Category: Caring adult

The Urgent Need to Avoid Punitive Responses to Poor Attendance, attendanceworks.org

“What improves attendance is partnering with students and families to identify and address the root causes that lead to students to miss school in the first place, whether absences are connected to barriers to showing up for school, negative experiences in school or a lack of engagement. Root causes can also be related to misconceptions about attendance, such as thinking that sporadic absences aren’t a problem, or missing two days a month doesn’t affect learning.”

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Morning meetings are a good place to start, but what you really need is a toolkit of strategies to meet your students’ social and emotional needs all day long.

How to Maslow before Bloom all day long

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Conversation groups allow students to explore vulnerability about their experiences and build trust in one another.

“This school year, many educators face the challenge of building relationships with new students virtually. How can they foster a sense of community without the camaraderie and spontaneity of in-person, classroom interactions? One approach is to make more time for personally meaningful, nonacademic, youth-driven conversations. In my teaching practice, this has taken the form of This …

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Using Social Justice to Promote Student Voice: Preteen students can gain confidence in their ability to navigate complex topics by using intersectionality to investigate social issues.

“There is power in student voice, and it isn’t a voice any teacher can give. We don’t give voices. We make space for them in our curricula and classrooms, or we don’t. Especially in times like these when our nation is burning, we should listen to the young people. We should center their voices through choice of their tasks, choice of what they want to study, and overall handing them some leadership opportunities. How else will they practice taking over the world?”

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Seven deadly sins to avoid on the path to anti-racism

“As we embark on our anti-racism journey, it is important to remember that this commitment is hard but necessary. We are not free until we are all free. Let’s roll up our sleeves and truly get to work. Our country will be better tomorrow for what we do today.”

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Taking attendance for online schooling a team effort: an example from Maricopa Unified School District

“All MUSD students must submit a weekly log to the school “for evidence of learning time.” Each student must also either be present for the daily synchronous lessons or submit work for the day on an online platform. “

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How White Educators Can Approach Antiracist Work:Striving to understand the origins of the concept of race and the effects of implicit biases are good initial steps.

“I believe that, as Dr. Ibram X. Kendi says, we are all “either racist or antiracist; there’s no such thing as ‘not racist.’”

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By establishing routines that address the challenges of online learning, teachers can help students in grades 3 to 8 feel a sense of belonging.

“how can we create a positive classroom culture when we can’t even see our students face-to-face?It’s going to take a mixture of adapting the old tried-and-true beginning-of-the-year traditions to digital media and creating whole new practices and activities.”

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Use Live Class Time to Center Relationships: By delivering content to students working at home, teachers can save live classes for what’s most important—the personal interactions that solidify learning.

“What made going to school meaningful?For both of us, that answer is simple: It was the human connections we made.”

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Online classes make some kids anxious, but building relationships with them can go a long way toward helping them feel secure.

““What do we do about those kids who didn’t show up to remote learning sessions last spring if we are still teaching remotely in the fall?” How do we get them to show up, to do the work—in essence, to comply?”

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