Over the weekend, our MOCHA and WOCHA students were hard at work creating vision boards – check out some of the attached pictures! MOCHA and WOCHAWe are partnering with UVA for the first MOCHA & WOCHA chapters at Journey Middle School.
The Men of Color, Honor, and Ambition and Women of Color, Honor, and Ambition (MOCHA/WOCHA) programs at the University of Virginia and nearby school districts are designed to develop successful leaders of tomorrow, today. MOC HA/WOCHA provides opportunities for academic, personal, and professional growth, and leadership development. Participants engage in development sessions and receive mentoring from members of the broader community. The UVA undergraduates receive mentoring and provide mentoring to high school students who will in turn mentor middle schoolers. The guiding principles are: Ambition, Achievement, Integrity, Service, Health/Wellness.
0 Comments
"All opinions are different and all voices matter, so things like students helping with this, it makes it feel like they care about the student body" Our student leaders continued to show that they were academic risk takers as they not only participated in this rich collaborative process but then took their findings and shared it with others. Students share their findings with the school leadership team, peers, and even the school board (as seen in the video below). Presenting to the school board were two AVID students and school leaders. Organize your thinking.Students had 5 minutes to make a plan, based on the three categories the houses would be judged: most likely to survive a blizzard, best decorated, and house I would want to live in. Some students made drawings, other made sketches with measurements and three-dimensional sketches. There were designs focused on the construction and architecture, while others has detailed decorating plans and landscaping. I heard lots of discussion about strategy and what a final product would look like. Then the conversations shifted to making a plan for how to execute the plan.
Collaborating to make it all happen!The students worked so hard on their houses, and showed great perseverance and collaboration. One groups whole design collapsed and rather than give up they changed directions and made a mini village of tiny houses with the pieces that survived. In another group I heard one student tell their team member, "I'm sorry I should have listened to your ideas earlier, I was just stuck on my own idea." I was so impressed with their collaboration and ability to reflect on their own actions. It was also great to see leadership skills in students who were less likely to be leaders during reading and writing tasks. This activity is another example of the many ways WICOR fits so nicely into our classrooms every day!
During sparkling moments, teachers share stories about our AVID students who are exceeding academic expectations, exhibiting a pattern of personal growth, leading the social emotional well-being in our classrooms, or overcoming obstacles.
With common grade level planning teachers meet once a week as a larger PLC to learn and grow together. Once a month that time is dedicated to sharing WICOR strategies in the classroom. To start of this meeting all teachers are invited to share their sparkling moments with AVID students. This is part of commitment to invitational learning. In addition to our school wide commitment to having all students as learners and leaders, taking this time to regularly recognize our AVID students as academic risk takers who are embracing a growth mindset is a great way to celebrate our students. Support literacy school wide through explicit reading and metacognition instruction. Picking up a textbook, assignment, or class notes, often shows a text covered in marks, highlights, and annotation. Marking textbooks enhances comprehension, increases concentration, and supports review of material (Nist & Kirby, 1986). Additionally, it reduces effort when it comes time to study and review material (Blanchard & Mikkleson, 1987). Many students do not instinctually know how or what to mark in a text which is why as school that supports WICOR school wide, we need to explicitly teach students how to mark the text.
