April 29, 2013 By Leave a Comment

A Call for Investment: Our Schools, Our Children, Our Future

By Kathleen Sullivan

Teaching is challenging, rewarding, exciting, exhausting, and never boring. Actually, every day is a new adventure. Lately, I’ve been struggling; Not with teaching students, but with everything else that goes along with being a teacher in a needy urban district where resources are stretched thin.

I am struggling with teaching well over 100 children a day while wearing so many other hats. Our students walk through our doors saddled with burdens. Some children are from difficult home lives, some are homeless. Others have arrived on our doorstep from war-torn nations, refugee camps, or from countries of sheer chaos. Students often show up hungry. Others are in need of shoes and clothes. Some are grieving the loss of a parent, which vary from parents who have no contact with their children, to parents who have died or been killed, to parents who have been lost to addiction, mental illness, or incarceration.

Even so, teaching is easy compared to the mental anguish and emotional drain of serving as counselor to children who are emotionally scarred. Our social worker/adjustment counselor oversees 600 students four days a week. She has a consistent caseload of 40 students, and an additional 10 plus extra students each day to tend to as each daily crisis arises. If you do the math, you will understand that teachers absorb much of the pain and agony some students bring to school with them each day.

In addition to students in crisis, we are also teaching students with intellectual, emotional and mental disorders with limited special education support in our classrooms. I love my job, I love my students, but I am exhausted and drained. If teachers are to prevail at making every child successful, we need help in our classrooms. We need help to meet the needs of our kids who are experiencing personal and emotional crisis. We need special education assistance for our students who need individual support.

When I think about what our struggling students lack, I have come to realize that no matter what their burdens are, they are each lacking consistency. School is their safety net. School is their refuge. Each day, for eight hours, they are safe. They have structure and they are surrounded by people who want them to grow into productive, conscientious, caring adults. For our students to succeed, they need assistance within the walls of that refuge.

Teachers will teach all students. Teachers will accommodate workloads and differentiate instruction to reach all types of learners. We will provide kindness, empathy, and respect. We step in when counselors are not readily available to children in crisis. When special education students are not getting enough individual attention, teachers spend extra time to meet the needs of these students and give them the academic support they need to make gains. How do we continue to spread ourselves to meet the needs of all our students?

Should we invest in staffing counseling within our schools so that counselors have reasonable caseloads of students and teachers can teach? Should we rethink how special education services are delivered by special education teachers so that students are properly supported, and budget appropriately?  Should we have additional staff to teach and support the large number of English language learners so that they are successful in meeting standards?

The answer is yes. We need to invest in our kids by providing them with access to counseling. We need to invest in our kids by providing our special needs students with specialized teachers working alongside general education teachers in their classrooms. All children can learn with the proper emotional and academic support no matter what their challenges. Some may learn differently, at a slower pace, or at different levels, but they can achieve if we provide the proper support.  We must support our students.

 

Kathleen Sullivan teaches 5th grade science at a public school in Malden, Massachusetts.

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September 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

My “It” Moment at VIVA Teachers

By Charlene Mendoza
VIVA Arizona Teachers Idea Exchange

As teachers, we know that moment when “it” happens. That moment when we know the bait was taken, the interest engaged, the inquiry begun or the spark ignited. That moment when the energy begins to flow and the classroom transforms into an active, engaging learning environment. For me, that describes my experience participating in the VIVA Arizona Charter Teachers Idea Exchange.

When I first saw the invitation to participate, I was mildly interested. As a teacher, my inbox is flooded with messages that appear to be similar in nature. Check this out! Buy this resource! Tell us what you think! Stop this! Start that! I am accustomed to being asked for a “teacher’s perspective” which often seems to give credence to another initiative or plan which typically does not really represent what I said, wrote, feel or believe. It is more like a celebrity endorsement…I talked to a “real teacher” and so my (fill in the blank here) is valid. Needless to say, I was skeptical.

Joining the Idea Exchange Conversation

I participated in an Idea Exchange about implementing the Common Core Standards in Arizona. As the topic was relevant to me, I logged on. At first, there were not a ton of responses, so, I decided to make a post that was relatively benign. Then, I began to get notices of responses to my post, questions from other teachers, ideas from other teachers, challenges from other teachers and suggestions of resources from other teachers.

I began to read other posts and respond to them. I was hooked! I had discovered a forum where a group of interested, articulate teaching professionals were engaged in a collaborative, collegial, constructive, critical conversation on my own schedule!

Although I was intrigued, I did not recognize at the time how valuable that experience was and still is. I continue to be enriched by the experience. Too often, talk in education devolves to complaints about what is being forced upon us or why whatever “it” is really is not much different than whatever “it” was before.

Rediscovering My Voice

By participating in the Idea Exchange, I rediscovered my voice and reignited my passion and found a place to use both.

This certainly does not mean that we all agreed about everything or even that we all became lifelong friends or anything like that. What it does mean, though, is that participating in the Idea Exchange connected me to others who were willing to be interested and engaged in real life conversations that pushed my thinking, sparked my interest and helped me to work more effectively with my students and colleagues.

I hope you accept the invitation to participate in the VIVA New Jersey Charter Teachers Idea Exchange! The experience is more than worth it.

