices; #ownvoices author; latina; latina author; latinx authors; #weneeddiversebooks; multicultural books for kids; diversity books for kids; books for latinxteens; books for hispanic teens; books for teen girls; latinx; novel in verse; poetry; poetry for teens; poetry for teenagers; we need diverse books; diverse books for teens; latinx protagonist; latinx stories for teenagers; latino stories for teenagers; latina stories for teenagers; own voices books; novels in verse for ages 14 and up; hispanic heritage month

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young adult fiction / people & places / united states / hispanic & latino

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young adult fiction / social themes / death

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young adult fiction/family - general (see also headings under social themes)

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young adult fiction/people & places - united states - hispanic & latino

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young adult fiction: people & places / united states / hispanic & latino *

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young adult fiction: family / general (see also headings under social themes) *

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Amazon.com: Clap When You Land eBook: Acevedo, Elizabeth: Kindle Store

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * From the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom.

"This potent book about America's most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist."-San Francisco Chronicle

NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD * NAMED ONE OF PASTE'S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE * NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time * NPR * The Washington Post * Chicago Tribune * Vanity Fair * Esquire * Good Housekeeping * Paste * Town & Country * The New York Public Library * Kirkus Reviews * Library Journal

"Nearly every paragraph is laced through with dense, gorgeously evocative descriptions of a vanished world and steeped in its own vivid vocabulary."-Entertainment Weekly

Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her-but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he's ever known.

So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia's proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he's enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram's resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures.

This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children-the violent and capricious separation of families-and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today's most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer isa propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.
Praise for The Water Dancer
"Ta-Nehisi Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me. So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations-and then proceeds to exceed them. The Water Dancer . . . is a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical significance. . . . What's most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal. . . . Timeless and instantly canon-worthy." -Rolling Stone

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Amazon.com: The Water Dancer: A Novel eBook: Coates, Ta-Nehisi: Kindle Store

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This routine helps students assess and communicate how they are feeling. Use this routine to check in on their emotional well-being, comfort level with technology, or something fun, like their opinion about a recent social media campaign, television series, or music release.

Face-to-Face Learning

Seat the class in a circle, if possible given social-distancing requirements, and pose a question. Have students respond by holding up a fist or 1-5 fingers. The fist indicates the low end of the scale, and five represents the high end. Use their responses to spark small-group discussions or a class discussion, focusing on strategies to move everyone closer to the high end of the scale. Possible questions include:

Fist to five, how are you feeling today?

Fist to five, how was your time management this week?

Fist to five, how well are you able to manage the class technology when working at home?

Fist to five, how is social distancing at school working for you?

Remote Learning

Start class by posing a question to the group, which you can say aloud, write in the chat, or share on your screen. If possible, encourage students to turn on their cameras for this activity, even if they are not in the picture and you just see their hands when they hold up their fingers. If students' cameras are off, they can write the number of fingers they are holding up in the chat. Explain that you will be asking some questions, and they should respond by holding up a fist or 1-5 fingers to the camera. The fist indicates the low end of the scale, and five represents the high end. Use their responses to spark a class discussion, focusing on strategies to move everyone closer to the high end of the scale, or have students come up with strategies in breakout groups and record them on a collaborative document. Possible questions include:

Fist to five, how are you feeling today?

Fist to five, how is your Wi-Fi connection today?

Fist to five, what's your interest level for our current project/book/your independent reading?

Fist to five, how well are you able to access class videos at home?

Fist to five, what's your motivation level today?

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This routine helps students assess and communicate how they are feeling. Use this routine to check in on their emotional well-being, comfort level with technology, or something fun, like their opinion about a recent social media campaign, television series, or music release. Seat the class in a circle, if possible given social-distancing requirements, and pose a question.

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Monday night I sat on my back patio staring up into a rare, starry Chicago night. I squinted and made out each point of The Big Dipper and then turned to see what I decided was Mars, twinkling in the distance. My partner and I sat in city silence, wrapped in a perfect, nearly unrecognizable temperature-and-breeze blanket. For an hour or so we reveled in this brief peace bubble and I gave myself permission to dream:

"What if?" I thought. What if we did something different, on purpose? What if we refused to return to normal? Every week seems to introduce a new biblical plague and unsurprisingly, the nation is turning to schools to band-aid the situation and create a sense of "normalcy"-the same normalcy that has failed BIPOC communities for decades.

In her memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist, Patrisse Khan-Cullors states that "our nation [is] one big damn Survivor reality nightmare". It always has been. America's criminal navigation of the COVID-19 pandemic further highlights the ways we devalue the lives of the most vulnerable. We all deserve better than Survivor and I don't want to help sustain this nightmare. I want to be a part of something better.

What If We Designed a School Year for Recovery?

"What if?" I thought. What if Chicago Public Schools (CPS) did something radical with this school year? What if this fastest-improving urban district courageously liberated itself from narrow and rigid quantitative measures of intelligence that have colonized the education space for generations, and instead blazed a trail for reimagining what qualifies as valuable knowledge?

What if we put our money, time and energy into what we say matters most? What if this school year celebrated imagination? In We Got This, Cornelius Minor reminds us that "education should function to change outcomes for whole communities." What if we designed a school year that sought to radically shift how communities imagine, problem solve, heal, and connect?

What if this messy school year prioritized hard truths and accountability? What if social emotional instruction wasn't optional or reduced to one cute poster? What if we focused on district wide capacity-building for, and facilitation of, restorative justice practices?

What if the CPS Office of Social Emotional Learning (OSEL) had more than about 15 restorative practice coaches to serve over 600 schools? What if we let students name conflicts and give them the space, tools, and support to address and resolve them? What if restorative justice was a central part of this year's curricula?

What If We Really Listened?

What if we made space to acknowledge the fear, anxiety, frustration and confusion students, staff, and families are feeling? What if we listened? What if we made space to acknowledge the anger and demands of students? What if our priority was healing? Individual and collective. What if we respected and honored the work of healers and invested in healing justice?

What if our rising 8th-graders and seniors prepared for high school and post-secondary experiences by centering their humanity and the humanity of others? What if healthy, holistic, interconnected citizenship was a learning objective? What if we tracked executive functioning skills and habits of mind? What if for "homework" families had healing conversations?

What If We Made Life the Curriculum?

What if we recognized that life-our day-to-day circumstances and our response to them-is curricula? It's the curricula students need, especially now as our country reckons with its identity. What if we remembered that reading, writing, social studies, mathematics, and science are built into our understanding of and response to events every day?

Here are some examples in the humanities. Reading: comprehension and analysis of the perspectives put forth about the twin pandemics (COVID-19 and, as Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III has come to call it, COVID-1619). Writing: thoughtful and supported arguments for equitable allocation of federal and local resources. Social studies: design and execution of public actions that educate and empower communities.

We can do this in math and science, too. Mathematics: calculation of distribution options for COVID stimulus checks. Science: inquiry about virus transmission and the role of vaccines... the possibilities are endless.

When we structure students learning around their lived experiences and present needs, they not only develop content knowledge and skills but they grow to care about and for one another. They are equipped to collaboratively face the world they are inheriting.

This work is happening in pockets around the city. But this moment invites us to expand the degree to and frequency with which social emotional knowledge and skills, restorative practices, and culturally and socially responsive curricula are implemented.

