UNBOXED Guest Master Teacher, Noel Perkins, has a vision for making math accessible to all students and confesses to being super passionate about the subject. She’s designed this month’s UNBOXED to ignite a kid’s passion for math.

 

“When I began teaching math, I wasn’t sure I was the right person for the job. I didn’t consider myself a math person. But it was actually through diving into it that I realized how joyful math can be and I rediscovered my math identity.

I work with an organization in Chicago called Math Circles of Chicago. Our mission is to bring math to every kid in the city through afterschool and out-of-school programs.  Traditionally math has been a white, male-dominated field. It’s really important to build math identity for students of color and for girls. There’s a lot of research that tells us positive math identity decreases for girls and for students of color as they get older.

Kids who feel more positively about their math identity tend to be less intimidated by the subject and will persevere in it. So, building into kids the idea that they can do math and be a mathematician is super important to breaking down barriers, especially for students of color.

 This UNBOXED kit is about putting math into a real-world context. It’s the perfect application of skills and ideas learned in the classroom kids don’t often get the chance to use until much later in life. It’s for every kid who’s asked, “How am I going to use math in my life?” 

This is a student self-directed project. We’ve set everything up to be accessible for every kid in 4th – 9th grades and all the math content is standards aligned. If a kid is already familiar with some of the concepts, they can soar and go further. Parents are going to add a lot of value by being willing to talk about the math with kids and being willing to engage with student questions about statistics and data. I think that will be the biggest help. 

This is a great way to build a positive math identity for every single kid. That’s what I’m excited about.”

— Noel Perkins, Chicago

 

Visit Prepared Parents’ 2+2 Math resource and access the November UNBOXED learning kit.

“Every student deserves amazing teachers; our teachers deserve amazing leaders.” – Greg Ponikvar

This Fall, I spent one of several Saturdays watching a difficult conversation between a principal and a struggling teacher who was consistently using deficit language about his students. It was the first of nine Leadership Fellows sessions of the 2020–21 school year and the culmination of the cohort’s first Problem-Based Learning experience. Ferdinand, a high school teacher at Summit Sierra High School, had been nominated to model the conversation in front of the entire cohort of 32 experienced teachers and early-career school administrators.

As Ferdinand engaged in the conversation, he tried to embody the tone his group had decided was best for the situation: be supportive, but directly challenge the teacher’s concerning language head on…

Read the case for home-grown talent and developing school leaders from within.

Launched in January 2020, the Charter Students with Disabilities Pilot Community Initiative supports a networked improvement community (NIC) of 10 charter management organizations (CMOs) aiming to improve outcomes for their students with disabilities. Race and class have a compounding effect on students in special education that creates an experience gap between these students and their peers. This is why the initiative prioritizes CMOs serving a high proportion of students who are Black, Latinx, or experiencing poverty.

In honor of the final week of Learning Disabilities Awareness Month, this series spotlights early improvement stories from the field, in partnership with technical assistance provider Marshall Street Initiatives. The pilot community’s goal is to systematically improve the way we serve students with disabilities and bring these solutions back to school systems everywhere.

I fell in love with teaching partly because it was more difficult than anything I had ever done before. Early on, I realized the only way to become the teacher I wanted to be was to pay close attention to what was working, for whom, under what conditions, and then commit to a process of ongoing reflection and iteration of my practice. Years before I discovered the formal tools and principles of improvement science, I had already internalized one of its core tenets: the belief in acting, reflecting, and then acting again. I had begun my “improvement journey” without even knowing it.

Because the process of continual iteration was in service of my driving goal—to become a better teacher more capable of reliably serving the full range of my students’ needs—continuous improvement wasn’t ‘extra’; it was a non-negotiable. Once I articulated this goal for my professional development as an educator, my improvement in the classroom was no longer dependent on permission-seeking or other external factors. As educators in charge of our own classrooms (or schools), we often erect barriers to change because we do not recognize all the resources within our direct locus of control…

Read the piece here.

Turning unexpected obstacles into improvement opportunities. How STRIVE Prep is using the PDSA structure to improve co-teaching observations in the virtual classroom this Fall.

