Creating a Positive
« Previous EntriesHelp your kids make the most of summer time
By Tobi Kibel Piatek | Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
Help your teen salvage the summer and pick up useful skills - this is the headline for an article in the Oregon this morning. The information is directed at parents, and contains lots of good ideas about ways to that parents can help use the rest of the summer season constructively. Tips include how to get kids motivated, how to help them network, ideas for using their entrepreneurial talents, and of course, lots of ideas for ways that kids can volunteer their time.
Of course, these are also great ideas for how MENTORS can encourage their kids to get involved, learn something new and benefit themselves and the community.
How do you motivate YOUR kids to make the most of their summer time? Tell us.
Topics: Creating a Positive, Family Involvement, How to Help, Quality Time | 1 Comment »
Get Involved: How Parents and Community can Help Teachers and Mentors
By Tobi Kibel Piatek | Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
Teachers need all the help they can get. The other day I posted some ways that teachers can involve parents in their classrooms to enrich the environment for everyone. Today, some ideas for how parents and volunteers can help teachers and the mentors too, who work with and support their kids.
Parents and Community Volunteers Can:
· Teach what you know. Offer a workshop on personal finance, watercolor painting, organic gardening or Russian folktales. Your perspective and knowledge can enrich any lesson or project. Design a presentation, or some activities and materials around your area of expertise so that even when you have left the building, your knowledge stays behind.
· Volunteer in after-school workshops, classroom enrichment, or tutoring to small groups of interested participants
· Teach the teacher or mentor. Are you an educator, a technology professional, a therapist? In what ways can your professional skills be used to help the people who work one on one with your kids? Be creative, be willing to help. Do not push!
· Spend some money, (if you can). Sponsor a class or building membership in an organization (such as one for gifted learners.) Sponsor an Artist in the School, or provide art supplies, educational software, books (used can be great) or a subscription to a publication that either kids or teachers can use and enjoy.
· Spend your time. Assist teachers by making or locating materials they need for special (and regular) activities. Update the website, edit a parent newsletter, ask … how can I help? Ask again. Even one hour a month can make a difference.
· Connect with the community. Help busy teachers by taking the time to locate mentors for kids with special needs, resources for families, and other community people who have skills and knowledge that will enrich the classroom and fill the needs you see.
· Communicate with other parents and community members. (See update the website above). Encourage them to participate in parent groups, classroom and building activities, and to chose from the items on this list so that they too can help to enrich the school environment. Translate information, or be willing to communicate with families in whatever way is needed.
· Who do you know? Do you someone with an interesting career? Someone whose experiences would be of interest and value to kids? Is there someone who can bring music, or art, or culture into the classroom? Arrange for guest speakers. TIP: Also, ask people with special knowledge or expertise to recommend (or provide) resources, websites, books or magazines so that kids will be able to continue their learning.
· Collaborate with teachers, other parents and students to coordinate and participate in special events. You might: Invite an author for a literary evening, a story teller, direct a play, publish and distribute a collections of resources, run a Family Math or Science Night, design and plant a garden, host a dinner, organize a cultural fair.
· Show YOUR love of learning. Support what you believe in. Model the behaviors you value. Get involved.
Topics: Creating a Positive, How to Help, Things to do | 1 Comment »
How Teachers, Parents and Community Members Can Work Together to Enrich our Classrooms
By Tobi Kibel Piatek | Monday, May 11th, 2009
In these tough times, parents and community can help … in fact, they must help. And this is a good thing, because the benefits they can bring to our kids are limited only by time, imagination and our willingness to work together.
School/family/community collaborations can take endless forms. Here are some suggestions (suited perfectly to Lesson 6) for ways that schools and community can combine talents and energy so that everybody benefits. This is the list for teachers. Tomorrow I will post a list of ways that parents and community can get involved.
Teachers can:
· Get to know parents and community members. Interview or survey them about their interests, activities, cultural background, languages, careers, skills and accomplishments.
· Enlist parents/community members to work with kids to develop volunteer, mentor and/or community resource files or databases. Make sure to include talents, skills, occupations, etc as categories.
· Schedule regular times for ‘mini-seminars,’ demonstrations or activities run by parents or community volunteers. These can be designed to offer kids a taste of new subjects, cultures or activities. Try to include many interest areas and learning styles. Ideas include: a poetry workshop, gardening, a day of math challenges related to real life, computer graphics demonstrations, a day devoted to a language and culture, an invention convention, a day of service.
