Introduction

Increasing access for students is at the forefront of my experience as a K-12 educator in a historically underfunded urban school district, fighting systemic oppression that has held my perfectly deserving students back from receiving the opportunities they deserve. Access to opportunities in my classroom has a bend toward what life will be like "outside of here" or after graduation. The "real-world" is a mysterious entity. The questions of college, career, pursuing further education and training or entering the workforce, as well as the ever-confusing world of personal finances, credit cards, applying for loans, cooking, and laundry are all common questions students ask me about. As the Chemistry teacher to these students during their junior year and an Advisory / Seminar teacher during the senior or junior year, I am often asked these questions by students who feel an immediate need to understand what is coming next.

Due to inequities of access, opportunity, and education, students are often left without many resources on these topics. This could include having parents who took different life paths or choices than the student desires, or a student may be a first-generation college student or the first in this country in their families and not know what is coming next once they are out of secondary education. I try to expand the opportunities that students in my classroom have access to, to encompass more than just a Chemistry curriculum, and to partner with families to fill in the gaps in student's needs.

In this Access portion of this Capstone, I will be highlighting two access opportunities that I have organized and executed for my students. The first is an amendment to the Seminar curriculum, which focused on financial literacy from budgeting at a high school level, to savings accounts, stocks, bonds, credit cards and scores, and ultimately loans and financial aid for college programming toward the end of the year. This opportunity was directly identified as a need by students themselves. The second opportunity occurred in this current school year, where I organized an opportunity for students to engage with astronomers and opened doorways for students to execute a formal, public presentation to community members at a school STEM Night. Students otherwise have never had the chance to communicate their learnings with community members, nor would they have been exposed to the possibilities of a career in Engineering or Chemistry in a field such as astronomy. This opportunity dually serves as a key Family Engagement event, as it was created and executed through my work on the Family Communications Team and allowed families access to seeing their students present difficult information. The event built a bridge between the community and the work students do in school, and when compiled with the other family engagement activities that I do on a day-to-day basis in my school, this forged an open line of communication with many families of the school.

Access Opportunity 1 - Financial Literacy

Purpose

Many students at X High School lack an adult at home who either has the time or expertise to explain to them aspects of the "real world" that students are interested in knowing. In discussions with students in my Seminar course for 11th graders at X High School during the 2021-2022 school year, it became clear that many of them desired information about finances and financial literacy. I shared with students how when I was in high school in an urban public school system, we had a course called "Consumer Economics" that was mandatory to pass for graduation and included many of these skills. I had to write checks, balance budgets, and manage fake credit card debt, among other things. When sharing this, it became clear that I had access to an opportunity that was not presently at X High School.

I became motivated by this student identified need, and began to design a course that utilized many activities from sources online, including Junior Achievement (JA) USA. This developed financial literacy curriculum was then translated into the 17 languages spoken at X High School and enacted by all teachers and students during the Seminar course which meets daily throughout the year. This opportunity increased my students' access to knowledge that they otherwise might not have received as it was not readily available. Access to knowledge about financial literacy is a privilege, and one that my students were not afforded previous to my creation of this lesson sequence. Students are impressionable, and the ways they interact with money and finances is largely affected by the roles models in their lives. By providing access to a curriculum of knowledge about finances, students are able to make decisions for themselves as opposed to simply repeating or not repeating what their role models did. Additionally, this opportunity exposed my students to resources that they can continue to draw upon throughout their lives to break cycles of poverty and poor financial literacy.

Planning

Students in the Seminar course at X Public High School follow a somewhat pre-assigned curriculum that has been deemed successful for the students. However, it is common that a topic will be brushed over or completed quickly in favor of focusing on school initiatives such as increasing survey response rates or other tasks that benefit school data. For this reason, students lose a lot of faith in the seminar curriculum and tasks. In order to combat this, I led an open-discussion for students, asking what they wanted to learn. As the students started shouting out ideas, I would write them down. This became an informal needs assessment. Some students began to shout "how to win a million dollars" or "how to buy a fancy car", and instead of shaming these "joking" responses, I chose to ask for more details. Asking, "Do you want to learn budgeting skills so that you can afford a car? Do you want to learn how to save money to have a million dollars? Do you want to learn how to avoid debt in your life?" and I soon came to realize that many of my students did not have this education or these skills taught to them at home, and they are seeking them from school. With this in mind, I set out to answer my student's questions and increase their access to information about financial literacy that they would not have otherwise had access to. I created a formal needs assessment (seen below) that students could check off what they wanted to learn, based on our informal conversation. This guided my research for useful sites and for a plan of action.