Launched in January 2020, the Charter Students with Disabilities Pilot Community Initiative supports a networked improvement community (NIC) of 10 charter management organizations (CMOs) aiming to improve outcomes for their students with disabilities. Race and class have a compounding effect on students in special education that creates an experience gap between these students and their peers. This is why the initiative prioritizes CMOs serving a high proportion of students who are Black, Latinx, or experiencing poverty.

In honor of the final week of Learning Disabilities Awareness Month, this series spotlights early improvement stories from the field, in partnership with technical assistance provider Marshall Street Initiatives. The pilot community’s goal is to systematically improve the way we serve students with disabilities and bring these solutions back to school systems everywhere.

Read the piece here.

In an unprecedented year, introducing a new project is no easy feat. How STEM Prep ensured the right conditions for a multi-year continuous improvement effort.

Launched in January 2020, the Charter Students with Disabilities Pilot Community Initiative supports a networked improvement community (NIC) of 10 charter management organizations (CMOs) aiming to improve outcomes for their students with disabilities. Race and class have a compounding effect on students in special education that creates an experience gap between these students and their peers. This is why the initiative prioritizes CMOs serving a high proportion of students who are Black, Latinx, or experiencing poverty.

In honor of the final week of Learning Disabilities Awareness Month, this series spotlights early improvement stories from the field, in partnership with technical assistance provider Marshall Street Initiatives. The pilot community’s goal is to systematically improve the way we serve students with disabilities and bring these solutions back to school systems everywhere.

Read the piece here.

COVID school closures did not stop Collegiate Academies from hosting a site visit in the Spring. How the team pulled it off — and why it pays to build team commitment early and often.

Launched in January 2020, the Charter Students with Disabilities Pilot Community Initiative supports a networked improvement community (NIC) of 10 charter management organizations (CMOs) aiming to improve outcomes for their students with disabilities. Race and class have a compounding effect on students in special education that creates an experience gap between these students and their peers. This is why the initiative prioritizes CMOs serving a high proportion of students who are Black, Latinx, or experiencing poverty.

In honor of the final week of Learning Disabilities Awareness Month, this series spotlights early improvement stories from the field, in partnership with technical assistance provider Marshall Street Initiatives. The pilot community’s goal is to systematically improve the way we serve students with disabilities and bring these solutions back to school systems everywhere.

Read the piece here.

Marshall Street Initiatives is a coalition of educators working to systematically improve opportunities for students across the country. We invite you to read the 2019-20 Marshall Street Impact Report and companion Marshall Street 1-Pager for an overview of our work, learnings, and impact in Year 1.

As Marshall Street closes our first year amidst unprecedented uncertainty in our beloved field of public education, we look back with deep gratitude and we look forward with great hope.

We’re thankful for the many people who believed in us when we were only an idea: the idea that sustaining and improving great schools requires dedicated knowledge, skill, and expertise. We’re thankful for those who encouraged and supported us when we were— and as we are—a growing but imperfect substantiation of that original idea. Thank you to our research partners, our funders, our thought partners from far and wide, our collaborators, our colleagues in higher education, in business, and in education nonprofits. We have learned so much from you. Thank you.

Read our Year 1 Impact Report here.

As a teacher, I always prided myself on my first-day-of-school lesson plans. Instead of reading aloud yet another syllabus, my 9th grade students spent the first day in conversation with one another, building connections with each other, with me, and with English Language Arts.

I take the same approach each July with the new cohort of teacher residents, who begin their year-long apprenticeship with a summer intensive. We carve out time getting to know each other as humans and as educators. We share our stories. We reflect on our identities. We engage in hard conversations about equity. We envision the future of education together.

This summer, the COVID-19 pandemic meant that we could not do any of these activities as usual. We would not hold our full-day sessions in person. We would not sit around the same table for lunch. We would not catch each other in the hallway for an informal conversation, where friendships blossomed and lifelong professional connections were formed.

Instead, we were 28 future teachers and 4 faculty, spread across 5 states and 3 time zones, gathered together in one Zoom room to build the foundation for our year together…

Read the story