Let's Stop Policing Our Imaginations

While reading Charlene Carruthers' Unapologetic a few weeks ago, I highlighted the lines: "Anti-Blackness works 24/7 to kill the Black imagination... The destructiveness is ongoing, chronic, but it is manifested acutely. It tells our children to dream of a better future instead of a better now, in the communities where they live."

Lately, I am acutely aware of how intentionally I have to work in order to renew my own lost imagination. How much have we snuffed out the what-if imaginations of our students with policies that police their bodies and minds, inequitably and unimaginatively distribute funding to schools, and tolerate out-of-date, counter-revolutionary curricula?

The removal of police from schools, after all, does not eliminate all forms of policing. What if we didn't police the imaginations of students?

What if enough is enough? No one is coming to the rescue. We can rescue ourselves. We must. As the fifth core assumption/belief of restorative justice states: Everything we need to make positive change is already here. We just have to let our students, families, neighbors, and friends tell us what they need. And we show up. And we learn together.
Photo by Tanesha Peeples. Image is of the mural created by Green Star Movement for Fernwood Elementary School.
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What If We Radically Reimagined the New School Year?

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Monday night I sat on my back patio staring up into a rare, starry Chicago night. I squinted and made out each point of The Big Dipper and then turned to see what I decided was Mars, twinkling in the distance. My partner and I sat in city silence, wrapped in a perfect, nearly unrecognizable temperature-and-breeze blanket.

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Relationships matter. We know this. We've always known this.

In fact, it's the exact reason many of us chose education as a profession. We believe in the power of connection in learning and in life. And collectively, we're very, very good at cultivating strong bonds with students.

Since COVID-19 struck, though, it's become a topic that has left many of us scratching our heads. It was hard enough to maintain relationships during emergency virtual learning plans last March. But now, we'll have to build relationships from behind a screen with a brand new crop of kids we've never met face-to-face.

Here's the good news, though. The key components of what makes a good relationship such as respect, trust, and support haven't changed. And, we can still show genuine interest in their interests virtually. We don't have to start from scratch either. Many of the relationship-building strategies we've grown accustomed to implementing face-to-face are transferable (with a little ingenuity).

Will it look the same? No.

Will it feel the same? Maybe not.

Will it be more challenging? Of course.

Relationships likely won't form as organically, so we'll have to be strategic. But, it can be done and done well! Also, because of the limited social interaction our students have had these past six months, many will be craving a connection. In fact, they need it. So, let's capitalize!

Here are 33 adaptable strategies for fostering strong teacher-student relationships in a K-12 virtual environment:

1. Screencastify Your Welcome Message: Pre-record a warm "welcome to class" message as well as a class overview using Screencastify. This tools allows you to record your screen, face, voice, and more. It's a great way to show them how to navigate your virtual classroom.

2. Establish a "Netiquette" Together: Using Padlet, ask students to share ideas of virtual class rules/norms they think are needed to build a successful online community. Group the ideas. Then, facilitate a conversation to guide the formation of your class netiquette. Their voice matters most in this!

3. Morning Meetings: Conduct Responsive Classroom morning meetings (as often as your virtual learning schedule allows) to cultivate community while reinforcing social-emotional skills. This article explains how one teacher transitioned his morning meetings to the online environment. Morning meetings are well worth the time in secondary classes as well. All students need to feel safe and connected, especially amid a pandemic.

4. Teacher Trait Wish List: What makes a remarkable teacher? Have students use a word cloud generator such as Mentimeter to share one or more traits they hope to disover about you this school year. Use their responses to deepen the dialogue. For example, you might say, "I see many of you wrote respectful. What are some ways I can show you respect?"

5. Student Interest Inventory: Have students (or parents depending on age level) complete a short survey to gather insights about student interests. Google forms work great and will store their responses so you can easily revisit the data as needed throughout the year.

6. Parent Expertise Inventory: Send out a short survey to parents asking them about their interests/areas of expertise. Find ways throughout the year to utlize their talents to support instruction. For example, if you have a parent who's a writer, perhaps they could join a synchronous session or make an asynchronous video to discuss their writing process. This authenticizes learning and creates rapport with parents.

7. Virtual Q&A: At the start of the year, host a virtual meeting outside of regular school hours should students/parents have questions that need answering. Record and post it for later review if possible.

8. Mental Health Check-Ins: We want to give students permission to feel and can do this by creating a safe, caring virtual environment. Prompt discussions about the ups and downs of daily life. Be sure to share yours. Students can share their roses/thorns, peaks/pits, highs/lows, etc. Help them name their feelings and expect varied levels of vulnerability. Students will gradually open up over time.

9. EdCamp(ish) Breakout Rooms: Based upon the data you collected on student interests, create several general discussion topics (such as sports or music) and give students 5-10 minutes to share about their interests in small-group breakout rooms using Zoom.

10. Refrigerator Decor: Create and snail mail a card (standard business or postcard size) including a welcome message along with contact information and a headshot for students/parents to easily reference on their fridge. This will be a daily reminder that you are a real person who can be easily contacted.

11. Say Their Name: During synchronous sessions, greet each student every time. We can't stand at the door, but we can acknowledge their presence. A quick, "____ (insert name), I'm glad you're here" ensures every child feels seen.

12. Tell Me Something Good: Start sessions simply by saying, "Tell me something good." Students can say it or type it in the chat box depending on preference. This activity usually gets people smiling, and will help you gather insights into their lives.

13. 2×10 Strategy: Struggling with a student? The 2×10 strategy suggests spending two minutes a day for 10 days in a row connecting with them about their interests/life in some way. While engaging for two minutes may not always work in the virtual world, find quick ways to connect such as sending a private message during live video conferencing or writing a personal message along with feedback on a piece of their work. This can be a game changer!

14. Meaningful Mementos: Using Seesaw or Flipgrid, have students show and tell about a personal artifact from their life. This is an eye-opening way for you to learn about students and for them to learn about each other. It also sends the message that you care about their lives and experiences outside of the classroom which supports culturally responsive teaching.

15. Share YOU: Students will let you into their lives if you let them into yours. Share your quirks and imperfections! They want/need to know you're human, and it'll help them feel more comfortable in their own skin while engaging in the virtual world which can be intimidating.

16. Music Playlist: Have students send you their favorite songs (with clean lyrics) and find ways to embed them into synchronous/asynchrounous instruction. Think of incorporating them as a soft start/end to class or when transitioning between activities. We may not be able to decorate the walls, but we can use little touches like this to instill a sense of ownership of their classroom.

17. EduBlogging: If you teach reading/writing, have students create their own personal blogs in place of composition writer's notebooks. Let them write about interests and topics of choice often. Edublogs can be easily shared with peers which motivates and builds community, but privacy settings can be adjusted when preferred, too.

18. Pic of the Day: During the first two weeks of school, share a daily picture of yourself taken at a special event, with your family, while on vacation, etc. After students get a read on who you are as a person, start featuring one student pic per the day.

19. Emoji Temperature Check: To gauge the mood of the "room", ask students to quickly draw/hold up or private message you an emoji. Reaction tools can also help you assess the climate of the classroom.

20. Connect Before Correct: Carve out time to call/email parents just to say something positive about their kid. This opens up the line of communication and means so much to students and parents.

21. Virtual Lockers: Have students design a virtual locker to reflect their interests. Make a copy of this template from Inside Education, Outside the Box.