· Look to your classroom for talents and skills. Brainstorm ways to provide in-depth and/or one-on-one study opportunities for kids who demonstrate special interests (we sometimes forget that kids with special needs and risks may have intense interests too.) Consider ways in which all the talents, knowledge, resources and abilities in your classroom and community can be used to enrich all its members.
· Organize a career day. Invite parents and community members to meet with students and discuss their work, their methods, their tools, and their challenges. Of course, the more diverse the jobs and the people who do them, the more interesting the day.
· Work with parents, colleagues, after-school programs, senior centers, community volunteers etc., to establish before or after-school clubs, Saturday enrichment opportunities, language programs, computer workshops, gardening clinics, sports clinics, art studios, bands, etc.
· Encourage parents and community members to help you organize internships, mentorships, and other opportunities for students to spend time working with businesses, artisans, craftspeople or professionals, in their special interest areas. Involve parents as liaisons, transporters, supporters and networkers.
Please post you ideas and success stories here … what works for you?
Topics: Community Service, Creating a Positive, How to Help | 1 Comment »
Dom Rocks!
By katelmoore | Saturday, April 25th, 2009
Messages that motivated and encouraged me were, “I see you and I like you” and “Hang on. I promise things will get better.” These were almost never directly spoken, but were conveyed through actions and feedback on my writings and my work. I still have a paper that my high school English teacher wrote on during my junior or senior year. I thought it was a light hearted piece about leaving high school and the secrets my locker had kept over the years. He saw through it to the screaming terror that I was engulfed with about the idea of leaving school, the only relatively safe haven I had growing up. On it he said, “Life is both more terrifying and more sublime that you can possibly imagine. Have courage and keep living it.” I wrote to him 25 years late when I decided to become a teacher and told him that I still pull that paper out occasionally to inspire me and calm me down. He was an extraordinary combo of foul-mouth, demanding, eternal caring that I model my practice on (mostly without the foul mouth).
Topics: Creating a Positive | 2 Comments »
Creating a Positive School Climate
By nadege7 | Sunday, April 19th, 2009
1. Genuinely ask them how their day at school was. Just by asking about their day and showing that you care can go a long way.
2. Get to know what subjects they are lcurrently learning, which are their favorite subject as well as which are their least favorite and why.
3. For the subjects they don’t like, try and make relevance by incorporateing something that they do like into it.
4. I would ask to see any projects or homework assignments that they were excited about doing. I think that me getting excited about something they did will further their excitement for not only that homework or assignment, but for future work too.
5. Having lunch with them, getting the tour of their classroom and meeting their teacher.
Topics: Creating a Positive | 1 Comment »
HOW NOT TO TREAT PARENTS
By Tobi Kibel Piatek | Friday, April 17th, 2009
This list of tips for how NOT to deal with parents, is a compiled from the lists developed by students taking Making Connections as a credit course. Their thoughts are too good NOT to share.
DON’T
• Tell a parent what you think they did wrong
• Talk to a parent about their child in front of other children or adults
• Fail to return emails or phone calls from a parent in a timely manner
• Have a school wide activity, including family members, and not have translators present.
• Forget to invite a parent to help out in class, help or volunteer in any way.
• Pressure parents to do more than they can i.e.; donations, fundraising, or volunteering.
• Judge a parent without really knowing the whole story, or let your own biases get in the way.
• Make a curriculum totally divorced from the realities of students’ lives (i.e. don’t teach the literary canon to my students!)
• Forget to explain expectations clearly to parents and students
• Forget to tell everyone about any and all resources available to them.
• Give up on calling/emailing a parent
• Forget to translate communication (in as many languages as you can)
• Cater only to the dominant minority; we have a student whose mother only speaks a little-known Pakistani language, and we can’t just give up because we only have a few language translators in the district. We need to make connections in the community and find someone who can help us! (And we did, by the way).
• Assume that because someone is a minority that it means that they will need help with their English or with communication.
• Make breakfast a “kids only” event; invite families, too! This worked at Atkinson Elementary in Portland; families ate breakfast, met staff and teachers, used a lending library. It worked so well, it created a ‘ripple effect’ of parents attending.
• Allow previous experiences with families to influence your thoughts about how they will be in the future. First impressions aren’t everything and remember that every single person has bad days and good days.
• Spend all of your time talking about what the student needs to improve, remember to talk about the things they do well too.
• Listen to negative messages from other teachers etc. about kids or families. Make your own judgments
• Focus on all that may seem negative in the child’s character. Instead add to the conversation the things that the child excels at or enjoys doing.
• Be too pushy
• Let the impressions of others color what you see with your own eyes
• Do most of the talking, instead ask questions and try to learn from families, as well as kids.
