Last October I wrote about a pilot initiative to identify and recognize public high schools that seek to close opportunity gaps through practices “that build on students’ strengths” — not by inundating them with tests. Today the first winners are being announced, and in the coming days, the schools will be profiled on this blog.

The people behind the Schools of Opportunity project are Carol Burris, principal of South Side High School in the Rockville Centre School District in New York, and Kevin Welner, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder’s School of Education who specializes in educational policy and law. Burris was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, was named New York State High School Principal of the Year. She is taking early retirement at the end of the school year to advocate for public education. Welner is director of the National Education Policy Center at UC Boulder, which produces high-quality peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions.

Here are the winners from the pilot initiative in New York and Colorado:

By Kevin Welner and Carol Burris

We are delighted to announce, exclusively on The Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog, the 17 recognized Schools of Opportunity for 2015. During this pilot year, all schools are in New York and Colorado, with five singled out for Gold-level recognition. These high schools use research-based practices to ensure that all students have rich opportunities to succeed. Some are working against great odds. All put students, not scores, first.

In the upcoming weeks in the Answer Sheet, we will describe these remarkable schools and what we can learn from them.

The Schools of Opportunity project, designed as a way to highlight schools that actively and equitably promote the success of all students, was piloted this school year in Colorado and New York, with plans to expand next year to include high schools nationwide. It is a project of the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), housed in the CU-Boulder School of Education. The Ford Foundation and the NEA Foundation have both generously provided funding assistance for the Schools of Opportunity project.

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The recognition of these schools is based on 11 specific principles identified by experts in the 2013 book, “Closing the Opportunity Gap“ published by Oxford University Press, which Welner edited along with Stanford University Professor Prudence Carter. These principles include effective student and faculty support systems, outreach to the community, health and psychological support, judicious and fair discipline policies, little or no tracking, and high-quality teacher induction and mentoring programs.

Read the full article in the Washington Post.

Prudence Carter is a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and Faculty Director of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities. 

GSE Student Guild invites all GSE students, staff, and faculty to remember Meyer Library. Light snacks, beer, wine, and EANABS will be served on the rooftop of CERAS.
J. Henry Meyer Memorial Library,47, formerly of 560 Escondido Mall, closed on August, 22, 2014 after a dismal seismic safety evaluation.  Meyer was dedicated at Leland Stanford Junior University on December 2, 1966.  Architect and Stanford alumnus John Carl Warnecke designed the Library.  Named for a wealthy banker and supporter of Stanford libraries, Meyer served undergraduates loyally until its official closure.  Meyer’s soaring arcades have long served as the backdrop for a mammoth "Beat Cal" sign, a rallying cry for the annualfootball game against the University of California, Berkeley.  Meyer Library is survived by its wife Lathrop Library;     children,    East    Asia  Library, Academic Computing Services, and 24-hour study space; sister, Cecil H. Green Library; 21 grandchildren through Stanford campus.  Services will be held on the rooftop of CERAS on Friday, May 15 at 4:00 pm.  In lieu of flowers, Library family requests you celebrate Meyer’s closure with beverages, snacks, and shared memories.

Close the quarter and kickstart your summer with our annual GSE End-of-the-Year Celebration!  Enjoy refreshments, music, and relax – you deserve it!  All faculty, staff, and families are welcome to attend. 

Continue the celebration at Cantor Arts Center and the Anderson Collection’s ArtsRoll party featuring student bands, interactive arts projects, and a roller skating rink from 6 – 9 pm. 

When Michaela Kron entered New York University in 2008, she already had a few college credits under her belt. She'd earned high marks on her Advanced Placement exams and tested out of nearly a year's worth of classes at NYU.

"I realized that I could arrange my schedule so that if I took a couple of summer courses, I could graduate a year early and save a ton of money," she says. That was especially helpful since her only aid was a small merit award, hardly enough to dent the more than $41,000 in tuition and fees that NYU charged in 2011-2012, the year she skipped. ​

Participating in classes and exams through AP – and other college equivalency programs – can do more than give bright high schoolers the chance to explore favorite school subjects, work with challenging teachers and stand out on college applications. Some high-achieving secondary students can test out of college credits, even graduating from college early and saving a semester or more of tuition money.

Here's what to know.

• Students can earn credit in several ways. After enrolling in AP or International Baccalaureatecourses, which demand more rigor than traditional high school courses, students can earn college credit by taking a related exam in the spring. 

The details of the programs vary. Students in the IB program can earn a special diploma, which may fast-track them to sophomore standing at some colleges, or certificates for taking individual exams. AP classes offer more of an a la carte approach. And students don't always need to take the courses to sit for the exams. 

Students may also explore dual enrollment at a local college in which they earn both postsecondary and high school credit and take a real college course​. The credits earned from dual enrollment "tend to be more portable," meaning that they translate more easily to college credit, says Kristin Klopfenstein, founding executive director of the University of Northern Colorado's Education Innovation Institute. 

• Transferring credits can be a challenge. "The earning of [college] credits is an entirely different conversation from the transferring of credits," says Phil Trout, college counselor at Minnetonka High School in Minnesota and president-elect at the National Association for College Admission Counseling. 

