Please identify your school. Share a piece of your discussion and next steps. Identify anything you need from Central Office leadership to be ready to present to your school on religious sensitivity.
Tags: Session 3
Please identify your school. Share a piece of your discussion and next steps. Identify anything you need from Central Office leadership to be ready to present to your school on religious sensitivity.
Tags: Session 3
We found it very interesting on how you can incorporate several SOL’s in a cross-curricular lesson. It really opened our eyes that you CAN do several “things” with one idea. We also discussed how to keep the students asking questions and showing interest in what they are learning. It is amazing how cultural and religious beliefs, along with prior background knowledge, can impact the student’s learning experience. We will look at this as a school and then as grade levels to identify areas that need to be addressed in reference to religious sensitivity.
Based on our discussions over the past 2 days, we have set 3 goals for pre-service week and the beginning of this school year:
1) Include recognition of all major religious holidays on the daily morning announcements, recognizing the upcoming holidays the day before they occur so that if students are out of school to observe the holiday, they can still hear and be affirmed by its recognition.
2) As the character word of the month for September is Respect, all staff (including the counselor in her lessons) will include consistent religious sensitivity awareness (all classes touching on the same points) for all students at an age-appropriate level throughout the month. This may occur through discussion, reading, research, sharing, or all of the above.
3) In order to better address the 5 nurturing needs of children, the character education program will be expanded to visibly recognize children from each classroom who demonstrate the character trait of the month by posting a signature sheet outside each classroom door. When a child demonstrates behavior consistent with the targeted trait, that student can go out and sign the paper, showing to all who pass by the classroom that they are a student of character. The counselor will provide the necessary materials.
One other point of consideration is to read a relevant book together as a staff over the span of a few months and come together in a staff meeting or staff development day to discuss it and what we as a school can draw from it and implement in our community. (i.e. Black Ants and Buddhists by Mary Cowhey).
With regards to religious sensitivity, we would like more information about religious restrictions (food, clothing, etc.). We plan to include the holidays on our school calendar so teachers and staff will be more aware when planning school and/or classroom activities. We like the idea of a “day of service” in honor of the gift giving season to give treats and cards to troops overseas, nursing homes, hospitals, etc.
Our school is still investigating gender inequalities with discipline and academic achievement. We also would like to implement more kinesthetic activities in classroom lessons, as well as using student generated questions to explore new activities that cover the SOL’s.
We too are in receiving information on religious sensitivity as it relates to food, holidays, clothing, activities, etc. Additionally, an enhanced calendar of religious holidays with implications (fasting, etc) may be helpful as we look at student behavioral changes and/or needs.
We love your idea of the “day of service” and would like to incorporate something similar at Carver. Please send this same information on religious sensitivity that is being sent to the other schools. We are looking at student behavior needs in our planning for this school year.
We really like the idea of including many of the significant holidays on the school calendar so that teachers and staff are able to plan classroom and school wide activities to increase religious sensitivity and awareness. The ” day of service” is also another good idea. This would enable some groups, such as, the PTA and SCA to become more active in school functions.
One thing that works for some of our teachers is using kinesthetic activities, such as, morning work to reinforce skills that have been taught. Student generated questions would be a fantastic vehicle for relevant lessons incorporating many of our objectives. We wish you much success as you go forward this school year.
At Dumbarton Elementary school, being that we have such a diverse population, we will plan to review and narrow down the most prevalent religions and their traditions. Once a committee has identified and assembled the necessary information, it will be discussed during teacher work week and then reviewed at each monthly faculty meeting. Also, additional information will be provided in the daily notes sent to the staff from the principal each day. It would be helpful to have summaries of all the major religions and traditions from central office to highlight the major information/points.
Our focus will be our ESL students and History. We will develop and implement strategies that will help them to be more successful mastering the SOLs in that area.
We will also work with our staff on presenting material to the ESL students according the the individual students learning styles; contact the World Language Humanities Center to have students come tutor our ESL students in History.
We will have bi-monthly diversity learning sessions with the parents/guardians of our ESL students to help them better understand the students educational needs. We will ask Val Gooss to send interpreters to these sessions.
We have decided to address this the first day back of teacher work week. Traditionally, we have a “Welcome Back” meeting with the entire faculty. At this meeting, each of the three Coalition Members will work through the scenarios (homework, recess, classroom) with groups of staff members to raise their awareness of student diversity and sensitivity situations that commonly occur in elementary schools. Our rationale is- if the faculty is more aware of common issues, they will process & react to situations in a more proactive manner.
