We’re Going to Tucson

By Gary Chapin

Writer, Educating for Good

Scene from an Excursion. They look friendly enough.

There are ten Learning Excursions planned for the ALP Convening in Tucson. They all focus on assessment and look at how Tucson and Sunnyside school districts are succeeding at doing many of the things that ALP advocates.

Two hundred thirty educators and friends (230!) are converging on Tucson with the jubilant curiosity of very, very smart golden retrievers. On day 3 of the convening, these 230 ALP friends will fan out across the Sunnyside and Tucson Unified districts, go into the schools, and learn from the teachers and kids there.

The Excursions have been planned by teams of Sunnyside and Tucson teachers paired with ALP folk who have been working on this since at least November. Other district leaders have been planning with us since last summer.

I’m only saying all this so that you realize what an amazing amount of creativity and labor have gone into these Excursions. So much work that, at times, I wonder why Tucson and Sunnyside agreed to this! It’s an extraordinary and generous invitation from the two districts. We are fortunate and grateful.

I talked to Yolanda Sotelo about this very thing. Yolanda is a mentor/master teacher in the CR (Culturally Responsive) Learning Department of Tucson Unified. It is she who has provided support to the teachers leading these ten Excursions, making sure that all of the resources are in place so that this very complicated set of events can happen without a hitch.

Yolanda has a long history of lighting up classrooms by simply bringing books the kids could relate to. Books in which they could see themselves.

“This book has La Llorona!”

So, I ask her about the Excursions, “This is a lot of trouble to go to for our benefit. Why do such a thing?”

She laughs and tells me “that’s not a question for me,” but then goes on to answer it anyway. “After what we’ve gone through with the MAS (Mexican American Studies) court case … our teachers need to be showcased.” They’re doing great work and “even though it’s in the middle of the quarter, you’ll see great assessments.”

I remember the quote from James Dickey, from the front piece to one of his books of poems: “Do not read these poems unless you are willing to be changed by them.”

How would Yolanda like the ALP folk to be changed by these excursions?

“They will see what is possible, I hope,” she says. “When you bring this Culturally Responsive literature, a CR approach, the kids light up. They have so much joy.” Her advice for participants is, “Watch the kids. They will show you.”

BONUS CONTENT

Books Every School Should Have On Its Shelves

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, by Erica Sánchez

Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya

House on Mango Street & Woman Hollering Creek, by Sanders Cisneros

Rain of Gold, by Victor Villaseñor

The Devil’s Highway, by Luis Urrea

Mexican Whiteboy, by Matt De la Peña

Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood, by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Somewhere Between Bitter and Sweet, by Laekan Zea Kemp

Let Their Spirits Dance, by Stella Pope Duarte

Zoot Suit, by Luis Valdez

The Making of an Excursion

By Gary Chapin

Writer, Educating for Good

Larissa Peru, bottom, Yesenia Ayala, and Gary Chapin talking about Student Agency at Desert View High School (Sunnyside Unified School District)

“If these are the experiences the students have had that have helped them to build agency, what do they want these ALP participants to experience so that they are also getting that same kind of feeling?” – Larissa Peru

At the ALP Convening, squads of educators heading out into Tucson USD and Sunnyside USD to check out and experience the work educators are doing embodying the ideals that the Assessment for Learning Project advocates. One of those ideals is student agency. The excursion – Student Agency and Student Voice – was designed by Kasie Betten and Larissa Peru, of Desert View High School (Sunnyside Dist.), and Yesenia Ayala, of WestEd and Stanford U. I talked to Larissa and Yesenia (Kasie was ill) about their process, specifically, why early on they realized that the kids had to be co-conspirators in the design of this excursion.

Larissa: We had already worked with four students presenting at a conference in October. The students spoke to what that was like to experience student agency. Kasie and I have been really playing around with the idea of how student agency moves our work from teacher to student relationships into teacher to student partnerships. It was important for us to have the students as partners in planning the excursion and then also make it evident to the ALP participants that our students are partners as presenters.

How did the students take to this process?

Larissa: Some of them were surprised that they were being highlighted as individuals who could speak to the work, but they were excited and eager to join the group and join the thinking around it. Especially because when Kasie and I asked these students to join, we really came from a place of, “We need your help. You are the people who have experienced this. You know what it's like. For us to be able to speak about this, we only really know one side of it, but you all are the ones who are doing the work.”

