2020-09-22 PPS School Board Study Session

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District Portland Public Schools
Date 2020-09-22
Time 20:10:00
Venue Virtual/Online
Meeting Type study
Directors Present missing
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Event 1: PPS Board of Education - Study Session 9/22/2020

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started perfect all right we're all ready everything's good we are good perfect i think this is officially the introduction oh yes that's right oh is that sorry is there an introduction to my script i closed my script roseanne i just sent you a new one i just sent you a new one just oh well i would seem to be dancing i can't see it i'm so sorry nicole let me be proper and introduce you and welcome you correctly of course like now my computer is not responding great good evening and welcome to tonight's study session we're excited to have an opportunity to engage with staff to learn about a very timely topic we are going to learn about the climate change and climate justice curriculum superintendent guerrero would you please begin tonight's session very happy to chair lowry uh for this school year uh i know we've had this conversation with with directors we thought um we'd want to focus on an opportunity to make sure our directors gain a deeper understanding of school districts work and priorities in in a bit more informal and interactive format especially with various staff who maybe you don't hear from all the time who are leading and you know doing some really uh awesome work uh in some of these initiatives so we wanted uh this experience of study sessions to be a little different from a typical regular meeting agenda item uh we hope to provide you a little bit of a learning experience that hopefully mirrors a little bit of of the student learning experience so our goal is for directors at the end of these sessions to be more knowledgeable about the strands of work that we've laid out in a learning syllabus for the year and learn about their direct connection to the comprehensive educational program that we want to provide our students so as educators we're excited to essentially have you as our learners our students for the evening so lead off batter tonight's first study session agenda topic is climate change and climate justice curriculum i'm really happy to introduce nicole berg if you recall nicole joined portland public schools as our climate change and climate justice programs manager and uh the ever talented nicole berg will be leading tonight's topic and so i'm going to turn it over to her thank you so much good evening superintendent guerrero board chair lowry directors and student representative shu and thank you for inviting me to share our team's work in moving climate change and climate justice curriculum forward and pps i have taught online before and i've taught in person and um i've taught adults and i've taught all different kinds of times of day but i'm pretty sure this is the latest class i've ever taught so so let's all bear with me and hopefully we'll keep it moving so you're engaged um that's my job so tonight um here we click on that one second there we go tonight you will have the opportunity to review our progress thus far in integrating climate change and climate justice into our core k-12 curriculum and experience a sample lesson from our newly created climate change and climate justice high school elective set to be piloted in six pps high schools this year so feel free to ask questions along the way or at the end of our time together let's begin with a reminder of how far we've come since 2016 when dedicated climate educators and youth activists brought resolution 5272 to you the pps board of education for approval in 2019 you reaffirmed your commitment to supporting this work by dedicating funds to create an innovative role the climate change and climate justice programs manager who would be responsible for accelerating and scaling the curriculum integration k-12 across the district and supporting the development of a climate justice youth advisory as the person who currently serves in this capacity i'm excited to report that this move has positioned our district to become a national leader in the area of education and as superintendent guerrero said in his welcome back message we're just getting started and as you know i moved here from the midwest and introduced myself to you all on my first official day of work almost one year ago to the day um having lived this past year in the pacific northwest experiencing both the global pandemic and unprecedented and catastrophic wildfires i have an even deeper appreciation and understanding for the rationale for climate justice education and activism that our community has named as central to our district vision and pps
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reimagined having also been part of our collective experience in bearing witness to the national reckoning regarding racial justice i intend to continue to do my part to contribute to justice for black indigenous and people of color who for generations have suffered the brutality of racism i entered this space tonight as a representative of the collective work of our educators and students this summer who are reaffirming our commitment to our pps core value of racial equity and social justice and through our work together we aim to disrupt systems of oppression and bring equity to our schools of the many characteristics named in our graduate vision for our nearly 50 000 pps students the one that most closely guided our curriculum development this summer is informed and influential global stewards through the development of our curriculum we hope that students will see themselves as global change agents who are responsible stewards of the environment and knowledgeable about climate justice issues our goal is to support their ability to think critically about important topics and consider the impact that their decisions have on those around them so that they can lead the way in creating a healthy and sustainable world for all so to create the kinds of learning opportunities that would offer students core knowledge in climate science and engineering solutions as well as critical orientations to racial equity and social justice our student and educator teams this summer developed a course anchored in project-based learning and inquiry this is the overview of our new climate change and climate justice high school elective and as you can see the course is comprised of five units plus a launch unit four of the core units offer students the opportunity to engage in many research projects related to case studies or other topics within each unit theme for their final project students will select an area of interest related to climate change and climate justice develop their own project and have the opportunity to share their learning with an authentic audience selected by the students and the teachers in their course an added benefit of this course is that it's anchored in sufficient next generation science standards to yield 0.5 credit recovery for students