The “Culturally Responsive Standards Edition” No images? Click here Teach Plus Illinois Honors Black History MonthTeach Plus Illinois recognizes the continuous efforts, accomplishments and contributions from Black educators, leaders and allies. We appreciate those that continue to push for equity, foster students' successes, and be outstanding pillars for the community. Thank you! From Teach Plus Illinois Josh Kaufmann, Executive Director, Teach Plus Illinois Dear Teachers, This month, we recognize and honor the contributions of Black educators -- from people like Euphemia Haynes, who taught for 47 years and was the first woman to chair the DC Board of Education -- to Teach Plus alumnus Corey Winchester, who spoke on a TedX stage at Northwestern University about how to educate radically. We recognize the teachers who work with Black students to affirm their humanity in an often unfriendly world. And we thank those teachers who work to share knowledge of Black history with students of all backgrounds. If you think back to your first year of teaching, I’m sure you can identify many things you did wrong, sometimes because you didn’t understand well enough how to support all the students in your class. We have an advocacy opportunity, TODAY, to ensure that future teachers are better prepared to meet the needs of all their students through supporting the new proposed Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards. These standards outline best practices for educators, so that students from all backgrounds feel welcome. They encourage teachers to self-reflect, get to know their students’ families, connect the curriculum to students’ lives, and encourage student leadership. Great teachers already do this, and the standards are about offering more support for these best practices. These standards also ask teachers to learn and reflect on systems of oppression that many marginalized students face. As a result, the standards have become politicized, the newest cause celebre for conservatives and a source of great misinformation. If you’d like a good, even-handed explanation of the standards, check out this great blog explainer. You can get a sense of the misinformation around these standards in this op-ed by George Will, and a rebuttal I wrote in the Chicago Tribune. There are two policy actions, each taking no more than 5 minutes, that you can do TODAY to honor the intent of Black History Month. The first is to write a short email to the Joint Committee on Administrative Review (jcar@ilga.gov), which will be making a decision on these standards on February 16. Please consider taking five minutes to write to JCAR (3-4 sentences is all it would take), and if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. The second is to sign this letter of support, drafted by our partner Advance Illinois, to urge that the state invest new dollars into its funding formula which directs money to the districts that need it the most. Moving forward together, Josh The Practice Corner Kristen Ciciora, Illinois Director of Instructional Programs As we come up on the year mark of the pandemic, everyone inside and outside of education has an opinion about "what school should look like." This experience has caused us to debate so many things about our current education system--the meaning of grades, the role of school in society, the value of "seat time," and the idea of "learning loss" in regards to students falling behind in standards and benchmark assessments. While folks are hyper-focused on the right now, especially where there has been contentious disagreement about returning to in-person learning, I am particularly interested in what school is going to look like once we return back to some sort of normalcy (hoping for this fall!). Will we keep some aspects of remote learning that were actually silver linings (like allowing parents to click into a zoom link for conferences instead of having to take half a day off work)? How will we assess where students are at and differentiate to meet their incredibly diverse needs? Will students just all move to the next grade and teachers will be left to figure it out? Or will schools blow up the whole idea of grade levels and create some sort of new system that allows for flexible groupings of students based on where they're at and what they need? I'm interested in what teachers from across Illinois think--please feel free to shoot me an email at kciciora@teachplus.org, and keep an eye out for a flash poll next month! Kristen OpportunitiesFulcrum Education Solutions: A FREE two-part series! Join Fulcrum Education Solutions for a free, two-part series on Designing and Leading Adult Learning (Feb 22 & March 22). Collaborate with other leaders to bring purpose, energy, and focus to your adult gathering and learning spaces. In this two-part, virtual series, you will gain strategies to help you get ‘unstuck’ while refreshing and refining your adult meetings and professional learning spaces. Through collaboration with other school leaders, we will share tools to simplify your planning, more deeply engage the teams of adults you lead, and plan to enhance the adult learning and gathering culture in your community. Register here. Black Lives Matter at School: National Week of Action! The Black Lives Matter coalitions published a resource drive FULL of