School Board

This webpage includes the following sections chronologically documenting the National Urban Alliance collaboration with the Redwood City School District. The order begins with the most recent on this webpage:

  • The Equity Committee (January 2021)
  • Amplifying Student Voice – Survey and More — November – December 2020
  • The Hub
  • Sustaining and Growing — District Led NUA Professional Development
  • Reflective Blog — Maria Sudduth NUA Project Director
  • School Board NUA Professional Development
  • Video Highlights of the NUA-RCSD Collaboration — June 2020
  • Participating RCSD Schools
  • National Urban Alliance
  • Pedagogy of Confidence
  • Professional Development On-Site and Virtually
  • Critical Thinking Tools Guide
  • Research and Beliefs
  • Amplifying Student Voice — January – March 2020

Websites for additional information:

The Equity Committee (January and February 2021)

The first of three Equity Committee sessions was held on January 22, 2021. The next two concurrent sessions will be held on the following two weeks. The sessions included over sixty participants in the sessions facilitated by Yvette Jackson, whose Pedagogy of Confidence research and book are the focus of the equity consciousness focus. The first sessions is available to view in four videos on The Equity Committee webpage. The first of four videos is below. The second session held on January 29, 2021 is also available on the The Equity Committee webpage.

Amplifying Student Voice – Survey and More — November – December 2021

The Amplifying Student Voice goes virtual with students facilitated in multiple sessions with their voices on equity, virtual learning and the quality of their education a focus. Their learning and questions have included survey with their voices that is being implemented in December 2020 and January 2021. The video below provides a view of the sessions of with the students. Download the accompanying PowerPoint used with the students.

Video Credits:  Thank You Students Grades 4-8 from Schools: Adelante Selby, Clifford, Garfield, Kennedy, Orion, Roosevelt
Facilitator and film editor: Robert Seth Price, NUA Senior Scholar; Linda Montes – RCSD Assistant Superintendent; Maria Sudduth – NUA Project Director: Whitney Eakin, Niffa Zuno – RCSD Coaches: Jesse Silverman, Art Educator; Stefanie Rome – NUA Senior Scholar.

The Student Developed Survey Date from 400 Students

The data from the student voice surveys is with quantified data, categorized when appropriate. Also included are quotes and exact words (in a Wordle) while being mindful of anonymity.

There were three responses to the question “8. Why do you think this? (a response to the previous question, “How do you feel people treat you at school?”) that could be a powerful direction to take the students in our next student voice group.

The students were overall positive and supportive in sentiments for their teachers who are trying their best and the empathy for fellow classmates. We participate in supporting the RCSD district with amplifying student voices for the hope that we can use their voices as our guiding compass for action.

The Online Survey

Download the complete survey as a PDF file.

See the survey online.

The Survey Results 

The Hub

This RCSD website is created by the coaches for all teachers in the district with planning for equity consciousness. This web site is designed to support NUA participating teachers easily access resources such as articles, lesson plans, unit plans, videos of teachers implementing NUA strategies, and recorded Professional Learning opportunities. The Hub can be accessed by clicking on the image or click here to visit The Hub.

Culturally responsive pedagogy is the process of eliciting, engaging and guiding connections to students cultural frames of references for deep understanding, high intellectual performance, competence and confidence and is at the heart of our work toward Equity Consciousness. – Yvette Jackson

“A strength-based classroom is a place where students with all sorts of labels come together as equals to form a new type of learning environment” – Thomas Armstrong

ELA Mini-Unit on Character Analysis
Using The Pedagogical Flow Map (PFM)
This unit created by RSCD Coach Whitney Eakin shows all aspects of a PFM with activities and supports for the success of all students. This lesson is an example of Unit / Lesson design with the Pedagogical Flow Map (see descriptive of the PFM below). Visit The Hub for more lessons.

Strategies Used – Powerful Questions on book cover, Key Word Prediction, Thinking Maps (Circle, Double Bubble, and Flow) for supporting students thinking before moving into quick writes and a multi-paragraph essay comparing and contrasting characters in the story.

You can use this unit as is or edit for the needs of your class. All slides have both English and Spanish headings as a way to honor the students first language (this lesson was originally designed for 3rd-5th grade Newcomers).

The Pedagogical Flow Map
The structure for creating lesson or unit design to address the “what” (the standards in the content acquisition) and the “how” (engagement and enhancement of reading expertise needed in all content areas).

Read more about The Pedagogical Flow Map including a video overview.