in science who choose this option this brings a level of system systematic equity to our schools by opening up the course to more students and while we won't have time to watch the entire video um i did interview some students and captured their what they had to say in this video i'll push play hopefully bandwidth works technology is our friend and it should end at a minute so i think i've got it timed for it for it to kind of end itself we'd love to hear what your experience was like can you tell us a little bit about that experience-wise it felt great to be working as students and teachers on the same product on the same project because like we are in the end the two groups that will be using product the most at the end like the the whole course design and everything it's all based on what we want and so our voice is being in like impacting the design of the course as a whole well it just felt great because i'm sure that it will lead to a better experience for both the end user groups at the end of the year ah um it was super fun but also weird because i've never done anything even anywhere near like this um but you know we kind of got this like inside peak on what actually teachers do behind the scenes um and also sort of felt like our voices were listened to in creating a class for our peers it was a lot of fun um like i learned how to design curriculum that's something that most students don't know how to do um great it was great like the learning experience and great knowing that we created this awesome class perfect so in addition to video and interview footage we also collected daily feedback from participants to help keep pace and moderate the institute along the way what you're reading here is um end of institute feedback from both students and educators and this is what they kind of that's what they had to say about their experience by the last day of the institute so as you can see the experience led to some transformative thinking and enthusiasm to see more type of like more kinds of this work roll out in our district all right are you ready to experience a sample lesson from the course so just a reminder this is hot off the
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press you are the first like student uh to participate in this lesson so we'll work through whatever hiccups might come up um but really throughout this lesson i invite you to consider how does this course support our district vision of cultivating informed and influential global stewards as well as our core system shift of transformative curriculum pedagogy so at this point you should all have your materials they were linked in board docs there is a the sheet of the student student reflection sheet that will have the slides paste out so if you get lost in the slides you can refer back to your sheet unfortunately you can't make notes in your sheet but you'll be able to link to the important information there this is adapted from from a resource online and you can always refer back to that website the poem is on that website but we will be referring to this poem um both like listening and seeing we're going to be reading this poem digesting it talking about it and so mainly the access to the poem is the most important part but this lesson is entitled rise understanding the impact of climate change through science and storytelling and it's adapted from the poetry of kathy gentnell kitchener and aca nubiana the lessons divided into two parts for today we are only going to focus on part one the ethnic studies and english language arts standards and know that it builds towards integration of next generation science standards and subsequent lessons and so i've addressed the standards below but let's go ahead and have three folks read the learning targets i'll read the first one i can analyze the different perspectives represented by the two speakers of the poem thank you i'll read the second i can determine the meaning of words and phrases as they're used in this poem including figurative and connotative meanings in the third i can investigate past and present events where national global interests are in conflict awesome thank you and this slide shows you what we're building toward take a look at the ethnic studies and the next generation science standards and the learning targets for future lessons so think about how these all fit together as we go through this and for distance teaching and learning we use a variety of digital instructional tools to transform digital spaces into classrooms so as we get started like i said please make sure you have your worksheet available everything's linked in there and the next layer of technology would be using a jam board but if that's if that's not coming up on your computers for you that is totally fine we will i'll just show you all how it works and how students would use it in a classroom but let's start with one thing we would do in a traditional classroom if we're kicking off a lesson is just get a sense of what our students know and what they wonder about so that as a form of as formative data i as a teacher kind of have a sense of where students are coming into the into the lesson in terms of their background knowledge or their experience possible misconceptions so what you know about the topic may or may not be factually accurate or may or may not be supported by academic studies but it's what you know and so let's think about what do you all know about the impacts of climate change thinking uh locally nationally and globally if we were to use the jamboard if you have the technology to do so i'll show you what that looks like and it's essentially a sticky note board so you would go to the sticky note you could pick your own color type in here hi save it and put it where you want so i know this right you can also just think about what you know and we can popcorn out and uh in a digital classroom um in pps we could also use a chat feature so students could have multiple different ways of sharing their knowledge with their peers okay so for those of you who have not put anything in the jamboard let's start with what you know let's see who's responsible for the yellow post-its all right then director let's see director scott might you share something that you know about the impact of climate change locally nationally or globally