22. The Art of the Handwritten Letter: Send a handwritten letter to a student. This is a lost art (and a time-consuming one) but there's nothing quite like receiving one. Plus, it'll make students feel like you're real.

23. Lunch Bunch: Schedule virtual lunch bunches either "just because" or as an incentive as your schedule allows. Many divisions are prohibiting one-on-one video sessions (and secondary students may not want to do this), so doing them in partnerships or small groups might be more inticing. If you have young children you're juggling, let them join! You can learn a lot about students and vice versa through normal, everyday chit-chat!

24. Class Mascot of the Week: Celebrate pets! Spotlight one per week.

25. Digital Photo Collage: Rather than posting pictures to a "Family Wall" bulletin board, create a digital collage of family/friends. Have each student send you a pic of a loved one and drop them into your Google photos. Then, go to https://photos.google.com/foryou and choose the collage option. Keep it some place that's visible to the students from time to time.

26. Open Mic: Once you've created a sense of community, provide a time/virtual space for students to share special talents. This is a great way to send students off after a synchronous session. Keep in mind, though, not everyone will want a stage, so make it optional.

27. Celebrate Birthdays Their Way: Give students a few options for how they'd like you to celebrate their birthdays. Some may not want to be in the spotlight. Do they want the class to sing "Happy Birthday" to them? Would they prefer an eCard? Could they use a homework pass? Would they like to receive video messages from classmates in Flipgrid? Let them decide!

28. Virtual Spirit Days: Think about special days to host such as Team Tuesday (to celebrate sports). Have students snap pics of their participation and post something about it in a discussion board thread.

29. Brain Breaks: Integrate fun brain breaks into instruction to re-energize and refocus students. GoNoodle offers a variety of movement, yoga, and mindfulness activities for younger students. Secondary students could take a snack break or walk around their block. Let your hair down and join in brain breaks with students, too!

30. Say Hey Emails: Send a quick email/video to each student from time to time just to say hi. Keep it casual and personal (not strictly academic).

31. Gamification: Introduce game-based learning platforms to your students such as Gimkit or Kahoot using "just for fun" topics such as pop culture trivia. Embed the game within a synchronous session so students can interact while playing. Personalities emerge during a little friendly competition!

32. The Johari Window: Building relationships requires self-awareness. How open are you? This is a good thing to reflect upon especially as we enter this brand new learning space. We also benefit from seeking feedback about ourselves from students to minimize our blindspots. Check out this video on The Johari Window which explains four quadrants to better understand ourselves.

33. Be Anti-Racist: Last but perhaps most critical, take action to stand up against racism. Many of our students, especially those who are BlPOC, have been impacted to the core by recent events. Launch developmentally appropriate discussions about race, racism, and racialized violence. See this resource How To Be An Anti-Racist Educator as well. Keep listening, learning, and leaning into tough topics. We can't build relationships with every student unless every student knows we're an advocate, ally, and activist.

And remember, the most important relationship to nuture is the one you have with yourself. The next several months will be hard (which is the understatement of the century). Make sure you're being good to you!

As a former colleague used to always remind me, "You can't pour from an empty cup."

I hope these ideas help. You've got this! We've got this.

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Virtual Learning: 33 Ways to Build Relationships - teachtrainlove.com

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"No significant learning occurs without a significant relationship." ~Dr. James Comer Relationships matter. We know this. We've always known this. In fact, it's the exact reason many of us chose education as a profession. We believe in the power of connection in learning and in life.

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Middle and high school students across the U.S. created and published their own audio or video commentaries for a national audience. The student media perspectives shared here showcase evidence-based argument, are rooted in authentic experience, and span the political spectrum.

Discover students' wide-ranging perspectives by location and topic.

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KQED Learn | Let's Talk about Election 2020

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Middle and high school students across the U.S. created and published their own audio or video commentaries for a national audience. The student media perspectives shared here showcase evidence-based argument, are rooted in authentic experience, and span the political spectrum. Discover students' wide-ranging perspectives by location and topic.

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Asking kids to create a collage or list-Who cultivates your genius?

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Asking kids to create a collage or list-Who cultivates your genius?

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Friends, family, teachers, community members, authors, etc...

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Friday Reflections being Contract grading?

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Friday Reflections being Contract grading?

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Weekly have students reflect on what they learned/participation/and challenges/Goals for the next week. FEEDBACK FOR TEACHERS--> What is working for you? What isn't?

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Our collection of educator resources includes a wide range of flexible materials. You will find resources that support teaching a complex moment in history or addressing today's breaking news.

Facing History students are 94% more likely than other students to report that their class motivated them to learn.

93% of Facing History students agreed that it is important to work for positive social change.

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Our student-centered teaching strategies improve literacy skills, nurture critical thinking, and create a respectful classroom climate. You can implement these strategies with any academic content.
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Our collections, units, and toolkits provide you with a range of options to introduce students to themes that are relevant to their lives.
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Lessons & Mini-Lessons

Our lessons and mini-lessons include primary sources and news sources to support their head, heart, and conscience.
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- Facing History Educator Reflecting on Our Reconstruction Unit

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Our collection of educator resources includes a wide range of flexible materials. You will find resources that support teaching a complex moment in history or addressing today's breaking news. Facing History students are 94% more likely than other students to report that their class motivated them to learn.

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https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11qmnRUU4oCkWOL1JcQcB2FKXBOWtWaTC/edit#slide=id.p3

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We are operating in uncharted territory right now and many things are still unknown. Your SCUSD Student Support & Health Services Department wants you to know that your feelings are valid , no matter what they are.

You might feel scared, confused, overwhelmed, angry, alone, grateful, or completely calm. You might feel many things throughout the days or all at once, like being upset that an event was cancelled, but happy that you can wear pajamas all day.

Your feelings are normal; the situation is not.

This Virtual Calming Room is a place for students, families and staff to find tools and strategies for managing emotions and feelings and building our resilience during this pandemic .

We are here to support you!
Disclaimer: The following links are purely for educational purposes and are not intended as psychological interventions or as a substitute for psychological treatment. If you are in need of psychological help you should seek the consultation of a licensed mental health professional.
Sacramento City Unified School District - 5735 47th Ave, Sacramento, CA 95824 - (916) 643-7400 -
The Sacramento Unified School District prohibits discrimination, intimidation, harassment (including sexual harassment) or bullying based on a person's actual or perceived ancestry, color, disability, gender, gender identity, gender expression, immigration status, nationality, race or ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or association with a person or a group with one or more of these actual or perceived characteristics. For questions or complaints please contact the following staff: Title IX Coordinator & Equity Compliance Officer: Melinda Iremonger - 5735 47th Avenue, Sacramento, CA, 95824 - 916.664.7446 - melinda-iremonger@scusd.edu; Chief Human Resources Officer: Cancy McArn - 5735 47th Avenue, Sacramento CA, 95824 - 916.643.7474 - cancy-mcarn@scusd.edu; Section 504 Coordinator: Noel Estacio - 5735 47th Avenue, Sacramento CA, 95824 - 916.643.9412 - noel-estacio@scusd.edu.
Non-Discrimination Policy Contacts

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We are operating in uncharted territory right now and many things are still unknown. Your SCUSD Student Support & Health Services Department wants you to know that your feelings are valid, no matter what they are. You might feel scared, confused, overwhelmed, angry, alone, grateful, or completely

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Home < Sample Activities & Templates <

This activity asks students to create a visual map of their socialization in some aspect of identity (such as race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) through the course of their life. Students will create a timeline of their lives, noting at what ages they learned particular lessons about their identity, by whom those lessons were taught, and how those lessons were taught.

