June

Text Resources on Race &

 Anti-Racism

Thank you to Dr. Jay Marks of Oakland Schools for sharing this organized list. 

Educators:

1. Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They’re Okay — Chances Are They’re Not
2. Books About Race That Everyone Should Be Reading Right Now
3. Anti-Racism Resource     
4. Framing Brave Conversations About Race and Ethnicity
5. Teaching as Activism, Teaching as Care

 

Students:     

1. Teaching About Race, Racism and Police Violence
2. Black Lives Matter Still Matters       
3. Let’s Talk! Facilitating Critical Conversations with Students 
4. Let’s Talk About It!

 

Parents:

1. George Floyd. Ahmaud Arbery. Breonna Taylor. What do we tell our children?
2. Raising Race Conscious Children
3. Your Kids Aren’t Too Young to Talk About Race: Roundup Resources 
4. Talking to Children After Racial Incidents 
5. Books About Race That Everyone Should Be Reading Right Now

Teaching Lessons Learned

On May 19th, both the SOEL & IDLL networks came together via Zoom for one last meeting of the year. Over the 2019-2020 year, our face-to-face meetings included a guest teaching artist from UMS, researchers from UM, visits to Washtenaw County schools, the UMMA and EMU C2W.  When we shifted to distance teaching and learning, we wanted to reflect on where we were and where we are going. 

A theme we noticed from our discussions in May was engagement in literacy. Here:

• a SOEL teacher highlights one way she engaged 3rd graders in a shared text, 
• an IDLL English teacher highlights a way she engaged high school students in storytelling, 
• and an ELL SOEL teacher shares how her teacher research and book study turned into professional learning for her colleagues. 

The Use of an Interactive Storyboard Engaged Third-grade Students in an Asynchronous Read Aloud of Grace Lin’s Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

by SOEL teacher Stephanie Burnstein

 

As students embarked on this epic journey with the main character, Minli,  through nightly read alouds posted to Seesaw, they posted comments identifying any newly introduced story elements. Their challenge was to make predictions about and connections between characters, symbolic objects, setting changes, and story arcs within the frame story and the embedded folk tales. These would then be added to an oversized storyboard that was organized by chapter and comprised of color-coordinated Post-it notes. Red string was used to show the interwoven connections students identified, and the storyboard eventually included a kite with red strings that led to the Old Man of the Moon perched atop a mountain in the clouds. 

As the journey progressed, students realized that the storyboard’s red strings, or borrowed lines, represented the “strings of destiny” from the novel’s “Book of Fortune” and that many of the symbolic objects and characters showed up again and again in slightly different forms, thus tying together all of the embedded stories into one intricately woven tale. 

Using Flipgrid to Storytell

by IDLL Teacher Shelly Venema

Keeping students engaged in remote learning is challenging. In fact, teaching the way we used to has pointed out what should and should not be done. So, one successful way I taught writing and telling stories involved an authentic experience, Google docs, Flipgrid, and peer critiques. This is a project I would repeat!

Raising Expectations and Instructional Rigor For English Learners Through Effective Instructional Practice

by SOEL Teacher Rhoshawda Miller

For my TESOL program at Eastern Michigan University I created a proposal and powerpoint based on the book No More Low Expectations For English Learners that I read for my for my Teacher Action Research. The materials focus on the topic: Raising Expectations and Instructional Rigor For English Learners Through Effective Instructional Practice, to help classroom teachers best meet the needs of English learners in their classrooms. The powerpoint is for a professional development for teachers and with the  Empowering Diverse Voices for the 2020 MITESOL conference in mind.