Pure Manaʻo

  Source:  Dyer, K. (Jan. 31, 2019). 75 digital tools and apps teachers can use to support formative assessment. NWEA blog . What is sacred: Normally, when I read an article that I am going to use for class, I highlight citations that are sacred, but this is a different type of article, so what I wanted to do was keep track of apps that I tried in class or am trying and use Dyer's own lens to talk about worth and value in my own classroom. I cannot do 75. I will do 5. Her criteria: S upports formative instructional strategies and ways to activate learners to be resources for themselves and peers Is free or awful close to it (under $10 per year, where possible) When possible, both students and teachers can take the activator role (sometimes teachers need to get things started) 1. Flipgrid  allows you, students, families to do a video response (from 15 seconds to now 10 minutes - I love a good upgrade). New in 2020 besides the added time - it used to be maxed at 5 minutes ...

  Source: Garcia, A. & Dutro, E. (2018). Electing to heal: Trauma, healing, and politics in the classrooms. English Education, 50 (4), 375-383.  What is Sacred: As teacher educators, we have to find a way to navigate in the dark spaces of fear and pain that crease the fabric of our work, noting the intersections between our disciplinary commitments, theoretical traditions, and democracy. What does it mean to do teacher education and study literacy in a democratic society in which the lives of many are continually disenfranchised? We need to locate the political in our work, and l ocate ourselves within it . We need to find places to highlight how classrooms are spaces of inclusion and oppression, are spaces that value and actively resist diverse identities, histories, and knowledges. This is a moment that can and must be harnessed for change, for coalition building, for electing to heal  (p. 382). Connection to current/future work: More training on "trauma-informed p...

  Source:  Worlds, M. & Miller, H. (2019). Miles Morales: Spider-Man  and reimagining the canon for racial justice. English Journal, 108 (4), 43-50.  Gist: The authors argue that racial hierarchies and oppression in the English classroom will continue as long as teachers continue to hold the literary canon as the standard for what must be taught. They conclude that "reimagining the canon with books like Miles Morales: Spider-Man can begin to splinter the racial hierarchy that reigns over English curricula.  What is sacred: When left unchallenged, the canon is a weapon of the colonial project, which perpetuates Eurocentrism and violence against people of color (Durand and Jimenez-Garcia) English language arts classrooms must be sites to name, challenge, and ultimately dismantle oppressive systems.   Connection to current/future work: The EDSE 428, which is my secondary English/language arts methods course, was able to have conversations around ...

  With all this time at home in the midst of this pandemic, I would have thought that I had more time to read, and the direct opposite has happened. Not sure why this is happening to me, but I am trying to push through and get back to a reading and writing schedule by starting with small articles and small posts. Source:  My daily reading queue is over a year long, so I started with this brief coaching post by Elena Aguilar (July 20, 2017), brightmorning (I think it is a blog post that turned into a pdf in my email). Gist: This is just a reminder that in order to be an effective coach, practice talking less.  What is Sacred: When training mentor teachers, I often have to first make them aware of the continuum of "coaching" so they are aware of moving from consultant (lots of talk from mentor, lots of "you should. . ." or "I would. . .") to true cognitive coaching where most of the talking, problem solving and ahas are done by the person being coached.  If ...

Na wai ke kupu o ʻoe? Whose sprout are you? Whose child are you?     As I prepare to start  fall semester in a few weeks, I go through the same motions that I have for the past 28 years. I create my syllabus, gather my resources, go over my notes from the year before, create my semester plan, my units, my day one lesson. This rhythm is familiar. But there is nothing familiar about this school year. In this year of pandemic, the new normal is that there is no normal. When our leaders shut the schools down at spring break, when planes stopped flying, businesses closed, when all we had was each other on the other end of a Zoom call to understand that there was a world outside of our house, we were just playing at normalcy because the end of the tunnel was summer when schools would be out, when we would flatten the curve, when we could start opening up again. As long as we could see the light at the end of the tunnel (June 1, July 1, August 1. . .) we could talk ourselves int...

We are living in new realities. I am caged on a dining room table where Zoom classes and meetings take up so much of my time that I have difficulty being present, sitting down, staying focused. Still, my job is to take this new normal, create a hybrid of synchronous and asynchronous content to engage students in learning through relevant grappling, deep dive discussions and minds on - hands on practice. The article Open Pedagogy by DeRosa & Jhangiani guides me to the intentional transformation of content to distance education (our new normal). "Open Pedagogy," as we engage with it, is a site of praxis, a place where theories about learning, teaching, technology, and social justice enter into a conversation with each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures. A site of praxis! When the public schools shut down in Hawaiʻi, thus shutting out our over 100 teacher candidates out of their practicums, what we missed most was our site of praxis. Th...

When our schools closed down right after spring break, I was worried about the 28 student teachers that suddenly had no classroom to practice in. With 5 weeks left of the semester, as faculty, we suddenly needed to advocate for our student teachers both with our licensing boards and with the public school mentors who also were in a very precarious space where the information from principals and superintendents changed daily for a little while. These kinds of uncertain times are the best teachable moments for a long time educator like me. It calls for purposeful innovation, calm, and Tim Gunn fortitude to "make it work." What I found out from my student teachers was that they were missing one or two formal observations. These formal observations are our way to help student teachers to "turn the corner." I am not sure how else to describe this phenomenon but I know it when I see it. When student teachers "turn the corner," it is my "all is rig...

I saw this on Instagram just as I was thinking about a way to get our alumni and early career teachers to think about their challenges in a way that "reframes" the source of their challenge. I noticed a pattern last quarter where the source of the challenges seemed to be other people (mostly the other adults in the school ranging from parents, colleagues, department chairs, mentors, administration). @authenticallylearning posted this caption with the image above: Taking a moment to do a self check-in is so important for us as teachers and leaders. It’s truly a form of self care. Celebrate your wins, forgive your mistakes or others, and enjoy your well deserved two days off. Take care of yourself, teacher leaders! Happy Saturday! 💜🙃 What is Sacred I think taking time to actually finish these starter sentences above helps to reframe our perspective. It allows us to get out our frustration but quickly reframes to a more compassionate and healing space.  I would lik...