Students can refer to the Cycle of Socialization handout to help them understand the relationship between identity and socialization. This handout offers a diagrammatic representation of how social identities such as race, gender, sexuality, and class are constructed and reinforced by socio-cultural interactions and context. It prompts students to reflectively engage with aspects of their own identities and identities they learned about but don't share to consider how their understanding of identities is enforced and how they reinforce or challenge the socio-cultural construction of identities. This activity could also be paired with The Social Identity Wheel to help students determine which aspects of their identities they might like to further explore in this exercise.

The activity includes questions for reflection and discussion that will encourage students to recognize the larger social context of identities and how identities are socially constructed and maintained.

To help students understand the ways their identities were learned and policed throughout their lives. This can prompt students to trouble the pervasive essentialization of identities.

To assist in challenging normalized policing of gender, sexuality, and race in social groups.

To emphasize the difference between messages students receive about their genders, classes, and races depending on what groups they belong to. For example, white students might not remember learning anything about whiteness from television as whiteness is normalized and abundantly represented in television. Students of Color, on the other hand, may have memories of learning negative messages about their racial groups from television.

This activity and the accompanying Cycle of Social Identity handout are suitable as an introduction to socialization and identity. Instructors should preface this activity by introducing the Cycle of Social Identity. The Social Identity Wheel could also be used as a way to prepare students for this deeply reflective exercise. The Mapping activity should be followed by a discussion to debrief and synthesize what students learned from their independent reflection.

Questions and instructions can be projected on the board or printed and distributed. It may also be helpful for students to see a completed timeline as an example.

The students may not perceive the activity as relevant to the course and thus may exhibit resistance. The learning goals of the activity should be emphasized in the introduction and reiterated in the debrief.

Students with relative privilege may feel inclined to cite instances in which they were treated poorly during their socialization as evidence of reverse sexism or reverse racism. Instructors should approach this activity with a sense of how they plan to respond to misunderstandings such as these.

Additional Associated Material

Mapping Social Identity Timeline Activity

Individual Component

Chose a social identity that you would like to reflect on and examine.

Map what you've learned about this identity in the following manner:

Draw a straight horizontal line in the middle of the paper

Write the identity you are mapping on the top of paper

Section the horizontal line with four vertical lines in roughly equal parts

Chart each section according to age (ex: 0-5; 6-10; 11-15; 16 to present)
(Note: Participants may also want to think in terms of school life: i.e., preschool, elementary, middle/junior, high, and high school & college.)

In mapping, refer to the cycle of socialization handout.

Questions:

What messages did you hear/learn about being ____?

Where did the messages come from?
(Parents, other family members, religious organizations, schools, teachers, media (print, TV, music), other institutions, peers, etc.)

What behaviors were encouraged, rewarded, and supported? How?

What behaviors were discouraged, unsupported, and punished? How?

Social Identity Mapping

Social Identity I am mapping: ______________________________________

Age: _______ Age: _______ Age: _______ Age: _______

Pairs or Triads

Discuss these questions:

When were you first aware of yourself as a member of _____ group?

When were you first aware of people from other groups in this category?

When did you first experience being treated differently because of your membership in this group?

When did you first witness someone being treated differently because or membership in another group?

Large group

What key insights did you arrive at through this activity?

Resource adapted for use by the Program on Intergroup Relations, University of Michigan

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Mapping Social Identity Timeline Activity

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Home < Sample Activities & Templates < This activity asks students to create a visual map of their socialization in some aspect of identity (such as race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) through the course of their life.

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all assigned multiple social identities. Within each category, there is a hierarchy - a social status with dominant and non-dominant groups. As with race, dominant members can bestow benefits to members they deem "normal," or limit opportunities to members that fall into "other" categories.

A person of the non-dominant group can experience oppression in the form of limitations, disadvantages, or disapproval. They may even suffer abuse from individuals, institutions, or cultural practices. "Oppression" refers to a combination of prejudice and institutional power that creates a system that regularly and severely discriminates against some groups and benefits other groups.

Systems of Oppression
The term "systems of oppression" helps us better identify inequity by calling attention to the historical and organized patterns of mistreatment. In the United States, systems of oppression (like systemic racism) are woven into the very foundation of American culture, society, and laws. Other examples of systems of oppression are sexism, heterosexism, ableism, classism, ageism, and anti-Semitism. Society's institutions, such as government, education, and culture, all contribute or reinforce the oppression of marginalized social groups while elevating dominant social groups.

Social Identities
A social identity is both internally constructed and externally applied, occurring simultaneously. Educators from oneTILT define social identity as having these three characteristics:

Exists (or is consistently used) to bestow power, benefits, or disadvantage.

Is used to explain differences in outcomes, effort, or ability.

Is immutable or otherwise sticky (difficult, costly, or dangerous) to change.

Oppression causes deep suffering, but trying to decide whether one oppression is worse than others is problematic. It diminishes lived experiences and divides communities that should be working together. Many people experience abuse based on multiple social identities. Often, oppressions overlap to cause people even more hardship. This overlapping of oppressed groups is referred to as "intersectionality." Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term in the 1980s to describe how black women faced heightened struggles and suffering in American society because they belonged to multiple oppressed social groups.

Watch: A short video on black women and the concept of intersectionality. From the NMAAHC, #APeoplesJourney, "African American Women and the Struggle for Equality."

During the time Crenshaw was articulating the concept of intersectionality, poet-scholar and social activist Audre Lorde warned America against fighting against some oppressions but not others. She insisted, "There is no hierarchy of oppression." All oppressions must be recognized and fought against simultaneously. She pushed American society to understand that although we possess different identities, we are all connected as human beings.

Stop and Think!

"So long as we are divided because of our particular identities we cannot join together in effective political action."
Audre Lorde cautioned us about the ways that our various identities can prevent us from seeing our shared humanity. Why do you think she felt this was a danger to all people?

In American society, systems of oppression and their effects on people have a long, profound history. However, America and our society can change. As our country continues to evolve, we can acknowledge its problems and work to make changes for the better. We can join together to resist the status quo and the systemic barriers that exist to create new systems of justice, fairness, and compassion for us all.

To make this better America, each of us should look at our own privileges and power. Some people have more power or influence than others, and this can shift quickly according to circumstances. Do you enjoy power, privilege, or influence? If so, what do you do with it? Do you silently enjoy your moments of comfort? Or, do you take risks to stand in solidarity with others?

Let's Think

"If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
​- Lilla Watson
Watson, an Aboriginal, women's activist, rejects people coming to "help" as she fights against oppression within her community. Why do you think she does so? Considering your own life and social identities, can you draw comparisons to her struggles?

"I learned a lot about systems of oppression and how they can be blind to one another by talking to black men. I was once talking about gender and a man said to me, 'Why does it have to be you as a woman? Why not you as a human being?' This type of question is a way of silencing a person's specific experiences. Of course, I am a human being, but there are particular things that happen to me in the world because I am a woman." - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie​

Why do you think Ngozi Adichie insisted on being able to talk directly about her specific identity as a woman?

What identities are important to you that others don't always acknowledge?

REFLECT: In the video linked above, Dennis Banks shares how he and thousands of other Native American children were forced into boarding schools by the U.S. government (with the support of the dominant society).