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well uh yeah thanks for calling on me so i i'm gonna start cold calling too no i love it i know i know that some of the uh the uh the extreme weather events with the east wind and the fires um last week in the dry weather um were most likely caused by climate change so that's a local local issue great great let's see who's e i'm can i see i'm trying to who else has not put a post-it in i'm eat and it's ailee nicole it's my first name is funky got it okay so that's i'm the three yellow ones there's another yellow one that's not me but i was really fascinated by the zombie hurricane because that's just so 20 20. that was absolutely fascinating i want one more i screwed up and did the other yellow one about the methane relate release from the arctic being uh faster than expected shocking shocking yeah absolutely we can do the same thing in the same presentation then with what do you wonder so what are some things that you're wondering about in terms of the impacts of climate change nicole yes this is michelle or otherwise known as director to pass but i prefer michelle okay i'm not sure how to interact with jamboard if i need to open another window or i love that there's sticky i love that there's an app for the sticky uh sticky wall but i don't know how to interact with it do you have your student worksheet i do the link is in your student worksheet okay i should say jamboard i'll show you the student worksheet really quickly let's see the curriculum materials yeah i think i have it right here it's in a pdf yep and the so you won't be able to put notes in there but you'll be able to link from there so the kwl jamboard activity which is in the first two cells of the table once you get past the description that will take you right to the jamboard still looking are you on slide 14 michelle i'm not even oh it's it wasn't in the powerpoint that was i think part of the problem that's right my computer's it's probably not the computer it's probably me but yeah it's it's not loading real quickly here no worries this is so real this is exactly what is happening in our classrooms so in the future you have to think through about five or six different ways and methods for students to stay engaged when one thing doesn't work and maybe it works for some but it's not working for others so this is just exactly the experience we want everybody to have is as understanding what it feels like to be a student in this type of environment so that's so real and so important and yes i'm finally here for the jamboard activity thank you for your patience i think i mean any opportunity to learn is a great opportunity and maybe this would be a great tool to use you know in in distance collaboration just even as a board or in any other way because this is um this is kind of helpful with visioning and just kind of getting ideas out in a different format so what are we all wondering vice chair bailey what might you wonder have we heard from you yet i can't see i have these disembodied voices half the time so uh yeah i just put up uh i wonder um how many people are gonna move here as particularly the southwest runs out of water uh when the oglala aquifer finally uh runs out um when the colorado river dries up all those all those things yeah we saw las vegas with a huge water shortage a couple of years ago that's only going to get worse right yeah and i'm seeing people posting about what are the chances of humanity becoming extinct will science save us
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perfect wait can other people move your sticky posts or they might be able to i haven't i didn't do any special like settings on this i just moved someone's and yes yes i think you can move them around yeah so if we were going to sort them in like thematically or numerically or something we could do that yep exactly what do we know about the impacts of climate change and so then as an educator in a classroom i could look around we could generate an infinite amount of questions from students this can actually then guide our curriculum development like in the end time lesson development piece like we already know the landscape we know exactly kind of where we're trying to go but now that we're seeing what students questions are we can just integrate that into our lessons for future reference so maybe these these will come up today or maybe these wonderings are things that we want to keep at the forefront and make sure that we address all of students questions throughout the throughout the lessons and where maybe i don't have a specific lesson that will address students questions maybe that's where we do a mini research project or we investigate something together and build the knowledge together so this is this tool is actually very useful for a lot of different purposes and nicole did i hear you say so i mean part of this in an online environment in particular is that giving students so hopefully students have access to everything they can post their own stickies but even if they don't maybe they have access to the chat or maybe they just say something and then you could write it on a sticky exactly yep yep or they or if they choose to say silent they can document their thinking in their student journal and that student journal can be shared with me later on or it can be an in-time journal that i keep up because it's a google when it's a google doc i can see all the edits that are being made you know in real time so i can keep an eye on even the the silent the quiet students that are less likely to speak up in a large group you can use these questions as a springboard for group projects or class projects or individual projects and again this kind of student-centered here's the question i'm interested in and and then you can you know the first law of ecology is everything is connected to everything else so you you get two different student projects uh a presentations and you can go okay class how are these two connected um and and that just makes it makes it that much richer yes yep exactly and so we'll shift now um that we've kind of done some formative assessing um and getting everybody's voices into the room in some way um i'll set up this next this next part is that we're actually gonna be learning um from two poets from two different parts of the world about um the impacts of climate change on their homelands so kathy gentnel kitchener is a world renowned poet and climate activist from the marshall islands and academiana is an inuk artist and activist from greenland their bios are here again this all has been has been adapted from that original website that's linked at the top of the document the student note sheet document and in the slides and so um you can refer back to that for more information but we're really only going to have time to dip our toes into the water um so i'd like to set up this video so part of i'm a bilingual educator by by trade so one of the things i like to always do is create a universally or as universally as possible accessible learning experience for all the students and then scaffold up from there so we usually start with speaking and listening and visual supports are excellent to help with that so again this video is a five and a half minute video but we'll only dip our toes into like the first minute so you can see how the two poets and the visual representation set up the poem so it helps you understand the written poem even better so i will start here sister of ice and snow i'm coming to you from the land of my ancestors from atolls sunken volcanoes undersea descent of sleeping giants sister of ocean and sand i welcome you to the land of my ancestors to the land where they sacrificed their lives to make my impossible to the land of [Music] the land my survivors chose [Music] marshall islands a country more sea than land i welcome you to gaddafi greenland
