Welcome to TCC’s newsletter, where we share professional learning insights, highlight our community, and keep you in the loop about upcoming events.
School Happenings
The New Year marks a prime time for setting goals. In our Goal Setting Playlist, The Core Collaborative Learning Lab shares resources and guidance for how to be successful with goal setting in your classroom. Build on students’ strengths and define their next steps in the new year so that together you can set personalized goals, engage in meaningful deliberate practice, and celebrate success along the way.
Youth Equity Stewardship
We are thrilled to partner with Benjie and Gary Howard, Wade Antonio Colwell, and their amazing team of equity stewards. This team brings an innovative, holistic, and experiential approach to building culturally inclusive and responsive school communities, and it works!
How is Equity Stewardship innovative, holistic, and experiential?
- Equity Stewardship consists of leadership support, teacher professional learning, community engagement, ongoing coaching, and the creation of intergenerational advisories centered on youth (called Youth Equity Stewardship).
- YES builds intergenerational advisories (consisting of educators, community members, and students) that amplify student voice in order to identify and analyze the complex educational challenges facing their system. These advisories collaborate to develop asset-based solutions that yield positive shifts in their system’s culture and climate.
- Youth Equity Stewardship (YES) uses music, movement, and art to connect educators, community members, and students. See it in action in this video:
Click here to learn more about how equity stewardship activates and sustains authentic partnerships between adults and students which lead to compelling, vibrant communities, and creates schools that work for us all.
Celebrating Success at Amistad Elementary
The teachers, students, and families at Amistad Elementary School in Kennewick, Washington, led by principal Julio Blanco and assistant principal Natalie Lahti, have a lot to celebrate!
Many of the students have been struggling to perform on grade level in literacy and teachers where working hard but not seeing the impact they expected.
This dual language school partnered with Dr. Paul Bloomberg, Rachel Carrillo Fairchild, and Isaac Wells to create and implement a plan for literacy success, especially for multilingual learners.
- refocus and revised their curriculum,
- implemented a dedicated English Language Development (ELD) time
- established clear structures, tasks, and instruction for intervention including frequent progress monitoring focused on prioritized skills,
- implemented high-yield instructional strategies for both foundational skills and reading comprehension,
- have taken ownership of their PLC process by meeting regularly as Impact Teams to analyze student work and teacher impact on learning and adjust instruction as needed,
- developing common formative assessments across monolingual and dual language classrooms in grade-level teams, even as dual language teachers are adopting a new literacy program,
- revised their testing plan to address the social and emotional needs of students making adjustments such as allowing students who may feel shy about their language ability to take their speaking assessment with an adult they have a relationship with in a comfortable setting, and
- three grade levels (so far!) are working after school with the support of their learning facilitators (instructional coaches) to create and revise a year-long series of literacy units anchored in focus standards and high-impact practices.
Among the outcomes they are celebrating are:
- Reclassifying or exiting more multilingual students than ever before at the site and even outperforming schools in the area.
- Meeting NWEA MAP growth goals for literacy.
- 84% of first graders making at least one year’s growth in reading foundational skills.
- Moving 91% of 3rd grade and 80% of 4th grade students up or out of their Tier 3 intervention groups.
- Identifying 100 students, based on their current data, who are close to exiting their language program as they look ahead to WIDA testing in February.
This, or something like it, could be your story. Connect with our Director of Quality Implementation, Sarah Stevens to determine how we can help you achieve your goals!
Partner Consultant Spotlight: Rachel Carrillo Fairchild
Rachel Carrillo Fairchild is one of those people who has a positive impact on anyone she meets. Over three decades as an educator, she has been a classroom teacher, mathematics coach, and teacher on special assignment, as well as a school leader. She is known as an author, thought leader, and presenter in working with Multilingual Learners, English language development, and supports schools and districts in working with struggling/disengaged learners, and assessment for learning.
Rachel was raised in a bilingual, bicultural household and was later a bilingual teacher in the same city in which she grew up. Her experience gives her the unique ability to understand the perspective of both students and teachers lving and working in diverse communities, as well as the importance of culturally responsive and sustaining educational practices.
Her passion for learning and coaching comes through when she is in schools working with teams of educators or in classrooms working with students. Rachel’s ability to listen and understand others’ viewpoints enables her to customize her support to the unique needs of the schools and districts she serves.
Check out some of her recent writing in one of our newest publications, Amplify Learner Voice through Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Assessment.
Celebrations
Martin Luther King Jr. Day, often referred to as MLK Day, was first observed on Dr. King’s actual birthday, the 15th. Since 2000, all 50 states have celebrated an official MLK day. Many people celebrate this day with acts of service to honor this great orator’s dedication to community organization and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s.
There are many resources available to support educators PBS has gathered lesson plans that include links to both primary and secondary resources. The Library of Congress has a selection of primary sources related to the Civil Rights Movement along with ideas for how to engage students with these resources.
Upcoming Events
Equity is Love in Action Conference 2024
January 18-19, 2024
San Diego, CA
CISC Leadership Symposium
February 21-23, 2024
Monterey, CA
COSA – Multilingual and English Learner Conference
March 6-8, 2024
Eugene, OR
Missouri Learning Forward – Show Me Professional Learning Conference
March 10-12, 2024
Osage Beach, MO
IL ASCD – Revolutionize Impact Teams (PLCs)
April 15th, 2024
Naperville, IL