As the SURN Principal Academy began its sixth cohort of principals from across the state this summer, we were joined by a familiar face in a new space. Jamon H. Flowers, M.Ed., joined the EPPL program as a full time doctoral student and joined SURN as a graduate assistant. Jamon was familiar with SURN as a principal participant in the Principal Academy during his tenure in Roanoke Schools. He agreed to share his thoughts on his return to William & Mary School of Education and SURN with us in the following blog post.
Jamon Flowers, center, returns to the SURN Principal Academy in a new capacity.
During my tenure as a principal, I spent most of my time coaching, supporting, inspiring, and problem-solving for others, but that all changed in 2012 when I became a participant in the SURN Principal Academy. My eyes were opened to how incredibly valuable it was to take time outside of my school for my own professional learning so that I could return and make school an even better place for learning.
Through the SURN Principal Academy, I had opportunities to connect with other principals from our network, including schools similar to mine and schools that were vastly different. Our collaboration increased my effectiveness as a principal and attracted me to actively participate in the on-going research and professional development initiatives, such as Visible Teaching, Assessment, Learning and Leading that promoted quality teaching and learning. Connecting with a diverse group of principals proved that the most valuable resource that all principals have is one other. Without collaboration, our growth is limited.
Now it is four years later and I have returned “home,” but in a different capacity. Instead of being a principal participant, I am a graduate assistant at SURN. In this role, I meet and work with principals who have a wide range of years of experiences, serve different school types, and strongly desire to improve the quality of teaching and learning within their buildings. Each peer offers fresh perspectives and a myriad of ideas. As a mentor, I am able to share my experiences, collaborate with others, and learn alongside principals across the state.
Commitment to ensuring that every student within the SURN school division network encounters an effective principal is a driving force in my dedication and excitement to work in this institute. As the old adage states, “home is where the heart is;” it is good to be home.
“The faloopious scaringas tringled quaransically to the barton.” This sentence, projected on a conference room screen, welcomed 65 middle- and high-school teachers from across Virginia to “ESL101,” a workshop at the William & Mary School of Education last week.
The group of educators, led by Katherine Barko-Alva, clinical assistant professor of TESOL, puzzled out possible meanings by analyzing the sentence structure and using the visual cue offered by an accompanying photograph. A consensus quickly emerged about a grumpy cat holding tight to a treat he did not want to share.
“Every sentence has layers upon layers of meanings,” said Barko-Alva. “The beauty of ESL is when you bring content and academic language together for the purpose of classroom instruction.”
The workshop, offered through the William & Mary School-University Research Network (SURN), was geared toward teachers with English language learners in their classrooms and offered strategies to help them meet the needs of those students.
The need for this type of training for teachers is huge. “When I ask superintendents what kind of professional development opportunities they need for their teachers, ESL training is almost always at the top of the list,” said Amy Colley, executive director of SURN.
Luckily for Colley, the William & Mary School of Education brought Barko-Alva onto the faculty last fall, and she enthusiastically agreed to collaborate on a series of workshops for elementary and secondary public school teachers from across the state.
Dr. Katherine Barko-Alva speaks to an attentive group of teachers at the ESL 101 Workshop.
For Barko-Alva, teaching ESL is a passion born from personal experience. She arrived in the United States from Peru with her family at age 15. And though well-prepared by her schools in Peru and ready for college study, she spoke only a smattering of English.
She recounted one memorable experience in a pre-calculus class when she was given a math problem about baseball. “I knew how to do the math, but the language of baseball — bases, runs, strikes, walks — was totally foreign to me.” Language, she added, depends entirely on context, and every content area has its own specific register. The challenge for the ESL teacher is to navigate the disconnects between content and academic language.
It takes anywhere from one to three years to gain the language skills needed for day-to-day social interactions. Cognitive academic language proficiency — the ability to read, write, analyze and evaluate subject-area academic content — can take up to 10 years.
A year and a half after arriving in the U.S., Barko-Alva enrolled as a freshman at the University of Florida. She’s now a leading voice in ESL education, advocating for students like her who arrive in this country with little or no English but who deserve a full and engaging education.
Public schools in Virginia serve somewhere around 100,000 English learner students. And while these students are guaranteed equal access to grade-level materials and content under federal law, the resources, structures and policies supporting these students vary greatly among districts and schools.
“Our focus for the workshop was to offer specific strategies that teachers could take back to their classrooms and put to use right away,” said Colley. “These are techniques that every teacher can use, regardless of how much experience they have working with ELLs.”
