All egos matter, right? Children and adults alike appreciate their ego being stroked. It’s euphoric and whimsical and can even create a sweet adrenaline rush when you know you have knocked it out of the park. Athletes thrive on receiving the right feedback from coaches, physicians, and scientists to perfect their run pattern, way they shoot or throw the ball, and even how they move or mold their bodies to get the most efficient move pattern necessary to finesse their opponent. The same can be said for teachers in a classroom. Within the walls of our South Boston school community, you can see teachers floating their spaces, waiving their majestic pens in the air, honing in for accuracy and sophistication of expository prose, multi-step math problem solving, or scientific claims. Student scholars are passionately pressing pencil to paper with ideas and representations hawking their teachers as they get closer to their desks. Sweat beads are forming and the timer is running out. They can feel their teacher’s warmth over their shoulders. Seconds seem like light years as the pen races over every line of calculation and response is examined. Did I do it right? That check plus means “I Rocked It!” A minus sign means I am still confused. Either way, Scholars exit that momentary experience smiling or brooding yet anticipatory of the next round of aggressive monitoring that will take place within another hour of that moment. When I begin in 2013, 39% of our Scholars were scoring Proficient or higher in ELA, 43% in Mathematics, and a mere 5% in Science. Girls were outperforming their male peers 3 to 1. 38% of English Language Learners were Proficient. And our Scholars on Ed Plans were more than likely to score Warning or Needs Improvement on any assessment they took. Approximately 50% of our Scholars ended the year reading on level. Scholar misbehavior was high and many of them were left to wonder if they were on target or on track because feedback on their performance came whenever the next test arrived or was just negative in nature. It was clear a shift in paradigm was necessary to move our school’s academic mountain. We started this year with higher composite performance index (CPI) in ELA, Math, and Science than in 2013. Girls and Boys are performing within single digits of one another. Three quarters of our English Language Learners begin the year Proficient. About a quarter of Scholars on Ed Plans are outperforming their general education peers. 60% of our Scholars started the year reading on grade level and we are on track for almost 75% of them to end the year reading on or above reading level. We attribute a good chunk of our school-wide success to how we are providing targeted feedback to our students over time. Every student receives some level of feedback and/or data on their performance three times a day during independent work. Our teachers have developed feedback codes to communicate to their Scholars how they are doing in real time. With exemplars in hand, our teachers know exactly what they are looking for and are thinking intentionally about how they will guide students to mastery. This is by no means a perfected practice or science--but we are noticing a different level of energy, tenacity, and motivation with our Scholars. Our Scholars crave the attention and the affirmation that their effort was for good cause and is leading them in the right direction. Our youngest Scholars run up or down the stairs (dependent upon their grade level) to show their check pluses and stickers to our school secretary, the P.E. teacher, and any caring adult in the building who is willing to tell them “Good Job!” or “I am proud of you!”. We are finding that our kiddos can appear to be egomaniacs and we LOVE IT! Aggressive monitoring, which is the art and science of providing targeted feedback (in real time) on how close our students are to hitting their learning targets based upon teacher developed exemplars, has become a critical and much needed friend to our instructional work. Teachers love using aggressive monitoring because it cuts grading by half or even three-quarters of the time because they are not taking home so many papers. They are also able to record performance on exit tickets and parts of independent practice in real time. At the end of each lesson, students have received feedback and know how they are doing on standards based tasks and so do their teachers. It’s a win-win for everyone. Article Published at: https://mespa2016.wordpress.com/2017/03/05/pushing-performance-through-praise/
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It's almost 3 a.m. right now and I am stuck in a river of thoughts and emotions hard to explain. Being a Black Man in My America is like having tofu in gumbo.
Cant really make heads or tails of it. Right now, I am trying my hardest to be politically correct with how I articulate what I really want to say. This week was dizzy-ing with a swath of hateration that came from people who appear to share the same hues as myself. I am still stuck in this conditioning of social uplift and taking care of our own. However, "my own" takes stabs at me fairly often. Maybe they need to see if I bleed the same. It is possible that they don't believe I am human. Maybe they don't care. What's crazy is...their perception of who I am is so far from my reality and I assumed (you know what they say about those who ass...u...me...?) they understood from my works what I stood for.... Why do I care so much about what people think--especially those who don't mean me well? Why do I care about what "those" people think when they do not exist in my atmosphere? They are not present when I need them. They are merely audience members at the ticket entrances while my life appears to be under someone's stage light. The mask is real. Being a Black Man In My America means you consume dysfunction as a part of your diet. You are conditioned to be tough and rough and stoic. Regularly, we are exposed to millions of images of us being shot, murdered, brutalized, sodomized, humiliated, and depicted as boogeymen to society. We have been mentally, physically, and spiritually castrated for so long that you wonder why some of us exist in alter egos, as schizophrenics, or just straight up ignant! It's hard to wake up to this being my constant reality. To some whom I walk by or am in the company of...they perceive me to be an entity that needs to be destroyed, exiled, or eliminated with the cast of my brothers. To a few others, I am expected to have a good paying job, invest in the latest wears, technology, and cars instead of my future, keep the six pack, lay the pipe well, and keep the mask real tight. There are a small number who I can count on my hand that allow me to just be me--in the skin I am in. In this moment, my heart is full. I live in a space where I am loved and see as "magic". In the eyes of my three and four foot Scholars, Mr. Martin can do anything and his hugs feel so good. I am funny. I am cool. I am HUMAN. Man, I am blessed to live in this space. I am someone who means something dear to someone else who has a heartbeat. But in my head...I can't shake the haters. I can't shake the images of us being shackled and imprisoned physically, emotionally, and/or socially from the wrecks of 400+ years of oppression, genocide, and disenfranchisement. Being me...A Black Man In My America means...? |
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October 2021
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