We are excited about going back to our school and sharing the information we have learned while here. We plan on sharing the elementary scenarios during work week with all of our faculty and staff. The scenarios are presented in a manner that will be beneficial and hopefully thought provoking with our school. All of the scenarios are real life and could happen at our school. Each of the participants from today will present and facilitate a discussion. Lastly, since there are many religious holidays in the month of September we will discuss religious policies near the end of teacher work week. We normally do stations for our teachers and plan for one to be on religious sensitivity where we have teachers share past experiences to gain knowledge and a better understanding of doing what is best for all students in our community. Our team will also present a list of websites that showcase religious sensitivity.
For the year we will introduce pieces from the coalition during each faculty meeting and also as opportunities arise on a day to day basis.
We are going to facilitate a staff development session the week before students return. First, we will show the RTI Coalition summary video. Next, we will share with the “cases” related to religious sensitivity. We will have teachers write down situations that have occurred in their classrooms over the last several years. A few will share aloud. We will identify what religious are in our school. Based on time we will review the existing sensitivity documents and add information about religions not on the list. We will then make the suggestion that teachers survey parents about religious needs. The teachers should then take the time to write their specific student religious needs in their planning calendar for the year. They will then have the daily reminders they need at their fingertips instead of having to find the huge resource document months later.
We would request that central office provide an updated religious sensitivity document with more religions and the most important calendar items? We would also like the CD that the speaker used.
Regarding religious sensitivity, our goal, loosely taken from the video, is “everybody has a seat at the table, no one is silenced. We can talk about it and fight about it and work on it so that some day the ideal will come true”.
Regarding our discussions, we leave this meeting having been enlighted, informed, motivated and empowered to influence change at our school.
Next steps: We will continue the Student Diversity Coalition started in 2009-10, with the addition of faculty involvement.
It is an exciting opportunity to incorporate culturally relevant teaching this year! One way we may do this is to pull from the community to bring the larger world inside. There are many ways to expand on our curricuum, even within tight budget constranints. We would love to provide our staff with the opportunity to read “Black Ants and Buddhas”, and a chance to reflect as a school.
Adams is currently transitioning, and it is an excellent time to revisit our efforts in order to be truly inclusive. We are excited to include the three R’s, as well as the educational time line in future professional development. Upon returning on week one, we will do a brief overview of our coalition, and our mission. This will be time of encouragement and reminders of how we will welcome our kids!
For Religious Diversity training, we will utilize the resources from our session, but also provide an opportunity to get out some feelings, trouble shoot, and plan for the sensitivity that we strive for.
Today’s discussion brought to light the fact that there are many cultures and religions present in the school that go unrecognized. Even though Deep Run is a rather homogenous school, there is a need to recognize these groups giving them a sense of belonging. Because there is such an unbalanced representation, it is important to recognize the different groups so the students are able to be more aware as they move on from Deep Run. The simple activity of sharing your name and its origin and meaning revealed that there is great pride and value (identity) associated with a name. Even though the discussion focused on religious and cultural awareness, our long-term goal will be focused on our earlier blog: addressing the gap in participation and performance with African Americans and Hispanic populations.
Our next step is to come up with a plan with our entire coalition team and principal to address religious sensitivity with our staff.
We would like to establish ground rules with parents/teachers for conferences and meetings to include a mediator so that everyone will be on the same page and be able to work as a team as far as the student is concerned. We hope that this will increase parental involvement for future meetings.
We would also like to separate the groups that sit together at meetings by giving everyone a number, piece of candy, color, etc. to divide up the faculty and staff to have more productive faculty meetings without personal agendas being so prevalent.
The PACE program would like to have a Math Night to enhance the math rigor of the overaged 7th and 8th graders.
We would like to have a “Grand Re-Opening” of The Academy and PACE Program. This would be a fun night to help establish a connection between the students/parents/staff to make it a great place to be.
We will do the balloon activity to help staff realize that we need to help all students not fall through the cracks and how to get the ones back that we do lose.
We will discuss religious sensitivity by completing the dialogue vs. debate activity and identify triggers and follow-up with sensitivity training.
We would to have staff be able to recognize the differences in people and learn how to embrace those differences to include everyone and to learn how to turn negativity into a positive, teachable moment.
During the August session, the second half of our team shared the same perspective as our peers in the previous session. We identified the same needs we see in how our program currently functions and some needs that will arise when the PACE program and the Academy at Virginia Randolph merge. We are agreed that the Balloon activity was a powerful in how it demonstrates how we meet the needs of individual students and the importance of teamwork.