For this opportunity to increase access, I chose to utilize resources from Junior Achievement. Junior Achievement (JA) is a nonprofit that works to prepare students and young folks for success. This website offers the opportunity to build a partnership with a school or district and has program resources for teachers, parents, and students that want activities or resources. I chose Junior Achievement as the resource to use after completing a resource exploration of various resources that can increase access for students through a course offered in this program. The resource exploration document--including a description of my intentions with the resource, a summary of the resource, and possible roadblocks--can be seen below.

The resources I was most interested by and drawn to from Junior Achievement were the ones on financial literacy for high school students. Some of the best resources offered here include: “A World Without Cash”, “Applying for Financial Aid with FAFSA”, “Career Decisions”, “Interpreting a Financial Aid Letter”, “Job Loss”, and “My Financial Future and Debt” (High School Resources Financial Literacy). Note that all titles are links to the resources. According to the American Psychological Association, socioeconomic status (SES) is not just about income but also “educational attainment, financial security, and subjective perceptions of social status and social class” (American Psychological Association, 2017). And, your SES is a reliable predictor for life span, physical, and psychological health thus connecting it directly to behavioral health and studies. I want to increase mental health and financial literacy for my students, and I often find that when I teach budgeting to students they feel that they have so little income either as an individual or as a family that they cannot budget. I want to teach to my students that any income is budgetable, and that there are ways to aim for a debt-free college experience if that is something they want to go forward and achieve. The resources provided by JA increase my students’ access to this mentality and increase their access to a more financially literate lifestyle. Using the resources from JA across classrooms during our seminar course time—a course designated for advisory, social-emotional learning, and increasing “life skills”—increased my students’ access to being financially literate and the opportunities for young adults to save money, earn money, and receive resources to aid with reducing or eliminating burdens of debt from college.

Based upon my informal and formal needs assessments, I determined the following sequence of lesson plans:

1. What is financial literacy and why is it important?

2. What is income? How to read a pay stub and a job description

3. What are taxes? Why is my actual pay less than what I was told it would be?

4. Budgeting 101

5. Opening a Credit Card: Pros and Cons

6. Managing Credit and Credit Scores

7. Savings: Accounts, Investments, and More

8. Closing Lesson

As one of 10 seminar instructors for the Junior team, I was not alone in the effort to teach this course; however, I was alone in planning and preparing these financial literacy lessons. I decided that with the knowledge from my needs assessment, I needed to allot time for creating financial literacy lessons and activities. I began to utilize Junior Achievement activities and resources as well as resources sourced from a variety of open-source online sites and created a successful, student-centered, inquiry based, equitable and culturally responsive course. The course did not assume a degree of income in a home but instead allowed students to role play as different characters with different incomes, thus separating themselves and their real life situations from the lessons. I did not want my small group of seminar students to be the only ones with this knowledge, so I began to share it with the Junior team, and would email out regularly about the materials we were working on and the slide decks we used. An example email can be seen below. I would be sure to take any feedback from sending materials out to folks and implement them as best I can. After all, the best way to increase access is to make use of as many resources as possible.

Students participated in these lessons through a series of interactive activities that took place in the hour long, daily seminar course. We opened each lesson with a slideshow presentation about the lesson topic, providing examples, details, and definitions for all students. I would field some questions, but typically quickly moved students on toward working on the interactive piece of the lesson, usually a role playing scenario game or a real-life self-reflection. Any unanswered questions or topics would be placed in the parking lot, seen in the below section. Students would work alone or in a group and analyze scenarios or their own lives and determine their income, how to budget their income, and how to best spend their income. These activities engaged all students in the process of budgeting in a gamified and exciting way.

The planning document that I created myself for the unit can be seen below. This was sent out to the head of the Junior Team who spearheads Junior Seminar courses, as well as the Junior team administrator, who approved the lessons to be taught. All lesson plans and lesson materials were created by myself for the team.