How do you think individuals, institutions, and the dominant American society justified this cruel and inhumane treatment?

What kept those who had power and voice (government officials, school teachers, civic leaders, regular citizens, etc.) from acknowledging the humanity of these children and preventing this atrocity?

Banks connects historical oppression to current oppression faced by Native peoples. How can we join together as allies against this oppression?

Let's Act

1. Work to be continuously self-reflective about your own privilege and power. Write self-reflections and revisit them so that you can seek out resources and supports to stop your own contributions to oppression.

2. Be a Georgia Gilmore by joining with others in teaching, advocating, and organizing locally to dismantle systems of oppression where you are.

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Social Identities and Systems of Oppression

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An oppressive system is built around the ideology that some groups are superior to others. These systems take on many forms, but they all have essentially the same structure. Let's recognize our role within them.

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Mid year planning thing with mini-modules

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Above the Noise, a YouTube series for teens, cuts through the hype and dives deep into the research behind the issues affecting their daily lives. The series investigates controversial subject matter to help young viewers draw their own informed conclusions while inspiring media literacy and civic engagement. FOR EDUCATORS: Join us on PBS Learning Media where you'll find standards-aligned free lesson plans, viewing guides, transcripts, and more for each episode. Learn more about our partnerships and funders.

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Above the Noise, a YouTube series for teens, cuts through the hype and dives deep into the research behind the issues affecting their daily lives. The series investigates controversial subject matter to help young viewers draw their own informed conclusions while inspiring media literacy and civic engagement.

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For Certified ERWC Teachers, Administrators, and Workshop Leaders

The ERWC Online Community is a collaborative space for ERWC-certified professionals to access the curriculum, enjoy a wealth of additional resources targeted to teachers and workshop leaders, share ideas and engage conversations through our discussion board, connect on social media, and contact the team with questions. Explore our categories and threads and start contributing today. Learn more about adopting the free curriculum or registering for the free certification workshops.

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Kelly Gallagher Presents In the Classroom

A Webinar Featuring Kelly Gallagher
Thursday, September 21, 2023

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A Webinar Featuring Felicia Rose-Chavez
Thursday, October 19, 2023

ERWC in the News

ERWC in Action

Rhetorical Grammar

Transfer and Engagement

12th Grade Module: 1984

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For Certified ERWC Teachers, Administrators, and Workshop Leaders The ERWC Online Community is a collaborative space for ERWC-certified professionals to access the curriculum, enjoy a wealth of additional resources targeted to teachers and workshop leaders, share ideas and engage conversations through our discussion board, connect on social media, and contact the team with questions.

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Instructional Resources Guide for C3WP | Secondary

The Instructional Resources Guide is the key to how the C3WP works and teachers' best friend as they create an argument writing curriculum that develops across the year through multiple C3WP Cycles of Instruction.

Each Resource:

Focuses on a specific set of skills or practices in argument writing that build over the course of an academic year

Provides text sets that represent multiple perspectives on a single topic, beyond pro and con

Engages students iterative reading and writing practices that build knowledge about a conversation focused on a single topic

Supports the writing of recursive claims that emerge and evolve through the reading and writing process

Supports students in creating intentional organizational structures that are designed to advance the argument, not based on formulas (e.g. five-paragraph theme)

Provides formative assessment opportunities embedded in classroom practice and professional conversations that identify areas of strength and inform next steps for teaching and learning

The categories in the gray bars organize the materials in groups that progress in sophistication and complexity. The resources in Entering the Conversation and Using Source Material Purposefully are relatively short, easy to use, and seek to initiate students into source-based arguments. Advancing Arguments with Evidence and Researching Self-Selected Topics depend on students already having experienced some of the the resources in the previous categories and are ready to tackle more sophisticated skills. The resources in Supplementary Resources can be used to supplement any part of the instruction.

C3WP is not a curriculum to be followed; it's an organized set of rich materials that work in conjunction with National Writing Project professional development and C3WP formative assessment tools. Teachers, in consultation with NWP teacher-leaders, design their own path through the materials, choosing the resources that best fit the skill level of their students. To support teachers as they develop that path, C3WP's formative assessment resources help teachers see what their students already know and what they are ready to learn. The guide works in tandem with frequent formative opportunities that are embedded in classroom practice and professional conversations.

To access each instructional resource, click on the title below, or follow this link to the live document that allows for easier access and downloading of the guide.

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NWP College, Career, and Community Writers Program - Secondary

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SECONDARY INSTRUCTIONAL RESOURCES Instructional Resources Guide for C3WP | Secondary The Instructional Resources Guide is the key to how the C3WP works and teachers' best friend as they create an argument writing curriculum that develops across the year through multiple C3WP Cycles of

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Covid 19 DL materials

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In response to the COVID-19 pandemic-related school closures and the challenge of teaching students remotely, I, along with several of my colleagues, have created an extended lesson plan designed to encourage students to capture this moment in history. However, before I share the plan, some thoughts:

Years from now, our students' children and grandchildren will ask them about this moment in time, and I want them to have a record of it. Their history.

The last thing I want to do with my home-bound students is to load them down with brain-numbing packet work. So this lesson plan was designed to honor student choice, student agency, student voice. This is not the time to give students chapter quizzes on their at-home reading of 1984.

We are not suggesting this is THE lesson plan everyone should adopt. We know our kids. We do not know yours. It is where our thinking resides today. Tomorrow, we may shift our thinking as events continue to unfold.

You are invited to use any or all of our thinking. We do not, however, grant permission for this thinking to be sold anywhere. No one should profit from this crisis. Adapt as you see fit. Make our thinking better. Share with others.

We also have a sinking suspicion that this crisis may worsen, and that our students may actually end up being out of school much longer than two weeks. We will be creating digital communities where our readers and writers can maintain a sense of community.

And although I am teaching seniors, many of my colleagues who have shared their thinking in the creation of these lesson plans are planning to use them in other grade levels. They are easily adaptable.

With that said, you can access our plans for our stay-at-home students here:
Coronavirus Lesson Plan
Special thanks to Penny Kittle and several members of the Magnolia High School ELA faculty for helping to create this plan.

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instructional materials - Kelly Gallagher

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In response to the COVID-19 pandemic-related school closures and the challenge of teaching students remotely, I, along with several of my colleagues, have created an extended lesson plan designed to encourage students to capture this moment in history.

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Kittle and Gallagher Helicopter teacher 

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Kittle and Gallagher Helicopter teacher 

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Consider two freshmen-Bryant, who is starting high school, and Jillian, who is in her first semester at a university.

Despite their age differences and the fact that they attend schools on opposite ends of the country, these two students have a lot in common. They are conscientious. They attend classes regularly. They dutifully do their work. As a result, each enters their new schools having earned a , B, average-which should signal they are adequately prepared to perform at the next level. But this is where the story takes a turn, because, unfortunately, Bryant and Jillian share something else in common: They find themselves woefully unprepared for the demands of their new English classrooms.

What do we mean when we say they are unprepared? Take writing, for example. In their previous schools, Bryant and Jillian were "one draft and done" writers. They could get away with putting forth minimal effort because they were repeatedly given the same kind of writing assignments-most often literary analysis essays-and they dutifully completed them. Writing became a mechanical task where the "shape" of the essays was determined by the teacher. Heavily aided by SparkNotes, they wrote to please their teachers, but in doing so, they didn't think very hard.