There are some additional areas we saw relevant as well. We saw the need to reinforce the three Rs because it supports mission of our program. Another part of our training on the second day was about creating a safe place and addressing bullying. That also occurs on our site and we think that we may need a strategy to tackle this issue consistently.
As Sandston moves to incorporate a school wide Positive Behavioral focus, recognizing cultural differences and bias, religious diversity and the need to model dialogue vs. debate within the staff, topics explored over the last two days will become paramount as we move forward with our plan. Additionally, the lesson plan approach incorporating the SOL’s with a student lead focus on content will be introduced to further the concepts of teaching across the curriculum. As we move forward to discuss with the faculty religious sensitivity, using the activity of having staff talk about a child/parent of a different religion and it’s impact on their instruction will be used. We will then go through the questions and discuss how we as a school could handle this. This is where we also begin to utilize the concept of equity that we have been talking about. Long term plans include the above and increased parent involvement. A plan to develop a way to collect data on this area will be discussed as we develop our CSIP.
In our group we discussed the lack of religious awareness and sensitivity among our students as well as staff members. We shared various personal scenarios from our experiences as educators that support this claim. To help the students and staff of our school, we plan to begin an initiative that will change the culture regarding religion. Our first step in the planning process is to identify the major religious backgrounds that make up our school population. This will be done in an effort to educate the Fairfield community as a whole. A few things we discussed as possible activities to enhance interest and knowledge are:
• A Cultural Festival
• Dedicate morning announcement time to inform staff and students about different religions
o Teacher/student dialogue
o Fact of the week
o Journal entries
o Writing prompts
• Staff Developments
o Ask the staff to list facts about specific religions and have them list questions that they have about the religions
o Have staff participate in a religious survey (DKDK)
Nice steps Fairfield!! I liked your specificity and attempts to educate the students simultaneously with the teachers. I’m going to steal that idea, thank you very much!!!
Our two day seminar discussions have empowered us to influence and motivate others within our school and community.
The next step will be to create a “diversity coaltion” to involve all stakeholders in open discussions to address the religious needs of our students.
Our plan will be to increase religious sensititvity and respect of different students.
We were able to share our table discussions with Matt from Henrico High and Jessica from Adams. As a group, we learned about the similarities that our schools have. One idea that stuck with us was the one in which you change teaching to the student style of learning. We were able to see how to engage students by asking questions, and to keep learning exciting by having chart paper labeled with BIG QUESTIONS on one and BIG IDEAS on the other. As a teacher, you will be able to create lessons and activities that focus on these areas and still center them on the SOLs.
For our religious sensitivity piece, we will show the short video that Central Office will provide. We will ask each grade level team to present on a specific religion and prepare a traditional dish that is from that religion. We will ask the our Media Specialist to set up a part of the Library that reflects different cultures and religions. We also plan to ask our SCA to read about different cultures and religions on the PA system once a month. As a school, we will continue to heartily and cheerfully greet each child and adult with whom we come in contact with each day.
Historically, Pemberton has not been very diverse; however, our student body is changing and we as the staff must broaden our awareness to embrace all cultures and religions. This will entail purposeful discussions with staff to broaden our knowledge in this regard beginning in September. For instance, teachers need to know that Ramadan is in early September and there may be children that are fasting. Also, we need to learn if in fact Jehova’s Witnesses really do not stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. In the past, we have made sure not to have homework or tests around the Jewish holidays. We need to make sure that we are aware of all of any other religious holidays. Many schools have female students who wear head coverings. Although we don’t at the present time, this would be something that we would want the teachers to be able to productively discuss with their students since children are curious.
We really had a great time reflecting on the 3R’s. Relevance seemed to be a recurrent theme or goal for our group, as we truly believe that we make a concerted effort at building relationships as teachers, administrator, or counselor. The activity illustrating dialogue v. debate is one that really resonated with each of us. We felt that this would be a valuable experience with our faculty especially as we hope to open more dialogue and inclusivity in our school community.
With regard to religious sensitivity, our next steps include examining the data of the demographics of our school. That data will drive which activities we plan and the focus of our dialogue. Again, we found the 3R’s to be particularly valuable and are wondering how we can incorporate each of those aspects into building religious sensitivity, raising awareness, and ultimately increasing inclusivity.