The results of the multiple choice questions strongly support the conclusion that Dungeons and Dragons club has had a positive impact on students' lives. Almost all items have exclusively positive or neutral responses, and some of the positive response rates are impressive. Some highlights include that 75 percent of student respondents report both that D&D club has made them more excited about coming to school and that it has increased their interest in creative writing. Likewise, more than 80 percent of respondents express that D&D club has made them more comfortable around new people and that they have made new friends in the club. These two conclusions are consistent with the expectations described in the literature regarding the impact of games on motivation, creativity, and social skills. Likewise, when it comes to student confidence when challenged, likelihood of seeking out answers when confused, and time spent coming up with new ideas, the club seems to have largely positively impacted students as well, with 50 percent of respondents to these questions selecting this option. This suggests that while the D&D club's most significant contributions to student access are in the domains of of social skills, creativity, and motivation, it also contributes in meaningful ways to student character strengths such as determination, curiosity, and thinking skills. The qualitative results from the survey were similarly positive, extolling many remarkable benefits of the activity.

Student-Facing Materials

Student Engagement and Reflections

Building Community

Students displayed their engagement throughout the course. Seminar was previously a time in which students were less likely to participate or speak with one another, they would rather put their heads down and not interact. The budgeting unit, being built around them and off of their ideas, allowed students to have a voice in the classroom and feel that they were learning important and relevant information. This trickled into a long term effect of building community in the classroom, which can be seen in the image below, where students decorated our door to show the community we had built in our seminar classroom.

Evidence of Engagement

In terms of the lessons, students shared their engagement through asking questions in the Jamboard and completing reflection activities about what they learned through this activity. A screencapture of the end of unit Jamboard can be seen below. The Jamboard asked students to reflect upon what they learned, what they wished they had learned, and to finish the sentence, "Knowing what I know now...". This is a practice completed in chemistry class, so many students were aware of how to use the Jamboard. Students were also prompted to increase the size of the sticky note if they agreed or wanted to say the same thing. This showed me the student engagement was high throughout the lessons and made me proud that students feel their new knowledge is usable and important.

Evidence of Learning

Students do not have to pass tests or quizzes in Seminar class, so instead of a typical summative or formative assessment, students were assessed on their learning informally during activities. Student learning was evidenced through successful budget balancing and other successful implementation of learned skills in the fake scenarios that we worked with during class time.

Closing Circle

At the end of the unit, students shared how this access opportunity that I brought to them impacted them. The circle questions were:

1. What was your understanding of financial literacy before this unit?

2. What is one word to describe how you used to feel about finances or money?

3. What is one word to describe how you feel now?

4. What is one key takeaway you have from this unit?

5. What is one thing you are still hoping to learn about or want to know more about?

6. What is one action step you are going to take soon to improve your financial health?

Circles are a regular part of our school's program of study, as all courses hold at least one circle a month. Students are encouraged to share their opinions, thoughts, and emotions. Because of this, the circle was a very safe place for students to share about the unit. Responses were delivered orally and as a norm, I do not write down anything nor record anything during a circle. Responses were as follows in general based on my own personal reflection afterwards:

1. Nothing, confusion, stress, some felt pretty good

2. More, Need, Stress, Unsure, Working on it

3. Growing, Learned, Stress, Plans

4. How to budget, how to pick out a credit card, how to to deal with money issues, how to invest

5. Most students felt lessons on stocks were not enough, some brought up bitcoin, and "the market"

6. Get a credit card, balance my budget, update my budget often

While I do not have a complete record of the circle, the main takeaways from students were that they were positively impacted by the unit and that they increased their financial literacy over the course of the unit. Students had doors opened for them that they previously did not have access to, such as seeing a sample budget template, playing with salaries and careers, and attempting to figure out how to live a balanced and financially healthy lifestyle under a fake profile. Students stated that they did not know the difference between credit cards or what a credit score was and that they learned a lot throughout the unit about how to make choices that support healthy credit.

My Reflection

Creating and implementing this curriculum was both humbling and gratifying. I was so happy to be able to share with students important life skills, and I was all the more invested in this work when students told me about their personal stories with finances. Many students came to me and mentioned privately that they did not have a lot because of the debt their family lived with, and mentioned both how they were happy that I did not look down upon those with financial instability and that I gave them clear steps they can follow to ideally avoid such an occurrence in their own financial lives. Many students during the course of the year started jobs and would ask me to pull up the document about how to fill in a W-2 or W-4 and would ask about how to read a pay stub to determine where their funding went. We would come back to these assignments and students would edit their fake scenario budget to reflect the money they are making and they would reflect upon how much they are spending on items such as shoes, eating at restaurants, or gifts as opposed to their "needs" list for expenditures.