Bryant and Jillian now find themselves in classes where they are asked to write narratives, informational texts, arguments, digital compositions, and multi-genre papers without being given any templates to organize their research and writing. They are willing, and they want to succeed-but they don't know how to generate and organize their own thinking. Instead, they spend much of their time trying to figure out what the teacher wants them to say, and , how, the teacher wants them to say it.

When students haven't been required to wrestle with difficult writing decisions-and when much of that decision making has been done by the teacher-they lose their sense of agency and their confidence as writers. Bryant and Jillian have ended up frustrated because they've had years of the same kind of writing practice. Their good grades in previous classes represent acts of compliance, not decision making. Suddenly, they have their first understanding of just how unprepared they are.

Jillian, for example, is currently writing about climate change for her freshman seminar course on "Tackling a Wicked Problem." Her professor hasn't given her a template or rubric. He just asked her to research a problem and present a recommended course of action, so she has a lot of decisions to make: What order of information will be most effective? Should she begin with an anecdote? If so, how will that set the tone for the piece? How can she most effectively weave together her anecdote and evidence to keep her readers engaged? How should she focus the piece in order to communicate the urgency of this issue? What are the anticipated counterarguments, and how will she refute them? Jillian finds herself in panic mode-not because she's lazy or uninterested-but because she doesn't believe she can do it. She doesn't know where to start.

Jillian's former teachers had good intentions. They created templates and step-by-step tasks for students because they had watched young writers struggle or give up entirely, and they wanted to help. Like many teachers, they might have concluded that students , can't, write well without detailed teacher's instructions.

We disagree with that assumption. We believe struggle is necessary in building the capacity to make decisions. We are reminded of Ellin Keene's research on engagement. Keene and her colleague Matt Glover (2015) challenge teachers to consider the consequences of their overprotective practices: "You may find yourself wondering why you've felt the need to break down tasks into an infinite series of first steps that somehow never add up to the authentic learning experience you'd hoped to create" (p. 108). Completing teacher-generated step-by-step work is not learning; it masquerades as learning.

Teachers who make decisions on organization and development for student writers are usually unaware of the damaging impact this can have. But as Peter Johnston (2004) notes, "Being told explicitly what to do and how to do it-over and over again-provides the foundation for a different set of feelings about what you can and can't do. ... The interpretation might be that you are the kind of person who cannot figure things out for yourself" (p. 9). Which brings us back to Bryant and Jillian-and many other students we have encountered-who've come to the next step in their education ill-equipped to figure things out on their own.

We want our young writers to make their own decisions, but we know that we need to teach them the habits of mind they will need to draw upon to do this. Such habits are sharpened through repeated wrestling matches with drafts-and through seeing seasoned writers actually work through numerous drafts.

We believe it's essential to model the writing struggle. In our secondary English language arts classrooms, we each model in front of our students our thinking about something we're currently composing. We occasionally show students a draft, asking them to tell us if it achieves what we intended. As we talk about our choices and compose in front of our students, we reveal our decision making before drafting, while drafting, and in revising.

When Penny shared with students an early draft of a piece of writing about her father, for example, she asked them to consider the mix of dark and joyful moments in the piece. She worried the balance was off, she told students, and wanted to know what they perceived in the piece. In this way, she invited students to join her in the decision-making process. When students see their teachers wrestle with writing, it fuels their own desire to write, their determination to figure out a compelling organization, and their willingness to re-read, revise, and shape their writing for an intended audience. They come to recognize that wrestling with decisions is what writers do. It's , normal,.

Taking ownership of the hard decisions required to craft a compelling piece of writing is empowering. It's also critical that students realize they may not know exactly what they're going to say or even focus on until they start writing. As Peter Elbow states, writers often find themselves starting "with incomplete pieces of feeling, impulse, meaning, and intention-and gradually building them into completed texts; letting the process of writing itself lead them to ideas and structures they hadn't planned at the start" (2000, p. 363).

We lead students to try this exploratory process by having them do daily, ungraded, low-stakes writing in notebooks. We use poetry, photographs, or infographics to inspire student thinking. We don't give them prompts. In these notebook entries, students choose a word, line, or passage that inspires 10 minutes of writing prose or poetry, then reread what they've written and work to improve it. We often close with students sharing a favorite line they've written, which demonstrates the wide range of thinking and writing in the room.

Such free, expressive writing leads students to confidence, fluency, and agency. We also spend time convincing our students that their ideas-as fragmented and unorganized as they may be-can be developed into powerful pieces of writing. To help them realize this, we study mentor texts, paying close attention to how authors develop their ideas. For each genre we consider in class, we study multiple authors-and thus multiple approaches to writing-and we ask our students to carefully consider the decisions behind the creation of these pieces.

Students extend this study of the writing process by meeting in writing groups with their drafts in hand. In groups of four or five, they practice listening to a writer's intentions and then reading the work to see if it matches those intentions, as well as getting responses to their own pieces of writing.

We select these groups, carefully considering the placement of writers who may need nurturing. Once grouped, students respond to each other's papers in person (in class), as well as digitally (outside of class). We use Flipgrid to create this digital connection, where our young writers-via video postings-ask their peers for targeted responses to their papers. We've found that the distance created by this technology actually brings our writers closer together: Students often give more honest, valuable feedback when they aren't physically sitting next to the writer.

This is not a peer-editing exercise; it's about generating meaningful peer , response,. One teacher's response is too limited to provide the richness of feedback that our young writers may need. When they hear from other writers as well, they are better positioned to evaluate their own work, to understand where their writing communicates their intentions and where it doesn't.

We recall the words of Donald Murray (1982), who defined a writer's inner dialogue:

The act of writing might be described as a conversation between two workmen muttering to each other at the workbench. The self speaks, the other self listens and responds. The self proposes, the other self considers. The self makes, the other self evaluates. (p. 140)

We believe peer response jump starts this kind of important inner dialogue. We hope feedback from other writers helps students to adopt the habit of muttering to themselves as they compose.

Empowering students to make their own writing decisions extends beyond essay writing. When students read books, for example, teachers often want them to explore their thinking via more informal writing. But with our students, we don't do formative assessment of their reading progress by asking teacher-generated questions. If our students begin by answering , our, questions, we may be guilty of determining from the outset what their thinking will (and won't) be. Instead, we ask students to read large chunks of text-60 or 70 pages-and then demonstrate their own thinking about the text through informal writing and drawing. They share this thinking via two-page spreads in their notebooks (see Figure 1 for an example). Notice that student-generated thinking comes in all shapes and sizes-and doesn't always fit neatly into the "boxes" of teacher-generated questions.

This is not just a strategy for English classes. A colleague of ours, Susan Fried, has her students generate two-page spreads demonstrating their thinking in her human anatomy classes (see Figure 2 for one of her student's demonstrations of thinking created after reading a chapter on the structure of tissue).

We aren't suggesting that teachers stop asking questions. We still ask our students questions. But we don't , begin, by asking questions. We begin by having them wrestle with their thinking. We know many of them will have trouble with this approach, since they have found comfort in dutifully responding to the teacher's questions and many have reached a place where they like being told what to take from a text. But we also know that encouraging them to begin generating their own thinking is an essential step in empowering them.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, authors of , The Coddling of the American Mind, (2018), argue that many students who reach college today have suffered from growing up in a culture of "safetyism." They are unprepared for the rigors of college because their parents adopted a misguided mindset that children are fragile and have gone out of their way to make sure their children don't encounter too much discomfort. This is ironic because the attempt to protect their children from difficulties has actually led to these students being less prepared to face the rigors of college life. It turns out that "helicopter parenting" is counterproductive to building independent, confident, and creative children.

