Access

This section shows how I have created access to learning opportunities for students at my campus; these opportunities have created an improved learning environment for students and, by extension, their families. The content of this report was shaped by my somewhat odd position at my campus: I am the only teacher there who is not a lifelong member of the town (or the associated colonias which, though not incorporated into Rio Grande City proper, form a unified cultural and social area). As a result, when teachers plan events, I rely upon my coworkers to provide the necessary local knowledge and connections, while I work with more ‘out-of-the-box’ opportunities for students, which principally involve bringing resources and opportunities to our campus.

This section is broken into three broad subcategories. The first subcategory describes the process of conducting research, creating proposals, and where relevant raising funds for a dedicated 2-year project. The second subcategory describes the implementation of this project, the associated benefits & impacts for students, and associated challenges, with incorporated evidence thereof. The third and final subcategory describes a handful of one-off events which provided useful but unusual opportunities for students and families, and which do not otherwise fit into a longer-term project, being more opportunistic and taking advantage of chances for family engagement which presented themselves organically throughout the year. Throughout this section, outside resources are cited to demonstrate the external validity and community need for each project, with background information on 'low-level' family engagement following the substantive subcategories.

Long-Term STEM Class Project: Need Identification, Research, and Proposal-Writing

As stated above, I work at a magnet campus that serves quite a small student population. The teachers are only hired to fulfill core area class requirements, with the understanding that students return to their ‘home campus’ for the last two periods of the day to take elective classes (world languages, physical education, bands & choirs, etc). However, this leaves both some time in our instructional day where students might have a study hall, and it leaves students without much in the way of real opportunity to apply their growing content knowledge and learning skills in a more authentic and expressive way. This is particularly concerning, since our students are classed as Gifted & Talented students, who are often most in need of meaningful and enriching learning opportunities (NAGC, 2019).

On the other hand, this small teaching staff encourages close collaboration among teachers, and it especially encourages cross-curricular and vertical collaboration in ways that a larger teaching staff may struggle to implement, merely due to the challenges of scale. This access opportunity is a good example of how, at my campus, ad hoc working groups can form to (relatively) quickly and effectively implement changes and improvements for students. This is to say that, while I played an instrumental role in this working group, it shouldn’t be taken to mean that I was the sole driving force behind this project.

As we returned to in-person instruction in the 2021-2022 academic year, several teachers and I engaged in a dialogue with our principal about ways to effectively use the ‘independent research’/study hall time to provide students with a greater degree of enrichment. We determined that students struggled to act as independent learners in the way described by Hammond (2014). This suggested to us that a class focused on project-based learning and problem-solving skills would be useful; with this in mind, we decided that a STEM-based class would offer these skills, while also filling a real gap in our programming as a core area only campus. In other words, we examined student need and proposed a solution which met that need. Given the lack of STEM offerings on campus, we went to our principal to investigate outside opportunities for training & program implementation.

Our principal, in turn, interfaced with staff at the Region 1 Education Service Center (see Escobar, 2022), and, at the start of the Winter 2022 semester, we agreed to attend a series of trainings on how to implement a STEM Design Thinking & Learning class on campus, starting in the 2022-2023 academic year.

I was one of the teachers who attended these training sessions, and due to a comfort dealing with a variety of technology platforms and interface tools, became one of the informal leaders of this working group. This transformed the project from one in which I was a participant into one in which I was leading the working group.

STEM Professional Development Certificates

Left: professional development certificates from the STEM pedagogy trainings I completed, with other teachers, during the 2021-2022 academic year. Click to open in new tab.

Towards the end of the 2021-2022 academic year, we met to discuss how to turn the abstract ideas from these trainings into a concrete program. A great deal of this conversation centered around funding. Eventually, we decided that applying for federal grant funding through the district’s federal funds liaison office would be the most likely route to success. Given my background in policy and journalism work, I volunteered to write the project narrative and funding proposal which we would present to the federal funds liaison office and district Superintendent.

Revised STEM Program Plan for 2022-2023 Academic Year

Ac2E Magnet Middle STEM Program Proposal

This proposal was successfully funded up to the amount of $50,000, which would provide training, equipment and software purchases, and financial support for the program at the school in the program’s inaugural year.

In the summer of 2022, I led a group of teachers who attended training provided by Region 1 staff on Project-Based learning procedures and best practices. This training was paid for through the funding we received pursuant to the proposal above. Teacher participants reported that they planned to implement these best practices in their classroom, which current research suggests will have a measurable positive impact on student performance (Duke et al., 2021), though final year-end data is not available at this time.

