I let them know that I expected confusion while we practiced, and I promised that once we learned how to do them, the writing circle sessions would become a valuable part of our writing workshop classroom

namaste

Instruction

Connectivity and Access

Student Work

If hybrid, activate plans to monitor and assess the following:

Support schools to communicate regularly with families in their home language about their child’s progress and the targeted plans for students in need of additional support.

Determine and activate structures outside of the regular school day, such as summer learning options, extended day, and after-school programming, to potentially be leveraged to support students in need of additional support.

high quality digital tools

Procure any additional standards-aligned tools or materials to support differentiation, intervention, and remote learning, based on students’ needs.

Conduct a review of each students’ IEP in partnership with teachers and parents to reflect each student’s evolving needs based on time away from associated services including OT, PT, and Speech while school buildings were closed

Conduct checkpoints with school leaders around curriculum pacing and ongoing monitoring of student progress, specifically honing in on the growth of students who need acceleration.

Ensure that every student:ɑHas access to standards-aligned, grade-level instruction, including strategies to accelerate student learning;ɑIs assessed to determine student readiness to engage in grade-level content; andɑIs offered scaffolds and supports to meet their diverse academic and social-emotional needs

Build school leaders’ and teachers’ capacity to design and develop blended and remote learning experiences that are equitable and engaging

Offer restorative supports for teachers and learning around equity and implicit bias

Create a plan for professional learning and training

Share knowledge and ideas around the use and effectiveness of digital tools and resources that support remote learning

Identify students who did not engage in remote learning and develop a plan to provide additional supports, if needed. Share data and concerns about each student’s growth and needs with students’ assigned teacher(s) for the 2020-2021 school year

Provide adequate time for schools and educators

Provide resources that demonstrate schools value parents as partners in their child’s education. Offer family supports that provide families with: ɑTraining about how to access and use the school’s chosen digital systems and tools;ɑSupports and resources for families to use at home, such as grade-specific activities and strategies for teaching and helping their child;ɑOpportunities to build their digital literacy; andɑStrategies to support their child’s learning at home

home language through multiple modes (e.g., text, all call, email, home visit)

Develop a continuation of services plan for students needing either occupational, physical, and/or speech and language therapy, including evaluations by school psychologists and social workers

Inventory all intervention programs and services available to students on the district and school level and identify any gaps

31MI Return To School RoadmapGovernor Gretchen Whitmerand learning environments, especially special education, birth to five services, and CTE. ɑEstablish structures for general and special education teachers to collaborate on delivery methods for assessments and instruction as outlined in IEPs. Consider students’ needs around accessibility and provide assistive technologies, where possible

Revise students’ IEPs, IFSPs, and 504 plans in coordination with general and special education teachers to reflect the child’s evolving needs based on assessment data and parent feedback, and design accommodations and match services accordingly.

Support schools to implement grade-level curricula that is aligned to Michigan preK-12 standards. ɑSupport teachers to utilize power standards that identify the major work of the grade in order to focus, prioritize, and accelerate instruction

Secure supports for students who are transitioning to postsecondary.

Set an instructional vision that ensures that:ɑEvery student will start the year with access to grade-level instruction and high quality, standards-aligned instructional materials in every subject.ɑEvery student will be assessed on their understanding of prerequisite skills and grade-level proficiencies using formative assessments, screeners, or diagnostics.ɑEvery students’ academic and social-emotional needs will be addressed with the integration of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) and strengthening connections with students

Guidance around daily instructional time and workload per different grade bands to ensure consistency for students

Modes of student assessment and feedback

Best practices for blended or remote learning

A description of the manner in which district administrators, board members, teachers, and any representatives of teachers collaborated in development of the Plan

deliver content in multiple ways

A description of the methods a district will use to keep pupils at the center of educational activities, including outreach to continue building relationships and maintain connections, and to help pupils feel safe and valued

Black males already have voice, so English educators cannot give them voice

Metaphors We Live By

He at-tended all 20 hours of the video-recorded classroom sessions. Plus, he and I had three intensive interviews (193 minutes) across Phases I and II. Each interview was audio-recorded, and later transcribed and coded for themes. In Phase II, I spent an academic year working with Shawn beyond We Choose to Learn (his senior year in high school) to trace the consequences of his metaphor. I visited Shawn’s school, Urbantown High School, which afforded me opportu-nities to meet some of Shawn’s teachers, administrators, and friends, as well as students he mentored. I also collected data in the form of a follow-up interview, observations, field notes, and reflective memos. Informed by multiple sources of data acrossacademic spaces (We Choose to Learn and Urbantown High School), over time(July 2013 to June 2014), I triangulated the data to enhance its rigor and complexity. Triangulation allowed me to authentically center Shawn as a writer and focus on his writing development with metaphor.

I realized he helped me to see differently

Appendix B

Researching and teaching metaphor

Consequential writing is writing that is intentionally developed by, for, and with communities. It concurrently cultivates both academic and critical literacies of historically marginalized communities in a way that encourages justice-oriented action, which ensures that community members actively shape community goals.

transferability (Bhattacharya, 2017; Steinberg & Cannella, 2012)

Literacies are so dynamic, and they are difficult to capture on standardized exams.

Tuck called for research that reimagines how findings might be used by, for, and with communities.

It felt as if the school put more money into our security system than into our educa-tion.

he group collaboratively agreed to establish a “safety protocol” in which we immediately pause a discussion and play a lighthearted team-building game. Anyone in the class could initiate the safety protocol if they felt overwhelmed with the content of the course

began the course with a series of procedures.