We believe "helicopter teaching" is also counterproductive to building independent, confident, and creative students. Too often, in trying to help students, teachers do too much of the thinking. Students come to rely on formula and standardization-and when formula and standardization take hold, the energy and intellectual rigor that comes from creation gets lost. Students become disengaged. Most important, they get away with this disengagement because they've figured out a way to settle into comfort zones where hard thinking can be avoided. When this happens, students run the risk of ending up like Bryant and Jillian, owners of good grades who find themselves overwhelmed in their new classes.

As Lukianoff and Haidt remind us, our job is not to prepare the road for the child; our job is to prepare the child for the road. We believe that preparing children for the road begins by creating classrooms where the teacher cedes much of the decision making to the students.

Gallagher Reflect & Discuss

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The Curse of "Helicopter Teaching" - ASCD

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Consider two freshmen-Bryant, who is starting high school, and Jillian, who is in her first semester at a university. Despite their age differences and the fact that they attend schools on opposite ends of the country, these two students have a lot in common. They are conscientious. They attend clas

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Common-Core aligned anti-bias curriculum for kindergarten and grades K-5 that include lesson plans, student activities, suggested children's literature and teacher guides.

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Emily's scavenger hunt

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Shared by Kimberly

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Sponsored by PowerSchool and ISTE U

This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.

When I taught seventh grade language arts, one of my favorite things to teach was S.E. Hinton's book The Outsiders. Every year, we began the unit with a discussion about the cliques that formed in students' lives, how these groups interacted, the unwritten rules that governed their behavior, and what happened when groups clashed or people formed relationships across group lines. After we did some reflecting, writing, and talking, we were ready to start the book.

The reading went fine, more or less. Some chapters we did in class (I would read to them, then they would read silently), and others at home. Some students became as absorbed in the novel as I'd hoped they would; others, not so much. Predictably, some fell behind in the book like they did with all assigned reading.

I checked students' progress with occasional quizzes, we did some work on plot and characters, setting and theme, and then, after a unit test over the whole book-containing mostly questions that asked students to identify characters, setting, and key plot points-we spent nearly three class periods watching Francis Ford Coppola's movie version of the book. And I got to drool over Matt Dillon in the movie's opening scene again and again and again. From start to finish, the whole unit took about three weeks.

In retrospect, I'm not sure why it was my favorite. Seriously. I mean, even though I loved the book, my students' response to it was mostly lukewarm. Maybe it was just the idea of teaching it that I loved. Maybe it was the connections I was able to make to the stuff students dealt with on a day-to-day basis. I don't know. I taught that book a few times, and even though I looked forward to it every time, I always finished the unit a little unsatisfied.

And it's only now, years later, that I'm starting to understand that dissatisfaction: I can't say with any confidence that my students actually learned something from that unit. Upon deeper reflection, I'm not confident that any of my students learned anything of lasting value from at least half the lessons I taught.

This is a hard pill to swallow, because I wasn't half bad as a teacher. I had decent relationships with my students and I believe most of them had good experiences in my classroom, but real, durable learning? I can't say how much of that actually happened.

I don't love admitting that.

But at least now I understand why my teaching didn't produce a lot of actual learning: I never set clear, measurable learning targets.

Things would have been so different if I'd known about backward design.

When teachers talk to each other about the stuff they're teaching, they often say things like this:
"What novels do you do in 8th grade?""Oh that'll be perfect. I can use this when I teach the American Revolution!"
"I don't think I can fit that in; we're doing moon phases next month."

We tend to talk about our teaching plans in terms of the broad topics we cover. This shorthand is practical; we're not going to drill down into specific skill and knowledge objectives while waiting our turn at the bagel table. But when I think about the lessons I gave my students, the ones I observed in my colleagues' classrooms, and the work I've seen my own children do, I think this shorthand might be a pretty fair representation of what many of us are still doing: churning out lessons that keep students busy with our content without ever getting clear about what we want them to learn.

Instead of starting with a topic, we'd do better if we start with an end goal, and that's where backward design comes in.

Traditional vs. Backward Planning

Traditional Lesson Design

For many years, teachers have been planning lessons and units of instruction like this:

Step 1: Identify a topic or chunk of content that needs to be covered.

Step 2: Plan a sequence of lessons to teach that content.

Step 3: Create an assessment to measure the learning that should have taken place in those lessons.

Notice that in this approach, the assessment is created after the lessons are planned. Sometimes it isn't created until most of those lessons have already taken place. The assessment is kind of an afterthought, a check to see if students were paying attention to the stuff we taught them.

For most of my teaching career, this is how I planned. It's presumably how most of my colleagues planned. I believe it's still how many teachers plan.

So what's wrong with it? Well, when we plan this way, we're more likely to include content and activities that have questionable value. When teaching the American Revolution, for example, if our goal is just to "teach about the American Revolution," we can throw in anything that has any relation to that topic: a coloring page of the Boston Tea Party, a colonial flag craft project, or a worksheet where students unscramble words like minuteman, independence, and Hancock.

This random approach creates two problems.

The first and most important problem is a lack of durable, transferable learning. One reason so many of us don't remember much of what we learned in school is that we learned it through this haphazard, topic-driven approach. These random activities are taking up precious time that could be spent on much more valuable stuff.

The other is poor student engagement. Our students know when they're being asked to do something pointless. If they don't see the relevance of what they're learning or a direct line between the content of your course and a desirable outcome, they'll tune it out. Sure, many students will do what you ask anyway, because they want good grades and the benefits that come from them. But they're not learning. If you don't believe me, ask them.

Backward Design

In their book Understanding by Design, which was originally published in 1998, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe introduced us to backward design, an approach to instructional planning that starts with the end goal, then works backward from there. The "full" version of Wiggins and McTighe's original approach is pretty complex and can be time-consuming to implement. If you're ready for that, I recommend digging into their book. For now, though, I'm just going to share the most basic version of backward design.

Here are the steps:

Step 1: Identify what students should know and be able to do by the end of the learning cycle.

Step 2: Create an assessment to measure that learning.

Step 3: Plan a sequence of lessons that will prepare students to successfully complete the assessment.

The difference in order is significant: Plan the assessment first, then plan only lessons that will contribute to student success on that assessment.

I was first introduced to this concept in my sixth year of teaching, and the genius of it completely blew me away. I used it when planning my next unit and experienced the biggest spike in student success I'd ever seen. On top of that, I was actually excited about teaching the lessons I had planned. For the first time, it felt like none of my class was wasted; everything actually mattered. There was something a lot more satisfying about doing things this way.

Let's take a look at an example to illustrate the difference between a unit planned the traditional, topic-driven way, and the same unit planned with backward design.

Before and After: The Lunar Cycle

The Before, Where the Final Product is a Test

At some point in their school careers, students study the phases of the moon. One pretty typical way to teach this is as follows:

A lecture or video about the phases of the moon, followed by a worksheet to label the phases.

An interactive activity like scraping the filling out of Oreos to represent the lunar phases.

Following a teacher's sample, creating a physical model of the moon phases using something like styrofoam balls.

