PLP Pathways: Webinar 3 Recap -- Family Engagement and Student Led Conferences

On Thursday, November 15, PLP Pathways hosted the third webinar of our yearly professional development series. The topic of our webinar was building family engagement, positive relationships and the benefits of student-led conferences.

You can watch the recording of that webinar here.  Prior to the webinar, PLP Pathways published a short pre-webinar video on family engagement featuring PLP Pathways contributor Kevin Pioli-Hunt. That resource can be found here.

Our special guest was Vermont teacher and parent Melissa Akey. Melissa had three students go through the Swift House program at Williston Central School and provided dual perspectives as both an educator and parent.

Throughout the webinar, a primary theme that developed was the continuing importance of building relationships with both students and families.

It became clear that providing multiple opportunities for families to connect and engage with the school community and teachers was a critical element of creating a tight web of support for students.  

Additionally, a variety of innovative ways to engage students in the conference process were highlighted. These included "flipped conferences", multiple conferences across the year, providing childcare for families with younger siblings and even home visits.

Whatever the strategies being considered, building those connections with students and families is an important foundation for student success.

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Key Webinar Discussion Questions:

• What have been your experiences with communication and engagement with your children's’ teachers? What types of methods have been effective? Where do you see areas for growth?

• What activities/opportunities were there for parents to become engaged with the students and feel like they were part of the greater learning community?

• Your children were all on a middle school team that had student-led PLP conferences. How did these conferences impact your child’s engagement and ability to advocate for him/herself in high school? Did your children feel empowered by this?

Questions From the Field

• It’s so hard to find time for productive conferences. How do make the time for this?

• What should educators do about families that are disengaged? How can we get them more involved?

• What platforms are teachers using for personal learning plans or for  students to share their work at their conferences?

• How are students prepped for student-led conferences? How do they create their goals and show evidence of growth?

Professional Development

Don’t forget that if you choose to view the webinar, you can receive professional development credit for doing so. Here is the link for that professional development credit.

Thanks always for your work with Vermont’s students!

Announcements and Closing

• November 30: Building a Culture of Equity - Vermont Principals’ Association second equity summit, Champlain College, Burlington, VT.

• January 12th: Middle Grades Conference at UVM - Davis Center

• March 13: VAMLE Beyond Bullying Conference  - Champlain College

PLP Pathways: Notes From the Field

This PLP Pathways Note from the Field has been crafted by Kyle Chadburn and Andrea Gratton, middle level educators at Orleans Elementary School. You can follow them on Twitter @OEShumanities

The Importance of Reflecting on Identity

When working with adolescents, developing relationships and building the capacity for empathy is a must. Without those foundational relationships between staff and students, as well as students with each other, learning opportunities will not reach their greatest potential.

However, adolescence is a time when students are almost constantly changing. Their passions, interests, hobbies, strengths, challenges, and beliefs are in a state of flux that makes it difficult to build those powerful and necessary relationships. However, the more students are able to reflect on themselves as learners and as human beings, the better they can communicate their needs, strengthen bonds with those who are available to support them, and find the motivation they require to be successful inside and outside the school community.

Using PLPs to Explore Identity

The middle level of our K-8 school has been developing new ways for students to engage in guided reflection about their individual and group identities. Much of the progress on individual identity has come from our work on Personal Learning Plans (PLP). We have a designated PLP work time each Friday, and so far this year, we have focused that time solely on exploring the facets of our identities.

Setting the Stage: Surveys, Selfies, Strengths & Challenges

Our process began with a student interest survey. The survey asked questions ranging from curiosities to hobbies, and favorite things to future goals. Not only did this provide our middle school staff with a helpful tool so we might better understand the wide variety of interests our students have, but it also provided the students with a chance to realize interests or passions that they hadn’t really considered beforehand. I am often surprised by the number of students who, when prompted to answer the question “What are you interested in?” will respond with a simple, “Nothing.”  Yet, when you take the time to dig deeper and provide scaffolding for this type of self-inquiry, students suddenly realize that they have far more interests and curiosity than they thought. Often they simply have never been permitted or enabled to explore them in the past!

After students spent some time answering questions and learning about themselves, our next step is to reflect on personal strengths and challenges. We provided students with a list of critical, transferable skills that are valuable in academics and in other aspects of their lives. Students were also permitted to include additional skills that were not listed if they were able to explain the importance of the skill. When our list was complete, we asked students to choose the three skills that they believed were their greatest strengths and three that were their greatest challenges at this point in their lives. These lists were shared by students at their first student-led conference of the year in mid-September, and will be used, along with parents’ input from the conferences, to form PLP goals in the near future.

