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  • Advocacy group leader talks about the challenges of transitional kindergarten

    Advocacy group leader talks about the challenges of transitional kindergarten


    Credit: Randall Benton / EdSource

    Michael Olenick has spent his life pondering the preschool years. His mother, a childhood development professor, was one of the first Head Start teachers back in the 1960s, so he started preschool at age 3.

    credit: CCRC

    In some ways, he has never left that space. Olenick, a lifelong advocate for children and families and president of the Child Care Resource Center, a California-based advocacy organization, has long been a champion of early childhood education, having seen its power to uplift lives firsthand. But he worries that the educational system often pits the needs of one age group of children against another. 

    For instance, he worries that the rollout of transitional kindergarten, or TK, not only has undermined the preschool sector by stealing away some of its 4-year-olds. He also notes that TK is poised to run into a number of speed bumps ahead, including a lack of facilities and the need for more child developmental training, as it reaches full implementation in the fall. 

    Olenick, who received his Ph.D. from UCLA in educational psychology and has shaped the field with influential research on the importance of quality child care, recently made time to chat about his passion for early education and what he sees as the key challenges facing TK.

    What fascinates you most about early ed?

    My mother said that I always liked kids because I always had to be there in her classrooms. To me, it’s the most hopeful period of time, the opportunity to change kids’ trajectories the most. It’s the most hopeful time in life.

    What are the biggest challenges in the expansion of TK? Do you worry about too much academic rigor, potty training incidents, the need for nap time?

    All of those issues. In the ’80s I evaluated hundreds of preschool programs and kept running into large numbers that were drilling children on colors, numbers and letters for inordinate amounts of time. Boys had a harder time with this than girls. In looking at teacher qualifications, I saw lots of certificated teachers who were doing the drilling. I realize that’s a long time ago, but I keep hearing from colleagues seeing the same thing now. That’s why we pushed for early childhood education units for TK teachers. The other issue that comes up is many schools are designed for children to go to the bathroom unescorted. Four-year-olds can get lost there.

    What do you think is the root source of the problem? A lack of understanding of child development, like the realities of potty training?

    I don’t think most current teachers understand early development. Over time, this may right itself if they get the education they need. But principals have to have the expectation that TK is not first grade. Also, teachers do not generally handle toileting issues, and schools are not designed for 4-year-olds.

    Is the academic pressure too high today? 

    I recently got an email from my first adviser at UCLA saying she went to half a dozen TK classrooms, and it looked like first grade. I wrote her back and I said, I told you so. We don’t have enough people yet that understand that kids learn differently. People learn at different rates, and we try to put them all into the same box and have them all learn stuff at the same time. Some of them are just not ready yet. You have to individualize instruction. 

    Why do you think the TK take-up rate has been more sluggish than expected?

    Some of the biggest challenges are in rural districts, where they can’t get a very large number to attend, and the lack of child-sized facilities, especially easily accessible bathrooms. Also, I don’t buy the part about this helping all lower-income children because their parents need a full-day, full-year solution, not just three hours. For families who have a predictable schedule, a 9-to-5 job, TK with aftercare probably works pretty well, but some families need more flexibility.

    Why are small ratios so important?

    There has always been the rationale for safety. But more recent literature focuses on individual interactions between adults and children, and the fewer children per adult increases interactions, learning and attachment.

    Why is play so key in TK?

    Play is so important. I’ve heard from several TK program directors who said it took their administrators five years to recognize that play was learning. It’s not just the teachers that need to be trained on what’s developmentally appropriate; it’s important for principals, too. You know, a principal comes into a classroom and expects to see that teacher up in front of that class teaching. So if you go in and you see all these kids are playing, you may not realize they are being taught. It’s all about how you structure things in the classroom because you can get the same results in a play environment. You don’t have to drill kids. 

    Do you think we focus on setting a solid preschool foundation too much when financial stability may be more important for families?

    It’s at least as important. We do a lot of work with families that are below the federal poverty line, the poorest of the poor. There are classrooms where there are kids who seem to be defiant. There was one kid who, it turns out, was deaf, and it took a long time to get him checked. He wasn’t being defiant; he just couldn’t read our lips. We have to work to give families what they need. 