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the biggest island so we'll pause there um our guiding question is really what did we learn from kathy gentner kitchener about the impact of climate change and other environmental threats to life in the marshall islands and then what did we learn from academiana about the impact of climate change and other environmental threats to life in greenland and so i'll give you a few moments to um is everybody able to access the written poem it should be linked in your it's linked in your um student worksheet so rather than watching the whole video i'll give you time to read the poem really quickly with these guiding questions in mind so think through like what's something we're learning from about the marshall islands and what's one thing we're learning about greenland in terms of threats uh now i'm happy to cold call or i'm happy to have people popcorn out as long as we're mindful of sharing space so if there's someone who has not shared yet let's start there the reference to nuclear waste sure um uh it was interesting because uh i think many of us are familiar with you know we tested all the nuclear bombs in the pacific but this one also had ice a nice reference to it i believe and now you've got me i'm trying to flip back and forth um first three wars inflicted on us then through nuclear waste dumped in our waters on our ice and now this that that gives it a historical perspective of you know this isn't the only thing um that's happened to us [Music] been been inflicted on us yep and there'll be opportunities later on in the lesson to kind of dig deeper into that historical perspective colonizing monsters pops up a couple of stanzas down what else did we learn from one of the poets i just i love the reference to the um place like the place based um just the references like ocean and sand shells shores the atoll bikini atolls specifically and i read it really quickly but i'm just like really loving the language um and how she's describing her experience in the landscape um that would be for the for kathy uh is it jet nil kitchener that's so that's kind of a perfect segue to the next slide but i want to make sure we don't have other people that want to share learning about the impact i got to say too this is my work right
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now at my day job is trying to frame the idea of sustainability away from this like environmentalists like white centric you know like the polar bear like floating on the little ice flow to understanding like the impact of you know rising seas and on on frontline communities um and and those places that are disappearing um and so this is just this is so amazing do you do you know either of these people um i did meet kathy jennell kitchener she was here at psu this last fall um doing a poetry reading and a lesson you know basically teaching you know using her poetry to teach us and so i was fortunate to have met her there but i know that she has deep ties to portland and i definitely know that you know our pacific islanders students um you know we have we have many many people who call the marshall islands home or ancestral homelands and so um this is very relevant and and important for all of our students to learn about because it's important for them to understand you know um where their peers are coming from or what's happening you know in communities maybe that um if you've been living only in portland or only you know in wisconsin for example we wouldn't necessarily know about these perspectives i um so marshallese is one of the languages that the city of portland when it comes down to the like the f the top five you know um safe harbor languages but marshallese is some of the bureaus translate into marshallese and then it's one of those languages that's like only the royalty speaks the late that knows the written language you know and versus verbal and anyway there we do have a lot of um we do have a lot of people uh micronesian uh marshallese from the islands there in portland yeah and actually in the bio on um on the website kathy jet no kisher does talk about how she was looking for legends um written in her in marshallese and so she was trying to figure out which legend would really fit nicely with this poem as as you see the the the two poets talk about legends and so thinking about the importance of and we can go you know deep or superficial but you know the the importance of language as culture and the importance of maintaining and supporting students in retaining heritage language or learning heritage language and really honoring that and celebrating that so whatever we can do in our schools to to contribute to that as well i think is so important it's amazing and so speaking of language um actually student representative shu i would love to bring you into this conversation because it's been a while since i've been in a formal english teaching classroom and so i want to make sure i have my definitions of figurative and connotative set how do they look a pop quiz um i'm sorry where do i find those um we're on slide uh what slide is this this is a 19. slide 19 which i get to by pressing what can you see the screen oh i'm sure that's gonna be okay i see that okay so figurative language being things like similes and metaphors like when you're trying to describe something but not using the literal words for it so an example in the poem would be like atolls and volcanoes are like the literal language but she refers to them as sleeping giants yeah about the connotative language so like you use a word to evoke a certain emotion or cultural association and a meaning but there's like this hidden meaning so you could choose to say i'm stuck or you could say i'm rooted and each of those have different connotations like rooted makes it seem more like ancestry and trees and life stuck would be more like kind of a negative connotation am i good i mean i think so frankly i haven't covered anything like this since like middle school oh no our high school english classes really don't have that kind of focus so well this kind of language stuff is in the standards we gotta make sure we're revisiting anything i think nathaniel just raised a point that the board needs to take up i really appreciate your perspective i love it so thinking back on the poem like we could dissect it again so we would have students review the poem so they're getting even more information that they're gleaning from the poem both in terms of content knowledge like understanding and then also there's this layer of english