The final step, as we get this process started, is to allow students to provide a visual representation of themselves on their PLP website. This could be a sketch, a FlipGrid video, or the most popular choice, a selfie. Though it is easy to write off the selfie as a wasteful and indulgent activity, it is also important to remember that it is a significant part of the culture in which our students are living, and it can have far more significance in helping us understand our students than we might believe at first glance. How they choose to represent themselves in their selfies provides insight about how they hope to portray themselves to the world. Plus, it is a fun and engaging process, and a great chance for students to see teachers participating in an activity that belongs to their generation.

Digging Deeper: Core Values & Sketchnotes

We are now reaching the stage of our process where we ask students to dig even deeper into their identities by examining core values. Identifying strengths and challenges is an important first step, but it is when we ask students to think about what is most important to them that they truly start to broaden their abilities to be self-reflective. For some students, this may be the first time that they are asked specifically to assign value to non-material things and examine what it means for something to be intrinsically valuable. Similarly to our strengths and challenges activity, we provided student with an extensive list of values and attached definitions. We provided opportunities for students to challenge these definitions if they wished. We then asked them to apply a “zoom in” approach to defining their core values. They started with ten values that they appreciated in others, then reduced to seven, then to five. It was not an easy task for many students, and they needed a sounding board to make some of their decisions. Therefore, if students are comfortable doing so, this is a great opportunity for teachers to open conversations with students, or for students to open conversations with each other.

The second component to our core values work was asking each student to create a Sketchnote. In case you’re unfamiliar with Sketchnotes it is essentially a way to collect ideas creatively through drawn pictures, symbols, and limited words. Our students embraced this activity more than any other identity work up to this point. The process of translating their definitions and examples of these core values into a visual medium was incredibly powerful to watch, and the end products are sure to be as well!

Potential Drawbacks

Despite the many positives associated with taking the time to explore identity with adolescents, it is important to acknowledge the potential drawbacks as well. This is especially critical when trying to advocate for this time in your school’s schedule or space in your district’s curriculum. By acknowledging the limitations, and then clearly articulating ways that the benefits outweigh them, you will be able to make positive change more quickly.

One drawback, as is often the case, is the time commitment. In order to do these activities and get quality results, it will take some time. Our students have spent six, thirty-minute sessions on their PLPs so far this year, and we are part way through completing their core values Sketchnotes. However, we have found that it is time very well spent, and there are few other activities that will provide such profound insight into students.

Another potential drawback is the possibility of disengagement from some students. There are a number of reasons why students might disengage during this work. Some come from backgrounds where reflection vulnerability are frowned upon. Others may have suffered some form of trauma, and this type of introspection opens old wounds. Of course, there are always cases where some students just don’t seem to see or understand the value of these activities.

Regardless, we have found that the vast majority of students do engage in this work, and for those that do, the awareness they gain from the work makes it a worthwhile endeavor.

Growth, Goals, and Mindset

Deep into October, as our school year is maturing, many teachers and students are reviewing their initial growth and learning, developing goals for growth, and preparing for student-led conferences.

As part of the personal learning process, setting goals is a critical element and one which can be incredibly rewarding and somewhat vexing. To support Vermont educators implementing personalized learning in their learning communities, PLP Pathways hosted a webinar October 18 focused on the goal- setting process. You can watch the recording of that webinar here.

Our special guest was Vermont teacher and author Christine Hertz. She had some excellent perspectives and viewpoints with regards to goal setting and what we ask students to do in the process of setting goals.

Throughout the webinar, we discussed different formats for the creation of goals, the different strategies used to engage students with goal setting, and how we can use goal setting to create positive mindsets and better relationships with students.

Key discussion questions that were addressed included the following:

• When talking about goals setting in your book you talk about telling the “story” of a goal by identifying the what, how when or where. Can you walk us through how to use this process in our classrooms. How does Carol Dweck's research inform this practice?
• How can teachers and parents help co-construct goals?
• How do we avoid potential goal setting pitfalls when the child’s goal is different from the teacher's goal or the child has no goal in mind.
• When students have goals,  how do we help them remember it?
• How do you integrate literacy into the goal setting process? Do you have any favorite short stories or books that support goals setting?

Additionally, we took questions from practitioners and addressed those through our discussion. These included:

• How do you engage students in goal setting in your classroom?
• How are families included in the goal setting process?
• What ways do you incorporate intentional conversations and opportunities to talk about growth mindset and self-talk in your classroom?
• What happens if a student is struggling to set a goal?

