DENVER, CO – APRIL 04: Denver Green School Southeast 8th graders, Suren Sadeghi, left, and Rishon Harvey work an exercise in Nicole Saab’s literacy class in Denver, Colorado on Thursday, April 04, 2024. Giant easel-sized sticky notes hung on the walls of Nicole Saab’s classroom.
Saab is one of 10 Denver Public Schools teachers who’ve helped their Black students achieve stellar academic progress and whose teaching methods are being studied by university researchers as part of the district’s Black Student Success work. “We want to be strategic,” said Michael Atkins, the district’s new director of Black Student Success. “These six schools are a learning lab so our babies can inform us of what we’re doing well or what we’re not before we full-scale do things we think will work.”
“My whole goal in education is to make sure that babies that look like me don’t have the same experience I did walking the halls of DPS,” he said.Chris Fleming is principal of Joe Shoemaker School, an elementary school about five miles southeast of Denver Green School. Shoemaker is one the six schools in the inaugural Black Student Success cohort, all of which serve a significant population of Black students — and all of which have principals who want to do better by those students.
Shoemaker has had a taste of success already. For the past two years, the school has experimented with what it calls “equity cohorts.” “Like with anything else, when you take on too many initiatives, it’s too much,” Fleming said. “Anytime you can narrow a focus, you have more success.”“There are so many different competing priorities in a school district,” said Corey Jenks, principal at Columbine Elementary, located in a historically Black northeast Denver neighborhood where gentrification has caused Columbine’s Black student population to dwindle to about 21%.
Anderson said her hope is to pull out “actionable change ideas” that teachers at the six schools in the cohort could try in their own classrooms next school year. Students, he said, are like plants. Educators are like rain. And you know those little stickers, Atkins said, that come with plants? The ones that tell you, based on the number of raindrop icons, exactly how much rain the plants need? Every student has one of those stickers.On sticky notes, the principals wrote problems they’re trying to solve. Students being bored and unengaged in class. Too many absences. Generational trauma from bad experiences in school.
Source: Education Headlines (educationheadlines.net)
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: DenverChannel - 🏆 239. / 63 Read more »
Source: denverwestword - 🏆 315. / 61 Read more »
Source: denverwestword - 🏆 315. / 61 Read more »
Source: denverwestword - 🏆 315. / 61 Read more »
Source: SAcurrent - 🏆 607. / 51 Read more »
Source: 9NEWS - 🏆 238. / 63 Read more »