For long term – we would like to engage our faculty in more cross-curricular planning and instruction (similar to the HS activity we did upstairs with the oil spill and World Cup examples). This planning will have a particular focus on relevance and rigor and can relate to yearly specific goals. For example, for the 10-11 school year our admin team has identified attendance as a focus area. As we relate this focus to our work here, we wondering – are there specific groups that are not included in our school, do not feel that instruction or the classroom is relevant to them and so this impacts their attendance and achievement in school.
With regards to the Inclusion model and the RTI initiative we will present the following topics to our faculty.
1. Collecting Religious Holiday data to include but are not limited to: dietary, apparel, customs and needs. This will be presented during preschool week with a September follow up and quarterly updates.
2. Awareness of suspension data which shows a 72% margin of African American males were referred to administration and received some kind of discipline infraction during the 2009-2010 school year. This will be addressed by our the team disaggregating the discipline data and preparing staff development activities designed for awareness and restructuring.
Hermitage Technical Center
Explain the RTI goal for the school year and into the next and that Religious Diversity is one part of the whole process and goal for the county. During teacher work week we will have the session relating to Religious Diversity. The presentation will include an overview, a breakout session, and a summary of findings. Topics to cover in the breakout sessions are stereotypes, holidays, dress, and school and student issues.
As a “one person team” I was blessed to be at a table with some lovely people from Laburnum and Adams Elementary. We discussed a number of important ideas today. One thing that struck us during the presentation on religious tolerance was the intentional or unintentional misuse of religious symbols. We commented especially on the use of the Rosary as a necklace for fashion. It is offensive to practicing Roman Catholics. The practice started a long time ago with Madonna and her “Like A Prayer” video. Now our demographic (Henrico and Laburnum) wear it because Lil’ Wayne and other performers do it. The praying hands tattoo with sayings about “only God can judge me”, are prolific as well. We believe that with the Rosary, it can be a teachable moment when you can gently let someone know that what they are doing can offend others.
As far as introducing religious sensitivity to our faculty at Henrico High, it would be my idea to have a Hindu student explain her religion by exposing myths/misconceptions about her religion to our staff at the first faculty meeting in September. This would of course be done after a brief introduction to the RTI stuff we learned today. To continue the program, we could introduce each religion represented in our school in the same fashion.
Down the long road, continuing education must be afforded to the staff, the videos we saw today need to be posted on PD 360!!!!!!!!!! They should also be required viewing across the county. In the future, we should also incorporate at the very least acknowledgement of other holidays on our school calendar on the Henrico High website.
The other three members attended the Aug. session. We have met with Matt and the Principal concerning these issues, After the site meeting and attending the sesssion we have arrived at the same consensus and plan to introduce the idea to staff that the need for religious sensitivity exists, along with ways that we can achieve acknowledgement of religious diversity.
Short Term:
We discussed the diverse state of schools today, and the importance of further discussion to explore ways to ensure staff and students are sensitive to religious differences. We discussed the feeling that the dialogue of Christian ideas and display of Christian symbols are being suppressed in order not to offend other religions. Bottom line how can we teach cultural music and song that respects all cultures.
It will be most helpful for Central Office to provide specific guidelines for religious policy that support curriculum and instruction.
For the 2010-2011 school year, the Tuckahoe team will address issues surrounding bullying. The 2009/ 2010 discipline data revealed an overwhelming trend of students misunderstanding bullying behavior, and how to address specific situations. Teachers will view the video “Let’s get real,” to heighten their awareness of subtle bullying that can take place in school. After viewing video, teachers will engage in a “clicker” activity to gather teachers’ responses to bullying behavior.
Staff members, along with students, will create skits so students will know how to appropriately identify and respond to issues of bullying. Skits/ scenarios will be run based on monthly themes. They will be aired the first day of the week, starting the week of September 13, 2010. Monthly, administrators will review and compare current conduct data and the data from 2009/2010.
An optional anonymous parent survey will be available during fee night to share religious/cultural traditions in our school’s community. This information will be used to assist our staff’s awareness of the religious needs and differences among our students. This data will be used to craft the principal’s monthly update, and will include those holidays which Tuckahoe students celebrate. Excerpts from “Religious Literacy” will be shared with the staff to further their awareness of significant religious holidays/activities.
