Educational Resources & Tech Tools 12/03/2021

• How to Help Students Manage Anxiety - SEL Skills by SOAR Learning

  tags: SEL anxiety stress

  • Anxiety severely limits –and often blocks– all logical and rational problem-solving regions of the brain. So, don’t expect to talk someone out of anxiety or rationalize with them. When students don’t respond to verbal coaching, they aren’t being difficult or defiant. The biology of their brain simply makes it impossible for them to think with reason.

     

    To help a student break out of an anxiety spell, get them moving! Aerobic activity is the fastest, most effective way to break the virtuous cycle of anxiety.

     

    Next, get them talking about the problem. Have them describe what the problem is, why it is bothering them, and how they feel about it using a feeling wheel. To get our SOAR^® Feelings Wheel, sign up for our “How Do I Feel?” Curriculum Kit in the blue box on the right of this page.

     

    This process does many things, it: draws the problem up to higher regions of the brain, minimizes the sense of “threat,” gives students a great sense of empowerment over the situation, and helps them better identify potential solutions.

     

    Finally, build their skills. Build their skills for managing the anxiety and skills for managing the situation that triggered the anxiety. To learn more about skills for overcoming stress and anxiety, check out the SOAR Social-Emotional Learning Curriculum.

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 10/14/2021

• How parents and educators can support healthy teen use of social media - MindShift

  tags: SEL social media digitalcitizenship digital citizenship tech Technology

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 10/08/2021

• ‘Trauma Is A Lens, Not A Label’: How Schools Can Support All Students - MindShift

  • Research about child trauma shows how important it is that children are in caring relationships with stable and supportive adults. In order to be ready for those relationships, that means in schools: "the adults need to feel cared for, connected and grounded in order to have the capacity to show up for kids,” said Venet.
  • In order to check in and make sure that educators feel that they can do all they need to do within the hours of the work week, she advises that school leaders provide space for teachers to ask questions, ideate and reflect with their principal or school counselor. “We have a cultural expectation that people aren’t working after hours.

  • Another way to support teachers’ working conditions and workload is “tap in, tap out,” a self care strategy from Fall-Hamilton Elementary School in Nashville, Tennessee. In this technique, educators form a text message group to contact whoever is available to temporarily fill in for them whenever they need to take a moment to step out and regroup during class.

     

  • “Too often, teachers perceive trauma as something that comes from ‘outside of school,’” said Venet. “Much of the research and writing on trauma frames it as resulting from factors schools cannot control.” When effectively applied, trauma-informed education means critically examining how oppression at schools causes trauma in students. Oppression can happen outside of schools as well as within schools, caused by peers in bullying situations, individual teachers and curriculum. 

     

  • making sure students know what is available to them when they are struggling whether it’s having flyers on the wall, information on the school websites, or informed teachers that can point them in the right direction.
  • High achievers affected by trauma are especially at risk for being overlooked, and adults often misinterpret their coping for resilience. 

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 08/04/2021

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 05/30/2021

• NAIS - An International School Shares Six Touchstones to Cultivate Global Citizens

  • To be sure, we benefit from a multilingual, multinational school community and from bilingual, French, and International Baccalaureate programs. But we believe any motivated school can offer an internationally minded education. At French American, we call it cross-cultural cognition — the ability to think, feel, and act across cultures.
  • We aim for students to understand and appreciate identity as a rich mix of national, regional, cultural, ethnic, religious, gender, orientation, socioeconomic, and other factors. This keeps the focus on what we have in common so we don’t become ensnared by differences, stereotypes, and simplifications that incite conflict at home and abroad.
    
  • Languages are loaded with culture, attitudes, tradition, history, etiquette, and more. To learn another language is to gain an alternate perspective, increase empathy, and become open to cultural cues.
  • We also honor our students’ home languages. If we are educating global citizens, we are affirming the value of each child’s identity, including his or her language.
  • Rather than pushing international faculty members and students to assimilate into our school culture, we encourage them to share their cultures with us. We believe having an educator or fellow student share his or her personal cultural background significantly enriches all students’ experiences.
  • Middle schoolers in our Arabic and Mandarin language classes do not just learn the language; they are exposed to our educators’ cultures, thereby developing an understanding of different countries’ lifestyles, customs, and attributes.
  • At French American, we define cross-cultural cognition as the ability to grapple with challenging and abstract concepts from science and math to humanities, social science, and arts in more than one culture.
  • In pedagogy, this can mean highlighting the different ways that cultures approach the academic disciplines — and even learning itself.
  • We have seen how an international school approach to identity, language, community, curriculum, travel, and sustainability can shape the character of our students for the benefit of our communities — in this country and across the world.

