"The CATDC Buzz" Issue #30

Standing at the threshold of a new school year, it is wise to remind ourselves why we teach. We will be fully immersed soon enough in what to teach, and how we are going to make this the best year ever. This noble profession only grows more challenging, and the values and beliefs that led us to choose this path should be held firmly in our hearts and minds.

Serving as Executive Director of the CATDC has deeply affirmed my own why, the belief in the power of education to transform individuals, to help people become more thoughtful, skillful, and creative, and better able to build a more just and harmonious world. At the CATDC, we teach teachers and develop leaders because we believe in lifelong learning and know that when educators are supported to grow, they are better able to provide the learning environments our students need. We bring them together face to face because most educators thrive on this kind of contact, and the rich relationships built within the CATDC learning community help sustain them throughout their careers.

This summer I had the great privilege of witnessing scores of California educators hone their craft and make these vital connections at CATDC events. Since mid-June, over 400 teachers and administrators from across the state participated in 12 Summer Institutes: becoming more intentional about how they manage time, moving toward mastery in group facilitation, developing new strategies for cultivating strong relationships with colleagues, discovering how to better support the social and emotional needs of their students, and developing their capacity to create more equitable and inclusive schools; learning a lot!

This month's Buzz features reflections on two of our cornerstone programs: Dr. Lizette Ortega Dolan, consultant and equity educator, shares her gleanings as a participant in Equity as Excellence. Lori Cohen, Dean of Faculty at the Bay School, who just completed her fifth year with Teaching Foundations, conveys key wisdom offered in the trainings she led in Los Angeles and the Bay Area in her Letter to Teachers. Their love of teaching and learning and deep commitment to young people shines through their words.

I am delighted to announce that in addition to her duties at Bay, Lori will be playing a new role at the CATDC this year. As Bay Area Program Coordinator and Facilitator Coach, Lori will be able to share her exceptional abilities as a teacher educator and trainer of trainers with an even wider audience. There are still a couple spaces in our Transformational Coaching Symposium which Lori will co-facilitate with Elena Aguilar at the Bay School. Spaces are also still available in our final workshop of the summer: Assessing the Well-Balanced Student led by Stanford educator and author Denise Pope.

Developing more meaningful and manageable assessments remains high on the list of priorities for many of the California educators I encountered this summer, especially as the Mastery Transcript Consortium gains ground. In her article Standards Based Grading: A Rose by Any Other Name author and educational consultant Susan Brookhart highlights the complexities and time involved in revising grades and amending report cards and urges us to make changes now: "I really encourage you to focus on moving your grades, in whatever form you must report them, closer to truly reflecting student learning. And that means - you guessed it - attention to the criteria you use to evaluate student work and the accuracy with which you do that evaluation." To learn more from Susan, join our two-day intensive, Assessment to Support Student Learning, in October at the Oaks School in Southern California.

The learning opportunities with the CATDC this coming year are legion, with several new ongoing programs and subject-based learning communities, as well as a wide variety of intensives. We are putting the final touches on our newest program in the Bay Area, the Impact Lab Series, a rich collaboration between several schools which will tackle a question near and dear to my own heart: How do we provide opportunities for our students to learn deeply while making a deeper impact on their communities and the world? I invite you to join us at our evening launch and networking event in San Francisco, featuring Kevin Brookhouser, author of The 20Time Project. The first 10 people to register will receive a free copy of his book. Prepare to be inspired!

I hope to see you soon at one of our offerings this fall. Meanwhile, best wishes for a wonderful start to the new school year.

A Rising Tide Will Lift All Boats

By Dr. Lizette Ortega Dolan

CATDC's Equity as Excellence Summer Institute provided the opportunity to explore the structures, policies, practices, and student experiences, augmenting or detracting from journeys within our spheres of influence, whether that involved increasing enrollment and hiring of people of color, LGBT, and gender expansive people; developing the equity literacy of school personnel; or increasing student capacity to understand their schooling experiences through a systemic lens.

Some questions posed during the four-day conference were: "What messages about race did you receive growing up?"; and "How do you use your 'sphere of influence' to advance equity?"; and "How can you walk away from a situation feeling like I made a just decision?" Increasing our own personal and professional equity literacy allows us to not only "courageously notic[e]" (J. Edwards, 2015) oppression, invisibility, and inequity in our schools, it gives us to skills to respond justly.

The goal of the conference was to increase our personal and professional equity literacy capacity so that we can be "diversity responsive". Dr. Elizabeth Denevi, Program Director for this Summer Institute, challenged us to consider that if we are thinking about "not appearing racist," then we are probably not effectively listening and "responding to the current need or challenge". We were encouraged to "lean into discomfort" because it is in those points of cognitive dissonance that we are truly learning and growing.

Read online...

A Letter to Teachers

By Lori Cohen, The Bay School of San Francisco

I spent a good part of the summer (and the months leading up to it) planning and co-facilitating Teaching Foundations in Southern California and the Bay Area with a team of stellar facilitators and cohorts of inspiring participants. While I end each session feeling physically tired, my heart always is full, and from that fullness, I feel ready for the school year ahead.

For those who have experienced Teaching Foundations, either this year or in the past, you know each day is packed with so much-and it takes time beyond the workshop to process it all. Part of the program is to engage in a little professional reading, oftentimes from educators offering advice about the start of the school year. From Peter Gow's A Letter to New Teachers to Jennifer Gonzalez's Find Your Marigold to the wealth of wisdom in the world of education, teachers aren't at a loss for some inspiration prior to the start of school. And as I thought about how to best encapsulate my sentiments from the summer, I thought I'd try my hand at writing a letter, too, offering wisdom that emerged from this summer (and many summers).

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Standards-Based Grading: A Rose by Any Other Name...

By Susan M. Brookhart, ASCD

Do the grades we assign to students truly reflect their learning? The answer to this question, after over a hundred years of research on grading and almost 200 years of practice, is "Not Always." There is lots of evidence that report card grades, and the assignment grades on which they are based, differ between schools and from teacher to teacher within schools.

Why is that? And what can be done about it? The two biggest reasons, according to both research and my experience working with teachers, are differences in criteria teachers use to assign grades --what teachers look for and recognize as important in students' work, and how they weigh those factors in their grading decisions --and differences in teachers' abilities to accurately apply whatever criteria they use. It follows that these are the issues we need to address if we are to make grading more truly reflect student learning.

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