Credit transfer policies vary by university – and can even vary by department within a single school, says Klopfenstein. The College Board, which administers the AP exams, provides a credit policy search tool, but students may have to keep digging or consult with an adviser to get the full scoop. IB is launching a new similar tool this summer, says a spokeswoman. In the meantime, students can download an index of university policies.

And some universities have tamped down on accepting certain credits. Brown University doesn't accept AP test scores for credit although some departments allow students to waive introductory courses. It does, however, accept IB scores for course credit under certain circumstances. Dartmouth Collegestudents can use AP scores for credit or to skip courses but not for graduation credit.

Read the full story at U.S. News and World Report.

Denise Pope is a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Challenge Success.

In 1967, media critic Marshall McLuhan predicted that within two decades, technology would make school unrecognizable. “As it is now, the teacher has a ready-made audience,” he wrote. “He is assured of a full house and a long run. Those students who don’t like the show get flunking grades.” But if students were given the choice to get their information elsewhere, he predicted, “the quality of the experience called education will change drastically. The educator then will naturally have a high stake in generating interest and involvement for his students.”

McLuhan was right about one thing: students can now get much of their information elsewhere. Many young people “are now deeply and permanently technologically enhanced,” said business and education consultant Marc Prensky—his observation will hit home to anyone who has watched teenagers sit in a Starbucks, wait in line at a Walgreens checkout stand, or attend a family function. But in school, those who don’t like the show still get flunking grades. However, these students have a vision of something different. They now have the experience, outside of school, of diving into worlds that are richer and more relevant than anything they get in school. There’s a technical term for this phenomenon, in which someone sees the possibilities that lie just out of reach but must spend time doing lesser things. It’s called boredom, or as theologian Paul Tillich once described it, “rage spread thin.”

In spite of our teachers’ heroic efforts, our schools are fighting a losing battle with boredom. Indiana University’s High School Survey of Student Engagement finds that 65 percent of students report being bored “at least every day in class.” Sixteen percent—nearly one in six students—are bored in every class.

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Each year, Keith Devlin, the popular Stanford University math researcher, observes an unusual little ritual. He is invited annually to address the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and each time he asks teachers to raise their hands if they are gamers. By 2010, he’d been posing the question for five years, and each year the results were the same: just a few hands went up. Then, in 2011, at the group’s annual meeting in Indianapolis, he saw something different: nearly every hand in the room went up.

Devlin mostly attributes this to a generational shift (also, the iPad had first appeared in the spring of 2010). But he said nearly all teachers are realizing that games are here to stay. “Nobody would think of being a teacher if they could not read,” he said. “Well, video games and other digital media are new literacies.”

According to Devlin, teachers have a responsibility to learn about kids’ interests. “It’s not the students’ responsibility to put themselves in our place. As teachers, it’s our responsibility to put ourselves in the students’ place. And if they are in a digital world, where they will invest many hours solving difficult, challenging problems in a video game, it would be criminal if we didn’t start where they are and take advantage of the things they want to do. That’s the world they live in, that’s the world they’re going to own and develop. As teachers our job is to help them on that journey. We have to start where they are, and if they’re in video games, we need to start there.”

Read the full story at Salon.

Keith Devlin is the executive director of the Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute at Stanford. Read more about Keith Devlin's Introduction to Mathematical Thinking MOOC.

A key goal of education policy is to help remediate the existing educational inequities across racial groups and socioeconomic status in the United States. However, to develop better policy, one needs to understand the underlying causes of these disparities. This paper examines one possible mechanism—the college application decision. Specifically, we investigate racial and ethnic differences in college applications using the population of recent Texas high school graduates. First, we find a lower propensity to apply to college among Hispanic students at all college readiness levels. Hispanics have lower college application rates than black students despite better average college readiness and similar high school quality. These results are robust to controls for student-level college readiness measures, high school characteristics, and high school fixed effects. Second, black students are more likely to apply to college than similar students of other races, but this effect is concentrated among students who are less prepared for college.  Finally, we examine the role of college characteristics in the decision to apply.

If you had 5 things to focus on in instruction, to create powerful learning, what would they be? I’ll explain why 5 is a good number, discuss what they are, and characterize what we can do to improve teaching and learning in not only math and science (where I have lots of evidence) but potentially in all content domains. I’ll discuss some tools for professional development, and how a district might make coherent use of this kind of framework.

On Monday mornings during recess at Brentwood Academy in East Palo Alto, kindergarteners can be found in a room writing code or 3-D printing their names.

That’s all because the Ravenswood City School District is ramping up its efforts to bring science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, education to its population. Menlo Park-based Facebook Inc.and other groups are helping the district continue the Ravenswood Makerspace Collaborative, which gives students in the district — 99 percent of whom qualify for free or discounted lunches — opportunities to explore some of the most in-demand STEM fields in Silicon Valley.

“The most positive thing is they’re excited about learning and also the collaboration going on,” said the district’s STEM coordinator Robert Pronovost, a former teacher and Stanford University graduate, who had the idea of bringing Makerspaces to public schools in East Palo Alto and eastern Menlo Park. “Every student is able to come in here.”

His initiative has grown with the help of the Ravenswood Education Foundation and Stanford’s Transformative Technologies Lab. It encourages students of all levels — 25-30 at a time with mentors present — to learn about robotics through Dash and Dot coding robots, and computer science and coding through Code.org. The lab came to the kindergarten through fifth-grade Brentwood this past fall. It was piloted at Los Robles Dual Immersion Magnet Academy about a year and a half ago.