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 05/10/2021

• 8 Workflow: projects | R for Data Science

  • There is a great pair of keyboard shortcuts that will work together to make sure you’ve captured the important parts of your code in the editor:

     
     
    1. Press Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + F10 to restart RStudio.
     
    2. Press Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + S to rerun the current script.
     
     

    I use this pattern hundreds of times a week.

  • You should never use absolute paths in your scripts, because they hinder sharing: no one else will have exactly the same directory configuration as you.

• 4 Workflow: basics | R for Data Science

  • All R statements where you create objects, assignment statements, have the same form:

     

    object_name <- value
    

     

    When reading that code say “object name gets value” in your head.

     

  • We recommend snake_case where you separate lowercase words with _.

• 1 Introduction | R for Data Science

  • Tidying your data means storing it in a consistent form that matches the semantics of the dataset with the way it is stored. In brief, when your data is tidy, each column is a variable, and each row is an observation.
  • A good visualisation will show you things that you did not expect, or raise new questions about the data.
  • Visualisations can surprise you, but don’t scale particularly well because they require a human to interpret them.
  • Models are complementary tools to visualisation. Once you have made your questions sufficiently precise, you can use a model to answer them.
  • by its very nature a model cannot question its own assumptions. That means a model cannot fundamentally surprise you.
  • There’s a rough 80-20 rule at play; you can tackle about 80% of every project using the tools that you’ll learn in this book, but you’ll need other tools to tackle the remaining 20%.

  • The complement of hypothesis generation is hypothesis confirmation. Hypothesis confirmation is hard for two reasons:

     
     

    1. You need a precise mathematical model in order to generate falsifiable predictions. This often requires considerable statistical sophistication.

     

    2. You can only use an observation once to confirm a hypothesis.

    • Hypothesis generation and confirmation
  • models are often used for exploration, and with a little care you can use visualisation for confirmation. The key difference is how often do you look at each observation: if you look only once, it’s confirmation; if you look more than once, it’s exploration.
    • Models for exploration, visualizations for confirmation

• 2 Introduction | R for Data Science

  • The goal of data exploration is to generate many promising leads that you can later explore in more depth.

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 03/30/2021

• "The Rainbow Connection" at 40: Paul Williams Reflects on Kermit the Frog's Banjo Classic | The Bluegrass Situation

  tags: graduation graduation speech speech

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 03/16/2021

• 'Black Season' at My White Middle School

  • It was our responsibility to make sure that our peers knew that an HBCU wasn’t an H&R Block for black folks. As students, we were also teachers. We just weren’t on the faculty payroll.
  • It’s nearly impossible to find a black kid in a predominantly white school who is unfamiliar with the idea of speaking for the race
  • We survivors all have our stories of fatigue and indignation at the moments when something black would emerge in the classroom and white kids’ heads swiveled in our direction in unison, expecting us to pick up the narration.

  • in the Black History Month show, we got to control the narrative."

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 03/15/2021

• Private Schools Are Indefensible - The Atlantic

  • if these children want to attend an elite college, their best bet by far is to spend their adolescence in a school where the experience of being Black is, for many, a painful one.
  • Among the posts from more recent students, what’s striking is that several kinds of experiences were related over and over: the expectation that Black kids would be excellent athletes (and possibly weaker students); insulting assumptions about Black students’ family backgrounds; teachers repeatedly confusing the names of Black students; other students constantly reaching out and touching Black girls’ hair; and non-Black students using the N‑word. Read collectively, these posts are a damning statement about the schools.
  • ‘Okay, we’re now welcoming you to the majority, where you should be’—with the white people, so to speak.” But “inherently within that, you are sacrificing who you are as a person—and it’s not like that would ever happen on the opposite end.” There had been costs to going to Spence. One of those, she now realizes, was “sacrificing my Blackness.”
  • Private-school parents have become so terrified of being called out as racists that they will say nothing on the record about their feelings regarding their schools’ sudden embrace of new practices. They have chosen, instead, anonymous letters and press leaks.
  • The parents had demands of their own, including an immediate halt to curriculum changes.
  • Many schools for the richest American kids have gates and security guards; the message is you are precious to us. Many schools for the poorest kids have metal detectors and police officers; the message is you are a threat to us.