The workshop was co-facilitated by Joy Martin ’02, M.Ed. ’08, who is a reading intervention teacher for Norfolk Public Schools and adjunct faculty member at W&M. For the past six years, Martin has led W&M’s Summer ESL Institute, which allows students to add an ESL endorsement to their teaching degree. Students who pursue the ESL-dual endorsement program graduate prepared to teach English language learners as content-area teachers and as ESL teachers. “And that is what our ELLs need to acquire English and succeed in school — teachers with the knowledge and skills to teach academic language and literacy,” said Martin.
Joy Martin directs teachers at the ESL 101 Workshop.
Working within the limitations of a one-day workshop, participants at ESL101 got a primer on ESL foundations, but the main focus was on actionable techniques for the classroom.
Martin and Barko-Alva led the group through interactive exercises to conquer oral language production, such as the “jigsaw,” a group activity in which each student becomes an expert in one aspect of a topic and then teaches fellow group members. Another, “think-pair-share,” allows ELLs to practice language with a native speaker before being asked to speak in front of the class. These strategies also ensure that all students have equal opportunities for producing language in the classroom.
Kathy Smartwood, a kindergarten teacher from Yorktown, VA who attended one of the workshops, recognizes the value of having English-language learners in her classroom — to her, it’s a unique opportunity for cross-cultural exchange, rather than an obstruction to learning. “All of my students, regardless of their ability to speak English, should feel confident socially and academically.”
140 teachers from 29 school divisions and the Department of Juvenile Justice participated in the workshops, representing seven of the eight regions in Virginia. “It was a great opportunity to reach out to content-area teachers, who are the front line of support for English language learners,” said Barko-Alva. “We have a lot of work to do to improve outcomes for these students in Virginia, but we have amazing teachers.”
Join SURN to explore cutting-edge ideas in learning and practical application. With innovative discussions on engagement and developmental feedback, modern views on branding and preparing students for the future, this promises to be a dynamic conference. Let’s turn tomorrow’s classroom into today’s reality.
The SURN Leadership Conference offers a forum to learn and exchange ideas at The College of William and Mary. SURN invites researchers and practitioners to share their work in a combination of interactive general and concurrent sessions to promote dialogue. Each year’s theme connects to the priorities identified by the SURN Advisory Board. Participants from our SURN programs share their experiences from year-long, job-embedded professional development that can be applied in other settings. Leading education writers, researchers, and consultants provide international and national perspectives on their work. The opportunity to share with other educators, discuss topics with leading researchers, reflect on the prior school year, be inspired, and plan for the upcoming year are all reasons individuals and school division teams attend.
Conference participants are primarily from Virginia, they include: superintendents (5%), central office personnel (35%), principals and assistant principals (45%), teacher leaders (5%), and other educators such as The College of William and Mary faculty, VDOE personnel and retired school personnel who coach in the schools (10%).
We are pleased to offer a wonderful slate of speakers, as well as concurrent sessions, and a post-conference session!
Past speakers have included Prof. John Hattie, internationally renowned researcher of education; James Nottingham, creator of The Learning Pit; Deb Masters, Principal Consultant at Cognition Education and the Director of Visible Learning Plus, and more! To see a full list of speakers from previous years, please click here.
Help support a middle school in the SURN Partnership to get 100K. Crittenden Middle School in Newport News is a semi-finalist for an award from Northrup Grumman STEM School FAB LAB. They need your help as they have a “voting day” through Facebook on November 19th. The school with the most votes moves forward. Crittenden Middle is one of 20 schools in the USA in the running, support Crittenden in winning the day by voting for them at https://goo.gl/Ga5HKl. The site has a paragraph and video of what they propose to do.
Crittenden Middle School is located within the Newport News Public School District of Newport News, Virginia. Crittenden has an underutilized space that could be used for a new lab – otherwise known as a ‘STEM Zone.’ The school’s STEM program draws students from all across the city, and they believe it could be further enhanced with a renovated lab. Their dream lab would feature a research center including a design, build and testing center. ‘STEM Zone’ could also host local leaders and innovative experts to bring real life scenarios to the classroom to inspire students. For more information about Crittenden Middle School visit:crittenden.mvwsd.org/
Thinking about Text Sets: Considering Time and Place
by: Kerrigan Mahoney
If you ever dutifully memorized the definition of the setting of a novel as the time and place where the story happens, and never much thought about it again, well … you have much to look forward to! Setting is the smell of chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven, the eerie chirps of crickets at twilight, the sensation of a pat on the back for a job well done; the sound of hope, the smell of fear, the chills of desperation. Time and place shape identity, experiences, and social and cultural norms: both for our students and in our books. Considering how time and place impact identity and shape actions can be a powerful bridge between students’ own lives and experiences and those of the characters in a book. Centuries can become seconds when you can stand next to your character and empathize with her.