 

Filed Under: Idea Exchanges, Teacher Blog Posts Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
June 13, 2012 By 1 Comment

How to Successfully Implement Common Core

Source: AZ Charter Teachers’ Association

In a meeting with Arizona Superintendent John Huppenthal and State Board President Jaime Molera, VIVA Teacher Leaders offered their advice for smoothing the transition to Common Core State Standards for all schools in Arizona.

Two hundred VIVA Teachers who teach in Arizona’s charter schools, where they already are implementing the new, higher Common Core State Standards in their classrooms, participated in the first phase of the VIVA Arizona Charter Teachers Idea Exchange, from April 16-May 13, 2012. They shared 50 ideas for ways to ensure the transition to Common Core. Then, seven of those teachers distilled the ideas into the 36 recommendations they delivered to Huppenthal and Molera on June 13, 2012.

Read an executive summary of the report, or download the full 32-page report, “Arizona Charter Teachers’ Guide to Common Core Implementation: Advice from the Classroom,” here.

Read the press release here.

 

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June 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Glimmers of Hope for Teachers

By Jesse Bacon
Social Media Consultant to VIVA

Karaoke night at Netroots Nation, the nation’s largest gathering of online activists. This crowd knows how to get down, sometimes drowning out the singer! Elana from Brooklyn, her bright orange hear shining like the sun, sings “Higher Ground” by Stevie Wonder. When she gets to “Teachers..keep on teaching” she gets the largest cheer of the night!

Netroots Nation was not a teachers convention. Education occupied maybe the second tier of panels, the subject of four panels, a caucus and a movie. There was some division about what to do about it among the attendees, and a general despair at tackling such a difficult issue in the wake of Wisconsin. But, more importantly, love of teachers came out in the most spontaneous and beautiful moments.

It’s out there…plenty of evidence that tide of anti-teacher sentiment may be turning.

Cecile Richards, the head of Planned Parenthood was walking the floor of the exhibition hall at Netroots Nation 2012. She was one the most popular figures at the 2700 person progressive conference because of her  status as a right-wing bete noire. She cut a striking figure, as she passed a teachers’ union booth, she said “It’s nice to see someone standing up teachers!” She was one of the many who took a photo to thank their favorite teacher.

Van Jones, former Obama advisor and dreamer-in-chief at Rebuild the Dream, was delivering the keynote speech of the conference about the conference’s central dilemma of how to simultaneously disagree with Obama on some issues and ensure his reelection. He used the word quandary, then said off-handedly “Thank you public school education. Thank you teachers.”

So from all of us at VIVA Teachers, whether you are liberal or conservative, whether you teach in a public school or some other kind, we want to echo those leaders: Thank you. You are not alone.”

What do you think, teachers? Is the tide turning?

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October 12, 2011 By 1 Comment

VIVA Chicago Teachers Project Launches

The high volume “debate” over extending the school day for Chicago Public Schools students has left Chicago taxpayers, parents and many teachers wondering what we’re actually fighting about. A longer school day? A better school day? Whatever you call it, we want to know how exactly it will help Chicago’s 400,000+ public school students.

There is a better way to ensure that decisions made in the offices of government leaders, legislatures, and boardrooms ultimately play out in the best interests of students: Ask the classroom teachers.

Legislation has ruled that Chicago Public Schools will lengthen the day by 90 minutes beginning next fall. There are legitimate questions about that which will be settled at the bargaining table. But there also are big questions about how to use that additional time to improve student learning. That’s why we are launching The VIVA Chicago Teachers Project.

The VIVA (Voices Ideas Vision Action) Project is a new way to connect big systems to the experts who work in them.  Using cutting edge technology, we conduct online collaborations that give any teacher a chance to share ideas with each other and create solutions together that will improve the chances that the policies made at the highest levels actually work  inside classrooms.

Too often in the heated debate over education reform, whether at the state, national or local level, we forget who the real experts are.

The teachers who spend their days teaching, cajoling, entertaining, nurturing and engaging students in the classroom and then spend more hours of their day consulting with colleagues, planning tomorrow’s lessons, grading papers, keeping parents up to date, and looking for great resources to hone their own skills are the people who know best what students need to excel.

We spend so much time deriding the “bad” teachers that we forget most teachers are good. They want to be treated like the professionals they are. They want to be consulted before policy is written. They want someone to listen when they talk about how that policy plays out in their classrooms and affects their students.

Too often the conflicts over contracts get all the press while teachers in classrooms across the city are focused on figuring out how to reach the kid who still hasn’t learned to read or the one who has trouble sitting at a desk or the one who falls asleep 10 minutes after school starts.

There are studies and professors and administrators and consultants who have ideas about the best way to use time in class to ensure students learn. We want to know what the real experts—CPS classroom teachers—believe will help their students learn.  It’s time we bring those two perspectives together.

The VIVA Chicago Teachers Project, which launches Oct. 13, will give all Chicago Public School teachers a chance to do what they so rarely get to do: exchange ideas with one another and take a step back from their daily work to connect the dots to education policy.  With a little time, and their own professional space, we know that they will share their ideas for making school work for their students and their peers. They will issue a summary of their best ideas in the coming weeks.

After all the debate, isn’t time we all listened more closely to what teachers are saying?

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