  • Shouldn’t the schools that serve poor children be the very best schools we have?

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 03/08/2021

• Peggy McIntosh: How to recognize your white privilege — and use it to fight inequality | TED Talk

  tags: DEI affinity groups privilege white ted

• Peggy McIntosh: How to recognize your white privilege — and use it to fight inequality | TED Talk

  tags: white privilege DEI affinity groups

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 02/22/2021

• People often take men's expertise for granted, but expect wo...

  People often take men's expertise for granted, but expect women to prove theirs. New study of econ presentations: women aren't just interrupted more. They're asked more hostile and patronizing questions. Respect shouldn't be contingent on identity. htt

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 02/18/2021

• The first time I realized I was black - CNN.com

  VIdeo series by CNN. Each video is about two minutes.

  tags: DEI social justice diversity

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 02/01/2021

• 7 Steps Toward Building an Equitable School Culture | Edutopia

  • microaggressions, they wrote, are “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to individuals because of their group membership.
  • The persons making the comments may be otherwise well-intentioned and unaware of the potential impact of their words.”
  • such comments also position the dominant culture (Euro-American) as normal and the marginalized group as aberrant.
  • You can find additional examples of different forms of microaggressions here.
  • Antiracism is the process of unlearning these biases and observing ourselves to see where and when these biases surface.
  • Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself.
  • For White people, that means taking time to examine and unlearn internalized dominance of White supremacy.
  • Think of yourself as an agent for a healthy, antiracist culture, not as the sole creator of it.
  • Develop humanizing ways to begin and close meetings. Check-in questions
  • Closing rituals such as process checks, which surface patterns of participation and facilitator moves, bring a reflective and purposeful closing tone.
  • Make sure the adults in the building are employing the same language and concepts when it comes to antiracism work.
  • Terms such as implicit bias, structural racism, White supremacy, and microaggressions should be explicitly taught, discussed, and defined within the context of the local school community and history.
  • “right to comfort,” a symptom of White supremacy culture that aims to smooth over conflict without getting to the root of the issues. Instead, norms should reflect a culture of curiosity, listening, and vulnerability: bravery. In brave spaces, adults can work in their optimal zone of development.

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 01/30/2021

• Principal found that applying a clear f...

  Principal @jessicacabeen found that applying a clear framework to her decision-making process made it a lot easier—for everyone. https://t.co/FtqZ1hq3FG

• “Brave spaces” are key to anti-racist en...

  “Brave spaces” are key to anti-racist environments. Learn more about how to support anti-racist practices at your school. https://t.co/O9kASfpb2I

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 01/04/2021

• Frame of Reference Exercise

  tags: DEI social justice diversity racial justice

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 01/03/2021

• NAIS - Addressing Anti-Blackness and the Trauma of the Past and Present

  • “How does your identity impact your pedagogy?” Group members sat in silence looking around the room for an entry point to start this uncomfortable conversation. I grimaced as I watched my colleagues shift in their seats. As a Black, queer woman from the South and a humanities scholar, I had engaged in deep self-examinations around this issue.
  • Why were they employing euphemisms and talking about racism in the abstract as if it were not here among us? 
  • it became obvious that the colorblind lens helped assuage those who were not people of color of any feeling of discomfort.
  • When we do talk about diversity, school leaders, administrators, faculty, and DEI practitioners often conflate Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), LGBTQIA+, and international students as one monolithic group. But this conflation erases the experiences of Black students. The harsh reality is that our independent schools are disproportionately harming our Black students.