What we’re going to do at this point is to see if we can carve out two time periods during teacher work week. During the first, which might be during the first faculty meeting, we would do the team building activity we did with the balloons. That would be fun activity to do and a good beginning. Next, we would like to do the activity of dialogue vs. debate to set the stage for the discussions we need to have during the school year with our faculty. Then, hopefully on another day of our teacher work week, we can present the information and have a discussion on religious sensitivity including the cases of religion in school. We’re also hopeful of being able to show one of the clips that Dr. Hicks showed of the playground scene. Longer term, we have a Human Relations Committee we want to involve in this work. We will get them to help us identify goals. We may also involve our Olweus Anti-Bullying Committee as some of the information we reviewed today is right up their alley.
Next Steps for the Coalition (RE: Religious Sensitivity)
Glen Allen HS’ short-term goal in addressing religious sensitivity involves having the courageous discussion with the faculty by the end of September 2010 during a faculty meeting. The administrative team will encourage the dialogue among the faculty and present specific scenarios and PSA commercials.
The school’s long-term goal will involve developing school culture through various activities. Because we are a new school, some of the activities that we are considering include “The Cultural Biography” and “The Sense of Belonging.”
We would like for the Central Office staff to provide us with a calendar of religious holidays. We would like to use this to make our staff and students aware of religious holidays that other cultures observe. It will also help us with our areas of weakness in History.
Information and ideas to assist with our faculty presentation.
During the last few days, we have realized that our faculty doesn’t know what they don’t know. We have such a diverse population, and we want to make sure that the faculty sees how wonderful this is. We hope by teaching the faculty, the faculty will teach the students full heartedly.
1. We will define diversity. We want to make sure that the faculty sees the positives of diversity. We will do this by using the circle activity. Inside the circle, we will write the positives of diversity, and on the outside we will write the challenges. We want to stay in our positive safe haven. (At tables, then with whole faculty)
2. We would like to identify what our faculty knows and doesn’t know. We will put up big pieces of paper for the teachers to say what they know and don’t know about each religion. Discuss it.
3. We will show videos of our students and faculty who have felt a disconnect with the Freeman family because of their religious beliefs.
4. After viewing the videos, the teachers will respond to how they felt and what could they do. This will be done with round table discussions. Then each group will present.
5. We will get the faculty to say what they would do in certain situations. These scenarios will be actual situations that have occurred at Freeman.
We like the idea of defining diversity using the circle containing positives regarding diversity and recording the challenges that diversity brings outside of the circle. Your second idea focusing on religion is intriguing and would be a simple springboard for discussion and then we could follow the discussion by viewing the video on various religious practices.
Being a new school, our primary focus will be to engage teachers in discussions in how, as a whole school commitment, we will create the culture and climate that will create the optimal learning environment for our students. The coalition discussions over these two days will prove to be a foundation for building that desired climate. In order to achieve this we will plan to implement the following intiatives/focuses:
1. religious tolerance/acceptance/ and sensitivity will be our first focus. The activity that we feel will be a good kick-off to begin these conversations would be for teachers to get into groups (much like we did today) and share personal experiences in which religion impacted them/their class/ or school as a whole. These conversations would come after the showing of the PSA DVD (if made available by first week in September). We feel this would set the proper context and atmosphere to have engaging dialogue regarding religion in public schools and Holman specifically.
2. It is important that all teachers are provided with important religions dates so that they will have information to make any necessary adjustments/accommodations for their classes and students. In some instances accommodations will not be necessary but still an awareness of various rituals or means of student observances of religion (ex: a fasting student) will be necessary to meet the educational needs of his or her students.
3. Inclusion of all HCPS adults that interact with students in the coalition initiatives is vitally important to its overall success. Support personnel have a means to interact with students that teachers/school counselors/admin do not (as we know, bus drivers are the first HCPS adult students see in the morning and the last HCPS adult they see in the afternoons. They should be provided insights and awareness to religious and cultural sensitivity as well. Cafeteria workers, C&M, etc. fall in that same category.
3 A. The PTA should also be provided the religious calendar. In addition, every effort should be made to have a culturally and religiously diverse population of PTA volunteers. This will go a long way in ensuring that Holman is an inviting and welcoming place for all.
The above starting points will hopefully create interactive dialogue that will help guide direction and sensitivity and future discussions of religious awareness.
We are very excited about moving forward on cultural sensitivity because it ties in so closely with past discussion we’ve had a school. Our immediate plans in preparation for the September staff development on religious sensitivity is as follows:
1. Send a brief survey home with each student the first week of school asking each parent what holidays are celebrated in their home and would they be interested in being a guest speaker on a particular holiday. The information will be collected to create a school calendar.
2. The school calendar will be used to announce these holidays on the morning announcements. In addition, the calendar will be used for planning purposes for the school year and the information will be included in classroom and school newsletters, in house weekly staff communications, and the monthly school calendar that goes home.