This process of securing funding and implementing the full program fundamentally transformed the project from a small working group into a project driven by my desire to create a sustained STEM program on campus to meet the identified needs of our students. This constitutes a non-obvious opportunity for the students, since it required 1) outside training, 2) outside funding, and 3) teachers willing to devote significant time and energy to starting the program from the ground up. It was also based in real student need, as articulated above. The program overall constitutes an unlikely opportunity for my students, who do not generally have access to specialty programs like this one, either at our campus or at their home campus.

Long-Term STEM Class Project: Implementation & Impact

Students working on the standing desk attachment project (described below). Student faces have been obscured for privacy. A note: accessible design is an important consideration for this class, and so the pictured group focused on building an angled lap desk for their group member in a wheelchair (pictured below).

Early Implementation

We began the STEM Design Thinking class as we began the 2022-2023 academic year. Each grade level has at least 1 STEM Design Thinking class; I lead the 8th grade classes.

The first several weeks of school were focused around instilling in students an understanding and appreciation of the Engineering Design Process (EDP). This was accomplished by allowing students to research different graphical depictions of the EDP, and then creating their own graphics for display in the classroom.

The EDP was then applied to an authentic problem by asking students to create modifications for the standard desks that all classrooms in my campus have. Students then reflected on how the process was useful, how it was less than useful, and how they and iterate upon their work processes.

This process will be continued throughout the 2022-2023 academic year, with students applying the EDP to creating digital products in a number of environments, including purpose-built educational environment tools like CoSpaces, Merge, and Scratch. Students will also experiment with using Python as the coding language of choice, which benefits both the rigor of the class, and students who will acquire abilities with an in-demand coding language that they can take with them into high school.

The early impact of this class has mostly been of the possibility-opening variety. Artifacts below show students considering new uses for computers, and narrative a mindset shift between acting as consumers of technology and creators of technological tools. I expect this to continue as the class and project are more fully implemented throughout the 2022-2023 academic year.

Early Impact Through Student Work

Student Project: Introductory CoSpaces Environment

As both an introduction to the class, and to the CoSpaces environment, students created a 3D 'house' which contained information about themselves. I've included one example here, as embedding a larger set of environments would create difficulties in viewing this page on some devices and some connection strengths. Note that the student had to code interactive, user-triggered elements, import image collages from an outside builder, and incorporate an element of sound design. Click on the 'open in a new tab' option to view the environment on your phone or computer.

Student Project: Engineering Design Process Presentations

To ground the STEM class in a rigorous approach to planning, building, and testing projects, we began with an exploratory project that asked students to investigate different presentations of the Engineering Design Process, and demonstrate their understanding by creating their own presentations and posters to use as anchor charts throughout the year.

Student Project: Standing Desk Modifications

To address a lack of flexible seating options in my classroom, students designed and built standing desk modification attachments, as described above. This allowed them to instantiate the Engineering Design Process and more from planning to building in a concrete manner.

Student Project: Lunar Phases Models

Students created 3D modeled environments to teach themselves and other students about the lunar phases; this was a STEM class project, but helped improve student scores in their core science class through peer presentations and use. Click on the 'open in a new tab' option to view the environment on your phone or computer.

Student Reflection Writing

The attached student reflections show that students in my STEM class are able to think deeply about their own learning and collaboration process, which will serve them well in their academic and professional careers.

Student Planning Writing

The attached student writings show that students are able to make connections between the skills acquired in my STEM class and their larger personal and professional goals, which will guide and anchor them through their high school years.

The overall, long-term impact of this STEM class is likely to be considerable. First off, there are important career benefits to STEM skills (ACTE, 2017), and starting before high school gives these students plenty of time to experiment broadly with STEM fields, to engage in early specialization, or engage in some combination of those two options. Secondly, the ability to creatively solve problems, a skill cultivated by this class, is one of the major indicators of an independent learner (Hammond, 2014, p. 14); entering high school with the independent learning skills cultivated in this class will make these students more capable of succeeding, including in higher-level dual-credit and AP classes, and this will in turn set them up for college and career success.

One Off Project: Bilingualism Essay Contests

Through my district, I was made aware of the National Association for Bilingual Education's Annual Student Essay Contest (NABE, 2022). Since a strong majority of my students are classed as Emerging Bilingual (EB, formerly English Language Learners/ELLs), this was a chance to encourage them to take an outside opportunity to express confidence and pride in their culture, heritage, and family languages.

