Learning about students

This overview introduces a seven-class unit focusing on learning about students and communicating with families. The overview provides contexts, lists learning goals, outlines activities for each class period, and provides guidance about how to sequence instruction. It also includes a post-unit performance assessment, as well as the complete unit plan (in its entirety).

In this lesson, “Learning from Escuela,” novices examine deficit and asset frames and associated language. The lesson introduces two anchoring concepts, the Community Cultural Wealth Model (CCWM) and the Ladder of Inference, which novices will use as supports and frameworks in future lessons. The lesson also prepares novices to enter a community to which they do not belong using an asset frame.

Using the documentary film Escuela, in this lesson novice teachers track observations about potential sources of community cultural wealth. They then engage in class discussion to connect the film, their observations, and teacher practice. This lesson gives novices practice seeing, hearing and learning about a child who is (likely) from a different background and challenges novices to think about and use the Ladder of Inference, which was introduced in Day 1.

In this lesson, novices engage with the decomposition of the learning about students practice and continue to prepare to engage with families and communities in asset-based ways, such as by discussing observational walks of communities and creating a “visual ecosystem” of the communities they observed. This lesson is especially important to include in a sequence of lessons when wanting to work with novices on the practice of learning about students.

In this lesson, novices unpack the decomposition of the practice of communicating with families. They also analyze real family stories to practice noticing rather than inferring and learning from others in ways that can inform and support enactment of equitable and ambitious instruction. Novices then prepare to engage in a panel of parents and caregivers. This lesson is critical when engaging in work around both practices featured in this unit.

In this lesson, the teacher educator assembles a panel of parents and caregivers that will allow novices to hear perspectives that are different from their own and that challenge novices’ assumptions about the students they will work with throughout their careers. Novices will practice listening to the panel as professionals so that they can build trust and learn from families in ways that they can use in their instruction. This session is critically important for engaging novices the sequence of work related to the practice of communicating with families.

In this lesson, the teacher educator assembles a panel of parents and caregivers that will allow novices to hear perspectives that are different from their own and that challenge novices’ assumptions about the students they will work with throughout their careers. Novices will practice listening to the panel as professionals so that they can build trust and learn from families in ways that they can use in their instruction. This session is critically important for engaging novices the sequence of work related to the practice of communicating with families.

In this lesson, novices share excerpts from their recording and analysis of their caregiver conversations and brainstorm alternative approaches. They then reenact those powerful moments using simulation, with another novice teacher playing the role of caregiver. The lesson ends by having novices reflect on the unit and their commitment to its core principles. This session is critical when working on both high-leverage practices.