• NAIS - The Truth About Making Real Change for Racial Justice

  tags: DEI social justice diversity racial justice

  • To look at ourselves honestly means to ask: Why are our schools here? The raison d’être of independent schools has been, and continues to be, that of advancing the interests of those who already have privilege—to provide a return on investment (ROI) to those who have sufficient disposable income to afford independent school. To put it differently, our main job is to preserve the social status quo or reproduce the elite; this class-bound purpose results in a hierarchical view of the world in which our students are destined for leadership. In our mission statements, the idea that we are creating leaders is almost universal. On their face, these statements provide a binary and hierarchical understanding of society, one in which there are leaders and followers, and we are teaching the leaders.
  • noblesse oblige, a worldview that accepts and perpetuates existing social hierarchies while promoting social good.
  • When we look at our schools’ service programs, the idea of “giving back” is ubiquitous. Yet we fail to discuss or even question how much taking is appropriate.
  • Families send their kids to our schools, and we must prove that we are better than local public or other school options. In other words, we ask the majority of our families to give us financial support so that their kids can get more—not necessarily different—than what their taxes pay for; the “more” is the ROI.
  • Furthermore, this hierarchical worldview permeates our practices—from grading to sports, we promote hierarchies cemented on ability, access, and popularity, among other things. By viewing race problems in our schools in purely cultural terms, we are articulating our hope that we will promote some hierarchies while erasing other hierarchies based on race, gender, and sexual orientation. But as we know, hierarchies intersect and sustain each other.
  • the demand that our teachers get better or different professional development, that we hire and admit more people of color, and that we collectively become culturally competent is a way to deal with the symptoms of racism, not with a system of racism.
  • Why would those who have privilege, and want to keep it by paying for a special pathway for their children, want to give it up? Anyone familiar with the college admission process knows the tensions that emerge around race and class. If our students and families are happy to embrace the language of inclusion, such superficial pretense often evaporates when college admission lists appear. It is then that we see the hard limits of our inclusivity.
      
     The families in our communities are essentially good people who want to share, but they don’t want to be left out.
  • They like the idea of “giving back” but do not want to take less.
  • many of our enrollment challenges derive from the fact that millennial families are looking for meaning and value—not access. We need to stop worrying about providing an illusory ROI and ensure that we help our students develop lives of meaning and purpose; we need to stop worrying exclusively about leadership and prepare them for ethical and active citizenship. It is only when we can talk to our students about the need to take less so that others can have their fair share that we will be able to honestly talk about race.

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 01/01/2021

• Resisting the Pushback Against the Work for Racial Equity and Justice  — Teaching While White

  • whenever there’s a concerted effort to address racism in the nation, forces of resistance rise up.

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 12/31/2020

• The Dos and Dont's of Talking to Kids of Color About White Supremacy | Colorlines

  • Do ground your children in a worldview that includes their spirituality, family traditions, heritage, cultural values and
  • self-respect.
  • Don’t perpetuate the myth that we live in a colorblind society. Everyone is not treated the same, and race and color do matter and America is a not meritocracy where they will succeed if they just try hard enough. Even if you believed this in the past, those ideas lack credibility today. If you need to do an about face, say so and explain why.
  • And research shows that by the time a Black boy turns 10, White adults often perceive him as being up to four years older than he is and less innocent than other children. A study released in June revealed that Black girls ages 5 through 14 are viewed as more sexually mature and less innocent than their White peers.
  • Do role-play to help them practice what to say during stressful encounters.

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 12/21/2020

• Listen and Connect: How Parents Can Support Teens’ Mental Health Right Now - MindShift

  • “It sounds really simple, but the thing that teenagers are craving the most is connection and listening because this is hard for everyone,” she said.

     

  • “Children take their cues first from us, always. We are their people.” But adults do not need to be paragons of positivity. We don’t have to pretend it’s easy, says Hurley. Instead, we can talk about how we are feeling with teens “so that they know that, right now, feeling like you're on a roller coaster every day is normal.”
  • “Whether it is taking that daily walk or doing an online yoga class or some sort of exercise to get the endorphins going, we have to think about our own coping strategies,” says Hurley. She also strongly recommends meditation apps because mindfulness is a proven way to reduce the acute stress response. “When we use it, it works.”

  • Check-In Without Interviewing

     

  • Hurley said the most common response she’s hearing from kids right now is that they are lonely. They miss their friends, and they miss “a teacher leaning over their desk to point something out on their paper. Teachers have this magical way of connecting with kids in small ways and they can't get that over Zoom, no matter how hard they try.”

  • Parents often report that their teens are not coming to them for support. But they are, Hurley says.

     

    “They're just doing it in a way that you don't like. When they're venting or sniping at you over little things – there it is!