For our September staff development, we will utilize the cultural autobiography activity to begin the discussion on religious and cultural sensitivity. We will also do other team building exercises during teacher work week.
At this time we don’t need anything from central office.
The afternoon religious sensitivity presentation was very interesting and thought provoking within the context of our Coalition Team and the 2-day training. However, taking it out to our staff, especially as the “first” roll out from the Coalition, seems daunting. Even with an introductory video that highlights what the Coalition is and what we’ve been doing, we still feel that we need more direction for a presentation. Are we to essentially “replicate” what Dr. Hicks did with us? Are we doing a presentation touching on various world religions? What is the HCPS expectation for the “religious sensitivity” message. I think we are just wanting to make sure that a consistent message is getting out to staff. Providing specific objectives for what staff “will be able to do” at the end of our presentation would be most helpful. The On Common Ground videos would be great to show as part of our presentation, if it’s possible to get those to the schools, as well. Overall, we are very excited to begin this journey with our learning community. Thanks for helping us to get on the road!
During the last two days we have have been exposed to many relevant activities that we can utilize during the year as part of our Staff Development sessions to promote cultural diversity. We have made a commitment to carry out these activities throughout the year.
1.) August 1/2 Staff Development based on today’s activities. Multiple times throughout the year, additional activities will be done to promote cultural awareness.
2.) As a staff, we will complete a pre and post survey to measure the cultural climate of the school.
3.) As part of grade level meetings, documentation of discussions and activities implemented each month will be reviewed.
How staff development can help us….
*creation of a pre and post checklist of cultural climate in the school
*creation of a video in partnership with the VA Interfaith Community that would inform Henrico County Public School staff about each of the religions from religious leaders.
We found that the idea of seeing celebrations or symbols of one religion in fact could be seen as exclusive as an ah ha moment. It crystallized the thoughts of inclusiveness, even when something may represent 78-80% of the population of our school it is exclusive to some. This creates challenges and questions of how to meet or affirm all students. For example, it has us asking if the lack of attendance by some of our students at the evening performance of our “winter concert” is due to family support or if there could be some underlining issue/cause/reason for not attending. Could this be connected to religious convictions? The need to continue our conversations about inclusiveness such as religious sensitivity needs to occur. This will enable our faculty to be more aware of, when we meet the needs of the majority, this could in fact, exclude and not affirm all individuals.
Our next step is to begin to bring our staff into the conversations on inclusion. An introduction will occur during work week. The RTI team will look at opportunities throughout the year for contiuned conversations to include religious senstivity (in September). The leadership team of the school will be involved in reviewing our data from the audits to help identify the school improvement goal on inclusion. We are looking forward the the video staff development is putting together.
In our discussion, we found that we need to work with our ESL students better and our teachers need to be more culturally sensitive to our students. It is necessary that we start the transformation in our school by offering some cultural information to our teachers regarding the international students that come into their classrooms. As we reflected, our discussion turned to a student who was in our school several years ago and no one knew that he was celebrating Ramadan, yet everyone was concerned about him not eating during the day. When we finally figured this out, we were all devastated that we were harassing this child about eating and not being sensitive to his culture. We had good intentions, but were seeking an inappropriate outcome.
The faculty has been working for the past few years on cultural sensitivity; however, the focus has been primarily on one culture. As our number of students that speak English as a second language is growing, it is necessary for us to expand our knowledge of other cultures to better embrace all of our students. Right now we feel the disconnect with our ESL students who do not speak much English and that is a concern for us building-wide. They are a constant source of discussion among our staff.
The National Junior Honor Society has decided to take on the ESL students as a service project to assist those students academically as well as assist them in immersing themselves into our school culture. This way we have both sets of students learning about each other. The NJHS will then share via our televised morning announcements about the different cultures we have within our school and the practices of the cultures. The Prejudice Awareness Group has also consented to make the Wilder family more aware of the cultures that are represented in our school.
We have decided to continue with our original focus on improving math scores for our students with disabilities. We will specifically target our 5th grade students who are preparing for Course I math in middle school and close the achievement gap. We are considering a plan to improve critical thinking skills in the area of math with PLC groups focusing on topics such as performance based tasks, quality questioning, and other problem solving skills to coincide with the county’s algebra readiness initiative. We will utilize the 3 R’s (relevance, rigor, and relationships) during our initial staff development training for the benefit of the entire staff.