Read the entire story.

Robert Pronovost received his master's degree from Stanford Teacher Education Program in 2007.

Researchers at Stanford University Graduate School of Education will share in a $1.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences to launch a three-year study of virtual schooling in Florida.

The study will explore how virtual schooling options affect students’ course progression, academic achievement and teacher effectiveness. Virtual schools have expanded rapidly in many states including Florida.

The results will help policymakers and school personnel understand how virtual classes affect achievement, which students are likely to benefit and avenues for improvement.

“As online learning options multiply, little is known about how well such courses serve K12 students,” said Susanna Loeb, the Barnett Family Professor of Education at Stanford and faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Analysis, said. “Our project will explore how access to online courses affects students’ test scores, course grades and progression.”

Brian Jacob and Brian Rowan of the University of Michigan and Cassandra Hart of the University of California, Davis, join Loeb on the study. In addition, Loeb will be working on the project at Stanford with research associate Demetra Kalogrides and a doctoral student.

“There are enormous gaps in the research literature on online schools,” said Jacob, a University of Michigan economics and education professor and the co-director of the Education Policy Initiative at its Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. “Policymakers have little evidence of whether online courses boost achievement, which types of students flourish, and the conditions that promote positive student outcomes.”

The researchers will examine data for virtual and face-to-face schools in Florida from 2003-04 through 2013-14. In addition, they will collect additional data through surveys from students and teachers in the Florida Virtual School and from students and teachers at Miami Dade County Public Schools.

“We will also ask the students about the supports they receive from teachers, such as feedback and encouragement,” said Hart, assistant professor of education policy at UC-Davis. “And we will ask teachers about the supports they receive from administrators such as curricular materials and real-time coaching.”

Members of the media seeking additional information can contact Jonathan Rabinovitz, Stanford Graduate School of Education, 650-724-9440, jrabin@stanford.edu, or Greta Guest, University of Michigan, 734-936-7821, gguest@umich.edu.

Students in the Stanford Graduate School of Education and related departments/fields, come and share your work and build a stronger intellectual community!

Our conference SWAYWO is a student-led, guild-supported, dean and faculty-endorsed  opportunity to increase a community perception, network, learn and envision collaborative work.

Goals:

To promote increased intellectual community awareness, bringing together the multiple programs and research groups associated with the school.
To develop collaboration and interdisciplinarity among graduate students in the Graduate School of Education.
To provide an in-house, low-stress formative experience for graduate students who want to bring their research to the public and potentially pursue and academic career.
To develop organizational and institutional knowledge for the continuation of this experience in the years to come.

The experience is planned to be a transformational milestone in the trajectory of the SGSE, not only by the actual opportunity to showcase and reflect current work, but because it emphasizes a key area of growth in the SGSE. In other words, we expect SWAYWO to have a direct impact in the culture of the SGSE and the lives of graduate students. 

These days, we often hear parents of prospective undergraduates ask why their children should bother with a liberal education. After all, they say, vocational fields like business and nursing are now a majority of all college majors. These parents want to be sure their children have a job on graduation, and they dismiss liberal learning as an optional extra on the road to being trained for work – not a necessity. We believe they are wrong.

How do we define liberal learning? We mean three modes of thought – analytical thinking, multiple framing, and reflective exploration of meaning– along with the capacity to put them into practice, which we call practical reason. Naturally, college students should also gain knowledge and skills in a range of academic fields in the social sciences, the natural sciences, and the humanities. But here we focus on these key modes of thought and practical reason.

Analytical thinking is the first mode, and it is needed to enable students to function effectively. Most entering college students require considerable help to gain the intellectual skills that analytic thinking entails. These skills play an important part not only in personal, social, and civic realms, but in vocational ones as well. Without clarity of thought and argument, without the ability to think critically and reason logically, people are captive to unexamined biases and unable to evaluate the validity of others’ claims or their own intuitions.

Colleges and universities are particularly fertile territory for learning to think analytically. Many other arenas call primarily for appeals to emotion. Unlike those arenas, analytic thinking demands rational inquiry, without bias or prejudice.

As powerful as is analytical thinking, it is not sufficient for answering every important question.

Read the entire blog post on Forbes.com.

For more about Thomas Ehrlich, please visit his profile.

Associate Professor of Education Anthony Lising Antonio is embarking on a year-long study of social network analysis after receiving one of the first Spencer Midcareer Grants. The new award allows scholars to advance “their understanding of a compelling problem of education by acquiring new skills, substantive knowledge, theoretical perspectives or methodological tools.” 

Antonio, who is also associate director of the Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research (SIHER), is one of six professors and researchers nationwide to win the award in its pilot year. The grant is restricted to faculty members who were awarded doctorates in the last seven to 20 years, and it includes a year’s sabbatical, salary and funds to accomplish the goals applicants outlined in their requests for funding.

In Antonio’s winning proposal, “Integrating social network analysis into the study of college student socialization and change,” he argues that the field of higher education has been relatively slow to adopt theoretical and methodological advances from across the social sciences.

