Craft Category: Artifacts

Teacher Explains Benefits of ClassDojo for Behavior Monitoring at Roots

Roots teacher, Megan Miles, shares how ClassDojo is used to collect data on student behaviors in order to inform support provided to students.

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Transcript: Megan Miles: right now what we do, and we’re trying to find a system – and most traditional behavior systems are based on this model where like you have the same kids all the time so you can track what they’re doing a little bit easier. So, we’ve been using ClassDojo, which all the teachers have on their phone. And we have different like, Dojos up for like showing our values, Dojos down for talking when you’re supposed to be silent. Or like, running when you’re not supposed to be running. Whatever that is. And so, we will give the kids Dojo down – a lot of it works more as like, an information system where at the end of the day, too, we can pull kids. So I can track kids throughout the day. I know exactly like, what they’re getting the dojos for, when they’re getting them, who’s giving them to them, so I can get a better sense of like, what’s triggering their behavior, and we also print out the reports every day at the end of the day, and those go home with the parents. So that way, like, parents are getting not only like, oh, your kid had a red day, or a green day, or whatever it was. But it’s like, your kid had like, 12 Dojos up, and they had them for this, this, this, this, and this; and they had 6 Dojos down, and it was for these three different things. So that way, parents can have conversations with their kids, too. They can also, which is one thing that’s really cool about Dojo is they can access the app in real-time. So I have – not every parent is using it, but it also have some parents like, honestly, I’ve had dads like, text me and be like, “All right, I need to talk to my daughter. I’m watching her Dojo. I know she has four dojos down. That is not acceptable. Can you have her call me?” And I was like, sure thing. And like, have those conversations in real-time with the kids, which is really cool.

August 8, 2016

Teacher Provides an Overview of the Community Violation Process at Roots

Roots teacher, Lecksy Wolk, explains the process for addressing behaviors that undermine culture.

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Transcript: Lecksy Wolk: all adults in the building are able to give out a CV. So it’s a community violation – for short, CV. And on the front side, we – you know, there’s a list of things that would warrant as a CV. So it comes as no surprise when one is circled – we send it home in the beginning of the year. This is what warrants as a CV, and then a description on the side, so I’ll say child made such and such a choice which resulted in a CV. And then, they – so that goes somewhere else. So I put in the group meet that says this child has received a community violation from our community, so they sit in the back of classrooms, they don’t get to participate in other activities. And then we have a place where a coach comes and gets them later. So, you may have noticed that coaches walk around pulling a scholar out of class with a red paper. They then have a conversation, and the goal is to have it as quickly as possible. Obviously, there’s a million things happening in a school every day, but it happens within the school day.

August 8, 2016

Teacher Provides an Overview of Habits of Success at Roots

Roots teacher, Megan Miles, is a Habits of Success teacher. She shares more about her role and what she does with students throughout the day.

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Transcript: Megan Miles: part of our model is based on the idea that in addition to sort of the traditional academic skills that kids need to learn in order to be successful, they also need a lot of social and emotional skills in order to truly be successful. And what they found in a lot of studies are, kids might be able to learn the academics. But if they’re not learning these social and emotional skills, even if they make it to college or whatever it is, they don’t have the skills to cope when they’re out in the world. So, part of what we try to do here is teach them these coping skills, social and emotional skills from the very beginning. And so what that looks like is, I teach a class every morning called morning circle, and we go through a lot of these different skills. We also work with them one-on-one. So you’ll probably see me and the other coaches and habits of success team pulling kids all day when we notice like, behavior issues, and I try to sit them down, coach them through like, working through their problems. We’ve tried that a lot of different ways just recently. We made a worksheet called I Can Solve It, which is really great. It’s been helping kids a lot. So when they come to me with a problem, a lot of times they can say, let’s go get a worksheet and let’s talk about your tools to solve this. And so, we – we’re using a curriculum called “Dovetail” this year which goes through –it’s got 12 tools that kids are learning, like the breathing tool is a really good one. The garbage can tool, where if they have a little problem, they can take it out of their head and throw it away. So, and honestly, I never thought that one would work. That’s like, the very best one. I don’t know, four, five, and six year-olds are really good at just like, throwing little things out. So, it helps them move on with their day. And instead of getting angry or hitting or yelling or whatever it is, we’re trying to teach them like, use your words to solve this problem. What can you say? Use an I statement. Take some time, whatever it is that they need. Advocating for themselves is another big skill that we’re trying to teach them right now.

August 8, 2016

CICS WB Overview of Learner Profiles

West Belden uses Learner Profiles to better understand each of their students and help them meet their learning goals. This overview explains many of the elements and uses of Learner Profiles at West Belden.