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  • LA arts education group fights falling literacy rates through poetry

    LA arts education group fights falling literacy rates through poetry


    A student performs a poem at the quarterfinals of the 12th annual Get Lit Classic Slam.

    Photo Credit: CJ Calica

    Salome Agbaroji wrote her first poem, a rap, in the second grade, and she’s been crafting rhymes ever since. Now the 18-year-old Harvard student is best known as the nation’s youth poet laureate. 

    “I have always loved poetry,” said Agbaroji. “Even before I knew it was poetry, I started loving rap music, so I’ve always loved poetry and using words creatively. That’s always just been what I gravitated to, even as a young, young child.”

    A Nigerian-American poet from Los Angeles, Agbaroji has performed spoken word poetry for the Golden Globes, an NFL halftime show, and she’s talked poetry with President Joe Biden at the White House. Her passion for spoken word performance began back at Gahr High School in Cerritos, where her love of words was further fueled by the arts education nonprofit Get Lit-Words Ignite. 

    “Get Lit is an amazing organization, giving you the space and the opportunity to share your voice and to be creative and to be wild and to be heard,” says the eloquent teenager who believes in the power of poetry to combat rising illiteracy and injustice. “They shined a light on me. They made such a big impact on my whole journey.”

    2023 national youth poet laureate Salome Agbaroji performs a poem at the 12th Annual Get Lit Classic Slam.
    Photo Credit: Unique Nicole

    Amid a deepening literacy crisis, Get Lit spreads a love of literature through spoken word poetry and performance. Founded by actor/writer Diane Luby Lane in 2006, Get Lit, which recently received $1 million from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, teaches classical poetry as well as empowers children and teens to write their own poems in over 150 Los Angeles schools, instilling a love of language in a generation often struggling with literacy.

    “Spoken word really helps with literacy,” said Lane. “It really helps when you put your body on the line, when you’re not just listening passively, but you’re actually memorizing, you’re performing, you’re responding with your own words. It’s such an interactive experience.”

    Get Lit reaches out to roughly 50,000 students a year, ranging from fourth grade to high school, through its school-based programs. The curriculum is a deep dive into great literature, from T.S. Eliot to Maya Angelou, that culminates in a three-day Classic Slam, the largest classic youth poetry competition in the country. 

    The Classic Slam “is really worth attending if you can, it is mind-blowing and so inspiring to witness,” said Malissa Feruzzi Shriver, co-founder of Turnaround Arts: California, a nonprofit that works in elementary and middle schools. “Students who participate benefit in so many ways; they gain confidence and poise and become empowered to use their voice in a unique way.” 

    Along the way, they teach the power of recitation, as well as how to amplify your own voice amid the noise of the social media age. The students come to hear the echoes in the ancient, putting the past in dialogue with the present.

    “We always say a classic isn’t a classic because it’s old, a classic is a classic because it’s great,” Lane said. “We’re redefining what the canon is.”

    Finding the joy in literacy can be a powerful message for children who don’t always feel celebrated in the school system, some say. Roughly 85% of Get Lit’s students are from under-resourced communities and 92% are students of color. 

    “Kids are sitting in school for eight hours a day, either being bombarded by facts and information or being asked to regurgitate those facts and information,” said Agbaroji, who has written poems that explore race, community and history. “Writing is like the one space, the one little pocket in an eight-hour school day where students actually can do something themselves, create something that they can say is mine and no one can take it away from me.”

    Ironically, Lane says that while some adults dismiss the study of poetry as a stilted and staid pursuit, most youths have far more open minds. 

    “It’s an easy sell with the kids. Very easy,” she says with a smile. “The elementary schools have been begging for it. You know how good young kids are at memorizing things. And sometimes their own responses are so deep. It’s unbelievable.” 

    Get Lit tries to respond to each child’s distinctive needs, experts say, tapping into what makes that student unique, how to help them shine.

    “They are doing amazing work,” said Merryl Goldberg, an arts advocate and veteran music and arts professor at Cal State San Marcos. “One of the things that I really like about what I know about them is that they incorporate community and student needs into their mission focused on poetry.”

    Lane says she knows just how to frame poems so that Tennyson and Tupac have equal pull with students and tries to shed light on the universality of poetry to capture the human experience.