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language arts that goes into it so let's talk about what you're seeing in the poem in terms of either figurative language or connotative language and knowing that poets or anyone using language arts for a purpose is very intentional about the use of language to to deliver a message and so thinking about what each of the poets messages are how does this use of language support that message or add to add a layer of understanding who have i missed so far how about how about uh nathaniel yeah what are you thinking uh for either of them yup you pick you pick let's see i don't know well here's i suppose a candidate um quote we have used we have months this is at the end of on page five i think um before you watch from your tv and computer screens waiting to see if we will still be breathing and no i misread that okay never mind um i thought it said something else let's see if i can maybe just move on to someone else while i find something decent have we heard from director brim edwards or director constant i i actually think this poem is not very figurative it's pretty literal um but um there are you know there there's a reference to the um i'm not looking at it right here but the the the glaciers are your children the c's are her children but generally i think it's pretty literal i've noticed there's a lot like kind of connotative language so the the word selection kind of evoked a certain emotion or an association absolutely even the phrase to see to see if we're still breathing you know that's in you know in some ways literal but not i i don't think they mean that literally but if you're talking about the marshall islands being completely underwater um in a sense you're talking about a whole nation a whole way of life not breathing anymore and so in the interest of time i'll just keep us moving but um to show you one more tool that then we could also use to have students to kind of dissect and understand even more um the messages in this poem so this links to an actual google earth presentation that i created to support this lesson so what students could do is we could re-read the poem again and what i've done here is i've linked all of the different locations that are named in the poem i've created links for them on this globe and as they come up in the poem we can have google earth take us there and we can really do some exploring and so this can go as deep or as surface as we want it to go but i just wanted to show you how this works so you know there's bikini atoll there's marshall islands roon at dome is mentioned i can move forward in the slides and it'll transport me to greenland and so what's wonderful about this tool is that it can take students on virtual field trips around the world you know so you can like zoom in and you can see things whatever they have available here for us to look at um so we can really kind of get in and go what is it like there what you know let's explore the town or let's explore the the area so i want to give you a sense of this as a tool because it's just a really excellent tool you have to show me how to do that linking with slides that is incredible neat i just was like in love with this they've really done some incredible updates to google earth so i'm not teaching this past year but i've been teaching economic geography most of the last 10 years and i give my students at community college i give
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them map quizzes um just more as a fun thing you know and they love them it's like wait you don't have another one for us today and that's a lot of it's just naming countries for the 10 largest countries or the fertile crescent where civilization quote-unquote started right um but um you know we're so closed in on our world and that's just another another way of getting them out out there but wow lincoln with with google earth and that focus is great this is pretty cool it looks like google earth has really um upped its game in the last couple years since i've been on it it's amazing yeah and scott i didn't know you taught um economic is it economic geography yeah cool it's uh i turned it into why are there poor countries in rich countries uh i took an economics class this summer uh called economics of emancipation so economics and political economy through a a black liberation lens that was a great class highly know more about that class i might want to it was you would love it it was like almost all 100 people of color presenting global citizens um through umass i'll send you i'll send you the info please thank you that'd be amazing it would be a great professional development yes absolutely yeah very cool yes i'm curious um i've got like two screens up here a touch screen and everything how um are you finding students so i'm assuming high school students are digital natives but do they have everything they need in order to be able to fully utilize all these capabilities my understanding is yes um because this is it's an educational digital tool that's in our toolbox connected to our um google but i would need to double check that because i just used it with my stuff so yeah super cool i just i'm hoping our students have like all they need in order to be able to just right explore their world yeah and you know bandwidth is a is an issue connectivity is an issue and so that's that's just like an ongoing challenge as you all know but um yeah to the extent that we can use this and i'm gonna have to put in a shameless plug for the fact that antarctica exists on this planet i can't tell you how many classes i have been in in my life in my career where we don't talk about the polar regions we don't talk about antarctica very much like you don't even see it when you look at those maps on the you know and in a store or whatever you know some map you can decorate your wall with i always go where is antarctica this is a giant polar cap and we have no idea that it's that it exists so just even things like that to help dispel the the myths that like pop culture puts out there or um just sort of you know consumer culture puts out there there's actually a black man that takes uh veterans and inner city kids to antarctica every year where yeah um i'll put that in your email too it's called soul river so he's a fly fisherman that works on like of course global warming issues but he's like an african-american man you're in portland he does every year i'm trying to get on as a cook please please we need to connect us with that person because we're looking for all kinds of people that can work with our students in the class and so you know students are interested in investigating certain things like let's make sure that they have access to people that can teach them firsthand he's he is amazing he like you wouldn't even believe it that's awesome so nicole i'm so sorry uh director scott i was just going to add to director deposit's comment about the gentleman the fly fisherman uh i know about him as well and one of the things that i think from a value standpoint is um his expertise who he works with but also his articulation of how difficult he has founded at times to participate in the outdoors as a person of color and how unsafe he has felt and so certainly we have students and families uh who have felt that way and so i would just second director deposa's uh nomination for us maybe learning more and reaching out to that gentleman thank you yeah it's an important point um i hate to bring politics in but i'm i'm sort of curious as we talk about this curriculum how do you how are we training sort of teachers how are we developing the curriculum to deal with the you know diversity of views on this so so i can imagine on the one hand in a learning environment right some of some of the best learning environments are where you get this free exchange of of differing viewpoints