On the surface it may appear to be scripted procedure used across the school, but I argue that after three years of disruptions caused the COVID-19 pandemic, routines and procedures are a welcome comfort for teachers and students. Starting the school year with routines and procedures. Establishing routines and procedures at the middle school level is a trauma informed practice that is needed following the COVID-19 pandemic (Crosby et al., 2020). Most importantly it allows teachers to model metacognition and show students the strategies used by effective readers. Strategies to teach metacognition while reading have positive effects on reading comprehension (Ahmadi et al., 2021; Boulware-Gooden et al., 2007; Fesel et al., 2016; Salmerón & Llorens, 2019). Metacognition is connected to our work to become culturally responsive educators who "coach students to develop internal cognitive routines for processing new content" (Hammond, 2021, p. 8). The outline below of Journey's marking the text strategy follows AVID's Critical Reading Process of Activating, Engaging and Extending; as well Hammond's (2014) three stages of information processing: input, elaboration, and application. Throughout each step teachers guide students and model the metacognition needed to go through each step. The direct and explicit instruction is designed to be a scaffold which is gradually removed over time so students are supported to become independent critical readers and thinkers. The # in #CUBA stands for numbering the paragraphs. Numbering the paragraphs supports students to use organizational structures to help facilitate discussions later on by making the parts of the text faster to reference. Next the C in #CUBA stands for circling important words, main ideas, headings, and titles. This in combination with numbering the paragraphs can be used as a pre-reading strategy. As students skim the text looking to titles and headings to circle they should be cued to make predictions and access any prior knowledge they have on the topic. Then the U in #CUBA stands for underline key details. As an ELA teacher, I am constantly providing students with practices with distinguishing between main ideas and key details. This distinction is needed in all classes where students read to learn, and requires modeling and practices. Once students begin reading, teachers can model circling important words and underlining key details as a way to dig into the language of the text, this is called the engaging phase of AVID's Critical Reading Process. Hammond (2014) describes this as the input stage where the brain filters information according to perceived importance. Using #CUBA teachers guide students to notice important ideas and mark them on the page through circling, then support those ideas with key details to be underlined. The B in #CUBA stands for bracketing unfamiliar words. While much of middle school reading is reading to learn, students are still learning to read. Being explicit about what to do when encountering unknown or less familiar words is part of how we support students to use context clues, access reference materials, and engage in meaning making. Finally, the A in #CUBA stands for adding information (with arrows). I find this part of marking the text provides a great opportunity to model how to connect thinking and wonder. As an experienced reader it is part of my cognitive routines to think about what I'm reading and how that connects to other texts, my own experience or things from the world, but that skill took years to develop. Strong readers make inferences and connect to background knowledge (Yeari & Lantin, 2021). AVID calls this extending beyond the text. Being explicit with students about how to make connections allows for them to make these practices automatic as well. Hammond (2014) calls this elaboration as the brain “makes material memorable and meaningful” (p. 125). With a well marked paper students are ready to engage in the Hammond's (2014) application stage where the brain creates and reinforces neural pathways each time information is reviewed or a skill practiced. From a lens of AVID and WICOR a well marked paper is a tool for discussion, reflective writing, and other applications of learning. Ahmadi, M. R., Ismail, H. N., & Abdullah, M. K. K. (2013). The Importance of Metacognitive Reading Strategy Awareness in Reading Comprehension. English Language Teaching, 6(10), 235-244. Blanchard, J., & Mikkelson, V. (1987). Underlining performance outcomes in expository text. The Journal of Educational Research, 80(4), 197-201. Boulware-Gooden, R., Carreker, S., Thornhill, A., & Joshi, R. M. (2007). Instruction of metacognitive strategies enhances reading comprehension and vocabulary achievement of third-grade students. The reading teacher, 61(1), 70-77. Fesel, S. S., Segers, E., de Leeuw, L., & Verhoeven, L. (2016). Strategy training and mind-mapping facilitates children’s hypertext comprehension. Written Language & Literacy, 19(2), 131-156. Hammond, Z. (2014). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Corwin Press. Hammond, Z. (2021). Liberatory Education: Integrating the Science of Learning and Culturally Responsive Practice. American Educator, 45(2), 4. Nist, S. L., & Hogrebe, M. C. (1987). The role of underlining and annotating in remembering textual information. Literacy Research and Instruction, 27(1), 12-25. Salmerón, L., & Llorens, A. (2019). Instruction of digital reading strategies based on eye-movements modeling examples. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 57(2), 343-359. Yeari, M., & Lantin, S. (2021). The origin of centrality deficit in text memory and comprehension by poor comprehenders: a think-aloud study. Reading and Writing, 34(3), 595-625. This task was surprisingly hard, but my eighth graders persevered. The highest egg tower was 5 eggs tall, and most groups could get 4 eggs. We had a variety of strategies including different egg support structures to create a supportive base, but ultimately extra play dough on a single stack seemed to work the best. From the teacher perspective I was wondering how to take its fun STEAM activity from an engaging task that develops collaboration and problem solving to actively supporting my students to reflect on how they used the language of inquiry to problem solve and support each other. As I circulated the room I said things like, "Great strategy, how did you come up with it?" or "What questions did you ask your team mates to help come up with this strategy?" or " You say ____ came up with this idea, how did you communicate your ideas with the group?" I would try to guide the students to consider how they used questions to develop ideas collaboratively. When the students shared a question they asked that helped move the group forward, I nominated a group recorder to document it on the reflection device for use later. By the end of the building time when we transitioned to reflection, every group had some notes to help them through the reflection. Below are some samples from their reflection papers.