What was particularly interesting about our conversation was how closely the development of goals and the goal setting process is tied to positive relationships and mindset in the classroom. The better the teacher-student relationship, the more effective and appropriate goal-setting can be.

If you have questions or what to review some resources, check out the PLP Pathways website and in particular, see this page for more examples.

Finally, don't forget that if you would like to earn professional development credit for time spent watching any of our webinars, you may do so by responding to questions based on that month's offerings.

Webinar 1: Identity and Building Relationships

Webinar 1 Professional Development Credit

Webinar 2: Goal Setting and Mindset

Webinar 2 Professional Development Credit

The Importance of Relationships

This blog post is from Kevin Pioli-Hunt, PLP Pathways contributor and teacher in Swift House,

Williston Central School.

This job is all about relationships. This was one of the first things I learned from my mentor teacher when I was student teaching and it has been a guiding force in my approach ever since. There will always be things that are out of the teacher’s control: new initiatives, changes in curriculum, changes in personnel. One thing that can remain constant, however, is the level of trust and rapport we build with our students year in and year out. Here are some tried and true methods we use to build relationships on Swift House:

Early Connections with Families

Summer Mailing

We are fortunate to be a 5th-8th grade team, so we have ample time to build strong, lasting relationships with students and families. Every summer, we send out a summer mailing to our new families and returning families. This letter consists of introductions, updates about the teachers’ professional growth over the summer (along with the fun!), core placements, student mentor/mentee pairs, and general logistics about the coming school year. For our new families, we also provide a student profile document for the upcoming Hopes and Dreams conference. Our hopes and dreams conferences occur a few days before school starts, and give us a chance to learn about our new core (homeroom/advisory) students. We also  begin the process of setting up some PLP goals before the school year even begins. It’s the first of many opportunities for our new students to not only feel connected with our team, but to also have a chance to advocate for themselves and their needs.

Mentor/Mentee Breakfast

The day before school starts, we have our 7th and 8th grade volunteer mentors come in for a mentor/mentee breakfast, which we host on Swift House. This, more times than not, is the mentor and mentees’ first interaction with one another, so we try to keep it as light and fun as possible. Mentors are given a questionnaire to fill out with their mentees, to get to know one another and help the conversation along, and then each of the four core classes do ten minute rotations where we play some fun and engaging team building games. We end the day by bringing all the mentors and mentees together in our Kiva space and play “signature squares” as one final getting-to-know-you activity before we leave.

Team Building

1st week of school

We embed team building activities (silent birthday line up, captain’s coming, shoe relay, play doh pictionary, etc) for the first 3-4 days of school. This happens in both small core (advisory) group settings within our morning meeting and large group as a whole team. We utilize our life studies and literacy blocks in our schedule  to make time for these team building activities. During our math classes, every teacher on Swift spends time focusing on growth mindset lessons(from youcubed.org) and establishing a classroom environment that values mistakes and learning from one another. We also make time early in the school year for students to complete some identity work that will go on their PLP. This year we used Chris Stevenson’s 5 Personal Efficacies as a foundation for our identity work. Students created a coat of arms in which they reflected on their competence, responsibility, awareness, affiliation, and sense of self.

Campout

An ongoing Swift tradition is our campout that happens on the second week of school. Every year, we bring students on an overnight camping trip to Grand Isle State Park. We begin planning for this on the first day back by delegating 8th grade campsite leaders. Once the campsite leaders are established, the leaders all meet with a teacher and begin making campsite groups. We begin with matching the mentors and mentees to help continue to build those relationships. After groups are made, they begin their campout planning. The students plan everything. They are in charge of collaborating and sorting out who is bringing what for dinner, campfires, tents, snacks, drinks, etc.

Once we arrive at camp, students work together to set up their tents and organize their sites and then we have a schedule of small group rotations and large group team building activities. There is of course freetime built in to swim in the lake or play and hang out with friends. The night ends with a Swift community dinner, where families and Swift alumni come to join us. This is an amazing opportunity to meet and socialize with the new families and have new parents meet returning parents and students. After dinner, we all have a bonfire and each of the campsite groups put on skits that they’ve been rehearsing. We end the night in a peaceful manner with candles and sharing what we are thankful for. This began in 2001. The Swift campout was the week after 9/11 and the facilitators held a candlelight vigil and had students and families share what they were thankful for in their lives. We have continued this ever since. For me, this moment at the campout when we are quiet with our faces illuminated by the flickering flame from the candles and sharing what we are thankful for, is when everybody feels what it means to be a member of this family.

