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K-5 Literacy letter and end of year message
Frontloading children. What a metaphor. Treating children like washing machines. Or cement mixers.
And classrooms in which teachers provide students with the opportunity to express themselves daily in meaningful and rigorous ways.
How long has it been since you expressed yourself rigorously? Why would we want to do this to young children?
Rigor: a harsh or cruel act; a state of rigidity in living tissues or organs that prevents response to stimuli; death stiffening; inclemency; rugged sternness; relentless severity; cruelty; severity of life; voluntary submission to pain; inflexibility; something hard to endure.
-- http://www.dictionary.reference.com
Rigor: Strictness or severity, as in temperament, action, or judgment.
A harsh or trying circumstance; hardship.
A harsh or cruel act.
Physiology: A state of rigidity in living tissues or organs that prevents response to stimuli.
Syn: Stiffness, rigidness; inflexibility; severity; austerity; sternness; harshness; strictness; exactness.
--The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 4th edition. 2000
NOTE: According to the Oakland website, The OUSD Strategy Group is responsible for implementing and monitoring plans in support of schools to increase educational opportunity and achievement for every Oakland student. Stam is Chief Academic Officer of this group, which also has a State Administrator, a Chief Financial Officer, a Chief Services Officer, and a Chief of Community Accountability.
TO: Oakland Teachers
FROM: Brad Stam
Chief Academic Officer
RE: K-5 Literacy letter and end of year message
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2007
Dear Elementary Principals:
Congratulations on another year coming to a successful close!
I truly appreciate your leadership, your tireless efforts on behalf of your students, teachers and families, and your dedication to student literacy.
Your efforts are bearing fruit. I am hearing from more and more middle school teachers and principals that the students they are receiving from the elementary schools are coming more prepared and with higher skills. I predict this trend will only grow.
I have attached the electronic version of the literacy letter that your network officers shared with you at your network meetings recently.
This letter represents a collaborative effort among the various members of the district's Reading Leadership Team to craft a unified message regarding effective literacy instruction with Open Court/Foro Abierto as the foundation. We welcome your feedback on this letter.
As you may know, OEA has been harping on the "drill and kill" of Open Court with its membership, and this letter not only clarifies our position regarding that curriculum, but demonstrates how effective literacy curriculum and instruction must be planned, comprehensive,
engaging, challenging and creative.
I strongly encourage you to share this letter with your teachers in the few days remaining so that they too will get this positive message, and will have time to think and reflect on its implications over the summer. I encourage you to re-distribute the letter again to your teachers in August as part of planning and preparation for the year.
Translated versions of the letter will be made available on the district's website, and will be emailed to you in August so that you can share our approach to literacy with your parents and community.
In addition to the letter, the Reading Leadership Team has been working on a rubric for effective K-5 literacy instruction. This rubric will serve as a common text for professional development next year, and will be a great tool to help principals supervise and evaluate literacy instruction. Mary Pippitt Cervantes will have more information on the rubric for you in August.
A critical part of the rubric is differentiation of instruction, and we will continue our focus on frontloading as an instructional strategy to
ensure access to learning by all students, including our English learners and students with disabilities.
This year, you heard me speak about the need to increase student talk and decrease teacher talk. We featured "Think, Pair, Share" as a strategy teachers can use daily to increase active learning, speaking and overall student engagement. Many of your teachers use other
strategies as well.
Next year, the Reading Leadership Team is expanding this focus, using the theme of "student expression".
Together, we will study, discuss, and look for classrooms in which teachers provide students with the opportunity to express themselves
daily in meaningful and rigorous ways. Student expression includes writing, oral discourse and response, engagement in collaboration and
cooperative activities, and artistic creativity. Student expression enhances language acquisition, content learning and metacognitive
development, it is a key strategy to accelerate student learning and achievement to new levels, and it is more engaging and fun!
Finally, several of our schools are piloting a K-5 writing pre/post assessment that will help us improve writing instruction and calibrate
expectations for grade level student writing proficiency across the district
I look forward to continuing our conversation and collaborative learning on effective literacy instruction and student learning in the fall. In
the meantime, have a wonderful and well deserved summer break.
2007-06-20
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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