As far as the religious sensitivity training, we will share the religious holidays calendar with the entire staff as opposed to just the administrative team. We are hoping to have more direction from staff development regarding the expectations/responsibilities related to these occasions.
Our discussions have focused on issues regarding bullying in schools as well as helping the faculty to create safe haven’s in their classrooms. We believe it is important to train our faculty on how to create these safe haven’s in their classrooms and to help support them as they deal with these issues. We would like to create a survey for our faculty to complete so that we can see what other issues they think we need to work on as a group. This will help us to choose specific activities from those provided to use today. We plan to use one of the staff development days (to be determined once we meet with our building principal) to educate the faculty-specifically, we will help teachers identify their triggers in order to appropriatly deal with all situations. We would also like to discuss with the faculty what they can do in their classrooms to prevent bullying. We also want to frame these lessons around Varina Nation and our school spirit initiatives.
From central office, we would like the video that was shown on bullying so that we can share clips from this with our faculty (“Lets Get Real”) and we would also like a copy of the book that goes with it.
Our topic today on religious sensitivity opened areas of discussion in our group about specific situations we have dealt with in the past. These situations have been limited but should be addressed with the faculty to raise awareness and avoid problems in the future. We should all commit to creating a sense of belonging and acceptance for our students. This topic will be included as we meet with teachers and plan for this academic year.
We found the past two days have provided some activities that will be both thought-provoking and meaningful to our staff. Because our school population lacks extensive diversity, we plan to lead the staff in brainstorming all of the ways in which students and parents might feel different and ways in which we can make them feel more included. We will develop strategies to welcome ALL families. Some of the activities we plan to utilize with our staff early in the year include exit cards, the balloon activity, the 3 R’s, and responding to triggers in order to facilitate further understanding with regard to RTI.
We have discussed our goals for September for staff development. As a school, we know we will be looking at our SOL scores as our black and disadvantaged students need extra support and did not do as well as we had hoped. In our meeting these last two days we discussed how important a sense of belonging is for all of our children. We will be looking at ways to ensure that each of our students feel included in our community. Our eyes were opened to being sensitive to religious and cultural diversity. We want to translate this experience to our staff and have more discussions about our cultural differences and beliefs at Carver.
We are looking forward to sharing all the different strategies we have learned from presenters and teachers. We are anxious to share the video and other materials from Central Office on religious diversity.
This workshop has enabled us to become more enlightened about diversity. It has helped us think more about what we do in light of religious sensitivity and we realize that the extra activities incorporate many of the principles covered in the last two days. We will review these activities with our faculty this year to assess the programs we have in place.
We like the idea of using the icebreakers that we learned to introduce the topic of equity during Back To School Week for the teachers. We will meet during New Teacher week to plan for our focus areas: increasing attendance, positive behavior, and academic achievement of students from low SES areas; and increasing parental involvement. We would like a copy of the religious sensitivity materials that are available for the presentation to be given in September. Will there be any funding available for buying materials to support programs we would like to implement or improve upon?
We are at Ridge Elementary. We are going to begin this discussion with our school by recognizing the strong base we have now in providing equity and inclusiveness, reviewing RTI, and reviewing testing data. We will share our focus on our lowest achieving student groups that we identified as LEP and Disadvantaged for Reading, based on previous test scores. Then we will do a team-building activity similar to the balloon game to help teachers recognize the diversity in our school and the team efforts that we will need to make in order to support all children and meet their needs. We will start Teacher Work Week!
Since Fair Oaks is so small and tightly knit we feel like we effectively deal with this if the situation arises. We respect all cultures and have created our own “Fair Oaks” culture that commands respect for all. In the month of September we would like to implement a short family survey that asks families which holidays/religious events they celebrate or observe throughout the school year. We plan to discuss religious sensitivity with the staff in order to make sure children and staff feel a “sense of belonging” and included in the school environment. We do not need anything from Central Office at this time.
At CT, we have always printed the religious holidays on our school calendar. We encourage teachers to be sensitive to these holidays, especially if it is not based on the Christian religion. We will also continue to encourage parents to inform the school if students need special accommodations due to their religion. Through open communication, we can help each other reach a better understanding. We would appreciate support from central office in making sure that the school testing calendar does not coincide with a major holiday. (Last year, the third nine weeks test coincided with a major holiday and caused some discomfort with our families).