These three books put time and place, front and center:
Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick, the Michael Printz Award winning novel for excellence in young adult literature, links together seven vignettes that unfold on the same Scandinavian island over the course of millennia. The sensory experience of the island itself, along with the mythology and peoples tied to this place bring together each vignette in captivating and visceral storytelling. This genre-defying book will provoke discussion on the nature of time and the congruency of the human experience among students and adults alike.
“Open Mike Fridays” in Mr. Ward’s English class bring together the students of Bronx Masquerade, Nikki Grimes much beloved Coretta Scott King Award winning novel. The first year copies of this book showed up in my classroom shelves I heard: when can I read that book? Hey, that looks like a book I actually want to read! My internal celebratory dance and accompanying whisper/shouting was immense, but I played it cool – and my students certainly took the bait. Each chapter in this story is told from the point of view of a different student in Mr. Ward’s English class along with accompanying poem shared at “Open Mike Friday.” The importance of classroom space itself and its power to help students learn through shared experiences in a positive and supportive environment cannot be undersold – in this book or your classroom.
“Where the best and brightest strive and shine and stairways lead right to cloud nine.” Sugar Hill: Harlem’s Historic Neighborhood by Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrated by R. Gregory Christie is a celebratory picture book for all ages. The reader can dance, sing, stroll, study, and play through the masterful use of language and compelling illustrations that take us on a journey in Sugar Hill. An excellent book to think about how literary devices and figurative language can help to captivate readers; it also could be an excellent mentor text for students to write about their own neighborhood, school, classroom, time, or place that is important to them.
Questions to consider when thinking about setting:
How does the setting impact the plot, characters, or conflict?
In what ways does the setting evoke a sensory response?
How does a change in setting (or lack thereof) help to propel the story?
How does the combination of words and images shape your experience of the story?
How does the setting in this story relate to places you have been or settings you have experienced in other stories? How does this impact your understanding of the setting in this story?
Last month at the Monroe Scholars Book Award Luncheon, SURN Executive Director Jan Rozzelle met Nancy Wright Beasley, author of Izzy’s Fire: Finding Humanity in the Holocaust. Beasley’s book tells the story of Jewish families who survived the Holocaust, going into hiding with the help of another family. It is a powerful story based on memoirs and personal interviews. An exhibit at the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond retells the story. Both the book and the exhibit are highly recommended!
SURN is pleased to have Diane Sweeney, author of Student Centered Coaching: A Guide for K-8 Coaches and Principals and Student-Centered Coaching at the Secondary Level, join us for our Leadership Academy this summer on June 22-23, 2015.
Diane has been a national education consultant since 1999. She taught and coached in the Denver Public School system before serving as a program officer at the Public Education and Business Coalition in Denver. She is a well-respected educator who focuses on coaching and professional development.
Student Centered Coaching: A Guide for K-8 Coaches and Principals (Corwin Press, 2010) focuses on school-based coaching designed to impact student learning. Professional development should focus on how to best support teachers and collaborate with them in order to design successful and targeted instruction. The book focuses on the critical role of principal in developing and sustaining a culture of learning.
Student-Centered Coaching at the Secondary Level (Corwin Press, 2013)is the follow-up to Sweeney’s 2010 best-selling book and focuses on the principles and tools of student-centered coaching in order to meet the challenges in middle and high schools. Coaching focused on the student can allow the coach to provide feedback that has a direct impact on student achievement.
For more information on Diane, please visit www.dianesweeney.com. For more information on SURN’s Leadership Academy and how to sign up, please visit our website for more information or email us surn@wm.edu.
Yesterday SURN hosted our last College and Career Readiness session of the year for middle and high school teachers. Check out photo highlights of the day’s events below!
The Wrap-Up List is a great YA book told from the point of view of Gabriela. Gabriela lives in a modern-day town where one percent of the fatalities happen in a very strange way, called “departing.” Gabriela’s group of friends is fascinated with the concept, until Gabriela receives her own death letter.
The book has an interesting mystery to explore in this alternate world where Gabriela and her friends must deal with first loves, a country going to war, and the idea of dying so young.
I recommend this thoughtful and engaging book to readers in grades 7-12.
