Dear JJSE Community,

We always invite parents to come drop in on their children’s classes here at JJSE, but busy parents rarely are able to take us up on the offer—so we’ve decided to bring the school to you! This is the first installment in what I hope will become a series of “Day in the Life of JJSE” videos, where we put together a snapshot of classroom experiences on an average day.

On Friday, December 2, I spent a couple of class periods wandering in and out of classrooms with a Flip camera. I also shot a bit of footage during passing period, at lunch, and at the end of the day. I think I got film of every class that was in session during those periods, although I know I missed some courses such as Spanish because I wasn’t filming all day.

My first cut of the video was nearly 20 minutes long, but I got it down to 8 minutes with the help of our masterful media coordinator Amanda Vigil. That’s still a little lengthy for those of us who are used to 30-second You Tube clips, but I encourage you to stay with it. The video is organized so that the first half is all 9^th and 10^th grade classes (what we call the Junior Institute) and the second half is 11^th and 12^th grades (the Senior Institute)—so if you watch until the end, you can see how students grow and develop over their time here at JJSE.

As you watch, notice the wide range of learning activities JJSE students are engaged in during an average day—from hands-on science in the park, to teacher lectures and explanations, to small group work, to whole-class debates and discussions, to individual work with one-on-one support from teachers.

Notice also the range of teaching techniques that shows up in these clips. Here at JJSE we are developing a schoolwide pedagogy describing what we think teaching for social justice looks like. Many examples of our pedagogy appear in this video. One of my favorites is when Geometry teacher Crystal Proctor pulls a student out in the hallway for a conversation about expectations—a common strategy we use as part of our “warm demander” approach to discipline. Another is when Humanities teacher Maya Gomez demonstrates how teacher questioning can be used to push students’ thinking, during a student presentation on forced marriages. I also particularly enjoyed the discussion in Armon Kasmai’s Humanities class about the different purposes of footnotes and a Works Cited page—a fabulous example of how student voice can drive lessons on even the most mundane of topics.

If you are a teacher and want a challenge, you could watch this video and try to classify the teaching techniques you see according to the categories in the JJSE Pedagogy Project. For the rest of you, just enjoy this day in the life of JJSE:

Sincerely,

Matt Alexander, Co-Director

Dear JJSE Community:

In a recent interview, Bruce Alberts, editor-in-chief of Science magazine, critiques the terrible state of science education in the U.S. today. He says that "the miserable No Child Left Behind law" has led schools to eliminate science or else make it so boring that students turn off. Instead, he says, "We need to teach students how to think like a scientist… The facts of science are important, but they aren't nearly as important as the way in which scientific facts are determined. Science is a way of knowing - that's what students need to learn."

Bruce Alberts’ approach is exactly how we teach science at JJSE—through inquiry-based methods that are designed to help students learn to be scientific intellectuals.

But we are faced with an additional challenge, in science and other subject areas as well: Many of our entering students have been marginalized and for a variety of reasons have missed out on learning the basic skills that are the essential building blocks of a college prep, critical thinking curriculum.

For example, science teacher Amber Lancaster has realized that many of her entering ninth graders do not know how to properly measure with a ruler, determine the amount of liquid in a graduated cylinder, or even read an analog clock.

Some might say that ninth graders should already know these skills—and indeed they should. But when a skill gap exists, we cannot ignore it, especially if we want students to design and conduct laboratory experiments. As a result, Ms. Lancaster teaches these and other skills through carefully designed mini-lessons during the first week of school. She provides intensive teaching, and then expects students to know it; in fact, they cannot participate in the required labs in her class until they pass a quiz on these and other essential science skills.

Here is an excerpt from Ms. Lancaster’s first-week lesson:

Notice that Ms. Lancaster does not shy away from the potential embarrassment that some students may feel at not knowing things they already should know. She reminds students that if a classmate does not know how to read an analog clock, their response needs to be not “You’re slow” but rather, “Cool, let me help you!” In this way, she sets a clear expectation around a social interaction that is almost sure to come up during a lesson like this, and helps establish a safe environment where low-skilled students can begin the process of catching up with their more skilled peers.

In Ms. Lancaster’s class, students quickly move beyond these basic skills to tackle complex scientific issues and challenging lab projects. But without the kind of explicit instruction Ms. Lancaster provides at the beginning of the year, many lower-skilled students would have been left behind. I think her class, where basic skills are not an end in itself but rather a means for students to access higher-order thinking, is the antidote to what Bruce Alberts called that “miserable No Child Left Behind law.”

Sincerely,

Matt Alexander, Co-Director

Dear JJSE Community:

Sometimes we progressive educators are so concerned with giving students opportunities to think critically that we neglect the importance of practice. There are certain skills, especially foundational ones, which cannot be learned except through repetition and memorization. And it is not enough to simply tell students to memorize; we must teach them to do so.