  • Even as the ‘warm fuzzies’ are not often reciprocated, teens still need them, still need to know they are loved unconditionally.”

• Should Schools Be Giving So Many Failing Grades This Year?

  • “The question is not, how can we get these kids who are close to failing to not fail. It’s, what is not working for those kids?” MacIndoe said. “How can we do a better job for them?”

• NAIS - NAIS Research: Budget Considerations for the 2021-2022 School Year

  tags: budget tuition

  • Data from the NAIS Snapshot surveys of varying groups of independent school leaders reveal that 61% of schools have increased their expense budgets for the 2020-2021 fiscal year, while 58% are projecting a loss for the same time period.
  • 49% of schools experienced a decrease in enrollment for the 2020-2021 school year, with 33% seeing a decrease of greater than 5%. At the same time, 47% of schools reduced their fundraising goals from the previous year.[2] Tuition revenue will only help fill the gap at some schools: 49% increased their tuition, while 41% kept it the same and just 5% of schools reduced it.[3] However, 70% do expect to raise tuition in 2021-2022.[4]
  • Sixty-seven percent of schools have already implemented revenue-increasing strategies, and 76% plan to do the same in 2021-2022. Schools most commonly plan to rely on summer programs, with 67% already offering them and 79% likely to for the next summer.
  • 74% of schools increased their technology budgets.[6] Thirty-six percent expect IT expenses to increase further in 2021-2022.[7] Other schools appear to be angling to attract and retain staff despite the cost: 43% increased salaries (compared to 21% who cut them), and 74% hired additional staff (though data from a different sample of NAIS members found that 30% had implemented a hiring freeze, while 19% instituted layoffs).[8] Additionally, 38% of schools have increased their general financial aid budgets, with 31% increasing it by more than 5%. Fifty-four percent have established a separate emergency grant fund for students needing additional assistance.
  • Despite the need for additional teacher training in online and hybrid learning, professional development budgets have frequently been cut to make up for additional spending elsewhere, with 41% of the schools decreasing the amount allocated (and 26% decreasing it by more than 16%).[10] Thirty-nine percent of schools are likely to continue to reduce professional development in 2021-2022, and 22% may freeze it altogether.
  • adding new degree programs was a common and successful tactic for boosting enrollment during the Great Recession and one that was also popular with faculty.
  • A parallel tactic for independent schools in markets that have seen increased demand for their programs, whether in-person or online, would be to add a part-time or afterschool component for parents worried about learning loss for their public school students.
  • Determining what motivates your parents can help your school focus its offerings and rein in expenses, helping you focus on what matters most to families.
  • Fifty-five percent of independent schools lost teachers this year due to COVID-19 concerns, and 8% lost 5% or more of their teaching staff, according to NAIS Snapshot surveys.[21] All of this has led to a nationwide shortage in both dedicated substitutes and, more broadly, people who can just watch over a classroom when the teacher isn’t physically present.
  • The goal of financial sustainability seems to have been superseded by the reality of teaching during a global pandemic
  • To address the substitute shortage in South Dakota, for example, one public school district partnered with a local university’s college of education. Teaching candidates are able to get the field experience hours required for their degree by substitute teaching in various classrooms.
  • After all, the job market for recent graduates has shrunk dramatically during the pandemic, with unemployment during the third quarter of 2020 particularly high among young people—almost 18% of 18- to 19-year-olds were unemployed as were about 15% of 20- to 24-year-olds.
  • • One-time revenue shortfall (with expected rapid recovery): This scenario is optimistic during the pandemic, but schools that were unable to hold a large revenue-earning event in 2020, such as an auction, community fair, or summer camp, but expect to be able to do so in 2021 can rely on endowment funds for the time being.
     
    • One-time or short-term expenses: Schools may need endowment funds to repair the campus after natural disasters or offer emergency financial aid grants for families facing hardship.
     
    • Short-term expense for long-term savings: Schools that haven’t already done so, or haven’t done so to as full an extent as they would like, can use endowment funds to upgrade technology or PPE infrastructures in order to attract and retain students in the long-term.
  • When making financial decisions, school leaders need to be honest about the challenges affecting their final choice.

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 12/02/2020

• You want this party started, right? Here We Go!

  You want this party started, right? Here We Go! #BidenHarris2020 https://t.co/cC1IYm8QaC

  tags: BidenHarris2020

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