While all teachers at my school were made aware of the contest, I was the only one to implement it. Since there was not really space in the district-mandated scripted curriculum, I offered participation as an extra opportunity for students in my independent research/study hall class. This led to a group of students self-selecting into the contest due to interest. The fact that I was the only teacher to actually offer the contest to students indicates that it was not readily or obviously available as an opportunity, since, if it had been, the school would have had a larger number of entries.

For the handful of students who were interested, I carved out time during their end-of-day study hall to work with them individually. This involved giving them verbal and written feedback on drafts, and providing them with examples to read of other Rio Grande Valley writers, like Gloria Anzaldúa, who wrote about the benefits of bilingualism.

Advantages Of Being Bilingual NABE Version.pdf

Student Essay: Contest Version

The student whose essay I'm using as an example submitted the above to the NABE contest.

Advantages Of Being Bilingual Long Version.docx

Student Essay: Extended Version

The same student produced a longer version of the same essay, though. I think this one shows off a much richer understanding of the topic that the hard word limit of the contest proscribes, so I've included the fuller version here.

I have attached one student's essay, in two formats, to illustrate the connections that students made between their community and this opportunity.

This one-off opportunity has long-term qualitative benefits. Students who have opportunities to practice writing for a real-world audience, with a real-world purpose, are more likely to engage deeply with their writing instruction in high school. Learning to write well has significant workplace benefits (Conrad, 2018), and so a small step now can have big consequences later in life.

Other Student Contest Opportunities

As a result of early student interest in the NABE contest, I was able to generate further interest from students in other contests, including the Texas Association of Bilingual Education's related contests. These involved not just essays but opportunities for students to design logos for the organization (see one student entry, right). This offered students the opportunity to participate in statewide contests, and build genuine writing and graphic design products, skills which will help them guide thier high school careers towards self-selected professional goals.

Above: a student entry into the TABE student logo design contest, which I facilitated.

E.B. TABE Essay Entry

Above: a student entry into the TABE Bilingual experiences essay contest.

These artifacts demonstrate sustained student interest, and access to varied opportunities along a common theme. It also demonstrates a commitment to bringing students' home languages into the curriculum, something that's not always encouraged by the curricular and institutional designs of Texas schools.

One-Off Project: Student Loan Forgiveness Informational Meeting

When the Biden Administration announced their student loan relief program at the end of August, several teachers at my campus asked that I walk them through the details (since I’m known to speak fluent bureaucrat; see the STEM research and proposal writing process section for another example of this phenomenon). In response to these inquiries, I held a short informational session for teachers in early September.

The response to this meeting was overall positive, and so I approached my principal about repeating the informational session for interested parents in the evening. This is a valuable opportunity for my area in particular; families prize education, but it's also an incredibly poor region. This is part of the conundrum that, nationally, has led to the student loan crisis disproportionately impacting Latine borrowers (Quintanilla, 2021). So, a loan forgiveness program was likely to be both useful and interest-generating for my students' families.

My principal was amenable to the idea, and so we promoted the meeting. I decided to hold the meeting in the middle of October, based on the DoE's projected timeline; this helped ensure that the actual forgiveness application was available, so that I and other facilitators could help parents with the application if they requested our assistance.

Right: a screenshot of the proposal email I sent to my principal. He verbally approved the meeting later that day, after we changed the date to avoid double-booking with the high school's football game on the originally-proposed night.

Student Debt Relief Updates Presentation

Left: the presentation slides from the parent meeting. An earlier version of this presentation was used to present to campus teachers in September 2022.

Parent Meeting Flyer

Right: The parent meeting was promoted with this flyer, through paper copies, the campus' social media, and individual classes' Remind and Google Classroom functions.

Loan Forgiveness Meeting Flyer (Updated & Approved).pdf

Parent Meeting

Parent attendance at the information meeting was fairly minimal--the district announced a homecoming celebration activity at the beginning of that week (after I'd already sent out the date to parents). However, I did have a handful of parents attend. We chose not to video the meeting for participant confidentiality.

Access Option: Virtual Presentation

Some parents, however, expressed interest in a digital version of the presentation (for one example, see right). Since this was a way to broaden access for parents, it was a reasonable extension of this opportunity. Accordingly, I recorded a digital version of the presentation (below).

Above: a parent texted to ask if there was a way to see the presentation virtually, since she works a second-shift job. I promised to do my best--a recorded version works reasonably well as a substitute.

Student Debt Relief Updates Presentation.mp4

Student Debt Relief: Recorded Presentation Version

This was recorded on 13 October, shortly before the beta version of the application was launched.