“Among them, social network analysis (SNA) offers an innovative conceptual frame that foregrounds the study of relations of individuals rather than individuals as autonomous units. Rooted in sociology but now with increasingly active scholars in political science, organizational studies, anthropology, economics, computer science, psychology, and epidemiology, the popularity of SNA is on the rise throughout the academy. It has yet to garner serious attention among scholars of higher education, however.”

Antonio intends to use the grant to bring new questions and fresh insights to the well-established area of college student socialization. His plans involve using resources available at Stanford including, for example, workshops offered at the Center for Computational Social Science and online courses in primary programming languages used in network analysis computing platforms. He said he will also tap into resources at the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan.

Antonio’s most recent research has centered on the career plans of engineering students, but he said the grant allows him to build upon the first interests and initial research projects of his career: understanding racial diversity in higher education and its effects on students, friendship groups, the organization of racial diversity and its impact on higher education.

In addition to his position at SIHER, Antonio is director of the university’s program in Asian American studies, as well as being one of its affiliated faculty members. He received his master’s in education and doctorate in higher education from UCLA in 1998; his master’s in mechanical engineering from Stanford in 1992; and his bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988.

He is also affiliated faculty at the Center for Comparative Study in Race and Ethnicity and resident fellow at EAST House (the Education and Society Theme dormitory for Stanford undergraduates). Outside of Stanford, Antonio is a fellow of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Research Coalition.

The Spencer Midcareer Grant is one of many educational research programs administered by the Spencer Foundation, which is based in Chicago. It finances and promotes scholarly investigations into how education, through research, can be improved around the world.

Another five applicants will be selected for the 2016-2017 academic year, the second cycle of the pilot program.

Ron Zimmer, Associate Professor of Public Policy and Education, Vanderbilt University

Since their inception in 1992, the number of charter schools has grown to more than 6,000 in 40 states, serving more than 2 million students. Various studies have examined charter schools’ impacts on test scores, and a few have begun to examine longer-term outcomes including graduation and college attendance. This paper is the first to estimate charter schools’ effects on student earnings, alongside effects on educational attainment. Using data from Chicago and Florida, we find evidence that charter high schools may have substantial positive effects on persistence in college as well as high-school graduation and college entry. In Florida, where we can link students to workforce data in adulthood, we also find evidence that charter high schools produce large positive effects on subsequent earnings.

The Cantor Arts Center earned a 2015 Gold Muse Award from the American Alliance of Museums’ Media and Technology Professional Network. The Cantor won the Honeysett and Din Award for TandemArt, a software application created by recent Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) students Renee Bruner and Meredith Downing. The app was designed to engage early learners (ages 3–6) and their parents and caregivers with art on view from the Cantor’s collection.

Bruner and Downing, both of whom earned master’s degrees in 2014, drew on what they had learned in the GSE’s Learning, Design and Technology program as well as their previous work experience: Downing had taught preschool at the Smithsonian Early Enrichment Center in Washington, D.C., and Bruner coded children’s e-books for Simon & Schuster. They created TandemArt, optimized for iPad but accessible from any tablet or mobile device, as their master’s thesis. During the year that they developed, revised and tested the app, they worked in partnership with the Cantor’s Family Programs Coordinator Lauren Hahn.

“We are delighted that Renee and Meredith’s love of museums drew them to the Cantor and thrilled that they are being rewarded for their innovative and important work to engage young audiences in the excitement of art and museums,” said Cantor Arts Center Director CONNIE WOLF. “Our mission is to connect with the academic life of the university, and we are deeply committed to academic accessibility. Renee and Meredith’s project, designed to foster connections with art for very young guests, aligns perfectly with the museum’s goals. The Cantor has always fostered a sense of discovery through direct experiences with works of art for all our visitors.”

The TandemArt app uses the history of the Stanford family to create a narrative around Leland Jr.’s 10th birthday party as depicted in Thomas Hill’s painting Palo Alto Spring. The app leads visitors on an adventure in the Cantor’s Robert Mondavi Family Gallery for 19th-century American and European art.

“Our goal was both to engage the youngest audiences in developmentally appropriate activities around the art, while also providing a tool for parents to better facilitate that experience,” Downing said. Bruner and Downing tested their digital prototype with a father and son, who at one point put the iPad down while continuing to engage with the art for 10 minutes. “That was when we knew we had accomplished our goal.” While TandemArt is specific to the Cantor Arts Center, Downing believes that many of the basic principles could be adapted to any museum space.

Muse Awards staff reported that “the jury loved how the experience targeted not only pre-literate children but also actively involves their caregivers in the experience. The idea of engaging young children in the delight of exploration of a museum’s exhibits and the exchange with others in TandemArt truly fosters the development of the next generation of museum visitors and supporters.”

Now in its 26th year, the Muse Award competition, an activity of the Media and Technology Professional Network of the American Alliance of Museums, recognizes outstanding achievement in museum media. The competition received more than 200 applications in 14 categories from a wide variety of museums in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia. This year’s entries included videos, interactive hand-held tours, applications, podcasts, blogs, online communities, Web sites, audio tours and gallery installations.

The Honeysett and Din Award recognizes top entries of student works that meet the criteria for any category.

Read the full announcement on the Cantor Arts Center website.

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This story was originally published in the Stanford ReportDish.

Graduating teacher candidates in the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP) present on guiding principles or habits of mind that teacher leaders and teacher scholars engage in throughout their careers.