    “We say, claim your poem, claim your life,” said Lane. “Because I am approaching it as an actor, I can pull Wordsworth pieces that make the kids raise their hand and fight over poems, and we’re mixing this with a lot of contemporary voices. Tupac is a great poet. The mixture allows for students to find themselves however they want to.”

    Cleveland High School students Robert Lee Shelton, Mateo Vejar, Heidi Lopez and Ashley Tahay perform a group poem at the 12th annual Get Lit Classic Slam.
    Photo Credit: Unique Nicole

    Parsing one word at a time, the way a poem requires, may be most ideal for struggling readers, Lane adds, who prefer to savor each syllable instead of speeding along the page.

    “My daughter, she was diagnosed with dyslexia. It was really hard for her to get through a whole book. It just was,” says Lane. “So many children in our school districts, their reading skills are not great, but their emotional IQ is high. So a poem gives them the opportunity to study something short but deep. It’s an absolute game changer. It changes the entire culture of a school.” 

    She’ll never forget teaching poetry to her daughter’s fourth grade class. She had them learn Angelou’s iconic “Still I Rise” by heart and watched the fourth graders light up with pride.

    “Here’s a kid that struggled with reading that doesn’t feel like they’re smart, but now they have this whole poem memorized,” she said. “They learn to perform it really well. They write their own response back to it. It’s deeply empowering. And they do it for the whole grade or class or school. And they get to feel really powerful by mastering short form content. That’s deep.”





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  • Leader steps down from foster youth advocacy group

    Leader steps down from foster youth advocacy group


    Amy Lemley, right, at an April reception for John Burton Advocates for Youth.

    Photo Credit: John Burton Advocates for Youth

    Amy Lemley was still a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the late ’90s when she founded First Place for Youth, the first housing program for former foster youth in California.

    The daughter of a large-animal veterinarian and a hospice nurse, Lemley has long been a force in policy advocacy for system-impacted youth. After First Place, she joined John Burton Advocates for Youth, or JBAY, an influential nonprofit that advocates for California’s homeless and foster youth.

    Amy Lemley

    Lemley joined as JBAY’s policy director at its inception in 2006 and went on to become its executive director, a role she has held for the past eight years.

    A handful of the policy actions led by Lemley during her tenure as executive director include establishing the nation’s first tax credit for foster youth, the extension of foster care from age 18 to age 21, and increasing state funding for housing for former foster youth.

    Lemley, who will be leaving JBAY on Oct. 1, recently sat for an interview with EdSource about her work and what’s ahead. The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

    Early in your career, you worked at a group home in Massachusetts for pregnant and parenting youth. What led you to work at the group home?

    I did what I thought you were supposed to do when you left college, which is to go into management consulting. My parents had paid a lot for that degree, and I felt like I was supposed to go get a big, fancy job. I was miserable, and then I remember breaking down with my mom. She’s like, “Why are you doing this job, honey?” And I said, “Because you guys sacrificed so much for me to have this education.” And she said, “You don’t really get what parenthood is. We want you to be happy.” I just remember the weight of the world coming off my shoulders, and I knew what I wanted to do is what both of my parents had done, which is to try and help people.

    I really had to make a hard sell to this nonprofit where I worked because I, clearly on paper, was not qualified. Whether that was responsible to the young people in their care is another question, but it opened my eyes to a whole world of young people who have had this very unfortunate circumstance and kind of set me forth on my career.

    What was your role in the group home?

    I was a case manager, so I had 14 pregnant and parenting young people on my caseload. I remember thinking at the time, “This shouldn’t be hard. I just have to keep them enrolled in school, and make sure they know how to parent, and help them get a job, and help them navigate public benefits, and how hard could it be?” My eyes were opened very quickly about the complexity of their lives. I had young people who would run away from the group home because their younger siblings were at home and they were trying to protect them. There were so many young people who were victims of intimate partner violence, and their lives were extremely complex. I did my very best to help them make progress in these different domains.

    Why did you pursue the path of founding First Place for Youth as a student at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy versus a different path of support for this particular group of young people, foster youth?

    I definitely have an entrepreneurial temperament. I also really deeply believe, as many others do, that with safe, stable housing, anything is possible. It’s the foundation on which lives are built, and without it, very little is possible. And so seeing the young people who I worked with in the group home age out of care, become homeless and then tragically lose custody of their children, it was clear to me that it’s completely unreasonable for an 18-year-old to be independent. I certainly wasn’t.