A major value of the National Writing Project is writing in community. Throughout the institute, Jen and Priscilla emphasized the importance of active listening. When our colleagues shared their writing, we would lean in and focus on every word. After each person presented, the community would respond, “Thank you for sharing.” Our constructive feedback always centered on areas specified by the authors themselves. Over the two weeks, I realized that listening is a cornerstone of pedagogical justice.

White people need to be honest now, and honest in a way that doesn’t erase the work of scholars of color who have led in this area. I fear the silence of white people represses the real, complex weight of whiteness.

I’m complicit and will never be absolved. So what else can we white people do?

Here I was in a predominantly white school district, being assured that it was committed to antiracism. Still, nobody seemed to actu-ally want to talk about whiteness.

187Tanner > Whiteness Is a White Problemnary) stereotypes of people of color mediate white people’s understanding of race is helpful here. It might be easier for white people to see race in people of color because doing so—that is, mediating whiteness through people of color—gives white people a way out of confronting race and racism. To explore some of the ways that white people mediate race through people of color, I now turn to moments of my own racial story. These mo-ments, or stories, focus on experiences from my time as a high school English teacher and now as an English education scholar.A Story about Our White ProblemMy first teaching job forced me to grapple with my whiteness.I was hired to teach English and drama at a large, urban high school in a major city in the Midwest. It was 2003, and I was 23 years old. Cardinal’s3students were predominantly Black—Black students made up 65 percent of the overall school’s population.My experience as a teacher at Cardinal forced me to account for my whiteness. In my first year of teaching, students constantly reminded me that I was, in fact, white.

My intention is that this article be a signal to our field that white folks ought to more deliberately wrestle with whiteness, without making race always and only about people of color. In this way, white people might begin to better shoulder some of the work of disrupting white supremacy.

sociocultural privileges

I’m white and it feels like my responsibility to grapple with the prob-lem of my race

We unapol-ogetically state that schools not only are prison for Black girls but that schools are actively reproduc-ing slavery in its afterlife in English language arts. When Black girls’ identities, ways of learning, and leadership capacities are symbolically bonded by chains through a White-only curriculum, cultur-ally biased literary texts, and pedagogical standards, Black female students are in fact experiencing nor-malized racial violence.

To minimize the lived experiences of Black girls demonstrates what Nigerian writer Chima-manda Ngozi Adichie called the danger of a single story: the complexity of Black girls’ lives reduced to a single, often stereotypical narrative weakens their humanity

Many of these stories include or suggest that the protagonist is both White and female. This practice often prevents many Black female learners from en-visioning themselves as queens or princesses.

Our narrative process of listening to, documenting, and analyzing their stories allowed us to access rich layers of data about how they voiced and storied their experiences in the world.

“understanding of the purpose of school, particularly the personal, social, and work preparation benefits”

mphasizing physical space, we believe space plays a crucial role in understanding adolescent literacies.

street, B. V. (1984). Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture: Vol. 9.Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press

We rely on Street (1984), who distinguishes between two dominant, competing models of literacy—the autonomous and ideological. The autonomous model, which views literacy as a set of discrete skills, “disguises the cultural and ideological assumptions that underpin it so that it can then be presented as though they are neutral and universal and that literacy as such will have ... benign effects” (Street, 2003, p. 77). On the other hand, the ideological model understands literacy not as neutral, but as “always embedded in socially constructed epistemological principles. It is about knowledge: the ways in which people address reading and writing are themselves rooted in conceptions of knowledge, identity, and being” (Street, 2003, pp. 77–78).

They used literacy to: (1) interrogate their racial-ized experiences inside and outside school, and (2) produce counternarratives to popular assumptions about Black youth from low-income urban communities.

bombarded with standardized tests

dealing with Souls and not with Dollars”

high-quality research has a logic of inquiry

propaganda tool for those trying to push a particular approach to read-ing and writing instruction

research

Finally, it is important for educators to implement these same tools with White students who benefit from white supremacy and the damaging narratives that mainstream media produce about Black youth and other youth of color.

In the July 2016 English Education themed issue, “Why Black Girls’ Litera-cies Matter: New Literacies for a New Era,” Sealey-Ruiz argues, “instruction must be urgent and purposeful in responding to and anticipating the social context of our times” (p. 295). In the wake of racial violence, we argue that it is important for educators to engage in revolutionary praxis by reimagining their classroomsas spaces for triage, self-care, healing, and social transfor-mation.

As illustrated during the Ferguson6 and Baltimore7

“he suffered from mental illness”

n To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus explains to Scout that “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it” (36). Make this advice more literal by inviting students to imagine spending a day in someone else’s shoes in this writing activity. Students examine a variety of shoes and envision what the owner would look like, such as their appearance, actions, etc. They then write a narrative, telling the story of a day in the shoe owner’s life. While this lesson plan uses the quotation from To Kill a Mockingbird as a springboard and ties nicely to discussions of the novel, it can be completed even if students are not currently reading the book

I taught “disadvantaged” students.

unleash their beauty on the page

They can choose to speak up or remain silent, but political meanings are going to be made of their lives either way

Speaking directly to the camera

political correctness.

Each time, there have been those who told us to fear the future; who claimed we could slam the brakes on change; who promised to restore past glory if we just got some group or idea that was threatening America under control. And each time, we overcame those fears. We did not, in the words of Lincoln, adhere to the “dogmas of the quiet past.” Instead we thought anew, and acted anew.