9:15-10:30am Sessions
Let it Grow: Tools and strategies for helping students develop growth mindsets
Presenters: Mary Clare Bernal, Dana Pede, Adrienne Pinsoneault, Adejah Taylor, Christy Van Beek
Location: CERAS 101

“I’m not a math person.” “I just hate reading.” “I can’t do science.” Why do some students doubt themselves to the point of giving up before they’ve even started? What, as educators, parents, or friends can we do to better support them? Join us as we explore a phenomenon present in every classroom but acknowledged in few: the impact of students’ mindsets on their learning. Students’ success is correlated with the degree to which they have a growth mindset, meaning that they believe their abilities are not fixed, but that they can grow and develop. We will investigate specific tools and strategies for helping students see their intelligence as malleable when reflecting on their own learning processes.

Windows and Mirrors: Celebrating Diverse Identities and Experiences in the Elementary Classroom through Children’s Literature
Presenters: Jess Clark, Taryn Gardner, Lauren Leinweber, Allison Matamoros, Kelly Rambarran
Location: CERAS 204   

As children develop their identities in school, they are exposed to images and words that both support and challenge their sense of self and place in the world. Depending on the students’ relationship to the majority culture, this media often either alienates the student due to its depiction of a norm that they don’t fulfill, or maintains the misconception that their own commonly represented experience is lived by all. As educators dedicated to social justice, we have the responsibility to teach media that validates students’ own experiences and depicts difference in a responsible and respectful way. In this presentation we will explore the classroom experiences of our students informed by the recently growing public conversation about the lack of diverse children’s literature.

When Will I ever Need to Know…?
Presenters: Luis Fernandez, Ramona Tumber, Oliver Yeh
Location: CERAS 300

We have created a website in order to shine a light on the interconnectedness of education and to suggest, as well as solicit, ideas on how multidisciplinary approaches of the different subject areas build and foster alternative career pathways beyond conventional ones. Leaders from different communities will share how they tapped into subject areas that, at first glance, seemed tangential or unrelated to their careers, but were key to their goal achievement. We will also gather information from “ordinary” folks who are able to leverage the knowledge and training they had acquired from school for their self-improvement. We hope that this information will empower educators and persuade students that it is through cross-pollination of seemingly unrelated ideas from different content areas that engenders original and fresh ideas and nurtures productive alternative careers.

The Self-Aware Writer: Composing Reflectively
Presenters: Jasmine Mark, Sierra Patheal, Anna Webster-Stratton, Ariadne Yulo
Location: CERAS 302   

We write to think, but how often do we think to write? Come explore your own metacognitive approaches to writing as we playtest strategies for encouraging reflection on—and appreciation for—the idiosyncrasies of the writing process. Informed by the development of our own writerly identities, we will delve into productive thinking strategies for writing, learning to love the writers we are and the writers we want to become.

Teaching in the Face of Stress
Presenters: Jeff Dong, Laura Luttrell, Anna Roberds
Location: CERAS 513

As teachers we will be mentors, educators and advocates for hundreds of students each year, many of whom face stress on a regular basis. Schools and classrooms cause some of this stress through the pressure of grades and test scores and/or the social pressures that students feel in the school environment. Other stress can be “brought in” to the classroom from students’ personal lives and some students also experience traumatic events that could endure over a long period of time. Stress undoubtedly affects students’ ability to learn and function in school to their fullest potential and it is important that educators develop a deeper understanding of how to best support students in their growth and success while acknowledging the stress that exists. There are some cases where educators can take action to decrease negative stress and in other cases we do not have control over the cause of the stress. Through student feedback and research our group was able to get a better sense of how different types of stress impact students’ lives/needs and what we teachers can do to alleviate these roadblocks to learning.

Past and Present: Competing Narratives in the Quest for Historical Truth
Presenters: Jen Barrer-Gall, Danny Kambur, Amanda Klein, Elizabeth Marsden, Steven Roy
Location: CERAS 527

This presentation will focus on the different narratives of historical and current events. How are events documented and for what purpose? Too often, students are limited to a textbook narrative of history, instead of given multiple perspectives. Events are never black and white, but how do we find historical truth when given multiple sides to the same story? We will explore the varied strategies historians use to craft substantiated claims about what “really” happened. Additionally, we will explore how these strategies and methods of inquiry differ in various social science classrooms.

10:45am-12:00pam Sessions  

Making every word count: The power of teacher talk in shaping student identity
Presenters: Aubrea Felch, Kalin Hove, Kate McDaniel Keith, Christine Moon, Matt Sheelen, Andrew Wyndham
Location: CERAS 204

Research on growth mindset and student identity have revealed that how teachers talk to students can have long lasting effects on student identity and performance. The words we use in the classroom-- negative or positive, neutral or evaluative-- can have an enormous effect on how students view themselves, and how they view learning. With these kinds of stakes, how can teachers ensure that their words are setting up students for success? In this session, we review the best practices for teacher talk and attempt to plot an honest, pragmatic course forward.
 