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and yet at the same time i could i could imagine it would be very disruptive right um you know to have someone who just says well climate change doesn't exist like why are we you know why are we learning about this it doesn't make sense and we have those students you know in our in our schools in our district that believe that how are we training teachers to address those situations so um i think that's where the first of all the launch unit is critical to this whole course because in the launch unit is really where and that's similar to our soft start but a little bit more intentional about like building protocols and sort of exploring identities and thinking about how to listen with empathy and how to respond with you know empathy or how to how to engage in topics that are difficult to talk about because they're politically contentious and so that's part of the the work that we would need to do like in the particular in the design institute um we had a our first full day was a lot of identity work and was a lot of collaborative like norming so making sure that we came to community agreements as as to how we were going to speak in spaces or how we were going to be with each other in in the space and then also more about unpacking our own identities and building a sense of community and so that we try to eliminate or mitigate any sort of us versus them kind of feelings because it's not really about us versus them it's about this collaborative dialogue that we can engage in where we all take away something new or we can all learn and think critically about topics and so in order to think critically about topics it's important to have a wide range of ideas about a topic so kind of really being intentional with that launch unit um i think then in subsequent teaching if we when we do professional learning for other teachers that will take the course up we'll do similar work i mean i think we'll need to learn also from this the students and the educators that did the course this year that are teaching the course this year and take lessons learned and apply that to future professional learning as well but it's you know racial equity social justice kind of 101 how do we how do we work in space together when we all have maybe very polarizing viewpoints about topics that can be a variety of things but we we get ahead of that by making sure that we feel connected to each other learn how to listen to understand and not listen to respond also learn how to use multiple sources to kind of pull together information so there's a lot of academic thinking that goes into it but then also a lot of bringing down that affective filter we talk about that you know gets students kind of maybe um well zoretta hammond talks about the amygdala hijacks so like if students are in a very tense situation they might shut down or they might go to fight or flight so how do we create warm and supportive environments where all students kind of feel a sense that they can they can explore ideas together that we'll learn from each other it's great thank you yeah it's great that in on a seminar um put on by the federal reserve bank of st louis titled how to teach about inequality uh or economic inequality and they really meant racial inequality but they didn't even put that in the title um and it was i mean it was they presented some really good resources and shared some good good stories and strategies but it was also painful to watch how timid they were in talking about how to bring this up in the classroom um and this was i think aimed at high school college community college a couple of presenters were college professors um and i appreciate that you know talking about protocols upfront and how to have that respectful disagreement you know that's the baseline and that wasn't even broached in this uh yeah so there's um awesome work to the team yeah the it was incredible they did they did excellent work yeah um so again in the interest of time um we would go back as a classroom we would go back and talk about like what did we actually learn once we kind of digested all this information and this would be kind of considered our synchronous time together then i would launch you into asynchronous so here's some stuff you can do on your own you have this foundation knowledge we've talked about things we've digested a bunch of ideas um now this is pretty cool um google earth has an actual um i don't know what they call it like a presentation i guess that's all about sea level rise and the fate of coastal cities and as you can
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see in the poem she names multiple coastal cities you know rio i believe and she talks about miami and new york and amsterdam and and so students can go in and do their own research their own investigation by touring these cities and learning about sea level rising impact on different cities so that's something that they can work through in the afternoon i get that it's screen time still which is hard but it's also this is really in important geographic information um and it's real time so that's you know it's useful um and so then the idea would be for um students to selective and then like learn about that as some more information but then select you know one of the locations that are named in the poem and let's dig deeper so the nuclear testing so the bikini atoll right and we can talk about what does it mean to have a bunch of nuclear waste buried under under an island that is becoming engulfed by ocean and what's that going to mean for the rest of the world if the nuclear waste gets out and into the streams and that so like there's lots of questions that can come up around that for example um nicole yes this is amy can i just want to pick up on something that you said this is a little tangential but um when you're talking about asynchronous learning and screen time you know it occurred to me like are we really asking our educators to think about project-based learning specifically as an antidote to the screen time environment that we're in right now like this class is a perfect example of thinking about you know what can you go out and do on your own that puts you you know in the middle of even an urban forest or in a stream bed or whatever but but all of our classes could have applications like that and maybe we should be thinking about project learning project-based learning and that in that vein it would be it's a it's an excellent framework for all kinds of work and as well as you know environmental studies it's you don't want to protect something you don't understand so like part of helping students care about our environment is helping students connect and and become more familiar with our environment so anytime students can spend outdoors especially in pandemic there's lots of places to go outdoors where you can be away from people but you know explore your area so yes absolutely i'd love to see that built in um this is somewhat tangential also but i became aware of a a um a portland parent that rented a farm or some land out