Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain

My Love of Writing

Posted on by Kathy Collier
“Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.”
–Sylvia Plath
Writing gives me Joy and teaching writing is one of my favorite parts of being an educator. So yesterday when my first article was published on Edutopia I was ecstatic; this has been one of my Bucket List items forever and especially since I started writing this, my own blog. The article is Fostering Identity, Joy, and Skill DevelopmentThe most amazing part of being published was the sense of community around me, both colleagues and students, who celebrated my accomplishment. It meant the world for me to go into a second grade class yesterday afternoon and show them my final writing as they were working on their own final edits and revisions. Naturally, this morning I woke up wanting to write about writing! In this post I want to list some of the strategies I’ve used in the teaching of writing to empower our youngest writers!

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Feedback to Pedagogical Change: Focus Student to Teacher

Posted on by Kathy Collier

We know that, as educators, implicit biases show up in the ways we teach. We also know that the best feedback we can get is from observing and reflecting on practice with a critical lens and, more importantly, asking our dreamers for feedback. (Note that I am using the term Achiever instead of Scholar to honor the funds of knowledge and expertise each student already has.) In this post I want to synthesize what I am learning about the “Focus Student” process. Engaging in a Cycle of Inquiry around a focus student can increase a sense of belonging, which leads to an increase in learning and a change in teacher practice adapted to the achievers with whom we engage.

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A First Try: Unit Planning With Cultivating Genius

Posted on by Kathy Collier

I’ve been studying the work of Dr. Gholdy Muhammad for several years by watching webinars, reading and re-reading her Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally Responsive and Historically Responsive Literacy, and this year by working alongside her in a year long in-depth study of her work and how to use the Historically Responsive Literacy framework. In the past I’ve integrated the framework into lessons and last week I started my first unit plan using the tool. I’m excited to share some of my thoughts in this post.

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My Why

Posted on by Kathy Collier

It’s interesting to me that this, my 50th post, brings me back to my “why.” I’ve written in previous posts about the importance of knowing one’s why, and acting within one’s why.

“We are drawn to leaders and organizations that are good at communicating what they believe. Their ability to make us feel like we belong, to make us feel special, safe and not alone is part of what gives them the ability to inspire us.”
– Simon Sinek

 

Today I want to delve deeply into my why and the reasons behind my why.

My Why:
“Be a mirror to reflect back to our students their beauty and brilliance
so they feel: belonging, safe, heard, seen, valued, joy, and LOVED.”

 

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High Leverage Coaching and Mentoring Tools

Posted on by Kathy Collier

Effective coaches and mentors use tools to best meet the current goals of a colleague. Reflective coaches practice, reflect on, and improve on their use of tools. They plan for conversations with an intentional review on past conversations, select potential tools for the upcoming conversation/s, are committed to showing up for the colleague, and know that the journey is where the real learning will occur. As a result, a coach needs to be flexible and follow the colleague’s cues and most pressing questions/challenges. I want to write, in this post, about what high leverage tools do, and share some of the high leverage tools I use at this time.

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Engagement and Interactive Read Aloud

Posted on by Kathy Collier

This week I am co-presenting a professional development session on increasing student engagement. We are modeling strategies to use both face to face and in a Zoom platform. The strategies are designed to increase student thinking and discourse, decrease teacher talk, and provide a variety of ways for students to respond. We choose to model our engagement strategies through Interactive Read Aloud (IRA), because IRA is one of the strongest equity moves in reading instruction as it models the work of a proficient reader, exposes students to diverse texts, provides opportunities for rich accountable talk, and texts are above what students can read independently thus giving a glimpse of what lies ahead for readers. In this blog I want to share some of the strategies we plan to share.

“Student engagement is the product of motivation and active learning.
It is a product rather than a sum because it will
not occur if either element is missing.”
– Elizabeth Barkley

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