These two days have opened our minds to exposed and hidden diversities in our school. This will help us to better serve our community, build relationships with parents, and create a sense of belonging within our school community. Our goal is to better serve our transient students! We want to be proactive this school year and create a plan to assess students efficiently, help students and parents get acclimated to the “Arthur Ashe Way”, and overall create a “sense of belonging.” We learned this can relate to one of the “Five Nurturing Needs of Children” which states that a recognition of social and emotional components should be just as important as the intellectual. In other words, our kids need to feel loved and safe to achieve academic success! For our existing students we want to make sure we address the 3 R’s in our school day and lessons. Especially creating relationships with our students to build trust and respect so rigorous and relevant learning can take place! We will plan to meet with our staff to share information gathered at the coalition meeting. From there we will make plan to implement and extend our goals for the upcoming school year.
Our focus area is developing common values. We believe that a cohesive school culture can be achieved alongside and even through embracing the diverse characteristics and standards of all members of our community. We want to continue hosting an “International Night,” in which families throughout the school set up booths celebrating their countries of origin; different groups educate others affiliated with the school on their language, location, and traditional food, clothing, music, and dance. We want to incorporate more celebrations and spirit days into our school calendar that are inclusive of all of our students, and will seek suggestions from our students and families themselves. We will present the 3 Rs initiative to our staff to ensure that we are all promoting this inclusive culture together. We would also like to further educate ourselves and other staff on religious and cultural diversity. Developing a quick-reference guide about holidays, traditions, dietary restrictions and other practices of the growing number of cultures at our school would help us to implement all of these initiatives. We would appreciate any information that Central Office Personnel can provide regarding our goals.
Through our discussions over the past two days, we have affirmed our decision to focus our data analysis on a particular neighborhood of students who attend our school. Looking at various forms of data, these students have low scores on their SOL tests, high rates of discipline referrals, and low rates of parental involvement. Therefore, we have realized that what we are currently doing in the classrooms for many of these students is not working and we need to develop relationships, relevance, and rigor in working with this group of students. We plan to move into tier two behavioral interventions for some of these students, including a check in/check out program with buddy teachers. In addition, we are going to track the academic interventions these students receive. Because we are an ESD school, we have a lot of support from central office staff and TTAC.
In September, our team will present basic RTI information to staff members that we learned throughout the past four sessions. Also in September, our team will focus on raising awareness of the various religious backgrounds of our staff and students. Our team will be meeting again prior to meeting with staff to make final preparations for our September presentation. During that meeting, we will determine what, if any, assistance is needed from Central Office. In the meantime, team members will receive individual direct responsibilities to be contributed to our overall project. Prior to implementing any specific RTI strategies, we must first unite our staff by fostering a sense of belonging and understanding.
@Seven Pines Elementary – We will continue our previously identified focus on the population of students with economic disadvantages. With recent test data we want to expand that to include African – American students and overlaps across both areas. From C.O. we need disaggregated data for 2009-10 like that presented in the initial sessions in the Equity Audit, that includes a gender break-out, to help us pinpoint our focus & work. Our early school year plans include sharing the Coalition’s purpose & work to date with our school staff and having our staff tour our school zone during the work week to help us develop our student relationships.
In our discussion, we focused on integrating our new population of students and community into Pocahontas. In order to create a meaningful dialogue with our faculty, we have chosen to hold 20 minute workshops after school, supplemented by reflections and additional resources on SchoolSpace, to discuss our goals. We feel our faculty will buy into shorter, more frequent, meetings in order to discuss these heavy topics. The topics discussed in these meetings will include: dialogue vs. debate, religious sensitivity, fostering positive social community/sense of belonging, equitable and inclusive curriculum, and strategies for the 3 R’s. As we go through the year, other topics may present themselves that will require additional thought and discussion. We are also considering creating a survey to be given to students in their mentor groups at the beginning of the year to gauge how students see themselves in our school. Then, after implementing the strategies learned during the RTI sessions, we will be interested to compare responses from the student survey taken again at the end of the year.
Additional information on the various religions in our school is needed from Central Office. We would also like the “Let’s Get Real” videos shown and the religious video introduced by Doug Hicks.
Through our discussions and audits, we have concluded that increasing parental involvement will be a focus area for Lakeside. The inclusion team will develop questions to survey parents to identify reasons why there is a disconnect and/or a lack of engagement in parent participation at Lakeside. With the help of the Central Office Staff Development team, we would like to conduct these surveys and collect qualitative data. We want honest feedback from the parents on their challenges in reference to attending academically based activities at school.
We will share religious dates with staff and include them in the teacher handbook. We would like to find ways to engage students in various school events without isolating them (i.e. Jehovah Witnesses).