Seeing in real time the effect these lessons had on students was one of those experiences as a teacher where you feel immensely proud and recommitted to the work. I know that I increased the access my students had to this information in a way that otherwise would not have been available to them because they told me and showed me how they needed these lessons. Student access to financial literacy and financial planning was greatly increased as a direct result of my actions in planning and executing these lessons. And while I cannot speak to the implementation of these lessons in the classrooms of other seminar teachers, I know that I at the least provided a grade-wide initiative and that the resources were made available so that all students at X High School had the newfound opportunity to learn and plan for a healthy financial future.

Access Opportunity 2 - Search for Life

Introduction

In Chemistry class, students spent weeks learning about introductory chemistry such as elements, molecules, and valence electrons through the grounding phenomenon of the Search for Life in the Universe. This lesson aligned seamlessly with the national naming of exoplanets found by the Webb Telescope. Utilizing my role on the Family Communications and Engagement Team, I organized a STEM Night that featured my chemistry students presenting their findings and learnings about the Search for Life to families and community members. This work was done in partnership with local astronomers and based upon the work of astronauts, thus exposing students to a wide variety of careers that utilize chemistry on a daily basis. This increased student access to hearing firsthand accounts of these possible careers and additionally increased family engagement and access to the school and our learnings in the classroom beyond the typical level of interaction.

Purpose

At X Academy in Massachusetts, I have worked to create and implement a STEM Night focused on the Search for Life outside of Earth. This night is the culmination of a unit-long project in which students teamed up with local astronomers and made use of resources from astronauts and astronomer-enthusiasts to supplement our inquiryHub Chemistry curriculum Unit 1 titled "Search for Life". The inquiryHub Chemistry curriculum storyline and its grade-level alignment can be seen below. While this is a great, student-centered, inquiry-focused curriculum, it lacked a final push in the direction of "Why does this matter for my life outside of high school?". At X Academy, our students are slotted into pathways (Health and Life Sciences, Computer Science, and Engineering) which are intentionally industry aligned to increase access for students to potential careers and fields of research that would one day earn them a living wage. Our chemistry course is in the process of becoming aligned to these pathways, and as we study the Search for Life, I was troubled that many students found the material to be fairytale-like or borderline fictional as they did not personally believe in extraterrestrial life. Thus, I set out to find a career connection to the material. I intended to increase access for students to careers that they otherwise would not have been able to explore. By opening doors for students to new career options, I am able to increase student engagement in the course and provide alternative pathways for their lives after X Academy.

Luckily, at the same time as I was attempting to make this course more relevant and increase my students' access to opportunities, the NameExoWorlds 2022 competition was launched by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). This competition seeks to create partnerships between teachers, students, astronomy enthusiasts, amateur astronomers and professional astronomers, culminating in a public event that presents the findings of this community about astronomy, exoplanets, and/or the Search for Life to the public. This is a great opportunity--not only for my students to take part in this competition that allows applicants to name a new exoplanet --but also for students to work with local professionals in this field and to experience delivering a public speech.

I was able to bring these two ideas together through STEM Night and the NameExoWorlds 2022 Competition. I bridged the opportunity to use real astronomer data in the Inquiry Hub Unit, with the competition to name a new exoplanet, and the opportunity to share knowledge with families and community members at STEM Night. I was trusted by my administration to completely plan and organize this, and to provide students with a new opportunity in their academic journey to take on a career-focused role, learn about a new possible career pathway, and practice the transferrable skill of public speaking and presentation. It was my hope that this opportunity additionally provided a newfound sense of purpose and care for the curriculum in chemistry and inspired lifelong learning.

Student presentations were then shared at STEM Night at X Academy on October 18th, 2022. Families were invited and the night was advertised using the student-created posters below.

This opportunity was planned to increase student access to two aspects of real-world skills and learning. The first was opening doors to learning about careers and fields of study that they would otherwise not be exposed to (astronomy, space-related fields), and the second was to allow students access to an event in which they had to organize a presentation and deliver a speech to the public about recent learnings and findings, thus completing high level executive skills. For many students, unless they are on debate or speech team, they are not regularly exposed to public speaking. However, a real-world, 21st century skill is the ability to speak with large groups and accurately communicate ideas, as well as field questions and provide responses on the fly. This opportunity allowed my students access to this experience at a young age.