A unit test that requires labelling the phases of the moon from memory and answering multiple-choice questions about the lunar cycle, eclipses, and seasons.

In many classrooms, teachers also have students track the appearance of the moon over the course of a month, so that might be added as well.

Following this plan, a teacher would feel pretty satisfied that they "covered" the topic of moon phases. But if we look at the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), the standard relating to moon phases says that grade 6-8 students will:

" Develop and use a model of the Earth-sun-moon system to describe the cyclic patterns of lunar phases, eclipses of the sun and moon, and seasons" ( MS-ESS1-1).

Note the language here: Students are meant to develop a model, then use it to describe these patterns. But in the plan above, students merely copied a model, and they didn't use it to describe anything; even if the model required some written captioning to explain what was going on, because the model was a copy, it can't be safely said that students were really the ones describing the system.

Then there's the test. If we assume that a large portion of a student's grade is based on the test, then students are not being measured on their achievement of that standard. The standard does not require students to memorize the phases of the moon. Nor does it ask them to "demonstrate knowledge" of how the whole system works. The standard wants students to develop a model and use it to describe the system.

It would be easy to blow off this distinction, to say Bah, same difference. The test asks students a lot of questions that would show an understanding of these concepts, so we're covered.

But not really. Asking a person to develop a model is a much higher-order task than asking them to copy a model. Describing systems and patterns is way more challenging than selecting the correct description.

Developing models and explaining things is the work of real scientists: They notice phenomena, study it, then figure out how to represent those phenomena in order to make it clear to other people. To say, "Look at this! It's interesting and it explains why things are the way they are!"

And that's exactly what the NGSS authors had in mind: "Any education that focuses predominantly on the detailed products of scientific labor-the facts of science-without developing an understanding of how those facts were established or that ignores the many important applications of science in the world misrepresents science and marginalizes the importance of engineering." (National Research Council, 2012, p. 43).

In other words, a superior education will teach students to think and practice like scientists. If we don't plan learning experiences that make that possible, we're giving them a sub-par education.

The After, Where the Final Product is a Model and a Presentation

So if we re-do this unit plan with backward design, we'll need to start by developing an assessment that would measure success with that standard. That means the assessment would not be a test where students merely label the moon phases, but a student-developed model of the moon phases along with some kind of presentation where students use that model to explain lunar phases, eclipses, and seasons.

When designing this final assessment, it's essential that the teacher crafts a rubric that clearly outlines specific, high standards for both the model and presentation. The rubric should list criteria for the accuracy and functionality of the model, plus the quality of the presentation itself. Here's an example of what that might look like:

With a good rubric in place, we then work backwards to determine what lessons students need to do excellent work on the final assessment.

Direct Instruction: Students still need to know the basics of the lunar system. Memorization is not the goal, so we're not grading for that, but students do need to know the information well enough to explain it and use the right vocabulary, so we can keep the lecture or video from the original plan. And having them work with the information a bit on some kind of worksheet or with some kind of online practice is fine, but I wouldn't give points for this work. If you need to motivate students to do it, require them to demonstrate proficiency (like scoring at least 80% on the match game with a set of Quizlet flashcards) before they can move on to the next step.

Active processing with models: Next, give students a chance to work with a model so that they experience the cycle in action. This will deepen their understanding of the earth-sun-moon system, which will better prepare them to give their own presentations. Something like this interactive model from CK-12 allows students to manipulate the time of day and the position of the moon to see how these variables change what we see in the sky. Working in groups, students could use the simulator to answer questions about the moon's appearance depending on what phase it's in and the time of day, then transition into making and checking predictions based on those variables.

Presentation practice: If students are going to do well on the final presentation, they'll need practice in explaining the lunar cycle in their own words. Using an existing model (such as the interactive mentioned in the previous step), have students explain the lunar phases, including information about the seasons and eclipses, to a partner or small group. Ask the listening partners to "coach" the presenter if their description has any holes or inaccuracies. Hearing their peers explain the system, along with attempting the explanation themselves, will help them use the language of the lunar cycle more fluently.

Model development: Now students begin developing their own models. The standard does not specify that this has to be a physical model, so you could offer students choice: The model could very well be made with styrofoam balls, but it could also be a hand-drawn diagram, a slideshow presentation, an animated video, a children's book, or even a short skit they present to the class or record on video. Many of these options, like the children's book, include the "presentation" piece right along with the model. Give students time in class to work on these models; this will ensure that they do their own work and will allow you to give feedback if a student is heading in the wrong direction. Remind them regularly that the explanation of the model is nearly half their grade, so they should consider scripting that out if their presentation is going to be "live."

Model presentations: Finally, students present their models. If you have a lot of students opt to give a "live" presentation this could take several class periods, which could be pretty mind-numbing since the subject matter is exactly the same for everyone. To cut down on that overall time, only have students present to the whole class if the class is actually participating in the model (like in some sort of skit or simulation). Otherwise, students can record their presentations on video or present to you one-on-one while their classmates work on something else independently.

With this "after" version, every lesson is designed to prepare students to give excellent presentations at the end. The whole time, they are using the lunar cycle vocabulary, correcting each other's misconceptions, and just like scientists, thinking about how to explain concepts to other people.

Some Questions About Your Lessons

Okay, so we've looked very closely at one small unit for a middle school science class. Now, take this same process and apply it to the things you teach.

1. What exactly do your standards require? Do they ask students to memorize and identify facts, or do they ask them to describe, explain, analyze, or create? (It's probably the latter.)

2. If it's the latter, how closely do your assessments measure those standards? Do they actually require students to do the describing, explaining, analyzing, or creating (which would likely require them to write, present, or create some product), or do they merely ask them to recognize when someone else does it in the form of an answer on a multiple-choice test?

3. Do you need to adjust your assessments so they more closely align with the standards?

4. If you do, the next step is to rework the lessons that lead up to that assessment. Does every lesson contribute to student success on that assessment? Could some of your lessons be omitted because they don't connect directly to the assessment? Are you missing anything? For example, if your assessment requires students to write in academic language and support their ideas with evidence, you should include some lessons that give students practice with that kind of writing.

5. Finally, will the assessment be weighted heavily in your gradebook? (It should be.)The lessons and activities leading up to the final assessment are there to give students exposure to the knowledge and practice with the skills necessary to perform on that final assessment; ideally, they should receive no grades at all on those activities. If you absolutely must assign some points, be sure the final assessment is worth a heck of a lot more than those smaller tasks.

Like I did, you probably also have some favorite lessons and activities. Some of these might turn out to be not just fun to teach, but also solid in terms of equipping students with knowledge and skills that will last.

If it turns out that those favorite lessons don't really align with any standards, you might be able to revise them so they do. Or you might keep them for other reasons-not every minute of class time has to be spent on standards-based instruction. Some activities have value because they help us get to know each other better, they help students develop social-emotional skills, or they simply offer a bit of fun. But if a lesson doesn't do any of these things, if it's disguised as learning but is doing little more than keeping students busy, it's time for it to go.

Using a process like backward design helps us get better at making these decisions. By making this approach part of our regular practice, we'll be able to look back on a day, a week, or a year of teaching and say with a lot more certainty that when they were under our care, our students learned.
Reference:
National Research Council (2012). A framework for K-12 science education: Practices, crosscutting concepts, and core ideas. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/13165.

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Are we planning with clear, measurable, meaningful learning goals in to guide us, or are we just keeping students busy?