It is that time of year again where as a site team coordinator we need to follow up with teachers across the school to make sure we are continuing to not only collect evidence of AVID and WICOR, but also that there is a system in place for sharing that evidence so we can both grow and learn from each other, but also efficiently document all the great work happening throughout the school. At JMS we start the year with faculty meetings that introduce our goals and talk about next steps for the year. We regularly follow up with grade level PLC meetings and mini-sessions in faculty meetings to share out resources, collaborate and plan. This month we had grade level PLC time to discuss our progress, use posted online resources and collect evidence of all the awesome WICOR happening throughout the school. Below is the slideshow we used to facilitate these discussions.
Sometimes just starting to write feels like a huge task. To help students feel more confident in starting their writing, eighth grade teachers have been using the 3W's to teach students a system for understanding what is being asked and how to best answer a prompt. This is a great example of AVID's Guiding Questions for Students from the which describes this strategy as important because it supports "students to clearly understand what is expected of them when they are given a writing assignment, they must develop a clear understanding of what they are being asked to do and then begin to ask and answer relevant questions that address the following considerations" ( AVID's Writing for Disciplinary Literacy Book, p. 226). First students break down the prompt with these question (like this sample). Then the students use the graphic organizer below to plan their essays (like this sample). According to AVID's Writing for Disciplinary Literacy Book the "graphic organizers empower students to facilitate their understanding of key concepts by allowing them to identify main points, classify ideas, and analyze information in a visual format" (p. 63). A graphic organizer is an amazing option for activating thinking and supporting students in the pre-writing part of the writing process.
Carousel brainstorming is a great collaborative strategy that can be used in a range of content areas. It was really awesome to see the students doing this reflective wrap-up activity following reading a novel in Spanish. Students annotated the text with the symbols, then reflected about the annotations on sticky notes. Students then did an annotation walk and took notes on other students reflections. Collaboration, note-taking, inquiry, critical reading and organizing thinking, I think all part of WICOR are wrapped up right here.
Click here to read more about this strategy. We are excited to start the new year off with Focused Note Taking, FNT. Having just finished our Fall 2018 revalidation, it was nice to take a sigh of relief having had a successful visit as a continuing National AVID Demonstration School. However part of the revalidation process is that constant cycle of reflection, so in that we continue to grow and refine our practice. In our reflection we noticed a lot of teachers providing thoughtful creation and application of a range of ways to take notes. Additionally there were an abundance interesting and creative ways to summarize and apply learning. Our area for growth was the middle, where students are provided with opportunities to go back and interact with their notes. We needed to think about how we were providing intentional and meaningful opportunities to process the notes and connect thinking. Our first step in this shift was to discuss the FNT process to better understand what our next steps would be. Then we shared resources available from MyAVID to help make plans about next steps. To document our progress and process, we started this document with the hopes that it would evolve into a blueprint of the FNT continuum at JMS.
|
AuthorAmanda Vogel has been teaching since 2007. With a background in special education and literacy instruction, I have been teaching in AVID schools for my entire career. I have seen first hand the powerful impact that AVID can have both on student in the elective class but also in supporting school wide improvements that works for all students. I am by no means an expert, but I hope that by sharing the experiences at our school we can build a community together. Archives
February 2023
Categories |