materials for all levels of students on Google Drive. Teachers, students, parents and other adults alike have access to activity books, lesson plans at the elementary through post-secondary grade levels, visuals and posters, multilingual resources and more! You can access this FREE resource drive here, today! Haymarket Book SALE! Take 40% off Haymarket books on Black liberation, feminism, art and struggle, radical traditions, and so much more. And, receive a free ebook with each purchase! Shop for this this deal and more here. Start Early: Job Opportunity Start Early is looking to hire a policy specialist who would focus on their work in special education and other state systems building. While working on the Illinois Policy Team, you will shape the foundational elements of Illinois’ early childhood system, including major funding streams, legislation and federal and state initiatives, through legislative, administrative, and grassroots advocacy. They work at federal, state, and local levels to influence policy change. Please click here. Chicago Public Schools: Job Opportunity CPS is hiring an Educator Equity Specialist that will focus on recruiting teachers into the CPS Opportunity School cohort. The Educator Equity team in the CPS Talent Office is focused on improving teacher recruitment and retention in Chicago Public Schools in low-income communities. For more information and to apply, click here. COMING SOON: Teach Plus Illinois Fellowship Applications Applications for the 2021-2022 Teaching Policy Fellowship, the Early Childhood Educator Policy Fellowship, and the Chicago Change Agent Fellowship will open in March 2021. Our instructional practice and policy programs grow teachers as leaders and empower them to take action in order to increase equitable opportunities for students. Be on the lookout for the application links soon! Teach Plus IL News Teach Plus Illinois Executive Director Josh Kaufmann shares his thoughts on why New Teaching Standards will Make Classrooms More Inclusive in the Chicago Tribune. My first day as a teacher, in an urban school very different from the suburban one I attended, I asked all the students to line up in groups of three so I could take their pictures. I was worried about learning their names and thought this would help. However, several students refused, and I stood there, confused. Why wouldn’t they want me to do this?...Read more Teaching Policy Senior Fellow Alex Parker was interviewed by NBC News for their Project Innovation Segment to discuss his contributions to the Nora Project, The Nora Project serves as a powerful resource to create understanding and provide training for students with disabilities and their peers. Their network of trained teachers and partner schools will reach over 200 classrooms this year. To learn more about the Project, click here. To see the entire NBC interview, click here. Teaching Policy Senior Fellow Arnetta Thompson hosted the new president of the Illinois State Senate, Senator Don Harmon for her Critical Thinking Skills Class! To learn more about Senator Harmon, visit here. Good Reads and Good Listens Teaching Policy Fellowship Alumni Keisha Wembert and Corey Winchester were featured in an awesome Illinois State Board of Education podcast episode entitled: "Culturally Responsive Teaching & Leading: A Conversation With Three Educators". Corey is a high school history and social science teacher in Evanston, Golden Apple winner and former IL History Teacher of the Year. Keisha, who is also is a member of the Diverse and Learner Ready Teacher Network which helped develop the new standards, is the 2019 Outstanding Middle-level Educator in English Language Arts and is now an assistant professor of teacher preparation at National Louis University Chicago. Listen to the whole podcast here. Teaching Policy Fellowship Alumna Gina Caneva shares her thoughts on known Chicago Teachers' Union activist and recently deceased, Karen Lewis in the Chicago Tribune. We were not scared, and we wouldn’t show it if we were... She spoke about working conditions and learning conditions. This was not just about Emanuel asking for a longer school day and not paying teachers for it. It was about decades of disinvestment in a school system that serves Black and Latinx children. Read more Remembering Karen Lewis: Chalkbeat honors the life and legacy of former CTU president Lewis, and her committment to fighting for equity and change. Lewis presided over the union from 2010 until she stepped down in 2018 to focus on her treatment for brain cancer...As president, she, along with the group that took leadership, the Caucus of Rank and File Educators, popularized the “common good” approach to union organizing that brought social issues to the core of their platform and pushed for teachers’ voices in shaping public education policy. Read more Teaching Black History in Culturally Responsive Ways. Black history is American history, and it should be taught throughout the year across the curriculum—not confined to a single month. -Rann Miller As Black History Month kicked off, I was reflecting on my time as a student. My experience all those years ago was similar to that of most Black children today: mostly White teachers teaching Black history primarily in February. Read more
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