Yesi: They are the ones who know their experiences the best and they are the ones who can articulate and design a way of showing what happens at Desert View. Students were really creative in the sense of what hands-on activities people can go through while at the same time having them do observations. They're actually doing a sort of escape room model. The students will be observing the participants and providing some feedback. It completely shifts the role that they take on.

Larissa: I think our ultimate goal is for our ALP participants to really think about what it means to develop this in this kind of classroom.

[So, prior to all this], our district has worked on a document for teachers to use to identify when agency is present in the classroom. It's a list of look-fors. What would you see in a classroom if students were being agentic? What would you see the teacher doing to develop it? So, one of the first things we did when we brought in the group of students was to ask them to look at that list and provide some examples of their experiences in relation to those look-fors.

Then they thought, “If these are the experiences they've had that have helped them to build agency, what do they want these ALP participants to experience so that they are also getting that same kind of feeling?”

Some of the examples that they came up with were: being able to see peers as a resource, using questioning to push their own thinking, … using the resources when they need them, and just being really collaborative in a space. They talked about having the vulnerability to work with people and admit when you need help or admit when you've made a mistake.

The team feels as if there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of student agency in the field.

Larissa: There's often misunderstanding with student agency that it means giving students choice, and that if you give students choice to do something in your classroom, all of a sudden, they're energetic learners. That is a false sense of what agency looks like. I don't want our work here to be misconstrued that we “gave students the choice” of how to do these things. It goes beyond that because myself, Kasie, Yesi really had to create the structures that allowed students to think deeply about their experiences, and how that translates to creating experiences for others.

ALP and Belonging, Part 2

By Gary Chapin

Writer, Educating for Good

When I first started seriously considering the quality of Belonging as one essential for our kids in our schools, I thought, somewhat provincially, “Sure, it’s fine for Hawai’i, but how could this possibly work in New England?” New England is not the center of the universe and it’s not the most important place in the world, but it’s where I live.

Also, it’s a good counter-case to Hawai’i. We have an ocean, but it’s cold, not gloriously tepid. We have giant rocks, but they’re granite, not igneous, volcanic formations. We have a miserly approach to sunlight, not an attitude of abundance. We love to brood. I’m reluctant to generalize, but when I was in Hawai’i I definitely felt an anti-brooding energy.

Could I imagine the Maine Commissioner of Education saying things like, “We’re not here to create college and career ready students. We’re here to create beloved community?” That’s really hard. Could I imagine New England schools adopting belonging — defined as “the relationship that cannot be undone” — as an essential quality to develop in schools? Also really hard.

But hard is not impossible. Carisa Corrow, founder of Educating for Good, has been working with Franklin Schools (SAU #18, NH) for two years on developing a Portrait of the Graduate. As part of their work they looked at how other folks do PotG, including Hawai’i’s Nā Hopena A‘o (“HĀ”). Carisa wrote about the experience and discovered that, contrary to my expectations, this New England learning community did latch onto belonging as essential (also, joy). Their final listing of six commitments (go here, scroll down) clearly reflects the influence of HĀ.

ALP veteran Bob Montgomery, of WestEd, also attended the HĀ conference in 2019, and was also fascinated by the question of belonging. In a correspondence he wrote the following:

Is belonging in my hands to improve or is it rather in the hands of my community? I think it may be both. As learning experience designers, how do we create the conditions for belonging AND opportunities for learners to improve their capacities to belong?

In what ways is belonging a disposition that we can improve at? If belonging is trusting that we will be understood and can find support from people around us when we need it, if the opposite of this is feeling ‘alone’ or left out, then what can we do to improve trust?

If belonging reflects how much we feel a part of a ‘learning community’ – at school, at work or at home, or in our wider social network. If it’s about the confidence we gain from knowing there are people we learn well together with and to whom we can turn when we need guidance, support and encouragement in our learning journey…. then, how can we strengthen our sense of belonging?

These are not rhetorical questions, but worth asking and of vital importance. Thinking, writing, and having conversations about belonging will help us get beyond the limits of our imagination, and possibly cut off my own brooding instincts. Could this be one way to get at joy in our schools?

COMING IN PART 3: We talk to Kau’i Sang, Cheryl Ka’uhane Lupenui, and Puni Jackson, leaders of the Nā Hopena A‘o (“HĀ”) project, about how Hawai’i’s work around belonging has evolved during their six years with ALP.