To inform our work, I connected students with NASA Engineer, who works for NASA Engineering and particularly the Artemis Project. He spoke to students about a career in astronomy and what the Search for Life is like for folks on the cutting edge of space research. Correspondences can be seen below with Mr. X as we set up a Zoom call with students. I coordinated all calls with Mr. X, I applied to NASA for a speaker to speak with us, and I coordinated having students in all chemistry periods to come to my classroom at the same time to hear the talk. In the Zoom call, students were prompted to ask questions to this astronomer about their career, what made them most interested in the career, and how they got from high school to the point they are at now. This was a great opportunity for students to hear from a NASA Engineer and to speculate about possible career pathways in Engineering outside of what they had been exposed to already through classes at X Academy. The call with Mr. X opened a door for students to see the importance of their work and offered a possible alternative pathway for life after high school, as Mr. X had a non-traditional path to getting to work at NASA.

Student-created posters for STEM Night

My Reflection

In the process of setting up for STEM Night and this unit, I wanted to put special attention on how this opportunity was more than just "interesting" or "fun" but how it truly expanded the access that my students have to different opportunities, experiences, and resources. Urban public school districts are often focused on numbers, and as a turnaround school we are more focused on the data and statistics than most other schools. It is our job to relieve ourselves from turnaround status, through MAP, MCAS, SAT, ACT, GPA, and attendance data. And yes, those are all acronyms for standardized tests. Our classrooms become regimented and built to help students succeed...on a test. Not as much in life. And our students feel this pain and pressure. They are smart, capable, and deserving, and they are additionally tired and burnt out from the system that tests their knowledge in multiple choice rather than prepares them for life outside of a Scantron exam. It is this experience, had by many of my students, that I hoped to change via this opportunity. This opportunity provided students access to new possible career paths and fields of study that touched chemistry, but also included the building of presentation skills, design opportunities, and more industry aligned experiences for students. I hoped that this opportunity would excite my students and inspire more attention in class and I found that it did just that, and the impact was felt in our community. Students felt an increased sense of ownership over the material and confidence that what they were learning was so important that a NASA Engineer took time out of his day to speak with students about their studies. This boost of confidence and increased opportunities to chat with industry professionals speaks to the increase in accessibility that I personally brought to X Academy. I worked alone in planning the project that built off of my curriculum, which led into the NameExoWorlds competition entry and the STEM Night presentations. These all increased access for my students to an opportunity to network, to connect with the community, and to practice marketable skills in a chemistry classroom.

Going forward, I will continue to make real-world, industry connections throughout the learning process. Students clearly became more engaged when they had autonomy in making decisions over what part of STEM Night they took leadership on, and they were excited about the opportunity to speak with a real astronomer about the questions we had developed during the unit thus far. I want my students and their families to understand that the work we do in chemistry class is applicable and has real-world connections. There is no better way to convince people of this than to do it themselves, and to demonstrate the alternative pathways that students can take within chemistry and subsequently after high school.

Access Opportunity 3 - Family Engagement

Introduction

Engagement with families is at the forefront of my actions as an educator. In order to teach a child, you cannot just partner with them in the classroom. There must be an additional partnership that occurs outside of the classroom in which an educator takes the time and space to know the people, places, and things that have shaped this student. In my classroom, I have many long term family engagement plans, such as frequent calls home to positively speak with guardians about student behavior, identification of students who have or may disrupt the class and partnering with guardians and others in the building to form improvement plans for students, and to ensure that my door in a physical sense and in a virtual, metaphorical sense, is always open to talk with families about their students.

However, these interactions are not enough. Parents love hearing about how their students are doing in class, but often they are not sure what they are doing or learning about during these classes. Most students do not rush home to tell their parents what they studied in class and their interest in the subject matter, and some parents have shared with me that it feels like pulling teeth when they ask about how their courses are going. There is a sense, in a teenager's mind, that all questions about school must be rooted in some sort of problem--academic, social, disruptive, or other. When in reality, most guardians do just want to know about what their student learns about and enjoys so that they can encourage and support them. It is my commitment as an instructor to students that I will partner with parents and allow them access to what we are learning about in class.

A large portion of my Family Engagement Project is related to my Access Opportunity #2, focusing on the Search for Life STEM Night. This STEM Night is made possible with the addition of parents and community members in attendance at this public event about astronomy. Students were tasked with sharing publicly what they have been learning about in school. And various students were tasked with advertising the event and helping to organize bringing in community members and adults to watch the presentation. This opportunity allowed families access to their student's learning process and projects in a way they have not previously been able to. I organized this event with the help of my students and the Family Engagement and Communications Team, which I am a member on with six other adults at X Academy.