Empowering Students In and Outside of the Classroom
Presenters: Bianca Aguirre, Jacob Erisman, Olga Fostiy, Brittany Martino, Caroline Stirn, Cecilia Walsh
Location: CERAS 300

Yes, school is for teaching English, History, Math, Science, Foreign Languages, and the Arts, but what about teaching students how to navigate life? Being successful in school not only requires writing an effective thesis statement, but also requires life skills such as self-advocacy and resiliency. These skills not only help students buy into the curriculum, it also helps them combat issues from disengagement in classes to rising suicide rates. We believe that embedding life skills in our everyday curriculum and having students practice these skills through the work they do is essential to empowering students to succeed in school and in life. In this session, you will have the opportunity to engage in interactive stations to learn how to practically integrate self-advocacy, resiliency, and crow skills into humanities curriculum. Our hope is that you will learn strategies to use in your own lives and classrooms, as a friend, mentor, parent, or teacher.

Misunderstanding by Design: Structures and Strategies for Reteaching
Presenters: Grace Chiarella, Jessica Goldkind, Mackenzie Peterson, Christina Taylor, Tiffany Yuan
Location: CERAS 302

Students do not master concepts at the same pace, yet the curriculum often assumes uniform understanding as it proceeds with a new concept every lesson. Our group explored how to proactively plan at the unit level for what to do when students leave a lesson with different understandings. We compiled strategies and classroom structures for reteaching to meet the needs of students with these diverse conceptual understandings. Presenters will share how we redesigned a math unit plan to embed reteaching; participants will have the opportunity to do the same.

Weaving in Wellness
Presenters: Taryn Elliott, Shannon Hoopes, Allison Houghton, Cameron Kolk, Kira Maker, Jovel Queirolo
Location: CERAS 308

In a world of standardized testing, peer pressure, and rigid academic standards, how are our students learning to live with meaning and purpose? As teachers, family members, and friends, what is our role in this conversation? 
This session will explore where and how to infuse wellness, leadership, and life skills into the classroom regardless of content area. Because students’ learning can and should expand far beyond academics, we hope to collectively answer the question: What is wellness and how can it be incorporated in the classroom to support students in dealing with all of the LIFE that happens outside of academic standards?

Let’s Go to the Tape: Using Video in the Classroom
Presenters: Jonathan Tomczak & Jing Xi
Location: CERAS 513

All video is educational. The question is: What is it teaching? Every day in classrooms the lights are turned off and the students watch any number of documentaries, movies, TV shows and news clips. Regardless of subject videos are a powerful way to deliver information, put content in context, and allow students to express their natural creativity. But are students getting the message, or are videos just acting as substitute teachers? In this presentation we explore the best strategies and practices for using videos—how to make sure the lessons onscreen are the ones that students walk away with at the end of the period.

1:00-2:15pm Sessions

Beyond the Four Walls: Engaging Students through their Environmental and
Social Communities
Presenters: Julia Hermann, Kyle Hillebrecht, Denise Kleckner, Izzy Pereira, Ana Sanchez Balsells
Location: CERAS 204

We will explore ways to make curriculum relevant, meaningful, and impactful by bridging the classroom to the community. In breaking down the four walls of the classroom, students are more likely to be engaged since learning begins by validating the intrinsic value of their life experiences and ideas. The products of our work in the classroom should have a direct impact on the students’ community and will thereby empower students to become agents of change in their environmental and social communities. We will highlight two case studies that demonstrate effective avenues for achieving these outcomes with our students. We hope that educators and community members alike come away with the tools and inspiration needed to engage K-8 public school students with their surrounding communities.

Gamification and Simulation: Two approaches to establishing and sustaining student engagement
Presenters: Daniel Brown, Peter Fabian, Sean McDonald
Location: CERAS 300   

Come explore two fun approaches to learning: gamification and simulation. This session will engage participants in concrete strategies while reflecting on their most appropriate uses for learning and maintaining student engagement. While the focus is on the world language classroom and language production, these techniques can be easily utilized in other fields of instruction as well. Attendees will experience both ludic activities and “real life” simulations and will collectively reflect on how they can inspire confidence and excitement as students develop communicative competence. These activities include games, sports, object-based simulations, and role-playing “authentic” situations.

“Can’t we just watch the movie?”: Strategies for Making Reading Engaging in the Classroom Presenters: Megan Bridge, Tony Escandón, Kelleen Loo, Melissa Yam
Location: CERAS 302   

Over the course of a regular school day, students spend a large portion of time reading and interacting with a variety of texts. However, classroom reading runs the risk of becoming monotonous and may result in students disengaging during learning segments. In the worst-case scenario, students may actually come to dislike reading in general, limiting the exposure, skills, and knowledge they could gain through text. We will explore different methods to engage students while they read in the classroom. We plan on unpacking a number of different actionable strategies that can be used during the reading process including drama, art, and different forms of educational technology to pique student interest. Through the use of these engaging strategies, we hope to avoid the question teachers dread from students: “Can’t we just watch the movie?”  

You don’t know, now you know—using misconceptions to build understanding
Presenters: Sam Howles-Banerji, Michael Lupoli, Andrew Masley
Location: CERAS 308   

Everyone comes into a science classroom with different ideas about how the world works, but many of them are based on deeply ingrained misconceptions. To connect science learning to the real world, science teachers encourage students to construct new explanations through authentic exploration and productive argument. Come do experiments with us to debunk your misconceptions!