• Assume! Always take the time to really find out what is going on for a child and their family.
DON’T ASSUME:
• Parents don’t care.
• All children are the same in manner, learning ability, or perception of things.
• Because a family is a minority that they have no culture capital or comprehension.
• All children work (or don’t work) outside the home.
• All parents’ feel comfortable reporting trouble at home.
• All minority parents will react badly to unfavorable reports about their child.
• A family is a minority that it means that they take pride in or live with their culture. They may have adopted the same lives as thousands of other Americans. Or, they could have been born here and never explored or experienced any type of culture from where their family originated from.
• Minority parents or students are willing, able, or even knowledgeable about what we perceive to be their cultural background. In fact erroneous requests can be seen more as insults than embracing of cultural difference. It is a classic case of “judging others by the color of their skin” when we seek to do just the opposite.
DON’T FORGET:
• Children and their families have lives, ideas and values, too
• Each child comes to school with a different story (and often, a different set of responsibilities.)
• To be respectful in every situation … with parents and children.
• To ask for help.
• That your co-workers have great ideas and can offer a lot of help when you are stuck.
• That all parents want the best for their child.
• Parents have busy lives as well.
• To focus on positive things of the child.
Topics: Creating a Positive, Family Involvement, Relationship Strategy | No Comments »
Silent Epidemic
By Amanda Adkinson | Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
My initial list:
Pregnancy
Death in the family
Ill family member
Abusive home
Working to help provide
Made fun of in school, bullied.
Not feeling challenged
Feeling bored, there is something better to do.
Having friends, boyfriends or girlfriends who do not attend school.
Having parents who do not enforce rules.
Not having friends in school.
Parents divorcing.
Having to move away, to a different school.
Not fitting in.
After reading more information throughout this lesson and reading page 8 from “The Silent Academic”, I would say some of the reasons on my list are correct but some, although risk factors for other things, may not be large factor in if a child decides to drop out of school.
I would like to think that most kids drop out because of something circumstantial, a death in the family, per say. What I realized, is that often times that is not the case. Children start thinking about dropping out of school well before they actual do. I believe the reading said 1-3 years to be exact. That is very interesting to me as my younger sister did not finish high school and she only 3 months left. After battling cancer for 19 months our father passed away within days of when my sister should have graduated (in June). My family always attributes her not finishing to my dad passing away and it being very stressful and emotional for her as they were very close. While I believe this played a huge part, I realize now there were many, many warning signs years ahead of time that made her at risk for not finishing high school.
I think children start displaying characteristics very early on that could make them at risk for dropping out of high school. Some other factors I have learned are:
Frequent absences
Behavior problems
9th grade transition
Low academic success-poor grades
uninvolved parents
Being held back
I am interested to learn more!
Topics: Creating a Positive | No Comments »
Ways to get to know my students
By katelmoore | Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
This is the action list I made for ways to get to know my students. I’m actually pretty good at this. I try really hard to get to know them early in the year and stay connected.
Start the year with activities that address community issues and build community:
Short story, poetry and quotation/sayings unit that includes represented cultures, alternative education settings, wide economic representation, real life issues. Ideas include “Am I blue?”, readings from “Stubborn Twig”, student stories from “Reading, Writing and Rising Up,” stories by baca, aphorisms from around the world.
Tiny talent show: First days of school have students share tiny talents. For example, I can sing “row, row, row your boat” backward both word by word and melodically. This gets ‘em giggling and encourages them to share talents.
Letter to their favorite teacher: This is an activity I saw another teacher do that let’s students tell their favorite former teacher what they liked about their class and why they were their favorite teacher. It gives you some insight into things that have worked for them in the past and sometimes about things they are interested in and why.
Group resume: I haven’t tried this one yet either, but the idea is that kids get a chance not only to find out stuff about one another (schools, experiences, jobs, sports, awards, talents), but that each kid gets an opportunity to be the classroom “expert” about something. And, as a side note, they get a chance to write both a personal and a class resume, a read world skill.
On the first day of school I ask each kid to introduce themselves to me and I let them ask me one questions, then I get to ask them one question. I write the phonetic pronunciation of their name down in my grade book. That way I never call Charles Milton and I never can Jennifer Minh, even though that’s what it says on the role sheet. Then I use those nifty little pictures in ESIS to pour over for the first three days of school. By the end of the first week, I know everyone’s name…no exceptions. It’s important.
When I had homeroom, I used to stand outside my door and greet every kid as they came in. Now I teach newspaper first thing and those kids are both frequently tardy and mostly self-directed and going all over the school in a dozen different directions. By second period I feel a little rushed to get into the coursework, so I don’t do that. Maybe I should slow down and make the effort again.