Student Debt Relief: Recording Dissemination & Usage

Parents were sent a link to the video presentation through Remind, a texting program used for parent contact. It also collects 'viewed by' and 'opened by' statistics, which allows us to see how many parents took advantage of a particular opportunity. In this case, there was an open rate of about 46%.

This opportunity piggybacks off of a well-publicized event--the loan forgiveness program--by offering an action that is often neglected: ensuring that those least likely to be able to take advantage of the opportunity receive guidance and support to do so. In this sense, it is non-obvious, since actions like these do not often occur. The benefit is that increased financial stability for families will help to prevent a variety of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) for students (CDC, 2022); this will leave them better-prepared to succeed in school. The in-person and virtual options worked together to ensure that a respectable number of parents were able to take advantage of the information, through both presentation formats.

Emory Immigration Law Clinic Flyer (Updated).pdf

One-Off Project: Immigration Legal Clinic

Left: the flyer used to advertise the free immigration clinic I made students and parents aware of. Note in particular that all information is provided in both English and Spanish, since the majority of families in my area are bilingual, and those most likely to need immigration services are likely Spanish-first speakers.

In September of 2022, my brother made me aware that his law school hosted a monthly online clinic in which lawyers were available over Zoom or by phone for free consultations on questions of immigration law. Since I work on the Texas-Mexico border, and my students have family members with a variety of legal statuses on both sides of the border, I thought that this would be a good opportunity to reach out to students and family members to make them aware of this opportunity.

This is an opportunity that, while conceptually obvious enough, is not logistically obvious. The closest university, UTRGV, does not have a law school, despite recent proposals to change that (Jimenez, 2021). As such, directly comparable opportunities are not readily available. Therefore, this opportunity is available predominantly because of my somewhat unusual position.

In the interests of confidentiality, I attempted to take myself out of the equation as much as possible (since any conversations I had wouldn’t be privileged, and I don’t want to endanger anyone’s immigration process or legal status). To achieve this, I created a set of fliers which directed students and family members to the online event’s links. Note that fliers are always printed in English and Spanish, these languages covering the vast majority of the home languages in my district. Spanish is particularly helpful in reaching those families who are most likely to require and appreciate such a legal clinic.

These fliers were posted around my campus, through my Google Classrooms, and through my class Reminds. I also enlisted my fellow teachers to distribute paper and digital copies to students who might be interested.

While I can’t speak to the usefulness of the clinic in any specific sense (those consultations being confidential), I can offer that spreading the news of the clinic has anecdotally coincided with an uptick in the use of conversational Spanish among my students with downtime in my classes, and in between classes. I suggest that this may be a response to 1) students understanding that I'm not put off by the language (which is not guaranteed when the teacher is a white man) and 2) that I'm not likely to ask that they keep to English-only conversations. This speaks to a sense that students feel affirmed in my class (see Hammond, 2014, on affirmation), which is a necessary prerequisite to encouraging them to take advantages of other opportunities I offer them.

The benefit of this clinic is that the chance for regularization of a student or family member's status is significantly more likely to help the student stay in school, whether through avoiding immigration-related legal proceedings (read: forcible deportation or entry bans) for themselves or a family member. This is also likely to reduce ACEs in my students, since stability in family living situations is a strong preventative factor for ACEs (CDC, 2022).

Consistent Family Engagement

In this section, I've attached an anonymized Parent Contact Log from the Fall 2022 semester. Given the continued uncertainty around the pandemic and school operations, I chose not to operate with a long-term forward Engagement Plan this year, and instead have focused on taking a more opportunistic role towards providing families with engagement options and opportunities.

For the clearest demonstration of the consistent nature of parent contact, I have embedded the centralized spreadsheet where I track parent outreach. You will see that the first several weeks are occupied with ensuring that students feel looked after and taken care of; I follow up on absences to a high degree (this is made easier by my relatively small caseload). This sends the message to both students and parents that I care about student engagement with my class. I am also careful to follow up on students in danger of falling below the expected grade standard, for the same reasons. I mix these updates with positive news and performance improvement contacts, since it's important to build a positive rapport with parents, especially in the first month or so of classes; "[e]stablishing strong relationships and clear lines of communication at the beginning of the year sets a strong foundation for parent-teacher interactions" (Tutt, 2021).

The below log is current as of 18 November, 2022, when the school broke for the Thanksgiving holiday:

T. Reynolds Parent Contact Log (November, FINAL).pdf

This general view is supported by selected emails, below, which demonstrate that I work as a partner with parents to ensure student success. Please open the images in the carousel below in a new tab for ease of reading.