Breaking Borders: How educators can support and empower Undocumented students through spreading awareness and educating the community
Presenter: Jan Quijada
Location: CERAS 513    

It is estimated that there are 1.5 million undocumented young immigrants under the age of 30 who arrived in the United States as children. Commonly referred to as DREAMers, these students enter into our public education system where they usually face a sense of isolation, discrimination and uncertainty as they struggle to find their sense of ‘American’ identity and navigate a system that is not set up for their success. In this session, we will discuss how we, as educators, can spread awareness on the issue and create a community of trust and support for DREAMers and their families.

2:30-3:45pm Sessions

School-to-Prison Pipeline
Presenters: Nelly Alcantar, Alma Nunez, Leah Thomas, Abe Shklar,  Stephanie Ullman, Helen Weldeghiorgis
Location: CERAS 204   

Every year students from historically marginalized communities are funneled from schools to prisons all over the U.S. Known as the “School-to-Prison Pipeline” this oppressive process is systemically produced but largely ignored by the system in which it exists…leaving effected youth invisible. The “School-to-Prison Pipeline” is rooted in many different but interconnected spheres of society, though education is inarguably central to its existence and educators play instrumental roles in the preservation and/or destruction of this process. Our group would like to explore the pivotal role of educators and others in relation to this challenge and our workshop will present research on the root causes, diverse impacts, and potential “solutions” for the School-to-Prison Pipeline. We hope to shine a light on the invisible youth affected by it, bringing hope to ourselves and those we serve.

Bringing Identities and Community into the Classroom
Presenters: Larry Bạch, Linzy Bingcang, Ernesto Hernandez, Destinee Johnson, Nancy Ku
Location: CERAS 300

How can teachers bring their own identities and their students’ identities into the classroom? How can teachers incorporate these identities in building a classroom community? Through video interviews we explore how several educators have been successful in highlighting identity and community. Learn about the activities they use in their classrooms, and experience them for yourself in our workshop

Whose History is it Anyway? Discussion of Ethnic Studies
Presenters: Katie Low, Kyle Medeiros, Annie Tickell, Di Zhao        
Location: CERAS 308

Ethnic Studies is grounded upon the notion of identity formation. This formation is often created through individual or group interactions with structural forces, while the structural continue to further shape our identities. We encounter this cycle of identity formation on a daily basis and it has become so deeply embedded in our society that it often turns into a smog or critical lens through which we see the world, causing us to overlook its significance. Due to its increasing importance in our highly globalized yet racialized world, Ethnic Studies is being rolled out by both SFUSD and OUSD in the coming academic year. Join us to discuss what Ethnic Studies is. What should the Ethnic Studies curriculum look like? Why is it important to teach Ethnic Studies?

Travis Bristol, a research and policy fellow at Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, and Claude Goldenberg, professor of education at Stanford, have created a curriculum that supports teaching about the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black man, and the protests and civil unrest that followed in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. The mini-unit, comprised of four lessons, is presented on the website of Edutopia.

The two scholars note that the events in the St. Louis suburb, as well as the more recent death of a young Black man in Baltimore while in police custody, present schools with a challenge that they need not shy away from. “We believe that the classroom is an important arena to address these events,” they write. “Not only are most students aware of and concerned about them -- especially those who live with the same realities -- but addressing this trend gives our society one more tool to further change, and helps America's children learn ways to be engaged and responsible citizens.”

Bristol and Goldenberg say that the “mini-unit” is aligned with the Common Core and is intended for students in secondary school English or social studies classes. It involves reading primary documents, watching an eyewitness and first-person account, analyzing the credibility of testimony and then developing and presenting written and oral arguments on the Ferguson case. 

“In designing this mini-unit, we call on all teachers -- whether in K-12 or university settings -- to develop similar curriculum allowing students to engage critically with primary documents that highlight violence in communities of color,” they add. “Moreover, this unit is also a call to our colleagues in university settings to remain relevant by providing K-12 teachers with resources to facilitate engagement and learning.”

To read their entire commentary and to obtain the free lessons and supporting materials, please visit Edutopia at http://bit.ly/1KIgYJ5.

Rich and poor students don’t merely enroll in college at different rates; they also complete it at different rates. The graduation gap is even wider than the enrollment gap.

In 2002, researchers with the National Center for Education Statistics started tracking a cohort of 15,000 high school sophomores. The project, called the Education Longitudinal Study, recorded information about the students’ academic achievement, college entry, work history and college graduation. A recent publication examines the completed education of these young people, who are now in their late 20s.

The study divided students into four equally sized groups, or quartiles, depending on their parents’ education, income and occupation. The students in the lowest quartile had parents with the lowest income and education, more likely to work in unskilled jobs. Those in the highest quartile had parents with the highest income and education, those more likely to be professionals or managers.

In both groups, most of the teenagers had high hopes for college. Over all, more than 70 percent of sophomores planned to earn a bachelor’s degree. In the top quartile, 87 percent expected to get at least a bachelor’s, with 24 percent aiming for an advanced degree.

In the bottom quartile, 58 percent of students expected to get at least a bachelor’s degree and 12 percent to go on to graduate school.

Thirteen years later, we can see who achieved their goals.

Among the participants from the most disadvantaged families, just 14 percent had earned a bachelor’s degree.

Read the entire post by Susan Dynarski, a professor of education, public policy and economics at the University of Michigan.

