Peoples Academy working on the final touches...

Today we spent the day finalizing our action research for over-hauling our TA.  

After many hours of reading and collecting research we have a clear vision!

Reflections Wednesday AM

Reflection Graphic + Explaination

Throughout this week I have felt proud to be part of a group which consistently works with direct intent. A portion of my focus within PLP structure and implementation has been around language. Specifically, how do we effectively use what we say, to guide our students toward authentic end results. Through the filter of "language" I have been collecting (at times concretely and at others passively) vocabulary, phrases and skills which we as adults comfortably use in order to effectively unpack our sizeable goal. With the belief that all of our students can meet with success along this PLP mission, I am aiming to translate our capacity for problem solving into student friendly actions. 

Since identification of what-to-translate is an important first step, I drew up this graphic which demonstrates a mixture of specific and overall verbiage. We know effective use of language enables critical thinking, demonstration of democratic values, and enhances growth and development. How we have been doing this work demonstrates many transferable skills that we can model for our students: how to ask questions which benefit the whole group, how to build on or clarify another person's idea, and how to critique a teammates comment, are all skills which sit on the foundation of language.

The work done thus far has encouraged me to feel more comfortable and excited about implementation this fall. So much has become more clear for us (time tables, stages, the how) that I feel certain (knock on wood) that by the end of the week we will have an articulated package to share with our extended team and our students, which includes developmentally appropriate language. It feels that we started with a modpodge of agreements and have come to more gelled commonalities. Moving forward we know what we need (tech agreement, and faculty/student support materials) in order to be successful. We now have an exciting potential to share and are putting the steps in place to make the potential actual. 

Reflections...

Reflection topics:

Transferable Skills - Middle grades teachers create learning opportunities within and across their disciplinary fields that enhance students’ transferable skills.
& Calibration of Proficiencies - Middle grades teachers collaborate with each other and with students to define proficiency and determine progress toward achieving it.

Some of our goals this week included a re-validation session of our Proficiency list. Our Proficiencies are set up as transferable skills, so it was important to examine the list for any content-biases so as not to impede transfer across disciplinary fields. Students must have a voice in the process of calibrating Proficiencies. This is needed for buy-in at all levels. It is important to curate honest conversations about the value and use of the Proficiencies with students across a variety of platforms- advisory, class reflection time, the lunch room, student council, dedicated meetings, all-school meetings and so on. As advocates for their needs, the teachers in the conversation brought student's concerns and experiences to the table we reviewed and validated improvements to the list.

Standards and Proficiencies

Transferable Skills - Middle grades teachers create learning opportunities within and across their disciplinary fields that enhance students’ transferable skills.

I hope I am not making a mistake of working on two tasks at once, but as we work through improving our TA practice at Peoples Academy we are also designing a new science curriculum. I justify this work on parallel platforms because it seems that all of our work is interconnected. I am transferring the skills and middle level philosophies we are exploring into my understanding of how science class should work. This work is driven by the coming expectation that scholarly habits will be assessed separately from content knowledge.

So... my challenge is to synthesize everything I am learning into a real world science class, while shaking out the skills we can develop in TA. I am getting more confused by explaining... Try again: I want to identify the transferable skills (scholarly habits) that we waste science class time teaching (or waste even more time by not teaching the skills), so we can concentrate on those skills in TA or AT.

Try again: I selfishly want TA & AT to serve science, and I want science and all of our classes classes to work together, so when it is time to start our experiment, we aren't having a lesson on "respect" or "being prepared."

I think it would be helpful if we had a common set of expectations(scholarly habits) across VT... Sometimes I think we put a lot of resources as a state into having many people working to figure out the same thing.