    So the creation and opportunity to create something with my very dear friend Deanne Pearn, to do something right, to do it well, to meet the needs of these young people, was very appealing.

    At the time, there was this kind of story we told ourselves, that young people don’t want a program; they want to be free; they just want to do their own thing. But in my experience, when you give young people something of value, something that’s actually helping them meet their practical needs, they’re very receptive to it.

    I’m curious about the transition from First Place for Youth to John Burton Advocates for Youth. Why transition over to JBAY at the time that you did?

    We co-founded First Place and got it to a certain size, and you can really only scale a program so far with private funding. And then I happened to have been introduced to John Burton after he was termed out of office (as a state senator) and really pitched to him taking the First Place program and funding it with public funding. He’d done that a hundred times over. What to me seemed like an impossibility, he had 40 years of experience doing it. So that’s why I left.

    Once an organization gets to be a certain size, as the executive director, you’re not running around doing advocacy. Your whole job really is to manage and maintain the existing organization. I felt like First Place needed an executive director that wanted to do that, and that wasn’t me. I had a different mission. I had the good fortune of meeting John Burton and having the opportunity to kind of pursue that mission together.

    How do you maintain your policy focus when there is so much need and a constantly changing landscape?

    Whether it’s inflation, unemployment during the pandemic or the housing crisis, whatever larger kind of macroeconomic developments occur, these young people feel it the most deeply.

    I think a really important part of our success has been to not try to be experts in everything. We have a specific kind of set of policies that we’re deeply informed about, and that we keep revisiting. We try to be very disciplined in terms of really knowing the body of policy, the public agencies that administer it, the details about the implementation, the different actors that implement it, so that we can develop really smart, strategic approaches that are based not just in a conceptual knowledge, but in a deep practical knowledge of how these programs are implemented in communities.

    I always say we don’t want to be an inch deep and a mile wide. It really means saying no when it’s appropriate and continuing to dig deep into those issues and figure out what is the most pressing need of young people and then how to marry that very pressing need with what is practically possible in today’s economic and political environment.

    What does the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last month in the Johnson v. Grants Pass case, which upheld an Oregon city’s ban on homeless residents sleeping outdoors, mean for youth in California and nationwide?

    Unaccompanied homeless youth are less likely to be sheltered than the general population of homeless individuals. And we know that young people who are unsheltered, even for a very short amount of time, are more at risk of violence and exploitation because of the vulnerability of their age. And so every night that they are unsheltered, they’re in danger. The optimist in me hopes that the ruling can be a catalyst for a more coherent, statewide approach, assuming the federal government isn’t going to provide the level of coordination and funding we require.

    What comes next for you?

    I am going to kind of take a couple months off and then I’m going to raise my head and think about whether I want to try my hand at consulting, potentially working with those high-quality local nonprofits who are doing very high quality service to young people and helping them match that with public funding and public policy, and taking what can be a really wonderful intervention and broadening applicability to all young people.

    I’ve promised my husband I will not found another organization. I already had my wheels turning, and he’s just like, “No, Amy, no.” And I was like, “Well, I’ll try my best.”





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  • How Doug Doblar Uses Cold Call to Solve the “Endemic Problems” of Group Work

    How Doug Doblar Uses Cold Call to Solve the “Endemic Problems” of Group Work


    The challenge is real…

     

     

    I’m pretty cautious about “group work.”

    It can be beneficial but the “can be” should be in italics because it has endemic problems that are often over-looked. One of which is the fact that it can be really hard to ensure that everyone is working, thinking and benefitting.

    The happy buzz of voices in the classroom, just far enough away that you can’t really hear what they are saying, can be a recipe for happy collusion: I will let you go off to the corners of the room and we will both pretend the optimal case is occurring.

    So I was very happy to read a brilliant blog post by my friend, colleague and TLAC Fellow (see below) Doug Doblar of Bay Creek Middle School in Gwinnett County, Georgia, that uses the TLAC technique Cold Call to solve some of group work’s endemic problems. 

