Pure Manaʻo

Source:  DellʻAngelo, T. (2014, September 29). Creating classrooms for social justice. [Web log]. Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/creating-classrooms-for-social-justice-tabitha-dellangelo What is Sacred: This is not really an article, more a reminder - social justice, defined as recognizing and acting on the power that we have for making positive change - is a good thing. It is necessary. Some of us spend all of our careers fighting for social justice in education. This is just a gentle reminder. when making curriculum decisions, consider, value, build on the diverse prior learning experiences of students Other focuses - creating community, making learning relevant, creating authentic assessment Connections to Current/Future Work: This does not replace the social justice focus that I talk about throughout the pre-service journey, but I can use this along with a TEDx talk to create a discussion point. If parents were educators themselves, I think wha...

Timeline Summer 12 - pre-proposal, lit reviews, submission for B-credit, negotiations for a course (place, time) Fall 12 - build the course using the village, build in  indigenous, developmental evaluation and sustainability Spring 13 - submit IRB approvals, pa ʻa the logic model, recruit teacher leaders Summer 13 - Alana Summer Institute Fall 13 - teacher action research and gathering of data Spring 14 - analyze data, write Summer 14 - write, collaborate, present This is a "in an ideal world" timeline that does not take into account the village, the permissions from higher ups, the ability to exist on a non-budget, the recruitment of teachers willing to participate in this work with me, the full time job duties that I already have AND the fact that Iʻm supposed to be in 6 or 9 credits worth of my own courses in the Summer of 13 on Oahu when I want to serve my Big Island teachers. Any suggestions?

Honua -  Land, earth, world; background, as of quilt designs; basic, at the foundation, fundamental (Pukui, Elbert, Hawaiian Dictionary) Honua is what we start with. It is the solid foundation on which we build our own project. Honua is also the prior knowledge and experience that we all bring to this community of learners. What each participant brings to this community is their own personal sovereignty . We value the unique skills and talents that are inherent in each individual. The foundational work that comes before us are the key ingredients from the previous post (Chopped All Stars). The ho'o kahua is the structure that we build on this solid foundation.  This post is a mini shed to house a part of the literature review section that informs the Alana Culture Based Education Project (yes, I have a name now and an intentional design ).   Culture-based practices: Why this? Why now? "Indigenous culture-based educational strategies sugg...

I have sat in on leadership meetings where we talk about extrinsic motivators for positive student behavior. When students are asked, "what would motivate you to do your homework, tuck in your shirt, not chew gum in school. . .?" students have answers, from the far fetched to the practical. Homework passes, free dress day (if uniforms are the norm), pizza party (or other food incentives), pool day, inflatables, etc. Sound familiar? We are trying to incentivize challenging tasks for the 13 year old who is in a hormonal battle that tops the cognitive/logical battle. I know I will sit in on more of these types of meetings, and I will be as professional as possible and "watch my face," but really, it's not going to work. Dan Pink's point on this TED talk is that science has found that the more challenging the task, the less people are affected by extrinsic motivators. In fact, the more incentive offered, the lower the performance. Dan Pink's TED talk...

It's the end of the school year and the classroom clean up is the only thing holding us back from driving off into summer, but fall will come soon enough and if you want to change up the decor in your classroom, Poster-Street.com is a free source for cute posters that can downloaded as pdfs or embedded on your classroom webpage or blog. The categories of posters they have are: office, home, teacher, kid, and teen. I'm constantly looking for teen stuff and they're a bit too cutesy, but still, FREE and easy to use. Besides downloading the posters, you can share it on twitter, facebook, delicious and email. One more poster for the heck of it:

"Infographics are 30 to 40 times more likely to be viewed and shared than text."  I think that's especially true for our students who live in a world saturated by visual stimulants vying to grab our attention. It's not enough to have billboards lining the highways. Now it's animated billboards. It's no wonder that our textbooks and newspapers are filled with colorful infographics. It's how we read. As a genre, infographics challenge creators to synthesize information and visually depict the information in a catchy, yet logical fashion. It's hard, but it's still a worthy skill to have students practice. easel.ly , although still in beta form, and very limited in its templates is a nice site that allows students to play with data using pre-made templates. The teacher would of course need to have a conversation with students on the purpose of each of the templates, and it's by no means perfect for all content areas, but check it out, it's...

