To encourage dialogue and reflection about the things we enjoy and how we can incorporate them into our days and lives, our question of the week is: What do you enjoy most about school? Why? Finding Your Enjoyment (Week of 4/10/22) (This is an anonymous Google Form)
Blake's Guiding Lights
Our Students
Blake's Core Values: Respect, Responsibility, Resourcefulness, Reflection
Our Essential Question: How can we cultivate and curate the progression of student learning and growth?
Our Mission: Blake Middle School believes in a living mission statement, based on the concept that our community seeks and respects knowledge, integrity, character, wisdom, and the willingness to adapt to a continually evolving world.
The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning. - John Dewey
You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow. - John Dewey
With the varied weather we had last Friday, it was really nice to walk outside at the end of the school day and feel the warmth of some spring sunshine. My weekend started by watching most of the Holliston-Medfield baseball/softball games - always fun to see my two worlds ‘collide’! It has also been lovely to see the daffodils blooming and the buds on the trees about to ‘pop’ over the last few days in our garden and on our walks. Hopefully everyone was able to make/find time for whatever felt needed.
I have also been thinking about our recent faculty meeting and some of the discussions (brief, yet very important) about accommodations, learning, and the systems we put in place to support all of our learners. The opening prompt - What do you need from others to help you learn? - is one that I was asked at a workshop a few years ago, and it really helped me to frame the approach and environment I need to learn. Through that process of self-reflection and collective reflection, I believe a vision for all of the learners in our community (students, staff, families) will become more clear and closer to being realized. I truly believe that these steps of ‘finding’ need to be intentional, articulated, challenged, and nurtured.
With all of these thoughts circling about, my intent in sharing the two posts below is to push both my own thinking and the thinking of others towards a reflective place about the systems we have and the systems we aspire towards. They address different elements of school (structural and social-emotional), yet they depend on one another. We need to keep checking in with an honest lens (reading, reflecting, and listening to students and one another), and we need to be intentional and purposeful with our adaptations. By continuing this process, we will be on the path of ‘finding and reflection’...
Having our Cake and Eating It Too
by David Cook in Getting Smart
There simply isn’t enough evidence that you can have a learner-centered education system (having your cake) while perpetuating the current system that hasn’t substantively changed since its 1894 inception. A current system that, while extremely effective at its purpose, is inherently inequitable because it measures all learners in the same way as if they were widgets (eating it too).
It’s widely agreed among educators, civil rights advocates, and child welfare experts that the U.S. education system is neither equitable nor does it sufficiently address the needs of all learners. What is needed is a system that sets each learner up for success according to their unique needs. Only then will we have real equity. That is when we know we have a genuine “learner-centered” system.
The chief elements of a learner-centered system center on the individual learner, not the machine of the system…Regrettably, the sorting of learners based on their assessment performance, rather than what they have learned, occurs every day in this country. This system doesn’t have a desire to KNOW each learner.
Here’s the thing. The idiom is right. You CANNOT have your cake and eat it too. You must choose between a genuine and substantive equity facing, learner-centered system that puts its effort and money where its mouth is OR a system that is designed to create widgets, fraught with inequity born of its preference to measure all learners the same while giving lip service to acknowledging every learner is unique.
CDC warns of a steep decline in teen mental health
by Moriah Balingit in The Washington Post
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning of an accelerating mental health crisis among adolescents, with more than 4 in 10 teens reporting that they feel “persistently sad or hopeless,” and 1 in 5 saying they have contemplated suicide, according to the results of a survey published Thursday.
…the survey also offers hope, finding that teens who feel connected at school report much lower rates of poor health. The finding calls attention to the critical role schools can play in a student’s mental health.
…the findings add to a body of research that show that feeling connected at school can be “a protective factor" for students. Schools can deliberately foster connectedness in a number of ways, including instructing teachers on how to better manage classrooms, to facilitating clubs for students and ensuring that LGBTQ students feel welcome. Such steps can help all students — and not just the most vulnerable — do better.
Concerns about adolescent mental health were rising before the pandemic: Teens had been reporting poor mental health at higher rates. Between 2009 and 2019, the percentage of teens who reported having “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 37 percent. In 2021, the figure rose to 44 percent.
The survey also revealed that students who felt connected at school fared far better than those who did not. Teens who said they felt “close to people at school” were far less likely to report having attempted or thought about attempting suicide, and they were far less likely to report poor mental health than those who did not feel connected at school. The same held true for teens who felt connected virtually to friends, family members and clubs.
Sampling of Responses from Last Week’s ‘Question of the Week’: What would you like to do in the future? Why?
- Go to universal to meet harry potter
- Get a dog
- I want to be an actor, I just love exploring new fantastical worlds.
- I want to be able to give money to charities and animal hospitals because I want to help animals and support local vets and shelters.
- Move to croatia
- I want to listen and help people with their feelings because if you really listen to people they have a lot of interesting things to say and I want to be a therapist to help people with their feelings and thoughts.
- I want to own a zoo because I love helping creatures.
- I would like to be a tennis player in the future because I love playing tennis
- I would like to be in the military because I want to serve my country
- I want to be a baseball player because I like baseball and all sports.
- Be a doctor to help people
- Go to a good college
- Be vegetarian to help animals
- I would like to be a dermatologist because I would love to see the smile on patients' faces when I can help them.
- Go D1 in Basketball or Football. I love playing sports and would like to continue it further in life.
- I wanna graduate
In keeping with a musical ‘theme’ (quote at the top of this reflection), Tyler Knott Gregson’s poem below seemed fitting as part of s National Poetry Month…
As always, let me know of any questions/concerns.
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Take care.
Nat