on soviet island okay that's one acre so it's not a lot but they have like a covered structure and they're inviting kids to come out and use this like learning lab wow it's so incredible except except it's not because it's not accessible right yeah that's that's a really good idea i mean i wish the district could um do something like that yeah and i've spoken to a few different community partners that have talked a little bit about you know can we can we create something outside at one of our parks or one of you know at any of our yeah where is in portland and you know can we have different sites around the city where we could work with students so i think all these conversations are you know perfectly timed you know and even post pandemic you know what does it look like to get kids out of buildings way more frequently than they're in them so they're out exploring things a lot of people in portland working on low-income kids in particular and i volunteered for years ten years for an organization that's not around anymore but um literally picking up kids from apartment buildings and taking them out to mount hood yeah yep and get them along the gorge and the columbia river yeah it's beautiful right yeah and there's so much history and so much just you know history and geography tied together so speaking of coastal cities uh coos bay tillamook and astoria among others are basically at sea level so i can see in future years the possibility of teaming with high school students in those places to do some kind of joint exploration of the topography and the impacts and to help bridge this you know this sort of other oregon than us urban rural right yep piece of what happens with climate change you know it's it's become so polarized if there's a way to depolarize that through this kind of an exchange yeah would be pretty cool and if there's
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one thing that the pandemic has done that's been really good is this idea of being able to connect across anywhere around the world through we're doing video chat so much so how do we even just get students connected you know classrooms connected through video chat even now to learn from each other meet each other and talk about issues that matter to them yeah absolutely are there other questions may i ask a question about your last slide about the six pps high schools yes is this going to be rolled out to every high school and do you know the two high schools at snot is it benson and jefferson let's see the ones that i know we do have it in um is alliance cleveland franklin grant wilson and madison um and and so we'll pilot it this year there's four four of those six schools were actually involved in the designing of the course with the students and the teachers together um and then the two other course the two other schools um came on after that um i think there's just there's just a lot going on in terms of master schedules and allocations and sort and so it has this has implications for so many parts of our system that i was just excited to get it in six schools right off the bat um so i think yes um we will it's absolutely it's it's a gvc structured course it's in atlas we will build out in canvas and also then um continue to co-create and refine and revise but um it'll be open to anyone to use yes excellent thanks yeah sure thing can you sp um say a little bit more or maybe just repeat it um you said that it's an elective but that it can be used as a credit recovery for a science class can you say that again because you said it yeah so what we did in the design of the course is we intentionally bridged science standards and social studies standards with ideas around language arts and even math to a certain extent but um we made sure that we have embedded into the course enough science credit or enough science standards that are assessed in priority standards that it would yield 0.5 science credit recovery so it would give students a half a half a science credit recovery because we have i think at minimum we have about we have we have more than six science standards but we have at least six assessed and priority science standards in this and so eventually it'd be wonderful if we could work with the system in such a way that we could maybe build in enough social studies or ethnic studies standards that students could get credit recovery for that or maybe english language arts standards but but for right now we thought okay let's just start small so that we can have two options and see how that works and make sure that it it works the way we intend it to um but yeah the idea is that it's completely standards based and so we can we can give credit recovery we can give credit recovery but it that wouldn't count as a like a regular right it's it's not a core science course they have far more standards in the physics and the chemistry and the biology the directors we're on the in closing slide so it was important to make sure that you walk away with a little bit of an elevator speech hopefully after a sample lesson i know that also shared with you was some other exemplar lessons at other grade levels and other topic areas i hope that you have a chance uh to peruse those but more importantly just to give you a little bit of a flavor about how to take a policy and materialize the development of a curriculum that's inclusive with students and and teachers and begin to roll out uh and pilot this curriculum not just at the high school level but begin to expose students at every grade level so they have at least one integrated unit and i think as nicole did masterfully just kind of hinting at how you can really take disciplines across content areas to really do do that integration and i saw uh lots of you in your comments sort of make those uh connections and in the process of one lesson i think directors got a chance to even try out some of the technology tools that our teachers are starting to integrate so not just the tools and the platform but some of the digital resources you know to give you a sense of how those can be pulled in too so even during distance learning you know how do we continue to stay on track with the content and the standards that we want to teach so uh it's really only possible when our educators make sense of it uh tonight you had a chance to learn from one of our rock stars in pps so