Whether you are part of a team that has relationship building built into the culture, or brand new to the profession, it’s important to remember that making any effort to build relationships with your students will have a positive and lasting impact.

PLP Pathways: Supporting Teachers and Act 77

Today’s post is brought to you by Don Taylor, language arts and social studies teacher at Main Street Middle School in Montpelier and co-director of PLP Pathways.

Introduction

The PLP Pathways collaborative is excited to continue our work supporting teachers implementing Act 77 for a fourth consecutive year. For those not familiar with our organization, PLP Pathways is an educator driven professional development community created to support the implementation of the three pillars of personalized learning (personal learning plans, proficiency-based assessment, and flexible pathways) and the development of innovative curriculum for Vermont.

You can follow us on Twitter, join or view our webinars on YouTube, or access relevant resources through our website. If you’ve got information or material that you think would help kids, teachers, and communities, let us know and we’ll spotlight those resources.

Building Student Relationships

As students, teachers, parents and the community approach the 2018-2019 school year, it’s always a great reminder to consider the relationships that, as educators, we will be creating and renewing over the first days, weeks, and months of the school year.

Are the “get to know you activities” planned for the first days of school designed to support students transitioning into the new school year? Are the activities linked to broader relationship building that will enhance the learning community? Are any of the planned activities designed to increase understanding of student needs relative to proficiencies and the development of flexible pathways? Can we begin building positive relationships with students that will  be a foundation for the development of independent learners capable of directing their own educational journey?

Thoughtfully planning these initial activities with the idea that resulting relationships, created over the initial part of the school year, will create dynamic learning communities can be the difference between a good year and a great year. One tool that we’ve used over the past few years to help develop this process is the Personal Learning Framework.

The Framework breaks down the student’s journey through the learning experience into three phases: Identity, Growth and Reflection, and Transformation. The Identity phase focuses on introductory activities that reveal student interests, strengths, challenges and goals. Exploring these in an intentional and purposeful way can help educators who are building curriculum, designing personal learning plans, and intent on building great student-teacher relationships. Find out more about some innovative Identity activities on our website.

Building Professional Relationships

Through the course of our work we’ve found that positive classroom relationships are enhanced through the development of supportive professional relationships. PLP Pathways thrives in large part due to our work with other organizations. These include support from the Middle Grades Collaborative, collaboration with the Tarrant Institute, resources from UP for Learning, and the innovation of Vermont Learning for The Future. As the new year begins, we encourage you to reach out to the numerous professional organization available that will help support your work, create positive relationships, and lead to a rewarding and successful school year. PLP Pathways looks forward to this work, to strengthening our relationships, and to supporting all your efforts. Good luck on the first day of school and keep in touch!

PLP Pathways: It's a Wrap

For PLP Pathways, today marks the start of summer. Yesterday, we finished the 2017-2018 school year with the closing of the Middle Grades Institute at Castleton University. As always, the Institute gave us the opportunity to reconnect with friends, colleagues and committed educators from across Vermont.

Supported by the Middle Grades Collaborative and the Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education, the Middle Grades Institute focuses on those principles and practices of middle level education that foster student growth and learning.

This year, the Institute used Chris Stevenson's 5 Efficacies: affiliation, ethical self, competence, responsibility, and awareness to frame how we engage middle level learners.



Coupled with existing pedagogical frameworks, these efficacies help understand middle level learners and give us touchpoints to consider as we continue developing our practices.

A key overarching theory underlying these efficacies continues to be the development of student voice and choice to increase engagement. Over and over again we hear the importance of engaging students by empowering them in the educational process. For a case study in how this can be accomplished in the high school classroom, check out this reflection by Alison Gauthier of U-32 high school.

Moving forward, Stevenson's 5 Efficacies will be woven into our work as we continue to support innovative and engaging teaching throughout Vermont and beyond.

To our contributors, supporters andall teachers and students who have worked so hard this year, have a great summer. 

The emPOWERment of Authentic Audiences

Written by Alison Gauthier, Dawn McConnell & Hope McConnell

Vermont’s Act 77 encompasses three pillars - Personalized Learning Plans, Flexible Pathways, and Proficiency-Based Learning and Assessment. Fluid across the three pillars, authentic audiences support students with both accountability and feedback as they grow and learn.