August 8, 2016

Teacher Discusses Prep Time and Collaborative Planning at Roots

Roots teacher, Mackenzie Wagner, shares how structured protocols and tools support planning.

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Transcript: Mackenzie Wagner: the form that we use right now is effective in guiding next steps for instruction. I’m hoping to make it even more detailed so that it really helps teachers – especially when I think about first-year teachers who might not’ve been through a data-driven process like this before. Basically, guide them step-by-step starting with what, again, like we start with the best growths. But then, really breaking it down into standards and why certain standards weren’t met and why certain standards were met. And then, guiding a really detailed instructional plan. So, right now, our analysis does a really good job of telling us what we’ve done for the last six weeks. I want to make sure we have a template that also tells us what we should be doing for the next six weeks.

August 8, 2016

CICS WB Overview of Personalized Learning Plans

West Belden uses Personalized Learning Plans to personalize learning for every student. The overview explains many of the core elements and uses of Personalized Learning Plans.

August 8, 2016

Roots Executive Director Discussing Benefits of Heterogeneous Groups

Roots ED and Founder, Jonathan Hanover, discusses why the teaching team uses heterogeneous grouping approaches.

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Transcript: Jon Hanover: I think of the benefits in two ways. First, it’s just an efficiency game. Like every public school in the country, we have limited funds and so we’d love to have a 1:1 student to teacher ratio, but we can only have the student-to-teacher ratio that we have. So, throughout each content we look for what are instructional routines that get the most bang for your buck to do one-on-one or in small groups and what instructional routines would maybe be better if they could be done in small group but are okay if they are done in a larger group because we have the teachers that we can afford. The second reason is that a lot of the routines that we do in large group or whole group are actually better done with more kids. For instance, this is where we would do CGI, cognitively guided instruction, where kids are really doing group problem solving on a story problem of the day and sharing out their strategies with the group. And there’s a benefit to having a larger group of students so you have a diversity of strategies and perspectives on it.

August 8, 2016

Roots The Grove Map

The Grove is an area at Roots where students and teachers have choice around where and how they learn and work with students.

August 8, 2016

Roots Director of Operations and Innovation Provides an Overview of the Physical Space

Roots Director of Operations and Innovation, Jill Tew, shares how physical space is used differently at the school to accommodate and enable personalized learning.

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Transcript: Jill Tew: the space at Roots looks a little bit different from a traditional school. We don’t have self-contained classrooms where the same child sits in the same classroom, with the same 25 other kids and the same teacher every day. The space is laid out in a way it allows for much more movement throughout the day, which to us equates to more choice for students in how they’re spending their time. So, we have a large open area called The Grove, where there are five different centers of activities where students can spend their time, rotating from the library, to the writing center, to the maker space – all over the course of their morning, and that’s based on the schedules that teachers have put together for scholars based on their needs, their gaps, their interests, and how they learn best. So, the space really mimics – the amount of options that we want on the table and that menu for kids, so that they’re able to, over the course of their time at Roots, start having a more active role in shaping their own day, and what they’re spending their time doing. So, The Grove is kind of the heart of our model where about 100 kids between two – sometimes three kind of grade levels are overlapping, and then around The Grove on the periphery we have classrooms of different sizes as well, which again gets back to our focus on choice and options being the best path to customization so that you have a choice as a teacher of which classroom you’re going to use for a lesson. If that lesson makes more sense as a small group instruction, you’re going to pull five or six scholars into a small group room that really is only the size for a kidney table, maybe some materials for you and the small group you’re with. But if you’re doing a whole group read-aloud and you want kind of the larger, more heterogeneous mix of scholars in that group, you would go into the more traditionally-sized classroom for read-aloud time on the carpet.

August 8, 2016

Roots Executive Director Providing Overview of Staffing Model

Roots ED and Founder, Jonathan Hanover, explains how the school is staffed into content areas.

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Transcript: Jon Hanover: so our staffing model is basically we have eight teachers who team-teach together for a group of about 100 kids that are multi-age, and that macro group is what we call a growth. And we split those eight teachers I think kind of horizontally and vertically in half. So half of those eight teachers are academic content teachers, half of them are Habits of Success teachers, so they focus on that academic content. And then within each of those teams half are lead teachers and half are teaching fellows. So in our Habits of Success team we have two lead Habits of Success coaches and two Habits of Success fellows. On the academic content team there’s a lead humanities teacher, a humanities fellow, a lead STEAM teacher and a STEAM fellow.

August 8, 2016