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Sept 26, Nov 9, Jan 18, Mar 22, May 18
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Oct 20-21, Dec 8, Jan 26, Apr 20
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Oct 23, Dec 5, Jan 24, Mar 12, Apr 23
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Oct 24, Nov 28, Jan 23, Mar 13
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Sept 27, Oct 25, Jan 22, Mar 13
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Sept 28, Nov 1, Jan 10, Mar 21, Apr 24
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Oct 5, Nov 2, Feb 8, Mar 15, Apr 19
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Oct 8-9, Nov 30, Jan 19, Mar 1, Apr 27
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1) If your school isn't already a member, encourage them to join
here
!
2) Register for our upcoming events, and keep an eye out for our spring schedule of workshops. 3) Get in touch and let us know what kind of professional learning opportunities you're looking for. 4) Have expertise to share? Contact us about writing a blog post or leading a workshop. 5) Join our mailing list to stay up to date on all our future workshops and events. |
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A message from the
Executive Director,
LISA HANEY
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With the school-year underway, I hope you are settling into your routines and enjoying this most challenging and complicated endeavor of educating young people. Immersed as I am in my own deep learning as the CATDC's new Executive Director, I am appreciating anew how sometimes you have to get it wrong to get it right, how struggle pushes us to grow.
Our offerings in this issue of "The Buzz" emphasize how critical it is for us to support our students through this process, even as we relish those moments when something clicks in a learner's mind and a problem being puzzled over suddenly becomes clear, or a perspective shared illuminates a world view.
I have been thinking lately about such a moment in my own life, which, while it did not take place in a classroom, held a lesson that eventually led me to become an educator committed to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Shortly after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed, I was walking to school with my best friend when she asked:
"Lisa, what is it like to be white?"
I hesitated. These were also turbulent times, and even though I understood little of all that was going on, I was shocked and saddened by King's assassination, and I knew that the answer I gave mattered a great deal.
What should I tell her?
I wondered. What does she really want to know? What is it like, anyway?
I decided to describe the details of how I spent my day, intending to make my life seem no different from hers. After I got up, I said, I brushed my teeth and washed my face.
She interrupted me, and my stomach turned; I knew I had somehow gotten it wrong.
I made it sound like she did not do these very ordinary things as well, she said. Did I think I was better than her? Didn't I think that being white was just the same as being black? I remember fumbling around for a response when she asked another question.
"And why did white people kill our king, anyway?"
I didn't even try to answer this one, and in the silence that followed I began to realize our lives were different, for reasons I could not fathom. She crossed to the opposite side of the street then, and we walked the rest of the way to school with that wide avenue between us, our friendship forever changed, her questions echoing in my mind for a very long time to come.
This memory came vividly back to me as I listened to This American Life's recent episode '
Essay B'
- two profoundly moving stories about race and identity and how we grow through life's most difficult challenges; one centers on how a college essay question gone wrong leads to a Pakistani high school student's understanding of the racial stereotypes held by her friends; the other tells of the "strategic experiment" undertaken in 1968 to integrate the elite private schools of the South and its impact on eight black boys. [A version of this story can be found in the
NY Times Sunday Magazine 9/10/17]
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I urge you to carve out some time to listen to the podcast if you can, or read the article. And I applaud you as educators engaged in the daily challenge to help students not only make sense of the events taking place around them, but also develop the skills they need to survive and thrive in a world that hasn't yet gotten it right.
The CATDC is committed to providing educators with opportunities to continue their own learning, and there are still spaces available in most of our
ongoing programs
and
one-day workshops
. Additionally, we would like to encourage you to write for our blog, sharing key moments on your path to becoming an educator or stories celebrating the learning taking place in your schools. Thanks to Andrew Davis, Head of the Mount Tamalpais School and co-facilitator of
Leadership 101
for his contribution this month about one of his "Aha!" moments during the opening weeks of school, and to the Nueva School for its fun and inspiring video also centered on developing a growth mindset.
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The One Word We Need for a Great School Year
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By Andrew Davis, Mount Tamalpais School
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I love to drop in on classes for five to fifteen minutes. Most often I leave having observed something about how a student learns or the way a teacher teaches. Occasionally, however, I learn something that makes me have the proverbial, "aha!" moment. That just happened. After leaving a fifth grade humanities class, I immediately sent the two teachers a thank you and sat down to write this.
As I walked in the room the students were watching a video of a dog trying, unsuccessfully, to carry a large stick across a narrow bridge. Cute, without a doubt. The students described what they saw as the dog persisted and, eventually, figured out how to carry the stick at an angle. The two teachers then connected this video clip to the word "yet." The dog did not give up thinking, "I can't do it" -- if dogs think such things. Instead the adorable brown lab thought, "I can't do it yet" and kept trying, eventually succeeding.
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Middle School Teachers Inspire Growth Mindset with "Try Everything" Music Video
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For many students, making mistakes can often invite feelings of frustration and shame. Gifted learners, especially, often struggle with perfectionism and other pressures that come with being high achievers. At Nueva, we want to encourage a growth mindset that propels students to take risks and see mistakes along the way as exciting opportunities for improvement and understanding, rather than an indication of fixed abilities.
One weekend in August, the middle school faculty met up at Fort Funston Beach in San Francisco to produce their video. From ballet dancing to volleyball to sandcastle building, the staff let loose and played their hearts out. They hope the video will serve as a conversation starter with their students and inspire them to dive into new activities and uncharted learning opportunities throughout the year.
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Host Ira Glass talks to Mariya Karimjee about a college application essay question. Essay B asks students to imagine a person they might meet in college-someone from a very different background. Ten years ago, Mariya's mostly white high school classmates in Texas didn't write about an imaginary person they might meet in the future. They just wrote about the one different person they already knew--Mariya.
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The Way to Survive It Was to Make A's
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By Mosi Secret, The New York Times Magazine
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T
he road to Virginia Episcopal School was more secluded in those days, winding a few miles from the white section of segregated Lynchburg through a wood of maple and oak to the school's rolling campus, shielded by trees and the more distant Blue Ridge Mountains. The usual stream of cars navigated the bends on the first day of school, white families ferrying their adolescent sons. Like nearly every other elite prep school in the South, it had been the boarding school's tradition since its founding in 1916 that its teachers guide white boys toward its ideal of manhood - erudite, religious, resilient. But that afternoon of Sept. 8, 1967, a taxi pulled up the long driveway carrying a black teenager, Marvin Barnard. He had journeyed across the state, 120 miles by bus, from the black side of Richmond, unaccompanied, toting a single suitcase. In all of Virginia, a state whose lawmakers had responded to the 1954 court-ordered desegregation of public schools with a strategy of declared "massive resistance," no black child had ever enrolled in a private boarding school. When Marvin stepped foot on V.E.S. ground, wearing a lightweight sport jacket, a white dress shirt, a modest necktie and a cap like the ones the Beatles were wearing, the white idyll was over.
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