Access Section Conclusion & Reflection

I have found that the best access opportunities are ones which actually get done--that is, that an unfinished grant application, or a half-made poster to promote an event that's more conceptual than concrete, does not actually help anyone. It's best when these passions intersect with the needs of students and families, as they do so in the highlighted projects. This link between student & family interest and teacher expertise will help ensure that the project is completed, and that students are able to take advantage of the opportunities presented to the fullest extent.

This general idea is one that I've tried to implement here. Students at my campus don't have access to the kinds of STEM opportunities that they did in elementary school (see Garcia, 2022, though the page is fairly barebones), and so providing a program that bridges them into high school with strong engineering, design, and programming skills meets a currently unmet need for students. As a teacher, I have a real interest in thinking about how to promote critical thinking and problem-solving in students. The combination of student need and teacher interest powered the STEM Design Thinking class to success. I've also got some expertise in fundraising and grant-writing, which allowed the project to get off the ground in terms of funding, and which was not otherwise available on my campus. In other words, the project was determined by the intersection of student need and teacher interest, and for that reason has been more successful than an externally-imposed project would be.

The same is true with each of the one-off opportunities. All of them leverage my existing expertise in interfacing with the bourgeois world, and offer families and students the opportunity for taking advantage of some of the opportunities which are usually hoarded by the better-off.

Opening these opportunities to students will help prepare them for success in high school and university; opening legal and financial opportunities for families will help them maintain the kind of stability that we know is important for avoiding Adverse Childhood Experiences for students (CDC, 2022), and for maintaining the supportive environment that helps students in my district focus on their academic careers. The overall effect, I hope, is that students and families will both feel more personally secure in the world, and that students in particular will have a better sense of the depth and breadth of opportunity that can be theirs with a strong education.

References

ACTE. (2017, June 6). Five Reasons STEM Training Will Boost A Student’s Career. ACTE. https://www.acteonline.org/five-reasons-stem-training-will-boost-a-students-career/

Award Competitions. (2022). NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR BILINGUAL EDUCATION. http://nabe-conference.com/award-competitions.html

Center for Disease Control. (2022, April 6). ACEs Can Be Prevented. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/prevention.html

Conrad, J. (2018, June 7). How Strong Writing Skills Benefit Your Career. Business Career Center | Smeal College of Business. https://careerconnections.smeal.psu.edu/blog/2018/06/07/how-strong-writing-skills-benefit-your-career/

CoSpaces Edu for kid-friendly 3D creation and coding. (n.d.). Retrieved September 11, 2022, from https://cospaces.io/edu/

Duke, N. K., Halvorsen, A.-L., Strachan, S. L., Kim, J., & Konstantopoulos, S. (2021). Putting PjBL to the Test: The Impact of Project-Based Learning on Second Graders’ Social Studies and Literacy Learning and Motivation in Low-SES School Settings. American Educational Research Journal, 58(1), 160–200. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831220929638

Escobar, S. (2022, April 19). STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) / Meet our STEM Team. https://www.esc1.net/Domain/50

Garcia, P. (2022). Academy for Academic Enhancement Elementary School Technology Class. https://ac2e.myrgcgisd.org/o/aaees/page/technology

Hammond, Z. L. (2014). Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students. Corwin Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=6261739

Jimenez, M. (2021, February 10). Lawmakers wish to bring a law school back to the RGV. KVEO-TV. https://www.valleycentral.com/news/lawmakers-wish-to-bring-a-law-school-back-to-the-rgv/

Merge Cube | AR/VR Learning & Creation. (n.d.). Merge. Retrieved September 11, 2022, from https://mergeedu.com/cube

National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC). (2019). Pre-K to Grade 12 Gifted Programming Standards | National Association for Gifted Children. http://www.nagc.org/resources-publications/resources/national-standards-gifted-and-talented-education/pre-k-grade-12

Quintanilla, D. (n.d.). Latinos with high college loan debt hope for changes, loan forgiveness. NBC News. Retrieved September 19, 2022, from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latinos-high-college-loan-debt-hope-changes-loan-forgiveness-rcna8702

Scratch—Imagine, Program, Share. (n.d.). Retrieved September 11, 2022, from https://scratch.mit.edu/

Tutt, P. (2021, July 30). Teacher-Parent Communication Strategies to Start the Year Off Right. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/teacher-parent-communication-strategies-start-year-right