Saw this on a tweet and decided to try it with our 6th grade Hawaiian studies readings. Check it out. Start here .  You'll get the screen below. I then went to grab some text from the Hawaiian Studies curriculum. This particular one is from the book on Kamehameha V: Lot Kapuāiwa, Introduction Chapter 1, pages 1-3. I put it into the VocabGrabber and here's what I got. A couple things I noticed: The list of 37 words on the bottom left are set up like a wordle, so the ability to bring out themes and important words is already built in. It gives you an example from the text which helps when doing a literary critique because you have possible citations. There are visual connections with the main word as the  piko  or the center (see screenshot below with the word unify) Yes, it does cost money if you want to create a word list or do more with it, but there is a 14-day free trial offer, and on their "educators" page on the menu bar, they give lots of tips o...

To get professional conversations going, one strategy is the visual synectics strategy. The purpose is to select a visual and generate comparisons as a way to foster professional conversations within the table. Our visual options were: Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz , Peter Falk from Columbo , Michael Jordan, Winston Churchill, Oprah Winfrey. The cloze passage for the day was: Learning with other professional educators is like_______________ because_______________. Our tongue in cheek response: Learning with other professional educators is like Dorothy because sometimes we need to realize that we're just not in Kansas anymore, embrace the change, learn through the process, and only then can we find our way back home. Why is this strategy  better than an icebreaker? It's not busy work. It guides participants to start thinking as a professional. It's not personal. The word icebreaker connotes that there is ice to be broken. People ...

Thank you to Barry Lane and Kelly Galagher for reiterating that yes, there is no magic bullet that will "fix" education. The only way to "fix" education is to support dedicated teachers, like these two gentlemen, who are willing to do the hard work.

In this upcoming election, Hawaii voters are being asked to vote on whether we should give up the right to vote for a school board and instead have a board appointed by the governor. Proponents of an appointed board say that this will increase accountability. At this point, since the elected board is powerless without the legislature's funding, and the legislature is powerless if the governor vetoes that funding, then the finger pointing will of course ensue. With an appointed board, the buck stops at the governor. I went to a panel discussion the other day sponsored by the League of Women Voters and former governor Ben Cayetano was one of the two speakers for an appointed board. According to Cayetano, an appointed board would eliminate the micromanaging that goes on with an elected board because they would "know their role" and be in sync with what is best for the schools. He also said that he knows many very qualified people in the corporate world that would be excell...

Despite the controversy leading up to the speech, and the outrage that Obama would take up precious class time to talk about his educational policy, his speech to the nation's students was a simple one on their kuleana . Kuleana is the Hawaiian word for responsibility. As Hawaiians, we understand that our kuleana, our responsibility is never a selfish act. When individuals do not fulfill their kuleana, the whole community suffers. We can be the most dedicated group of teachers, with the most experience, the most aloha, the most education, but if our students are not willing to put in the hard work necessary to learn to their greatest potential, (their kuleana), then our future, our community, our ahupua'a will not thrive. The president's speech wasn't about any educational policy, it wasn't about politics, it was not tied to NCLB, test scores, statistics. It was tied to personal anecdotes of kuleana. It's too bad that some felt that it was a waste of precious cl...

Deborah Meiers, on her Edweek blog Bridging Differences writes about "test scores and reinforcing the wrong connections." We need more people willing to have a "conversation" on slow change and long-term solutions. Not everything can be fixed quickly. As long as we use test scores as our primary evidence for being poorly educated we reinforce the connection—and the bad teaching to which it leads. If by some course of action we could get everyone's score the same—even by cheating—I’d be for it, so we could get on to discussing the interactions that matter in classrooms and schools: between “I, Thou, and It.” I’ve spent 45 years trying, unsuccessfully, to shift the discussion to schools as sites for learning. Such a “conversation” might not produce economic miracles, but it would over time connect schooling to the kind of learning that can protect both democracy and our economy. Because that’s where schools are (or are not) powerful.

Did you have a journal? Were you a writer as a child? Did you lose that passion when you grew up? How long has it been since you, as an adult, have written for yourself -- not because you had to, or it was expected of you, or you were grading papers, but for the pure joy of writing? Cathy Song, Hawaii's own "poet laureate" started writing at a young age. She says, "our family travels started my writing. I guess I was around nine years old when I decided I wanted to be the family chronicler." My own journey started with a Holly Hobie journal given to me when I was seven as a way for me to fill in the empty spaces left from my parents' divorce. My mother gave me a journal every year for the next 30 years. Are we nurturing that passion for writing in our students? Or are we killing that passion with our focus on writing for testing, formulaic writing, and the unhealthy balance of reading first? Choice Literacy, working off the text "Unlucky Arithmetic: Thi...

At the annual Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn, the Obamas read stories to the children, including Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. C-Span has the video here . Use technology like C-Span and You Tube or TeacherTube to bring more videos into your classroom of historical figures and celebrities reading books aloud. Post links or post the videos directly into your website. Share resources.

