Resiliency In Action: to adapt, persevere, and succeed despite adversity.

1. Resiliency In Action:to adapt, persevere, and succeed despite adversity. University of San Diego Christine Kane Aja Booker Fall 2011

2. All of Us Are Learners • Think of something you learned how to do recently. • How did you learn how to do it? • Who helped you? What helped you? • What steps did you take to learn it?

3. I Don’t Shine, If You Don’t Shine The ways we organize classroom life should seek to make children feel significant and cared about -- by the teacher and by each other. Unless students feel emotionally and physically safe, they won't share real thoughts and feelings. Discussions will be tiny and dishonest. We need to design activities where students learn to trust and care for each other. Classroom life should, to the greatest extent possible, prefigure the kind of democratic and just society we envision and thus contribute to building that society.

4. Intelligence & Experience Students who under-perform often have backgrounds that have not primed them for mainstream schooling’s ways of learning, speaking, reading, and thinking. They are immigrants, great-grandchildren of immigrants, speakers of non-mainstream dialects, special education students, and others who have not been immersed in the academic thought and talk that is valued in school. These students need rich experiences that supports their content knowledge, thinking skills and literacy skills. Students need curricula and teaching that connect to their cultural and cognitive roots, and they need accelerated learning because their high-performing peers do not just linger around, waiting for them to catch up.

5. Superheroes Need Not Apply • Scaffolding and Rescuing are not synonymous. • Both rescuing and scaffolding stem from a foundation of collaboration and assistance. • Both are helping behaviors. • Both scenarios denote a more capable person (the tutor) supporting a needier individual (the learner). Despite these connections, rescuing and scaffolding can often be polar opposites. • The primary difference: AGENCY.

6. Culturally Responsive Pedagogy Vision is the ability to see the opportunities within your current circumstances. • Funds of Knowledge (Moll) • Academic Self-Efficacy vs. Self-Confidence • Removal of Ego

7. “No Opt Out” Strategy • I Don’t Know…..Yet. • Addresses two common problems: • Eliminates the possibility of opting out by avoiding the "I don't know" response to a question in the classroom. • Useful in helping earnest students who are trying, but honestly don't know the answer. • The basic belief is, a student who doesn't know or is unwilling to give the answer to a question, should give the correct answer even if he just repeats the right answer. Format 1: You Provide the answer; the student repeats the answer. Format 2: You provide a cue; your student uses it to find the answer.

8. “Right Is Right” Expectation • Right is Right, is about the difference between a student being partially right and 100% right. • It is the responsibility of a teacher/tutor to be sure the student gives a correct answer. If the answer is not totally right, the student may falsely think she can do something that she can not do. • Accepting a partial answer from the student is not good enough. When a teacher/tutor holds out for a right answer, he/she is demonstrating to the student that they are capable of getting the answer as right as their counterpart peers who are successful in class with them.

9. How Will I measure Success? • Who is physically involved in completing the work? • Who did most of the talking? What type of questioning (closed/open-ended)? • Who is exhausted after a lesson?

10. Future support: Contact Info • San Diego Global Vision Academy www.sdgva.org • Aja Booker email: aja.booker@sdgva.net • Christine Kane email: christine.kane@sdgva.net