This spring, ninth grade students from U-32 experienced authentic audiences when presenting about their Earth Science unit related to Climate Change and Engineering. The unit was designed with Act 77 specifically in mind - a flexible process and product to reach a common set of proficiencies on the Sustainability and Engineering Science standards.

Based on interest, students were organized in “country” teams of two or three persons; each team represented a country affected by climate change. From Haiti and Bangladesh to the United States and Germany, each team had to determine the specific ways that climate change was affecting their area of the world - and determine feasible solutions to either adapt to, or mitigate, these effects. Each country had a budget (the country’s actual GDP per capita) to purchase items from the engineering store to design a prototype solution for their specific problem. Items at the store had inflated prices - for example, a piece of paper was $100 and a pipe cleaner was $50. Countries with a smaller GDP per capita were forced to think creatively about their project, or get grants from other, more-wealthy countries.

The summative of the unit were the country presentations where students had to “sell” their prototype to other countries. Each person was granted $20,000 from the UN to buy prototypes that their specific country needed, and these individuals were accountable to their team and to other countries because they were attempting to “sell” their specific prototype to others. To make their prototype more appealing, teams had tested out the prototype and analyzed data in order to yield evidence that this would indeed work for other countries. From slides to posters to short movies, no advertising scheme was the same.

This was the first authentic audience that students in this class experienced this year in Science.     

Shortly after the country presentation, Hope McConnell,

a 9th grader at U-32, presented to a different authentic audience. U-32 received a Vermont Academy of Science and Engineering (VASE) small equipment grant earlier in the year to purchase engineering supplies for the store. These included several 3D pens, a soldering kit, and an introductory coding kit. Hope presented to legislators and VASE partners at the State House in Montpelier, describing her country’s climate change project, and explaining how the VASE-supplied 3D pen enabled her team to create a floating greenhouse.

Hope’s slideshow can be found here. As the teacher watching Hope present to legislators about climate change, I was struck by the level of conversations she engaged in with adults and other teens in the room. Hope also had background from her ninth grade Global Studies class related to the state and international policies related to climate change, and I quickly saw the conversations progress from discussing her project to discussing international policy. Hope talked animatedly about “mitigation” and “adaptation” and how her assigned country in the “Global South” is suffering from effects largely caused by the “Global North”. At one point, Hope encouraged legislators to push specific policies that would help Vermont mitigate its emissions.

Later in the spring, Hope McConnell (9th grader), Iona Bristol (9th grader), and Maeve Hoffert (8th grader) presented at the ECET2 conference in Hanover, New Hampshire. Founded by teachers, for teachers, ECET2 stands for Elevating and Celebrating Effective Teaching and Teachers, and their mission is to bring exceptional educators together for meaningful collaboration and professional development.

Hope, Iona, and Maeve gave a presentation about the climate change unit to a small group of teachers from Vermont and New Hampshire. They explained how they were able to personalize their product and process, while still showing proficiency on the various scales. The presentation was engaging (they had the teachers try out an engineering problem) and informative. The teachers were interested in how the students were able to show their voice through the project. One teacher from New Hampshire asked each of them to explain something that went well in the unit, and something they would change for the future. As their teacher, I was taking notes of their responses as a form of feedback to make the unit better in the future.

At the conference, I was again impressed by how the students acted with this new audience. When watching other presentations by teachers around New England, they asked questions, were engaged, and came up to me after with ideas for our class and school. “Do you know how competency-based learning is happening at this school in New Hampshire?” Iona asked me. “Our principal needs to hear about this!”

Dawn McConnell, Hope’s mother, stated this following the ECET2 conference: “I was surprised at how much Hope enjoyed attending the teachers' conference with you. She had a great day and came away with a greater appreciation for what teachers do. I think it was the first time that she was exposed to what goes into the planning and thinking behind lesson planning. She was impressed by the care and discussions of the teachers regarding how to present information and engage students. She told me that she even spoke up in the one of the teacher sessions to offer her perspective on reaching students who are struggling in class. It occurs to me that these kinds of interactions are beneficial to the teachers and the students. I'm wondering if there might be other opportunities for students and teachers to share their struggles (and successes) with each other in a similar format. It certainly helped my daughter to have renewed respect for teachers and gain an understanding of their perspective.”

During the conference and following these words from Dawn, I realized that exposing adolescents to authentic audiences is actually an act of empowerment. By learning about various perspectives and understandings, students walk away with more tools in their learning toolkit. Authentic audiences not only benefit from the knowledge, skills and questions of our students, but our students benefit from the insight, inquiries, and opinions of others.