April is Poetry Month, but as a language arts teacher, I know that amongst language arts teachers, there's a dirty little secret, especially in the secondary... we tend to relegate the poetry unit to the end hoping that we've run out of time. Have I exposed a nerve? Am I talking about you? Am I bringing up your own schooling demons? Have you analyzed poetry to death only to be told that you're way off base? Are we guilty of doing the same in our own classes? Have we just totally killed poetry for the next generation? April is the month to go back to your childhood and remember what you liked so much about poetry. No one reads a poem like "There Was an Old Man of West Dumpet" to a child then has that child analyze the motive of the old man. Poetry is to immerse yourself in sound and emotion and imagery and taste the words as they're going in your brain and coming out of your mouth. There was an old man of West Dumpet, Who possessed a large nose like ...

I'm in the unique position this year of visiting classrooms to see what's going on in these little boxes we call "our rooms." I must say, it's very different when it's someone else's little box rather than my own little box. I see wonderful things going on in isolation and I see potentially wonderful things going on, with no real way to share out with others. I see things going on that would be a great connector to something else in another grade level or even another subject area, but I also feel that my hands are tied because of the disconnected nature of schooling. We separate ourselves into neat little subjects, divided by grade levels that rotate on their own little axes. Not counting education, can you imagine if the real world worked this way? We'd all be working with people that were the same age as us, we'd all travel together to our little departments, our learning would be dictated by "the authority," and our self worth would d...

I've used voice threads in my language arts class, but how did it work in other classes, and how was it better once we actually paid the $1/child for their own account? This is an example from Mele's Hawaiian studies class. The students were doing research on Princess Pauahi and what she did for her people, then they drew a picture for their slide and wrote a script. Positives: the students were able to continue recording until they were satisfied. They took to the technology quickly. They were able to get comments from their parents, so there was a connection between school and home. Things we still need to work on: I continue to say this, and I'm going to say this again: technology is just a tool. Good literacy instruction is the foundation for all projects, so teachers need to check the writing first. I think Mele had to go back after some were recorded because their information was wrong. We're working on fixing that - check everything first. Second, the students ne...

I got an email from Classroom 2.0(an educator's networking site)that announced that they're partnering with PBS to offer a series of free online web seminars (webinars) for teachers. Webinars are a great way to do quick (usually one hour) online classes with an opportunity to participate in the running discussion as well as an opportunity to ask questions of the speakers. Another perk is that by signing up you are sent a link of the archive so that you can take your time to digest and synthesize the information outside of the timed parameters of participating live. P.S. For the Hawaii educators, the webinars are usually listed in Easter Standard time, so take off 5 hours and I'll meet you in the seminar room at 3 pm Hawaii Standard Time on the 28th. Here's the webinar information from the email: A message to all members of Classroom 2.0- PBS Teachers® and Classroom 2.0 are partnering on a series of free monthly webinars designed to help preK-12 educators learn new ways ...

February is African American History Month so let me help with some resources. Books: The Underground Railroad: An Interactive History Adven ture by Allison Lassieur Reading level: Ages 9-12 Paperback: 112 pages Publisher: Capstone Press; 1st edition (January 1, 2008) Language: English ISBN-10: 1429611839 ISBN-13: 978-1429611831 Describes the people and events of the Underground Railroad in the 1850s after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed. The reader's choices reveal the historical details from the perspectives of a runaway slave, a slave catcher, and an abolitionist. It's $6.95 retail, but scholastic.com has it for $5.00 in their January TAB flyer (T50600). Also from Scholastic, Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott by Russell Freedman Reading l e vel: Ages 9-12 Paperb ack: 114 pages Publishe r: Holiday House (November 4, 2008) Language: English ISBN-1 0: 0823421953 ISBN-13: 978-0823421954 In Freedman's clear prose, relive the protest th...

If one of your new year's resolutions is to be a more reflective and FABULOUS English teacher, then join the English Companion ning right now. This ning (social website with a specific focus) was started by Jim Burke , prolific author ( English Teacher's Companion, The Teacher's Daybook, Reading Reminders, Writing Reminders, Tools for Thought: Graphic Organizers in the Classroom , etc.) webmaster, and guru for secondary English teachers. English teachers can join groups, start discussions, participate in discussions, blog and meet other English teachers from around the country and around the world. Within less than one month of starting this ning, there are already 600+ educators learning from each other. I think I joined two weeks ago, and everyday that I go on and read the discussions, join in, and hear mana'o from other educators, I learn and am inspired again. The passion for teaching is contagious. People have great forum topics and it is as beneficial for the...