I have been reminded of this truth recently because I am teaching a pre-algebra class with a number of ninth graders who have not finished memorizing their multiplication tables. They are all perfectly capable of figuring out what 7 x 8 is—but it takes a ridiculous amount of time because they are counting 7s or 8s up from zero. Try doing a multi-digit multiplication program without knowing your times tables; it’s possible, but it’s a bit like making a cake by first grinding the wheat instead of buying flour from the store.

JJSE Spanish teacher Maya Gomez is an expert in leading skill-based practice sessions. Just like an effective sports team practice, her classes include a mix of different drills, which are designed to help students develop different sets of skills. In this video from an introductory Spanish lesson, we can see two examples—

1) Students learning the alphabet by singing a catchy song in unison.

2) Students reviewing the conjugation of the verb “gustar” (to like) by rearranging sentence strips to build the phrase Ms. Gomez has given them, and then holding up the strips so she can check their answers. (This verb’s grammatical structure is often confusing to English speakers because the order of the subject and object are reversed compared to English, so students may need to learn what “sounds right” through repetition.)

In these clips, we see that the students are engaged and enjoying a process of memorization which might otherwise be tedious. Young people certainly need to learn how to deal with boredom, and they should not always expect school to be entertaining—but when it’s possible to make memorization fun, why not do so?

In our schoolwide pedagogy, we have a teaching technique called Independent practice, which often is associated with students practicing on their own. But the type of group practice we see in Ms. Gomez’s class is another powerful way for students to develop their skills.

The second part of Ms. Gomez’s lesson (where students hold up the sentence strips) demonstrates the teaching technique we call Data collection, because it allows Ms. Gomez to know instantly which students are “getting it” and which students need more help. She tells them when they make a mistake and asks them to correct it themselves—so students are able to adjust their efforts on the spot and make more rapid improvements.

Entry-level language instruction is all about practice, so it is wonderful that Ms. Gomez is a leader in this area. I’m wondering if we should do more to incorporate some of her techniques into other subjects as well.

Sincerely,

Matt Alexander, Co-Director

Dear JJSE Community,

In a recent San Francisco Chronicle article about state test scores, reporter Jill Tucker said that JJSE’s API score of 542 was a “concern.” Her comment seemed strange to me, since not a single JJSE student, parent, or staff member had mentioned the API to me. I started to wonder: Is it a concern to the JJSE community?

Some of you may be asking, what exactly is the API? When I first heard these initials, I thought someone was talking about my friends in the Asian Pacific Islander community. But it turns out that in education-policy-speak, “API” stands for Academic Performance Index, and it is one of the main ways that the state of California measures whether public schools are successful.

Believe it or not, the formula for the API changes every year. According to the California Department of Education, here is the current calculation, which results in an API score of between 200 and 1000:

1. Convert each test result into a score on the API scale using statewide performance level weighting factors: Advanced (or CAHSEE pass) = 1000 points; Proficient = 875 points; Basic = 700 points; Below Basic = 500 points; Far Below Basic (or CAHSEE not pass) = 200 points

2. Calculate a weighted average of the scores using statewide test weights. The high school weights are: English 0.30; Math 0.20; Science 0.22; Life Science (10^th grade) 0.10; Social Science 0.23; CAHSEE English 0.30; CAHSEE Math 0.30; No Math test taken (score=200) 0.10; No Science test taken (score=200) 0.05.

3. Add in the Scale Calibration Factor (SCF) of 16.94.

4. Sum the weighted average of the scores and the SCF to produce the API.

The complexity of this formula may give the impression that it is measuring something with a great deal of accuracy. But what it really does is take a variety of standardized test results and weight them arbitrarily to produce a single number, which is not a measurement of anything in particular.

When I ask parents at JJSE what they want for their kids’ education, most of them say they want them to grow as human beings first, and then as students. They want to make sure their children finish high school, walk on stage, and have the opportunity to go on to college if they choose. The API does not measure any of these things.

And these things parents want are the places where JJSE students excel. In the class of 2010, for example, JJSE had the second-highest college-eligibility rate in the city, after Lowell High School, and our graduates earned over $1 million in scholarships. To my knowledge, the San Francisco Chronicle has never published an article about how well different high schools prepare students for college.

What inspires JJSE students to attend college? Listen in on this excerpt from an informal panel of seniors talking to their younger peers:

It's clear that these students are not motivated by a desire to improve their test scores. It’s also clear that JJSE students need more practice at standardized tests--but I’m not convinced the API measures much of anything. What do you think? Is the school’s low API score a concern to you? Please let me know what you think!

Sincerely,
Matt Alexander, Co-Director