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uh as we say you know an applause visually for nicole berg for for being with us uh this evening um i'll be really interested as we close up if you have any comments about whether this format for a study session that's structured more like a lesson plan which i really enjoyed working with nicole on as we think about our monthly topics if i noticed folks were very engaged and it was informal and interactive and if that's the kind of format i know that director bailey and i talked about as an objective for this time together uh we do hear sort of your your feedback before we dismiss class i am so impressed and it's late um because i'm an early bird but um nicole thank you so much and superintendent too for for collaborating on this this is you know history and it's environmental justice and it's like so many things in poetry and english and everything wrapped up i just i want to come back to class it was amazing great thank you thank you i agree and um on your solicitation for feedback superintendent um i really enjoyed the opportunity to not only learn about the process here and some of the subject matter but to have an experience like a student with the platforms with the tools i think is really helpful and fun that's awesome yeah i loved it and no disrespect to anyone else who's done amazing presentations but this was my favorite work session of my last year hey gold star thank you this is a study session not a work session that's why it's different fair fair enough fair enough this will be the new thing we'll be doing um so the second meeting of every month we will have a study session afterwards and um the syllabus the learning guadalupe calls it the syllabus i call it the learning plan um you've seen that of the things we're going to cover over the months to try to really help us as board members have a robust sense of all the different things that are happening and unfortunately we couldn't get to jonathan and community engagement tonight they have a new framework and some new information for us um so they'll be sharing that in a future meeting um but i also really enjoyed this nicole you are amazing so thankful you're here with the district and um i loved the poem and just all the different ways different kinds of learners could engage with the curriculum so i think that also shows just the robust curriculum development we have at pps thank you i just want to say john jonathan you've got your work cut out for you as uh following up this presentation yeah i hope uh uh again talking with our superintendent about how to make these sessions work um okay i'll just say better than some of the presentations we've had where we get an hour powerpoint and three minutes of discussion uh i know director brim edwards that's one of the points that you brought up and and others as well and to me this really uh was a great mixture of that participation discussion as well as sharing information um in in a really a really wonderful way so awesome thank you it's a great way to lead things off uh again so jonathan good luck thank you yeah i was really excited about the format this is new to me as well um in my former district i remember kind of like those presentations we have to present to the board to explain what's going on and it always seemed like maybe they got half of what we were trying to say and that's adult learning theory you only get about half of what's said to you so let's engage you and as adults and learners did you have some feedback to share about the study session yeah i just wanted to say that i also think that this format is great um i've i've never really seen anything like this but it is it is great um and it's also fun to watch board members try to figure out jamboard um so i hope we keep doing this please please uh delete the the powerpoint that you received last week we're gonna start from scratch thank you for giving us another two weeks what do you think about your peers in terms of like this kind of a lesson can i ask that do you think this would be an engaging way for students to learn or wouldn't if it was actually executed like it was here i think it could be yes but i mean it's all in the execution sure sure although i mean if current
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trends continue i could foresee it like um when you ask for questions i could very easily see no one respond me you'd just be looking at a bunch of um cameras that are turned off um yeah sea of silence i don't know if you could run into those issues well as you had a question i don't know nicole if you can answer this or somebody else but like so at one point i was like oh my god i hope i don't get called on and like you were circling me um but it was like i couldn't find something and i'm just wondering like how students are and then i got like off onto the world the google map and um i was still hoping i wasn't going to get called once i was into something really interesting but how are students like if you can't find something or you're missing a link how are students getting help and i don't know if that's a question to fairness directed to you or somebody else but it that's just what i got a sense it's like oh this is what happens virtually is like you have students in their individual homes and maybe you miss a step and then you're just off for the rest of the time yeah i think there's a couple pieces to that one that's where the chat feature really comes in handy because then someone can chat a question and while the teacher is continuing to move you can even set up maybe like you're the chat moderator and you're this and you're that or you can moderate the chat as well and say oh um and often i would be poppy i would be populating the chat with the documents that students needed right in time as well so they could have access to those links right away so it's part of how you set up your classroom norms and routines and then also making sure that things are yeah accessible in multiple different ways so everything's attached to your calendar invite and everything's in the chat and everything's in your you know your student worksheet it's all linked there so yeah but you were also off task but you were still learning and so that's also cool you were getting into a rabbit hole that's great well then also like we can't use the chat because we're in a public range it's like good to know that's a feature and i mean just you think also about like which of our teachers are digital natives um that this is just like second nature um and where what kind of pd just because this seems super um accessible and engaging yeah fair larry i just want to i'll end with um really appreciated the opportunity tonight to to cover this topic it is representative of so many uh educators who who dedicated time in the curriculum institute and have continued to stay engaged whether through the climate justice committee or or in other ways continue to advocate and of course we wouldn't have been provoked to really giddy up with this work if it were for our students so here you have sort of a progress report of where we are with it i think this is unique and innovative work i don't think you're going to find it in another school district i can only imagine where we're going to be by the end of the school year when this continues to roll out across all of our schools and all of our grade levels all right i'm gonna call us to um the end of this session thank you everyone for your time tonight and for the great work that we were able to get done today we have agenda setting tomorrow morning at 11 so if you have any topics for agenda setting please email those before 11am tomorrow as we won't receive them after that um and i will be sending out my wednesday weekly update to you with all we covered at agenda all right everyone have a great night and we'll see you in a couple weeks if not


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