I will additionally touch on year-long goals that I have for family engagement, such as student-led conferences. These conferences engage families beyond traditional interactions such as phone calls home as they allow a connection to be forged between students, families, and teachers. This connection can change the course of a year for a student, and can be a turning point for families as they realize the impact they too can have on student success.

Year-Round Family Engagement

Student-Led Conferences

Purpose

At X High School, there was a school-wide focus on restorative, student-focused and centered coursework and actions. To fall in line with this, in both the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school years at X High School, I engaged in Student Led Conferences (SLC's) at the close of each quarter of the school year. Student Led Conferences are an alternative or an amendment to parent-teacher conferences. An SLC is a conference held between the student, a parent or guardian, and an advisory teacher. I held SLC style conferences with students in my Junior Seminar course at each quarter mark to increase their responsibility for their learning, their investment in the learning, and to engage families in conversation with their students about their academics and social progressions.

Reflection

Completing Student Led Conferences is an extremely rewarding time as a teacher. It can be easy to get "lost" in the monotony of grading papers and telling students how well they are doing. SLC's allow students to explain the story behind the grades, and to share their goals and hopes for the next quarter as well as their reflection on the previous quarter. When this is shared with family and guardians, families begin to understand more about how their student is acting in school and their academics. In previous parent-teacher conference models, parents are just hearing about the successes and failures of their student without allowing the student to speak for themselves on what was happening. In some of the samples above, students noted that they had a bad quarter and it was very hard for them or stressful, which resulted in lower grades that marking period. By allowing the student to speak on that prior to discussing the letter grades, it prevents family or teachers from being punitive or making assumptions about what caused those grades.

I have noticed that after SLC's, students are more focused in classes and motivated to make the gains they told their family they would make. Additionally, families feel a renewed connection to the school, and from these conferences I have set up regular check-in calls with families, text updates for student progress, and more. These forged connections are a direct product of my work to hold Student Led Conferences.

Volunteer Opportunities

Purpose

Throughout the year, I prioritize volunteering at family and community engagement nights and weekend events. Some events I have volunteered at this year alone are...

• Backpack Drive

• WIDA Night

• STEM Night

• Thanksgiving Turkey Drive

The purpose of showing up at these events is not only to help out the school community with running them, but also to build relationships with families in an organic and positive manner.

Reflection

These events are so important because they are positive ways to engage with families and community members. I find that when I complete phone calls home, parents often assume I am calling about a mistake their student made or an issue we had in class. This can result in anxiety on the call and a feeling that the school is trying to "pull one on them" or blame them for their student's behaviors. By showing up to events that are in the school community and volunteering, I am able to better share memories and meet families while discussing something unrelated to their student. Then, when I go to call home, hold a conference, or otherwise contact these adults, they are familiar with who I am and they associate with me positively. The best family-teacher relationships that can be transformative for students are those that are positive and constructive, and in my three years of teaching I have found that a way to forge this type of relationship is through volunteering at school and community events.

One such event was STEM Night, which I not only volunteered at, but organized, and can be seen below.

STEM Night

Families at STEM Night

Plan

At STEM Night, parents were instructed to arrive at 4:30 pm and enter into the Atrium. There, they were able to see stations set up from all grade levels with an interactive experiment that relates to current learnings. Then, at 5:00pm, the Chemistry Search for Life Keynote Speech began. Students were tasked with roles ranging from ushering people to their seats, passing out pamphlets that they designed, introducing the speakers, and delivering a speech based on their findings about the Search for Life outside of Earth with regards to chemistry and what was learned from local astronomers.

Resources Given to Families

Families were given two main resources during STEM Night. The first was a student-created pamphlet that detailed the main points of the session and was translated by students into commonly spoken languages by families. These pamphlets helped families to follow along with the presentation and additionally gave the parents a physical item to bring home to their student and ask what role they played in the event or how they felt about the learning that was being done in class. It also served as an announcement of the name that we chose for the exoplanet and a definition of the name as it applies to our community. The other resource was a survey given to families about their student's involvement in STEM Night and their perception of STEM Night, which will be taken back to the Family Engagement and Communications team to continue to improve upon how we reach out to families and how we best engage with them. To help with data for the team, the reflective survey includes a question on what grade level(s) your student is in and additionally asks how the family heard about STEM Night so that we can determine how families are hearing about school events and how we can further promote events.