When I asked the kids what I should include, they said:
Go to our games
Come to our plays and concerts
Ask what’s wrong when we are acting weird, instead of yelling at us
Notice who we hang out with, and when we aren’t any more
Ask about our families and stuff, but don’t act weird when we tell you
Ask why we didn’t do something, instead of assuming we’re just lazy
Act like a real person, we like it that you talk about your kids and your husband and have pictures and stuff
Topics: Creating a Positive | 1 Comment »
A Rich Resource on Classroom Climate and more
By Tobi Kibel Piatek | Friday, March 20th, 2009
Sometimes it is easy to forget that blogging is interactive. Wednesday’s resource post brought a happy reminder that there are people out ‘there’ who read what I post, and, that there are other organizations with similar goals and interests who are thinking and writing and working to find ways to make connections with kids. In fact, I discovered that there is another great blog filled with relevant resources that are ideal for teachers, mentors and anyone who cares about making kids feel comfortable in school.
The School Climate Blog is “maintained by the staff of the Center for Social and Emotional Education (CSEE), a national nonprofit organization dedicated to working with schools to improve school climate. Designed to promote dialogue about the importance and influence of school climate in K-12 education, we’re talking about assessment, best practices, funding opportunities and everything in between.”
I will be sharing some of the excellent information I have found on this blog, but for today, my goal is to direct you to this rich resource, and to point out that this blog has a great list of other blogs about education, technology, parents, policy, relationships, resources, and much more.
Check it out!
Topics: Creating a Positive, RESOURCES | 1 Comment »
Building Family/School Partnerships: What NOT TO DO (Edition 2)
By Tobi Kibel Piatek | Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009
Last term I provided a list of suggestions from course students on WHAT NOT TO DO when your goal is to create a classroom community where kids and parents feel comfortable and included.
This semester, students once again have shown their creativity, cultural competence and caring – this list is well worth sharing, and reading.
1. Don’t pick on/embarrass the students
2. Don’t show favoritism
3. Don’t encourage bad behavior by laughing
4. Don’t lose your temper or yell
5. Don’t speak of personal problems or gossip while in the classroom
6. Don’t ever make a child feel silly for asking a question
7. Don’t always say don’t, try to always say positive words
8. Don’t speak of “certain” student’s needs in front of other students
9. Don’t ignore parent helpers – and their ability to contribute to your classroom
10. Don’t underestimate parental involvement from working class or non-traditional families
11. Don’t ever be “too busy” to help a child
12. Don’t ignore students’ past achievements
13. Don’t overvalue the significance of a student’s income level
14. Don’t have/encourage unrealistic expectations for students
15. Don’t forget to build trust
16. Don’t assume parents aren’t involved with their child’s education
17. Don’t let the “business as usual” type of mentality get in the way of helping parents get involved with the school or with their child’s learning.
18. Don’t get demoralized by the negatives out there, though there is much work that needs to be done, there are a lot of teachers, parents, and students doing incredible things,
19. Don’t use stereotypes while communicating about ANY student.
20. Don’t be afraid of confrontations with parents for problem solving.
21. Don’t hesitate when asking parents to volunteer for school activities.
22. Don’t let the summer fly by without keeping your children’s minds active- read, go to museums, zoos, play games. (Teachers and mentors, Don’t forget to send lists of ideas home to families.)
23. Don’t pass up the Internet as only a place where kids play games or waste time. Steer parents and kids toward educational sites.
24. Don’t disappear at your child’s school. Introduce yourself!
25. Don’t wait to be invited to participate in your child’s education.
26. Don’t pass up invitations to attend school events.
27. Don’t judge students based on what others of their same culture have a tendency to do. And don’t underestimate the importance of culture in every life
28. Don’t get frustrated if a student’s English level is so low that you have to keep repeating and rephrasing the same things in order to get your message across.
29. Don’t rush; mistakes can be easily made.
30. Don’t get too close to students in a personal way; this makes relationships blurry and you less subjective.
31. Don’t correct students in a reprimanding way..always rephrase to be constructive.
32. Don’t try and handle a situation on your own when you feel uneasy.
33. Don’t neglect a student’s home culture or history. It plays a huge part in their decisions and plans.
34. Don’t forget that students may be stressed with school and may have problems at home that are affecting their academic success.
35. Don’t forget to offer extra help than what the student is asking for; sometimes we have to do a little extra fishing.
36. Don’t tell others about problems your students come to you with. Everything should be kept confidential
Topics: Creating a Positive, Family Involvement | 1 Comment »
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