Raise the Bar!

1. Raise the Bar! Students will rise to new heights if we expect it.

2. Expectations • Research consistently shows – high teacher expectations leads to higher student achievement. • We must see high potential for our students futures. • What teachers try in the classroom the relationships they build with students, the extent of their encouragement, and a climate of possibility – these things affect learning (Sleeterp. 127)

3. What does this mean for Curriculum Planning? • Think beyond students’ present performance. • Think beyond closing the achievement gap. • Expect more! • Higher order thinking skills • Innovative teaching • Eliminate low-level boring classes • Tune into individual needs • Look for solutions – expect to find them

4. What does it look like?Models for success • Publishing in the second grade – Juanita • Second graders creating books using computers. • This project had them writing, editing, using technology to publish their own work. • The project is fun, collaborative, innovative and challenging. • Expects and teaches beyond the curriculum • “College doesn’t give you power, but you must bring it with you, from when you’re little” (p.131).

5. Curriculum Planning, Intellectual Challenge & Mr. Bloom • Intellectually Challenging or Skill based? • TEACH BOTH! • Use Bloom’s Taxonomy to make sure your hitting lower and higher order thinking.

6. Four Questions to Ask • 1. How does the unit as you have planned it so far, or as you have taught it before, address each of the six levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. • 2. How do the curriculum standards for the unit you are developing address the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy? • 3. How does the textbook address the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy? • 4. Using Bloom’s taxonomy as a guide, if your students were to be prepared for college, what should they be learning to do in this unit that isn’t listed above?

7. Mini University: Mona • Multiculturalism, high academic expectations and Bloom’s in action in a 4th grade science solar system unit. • She uses a syllabus, students conduct research, create power points, write reports and learn to take notes on mini-lectures. • Intentionally demystifies college for students to help them envision it in their future. • Links to different cultural myths about the solar system, • Students analyze and synthesize knowledge.

8. Enabling Strategies • Teach students how to think more complexly. • Modeling the thinking – not just showing how to do something. • Alternative perspectives about knowledge – developmentalist perspective • Focuses on the process of knowing. • Making meaning trumps memorizing • Individualize instruction

9. Scaffolding • Allows teachers to build higher order thinking alongside lower order concepts and skills • To determine types of scaffolding needed – use assessment rubric to know what learning looks like by end of unit. • Don’t over scaffold • Example: Gina scaffold Spanish Lit Analysis • Develops language skills while teaching literary analysis • Uses comparison charts to scaffold • Later, students do it independently

10. Possibilities • Teaching as intellectual apprenticeship • Teacher as senior practicing intellectual apprenticing students through complex world of academic work • Show students how we solve intellectual problems and work to complete and academic task. • Engage students, then slowly pull back – build their confidence in their ability to do it.

11. Challenges and Solutions • Serving students from historically underserved communities is a challenge. • The structure of knowledge as standards/test/textbook – students as consumers. • Solution is – Paradigm shift – students as intellectual workers who produce knowledge. • If we believe they can, and show them how, it is possible for them to move beyond the achievement gap.