Reflection

Family engagement, despite being on the Engagement and Communications Team, has always been an area of growth and an area of anxiety for me. Families are important, as they shape these students for the other half of the day that I am not with them. Partnership can be make or break in the success of a student over the course of the year. And in the case of something like STEM Night, family engagement represents more than just how many phone calls are made during a week, but it represents for students how much the families of X Academy care to be a part of our community and listen to their learning. Students often assume families will not come or show up, and that can be true for some families that are busy or dealing with more than a "typical" household would. But by and large, families want to know their students. I saw this at STEM Night because parents cleared their night to show up and hear about their student's learning. At X Academy, parents want to ensure their students are forming relationships with their STEM teachers, and STEM Night was a great opportunity to see how students, teachers, and families can partner together.

Additionally, I appreciated that families were able to be engaged beyond the normal level of phone calls or emails home, and they were able to sit down and listen to their student share about their learning, or hold the pamphlet their student designed and worked hard on, or sit with their student while they took in the work of others. Families were actively engaged and present, and it was visible. This visibility and tangibility in a relationship with families is an important sign to the students that we as a school have good relationships with their home and that we care about them as a whole person.

Actions such as STEM Night, paired with student led conferences, phone calls home, and generally showing up for volunteer events at the school all ensure that families know me as their student's teacher, and that I know them as my student's families. These relationships can make or break a student's engagement for the year, and for that reason I choose to focus on them greatly.

Access Section Conclusion & Reflection

Facilitating opportunities such as the Search for Life STEM Night and course amendments such as the Financial Literacy materials ensures that all students in my school and in particular those in my care are experiencing the same opportunities present to folks at schools with greater funding and resources. My students are deserving, capable, kind, and intelligent. Their attendance at a turnaround school should not be a barrier that at all limits their access to opportunities that they are capable of participating in and completing.

In compiling the materials for the Financial Literacy course, I made note of the needs that my students identified: they wanted ultimately to understand how to "do it right" as many of them had seen adults "do it wrong" when it came to finances. They have seen what debt can do to a family, they have used food stamps when income cannot stretch far enough, some of my students are without shelter. It was both humbling and meaningful to be a part of breaking this cycle for my students and opening a doorway to an understanding of personal finances that many could not have gotten at home. Despite being a chemistry teacher, students will always come up to me and ask about "life skills". And it is my responsibility to not hush these students in favor of focusing on chemistry, but instead to listen to their needs and find an appropriate time and place to provide this opportunity to them. Students displayed a great amount of gratitude for this experience, and saved the documents I shared with them to their hard drives so that they could later reference them. Students also began to ask more questions, especially those who initially were not interested in the financial literacy lessons, but who then found their interests were piqued and they began to ask about careers or paths of study that included a focus on finances. The impact on students was tangible, as students discussed with me their key takeaways and their next steps with budgeting and increasing their own financial literacy. This access opportunity thus exceeded my expectations and provided many students a new perspective on what they could do in life after graduation--in more ways than one.

As for the Search for Life STEM Night, it was a great experience to plan this access opportunity and pair with local astronomers and expose students to new career paths, and to ultimately watch my students present the information to an audience of their parents and friends. Students enjoy grounding phenomena in class, and I believe it is a task of the teacher to show students how solving problems in class is similar to a real-world field of study or profession. The Search for Life in space may feel at times fictional or fantasy-like, but when paired with access to astronomers, current research, and the knowing that their studies are worth presenting at a STEM Night, my students began to see this as an opportunity to expand their career goals post-high school. The opportunity provided alternative pathways for students after graduation from high school and opened doors to partnerships with community members who attended the STEM Night. Students were impacted in terms of their newfound aspirations in STEM and new confidence with regards to presentation skills and sharing their expertise to seek out opportunities outside of school.

Additionally, family engagement at this event was overwhelmingly positive, and students and families alike enjoyed entering the school for a reason other than parent-teacher conferences or discipline conferences, but rather to have a window into our classroom. The other family engagement tasks that I take part in regularly such as phone calls home, student-led conferences, and parent engagement nights all bolster my relationships with families. When coupled with a large-scale engagement event such as STEM Night, the feeling of knowing and belonging amongst families in the school becomes more tangible as it is occurring in real life and over a fun, engaging task.