    Here’s how Doug describes the endemic problems of group work:

    One of the challenges that requires constant vigilance … is assuring that every member of a group thinks and learns during the day’s thinking task.  There are quite a few ways this can go wrong, I’ve found:

      • One or two students in the group form a quick understanding of the new topic and race forward, leaving the other member or members of the group in the dust
      • One or two students in the group do not form a very quick understanding of the topic, but are afraid to say so, so they feign an understanding, allowing the other member or members of the group to similarly leave them in the dust
      • One or two students in a group “aren’t feeling it today,” so they don’t participate, feign an understanding, and get left in the dust

     

    Or some other iteration of this situation where part of the group is off to the races while another part of the group is stuck at the starting line, willingly or not.

     

    Perfectly put. I love an advocate for an idea who is keenly aware of the potential downside!

    Doug advises addressing these challenges through a variety of tools, which is supremely practical and realistic. A complex challenge in the classroom is rarely solved by one tool alone.

    First Doug advises building strong routines and setting clear expectations that address the pitfalls.

    But Doug also advises using Cold Call and I think this application of the technique is brilliant.

    As you walk from group to group, he advises you should Cold Call students who are at risk of non-engagement.

    Here’s how he describes it:

    Cold calling is my go-to technique during thinking tasks when I’m worried that a member of a group might be getting left behind, willingly or unwillingly.

    As I actively observe during thinking task time, it usually isn’t too hard to spot these students.  They stand a little farther from the group, maybe don’t face the whiteboard, rarely have the marker, and might be ones I already know are “not feeling it” today and who feel that their bad mood should excuse them from learning and participating.  They’re also ones with personalities who make them regular disengage-ers who I’m always aware of.

     

    As Doug circulates he finds these students and Cold Calls them in one of three ways, which I will let him describe:

      1. Directly asking a student to do the next “thin slice”: During thin-sliced thinking tasks– which I use more days than not –I’ll often just show up to a group and ask a student who I’m afraid might be disengaged to lead the next example or to explain a prior example to me.  “Bryce, will you lead the next one?”  or “Maddie, will you explain this last one to me?”
      2. “What’s he/she talking about?: When I come to a group whose leader is doing great of explaining thinking and trying to make sure the group is following along, but I’m worried that a member of that group is either disengaged or feigning an understanding to keep things moving, I’ll often just slide up to that student and ask “what’s he/she talking about?”  It’s a quick and easy cold call that holds the student accountable for explaining the leader’s example.
      3. “​What’s he/she doing?”: This version of cold calling works just like the “what’s he/she talking about” one, except I use it when the group’s leader isn’t doing as good of a job.  Sometimes I’ll catch the student with the marker silently and independently working a slice on his or her own with just the other members of the group watching.  Usually this is ok, but I’ll frequently slide in and ask another group member “what’s he/she doing?” while it’s happening to make sure that the rest of the group actually understands what’s going on.
    2.  

     

    As if that’s not helpful enough, Doug has posted videos of himself doing this and I’ve made a short montage of them here:

     

     

    Doug wraps by talking about how important it is to keep the Cold Calls positive and how that helps  build what we sometimes call ‘loving accountability.’

    They know I might move over at any moment and cold call one of them, and not a single one looks anxious about it…the students understood and they were proud to be able to explain that to me…. Accountability is hard to build into any instructional setting, but once it is assumed, kids really take ownership of their learning most of the time. 

    It’s great stuff and there’s plenty more insight in Doug’s full post, which you can read here.

    Want to know more?

    Check out:

    Doug’s Blog: Doug writes beautifully about implementing Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics and how TLAC techniques support that framework. He provides practical advice and video. To read more, visit his blog here: http://www.dougdoblar.com/

     

    TLAC Fellows: Doug is one of twelve of our talented TLAC Fellows – Cohort 3. We’re opening the application for Cohort 4 on February 18th! All application materials and more information about the program can be found here: https://teachlikeachampion.org/teach-like-champion-fellows/

     

    Upcoming Engaging Academics Workshop: Interested in exploring Cold Call with us? We’re in LA on February 27-28 for an Engaging Academics workshop where we’ll study high engagement strategies like Everybody Writes, Cold Call, Means of Participation, and Lesson Preparation. Join us here: https://teachlikeachampion.org/engagingacademicsfeb2025



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