For more about Sean Reardon, the Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education at Stanford, please visit his profile page.

This cover story in the May issue of The Atlantic looks at the initial phase in a grand experiment by Starbucks: The company is providing financial support to employees who are trying to earn a bachelor's degree through online courses offered by Arizona State University.

A linchpin of the program is the counseling that is being offered to the employees as they try to navigate their way through college. A firm was retained to provide this service, after its effectiveness was documented in a study, published in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, by Eric Bettinger and Rachel Baker of Stanford Graduate School of Education.  

Here's what the Atlantic article's author, Amanda Ripley, had to say about the research:

Unlike so many other education reforms, coaching has been shown to have significant, measurable effects on student results. In a 2011 study, two Stanford University researchers conducted a randomized, controlled study of the performance of 13,555 students in eight colleges of varying degrees of selectivity. One group of students received coaching from InsideTrack, and a second group did not. After six months, the students in the coached group were five percentage points more likely to still be enrolled. The effects lingered for at least a year after the coaching ended. Five percentage points might seem small, but compared with the results of other, more expensive efforts to increase retention, it is impressive.

Read the full cover story by Ripley, whose latest book, The Smartest Kids in the World, is a New York Times bestseller.

The Stanford Graduate School of Education is proud to announce that this year's commencement speaker is Professor Linda Darling-Hammond. 

Darling-Hammond is Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education, a position she has held since she joined the Stanford faculty in 1998.  Her work at Stanford began as the Faculty Sponsor for the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP) where she teamed up with other Stanford faculty to redesign the program, which is now widely cited as an exemplar, nationally and internationally. She has taught in the STEP program, as well as the GSE’s programs in Curriculum and Teacher Education and Administration and Policy Analysis. She twice received the GSE’s Outstanding Teaching Award. 

GSE graduates and their guests are encouraged to attend both the Stanford University Commencement Ceremony and the Stanford GSE Diploma Ceremony. A reception will follow the Diploma Ceremony.

For more information about the day's programming, please click here.

Most people intuitively know that pervasive negative stereotypes are tough to deal with. Now, researchers at Stanford University have found another, particularly disturbing effect of subtle stereotypes. A series of five studies showed that people are more likely to lie, cheat, steal, or endorse doing so when they feel that they are being devalued simply because they belong to particular groups.

For example, imagining a sexist or a racist comment from a boss made women and ethnic minorities more likely to intentionally do inaccurate work, start rumors, or ignore co-workers who need help. In one correlational study, the researchers asked 311 college students whether they worried about being seen negatively because of their ethnicity. The more the college students worried or expected stereotyping, the more likely they were to report engaging in delinquent behavior, like skipping classes, verbally abusing someone, or vandalizing school property.

The research also adds to the growing body of evidence that even slight cues — like reading an article containing a negative stereotype or just remembering a painful instance of being judged unfairly — can have a sizeable impact.

“Most people reject overt racism today, but prejudice can exert its negative effects in more subtle ways,” says Peter Belmi, a graduate student and one of the researchers. “Threats to social identity can really harm people’s prospects for success, particularly for individuals who are already socially disadvantaged.”

The researchers included Margaret Neale, Stanford GSB management professor; Geoffrey L. Cohen, Stanford Graduate School of Education professor; and graduate students Belmi and Rodolfo Cortes Barragan. The paper was published in thePersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Neale says she hopes the research can help people understand that the responsibility for criminal and deviant behavior lies not only with individuals, but with society.

“We tend to make criminal behavior a dispositional attribute — a quality of the individual. But maybe we are part of the problem that is expressed by those people behaving badly,” she says. “We have huge agency and capacity to change the situation.”

The research shows that even white Americans, a historically non-stigmatized group, engage in social deviance when they feel they are being negatively stereotyped.

“We can create this in other groups, perhaps in almost any other group,” Neale says.

The paper also identified the mechanism connecting social deviance and negative stereotyping: People feel disrespected and expect unfair treatment from others when they feel they are being viewed through the lens of a stereotype. This leads them to defy or undermine group norms, according to the paper.

“Social identity threats feel particularly disrespectful because they are tied to enduring group memberships. Stereotypes convey to people that they are being judged by their group membership and not by their individual merits,” Belmi says.

The team also found that feeling devalued can elicit deviance even among historically non-stigmatized groups. They asked a group of white Americans to write either about a time when they felt devalued by others, or about a time when they did not get what they wanted.

Then the researchers gave participants a test: unsolvable anagrams, so anyone who reported solving one was considered to have cheated. Participants were nearly twice as likely to cheat if they remembered a time when they had been devalued based on their group identity.

The same effect held true for women of various ethnicities. The researchers asked the women in the study to imagine overhearing that they might not get a promotion either because their boss didn’t like them or because their boss thought women weren’t suitable for a leadership position. Women who heard the latter were more likely to embrace counterproductive work attitudes.

The researchers say that people may differ in their response to being negatively stereotyped. So what differentiates those who deviate from those who don’t?

Neale says one factor could be how strongly you hold a particular identity. For example, your ethnicity might be a core part of how you see yourself, so you might be more concerned with a racial stereotype. Or, different personality types may be better equipped to defy a negative stereotype — like a woman or a black American who becomes a CEO in part to prove a stereotype wrong.

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This story originally appeared inInsightsby Stanford Business.