Six Critical Elements

  • Clear Learning Outcomes and Success Criteria
  • Focus on learning using preparation of student to the content or learning, mediation to make the content comprehensible, pauses for review and reflection of learning, practice and assessment
  • Targeted to a concept or unit theme
  • Focus on the Metacognitive thinking and learning processes as well as the content
  • Use of text-oriented learning
  • Incorporating ongoing reflection and discussion

Stefanie Rome, NUA Senior Scholar – Pedagogical Flow Map

Reflective Blog — Maria Sudduth NUA Project Director

Read the complete RCSD NUA Collaborative Blog written by NUA Project Director Maria Sudduth.

School Board NUA Professional Development (September 2020)

Facilitated by Stefanie Rome and Robert Seth Price.

Sustaining and Growing — District Led NUA Professional Development

Information and PowerPoint from recently facilitated professional development by Linda Montes and Whitney Eakin.

Video Highlights of the NUA-RCSD Collaboration — June 2020

The compilation video below this text of the National Urban Alliance and Redwood City collaboration includes RCSD students, teachers, school leaders and district coaches. The video focuses on National Urban Alliance’s Pedagogy of Confidence model including the  collaboration with professional development and amplifying student voice (6 minutes 23 seconds). The longer versions of the video clips within the compilation may be found on this NUA-RCSD blog and together on a Vimeo page.

Participating Redwood City Schools

Cohort 1 Schools (first year cohort — 2019/2020)

  • Garfield Community School
  • Hoover Community School
  • Roosevelt School

Cohort 2 (new cohort — first trainings virtually May 2020)

  • Adelante Selby Spanish Immersion School
  • Kennedy Middle School
  • Clifford School
  • McKinley Institute of Technology
  • Orion School

National Urban Alliance

The NUA’s mission is to substantiate an irrefutable belief in the capacity of all public school children to achieve the high intellectual performances demanded by our ever changing global community. Our focus is teacher and administrator quality through professional development which incorporates current research from cognitive neuroscience on learning, teaching, and leading. We partner with school districts to support the building of their capacity to advocate community-wide responsibility for realizing the learning potential of its children. 

National Urban Alliance helps districts provide school leaders and teachers with the opportunity, guidance and voice to identify what practices they need that will help them build on student strengths and engage them in learning essential skills, content and strategies. Since our founding in 1989 at Columbia University’s Teachers College with the College Board, the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education (NUA) has provided professional development, advocacy and organizational guidance that transform urban and suburban schools. 

We focus on three core beliefs: intelligence is modifiable; all students benefit from a focus on high intellectual performance; learning is influenced by the interaction of culture, language and cognition.

Eric Cooper – Founder of National Urban Alliance

Pedagogy of Confidence

National Urban Alliance’s approach is guided by the Pedagogy of Confidence, the fearless expectation and support for the high intellectual performance of all students, especially those who are dependent on the school and community for the skills and support needed to attain high achievement. We uncover strengths of students and teachers and then build on those strengths.

7 High Operational Practices™

All students have an innate desire for engagement, challenge, developing strengths, belonging and feeling valued. The Pedagogy of Confidence ® addresses this desire through its High Operational Practices TM (HOPs) that guide culturally responsive pedagogy for equity through excellence, eliciting and nurturing high intellectual performances for self-actualization and personal contribution from ALL students.

  1. IDENTIFYING AND ACTIVATING STUDENT STRENGTHS. Teaching that encourages students to recognize and apply their strengths releases neurotransmitters of pleasure, motivating students to actively participate and invest in a learning experience, set goals for their learning, and follow through with their learning for meaningful application and deeper development of strengths for personal agency.
  2. BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS. Students fare best cognitively, socially and emotionally when they know they are liked, appreciated, valued as part of a vibrant, caring community. Positive relationships stimulate oxytocin, positively impacting both the motivation and the memory capacity critical for learning.
  3. ELICITING HIGH INTELLECTUAL PERFORMANCE. Students crave challenges. Their intelligence flourishes when they are asked to think at high levels about complex issues, demonstrate what they know in creative ways, and develop useful habits of mind such as reflection, raising substantive questions for deeper understanding and thinking flexibly and innovatively.
  4. PROVIDING ENRICHMENT. Enrichment taps students’ interests, generates strengths, expands their cognitive capacity, and guides them to apply what they know in novel situations for self-actualization.
  5. INTEGRATING PREREQUISITES FOR ACADEMIC LEARNING. Foundation schema building activities are critical so that students have the right foundations for learning new information and acquiring new skills. This foundation heightens students’ understanding, competence, confidence, and motivation.
  6. SITUATING LEARNING IN THE LIVES OF STUDENTS. Students perform most effectively when they can connect new learnings to what is relevant and meaningful to them. These connections validate their lived experiences activating the focusing of the brain through its Reticular Activating System (RAS). Without such personal connections, the new learnings are not likely to be retained and used effectively.
  7. AMPLIFYING STUDENT VOICE. Encouraging students to voice their interests, perspectives, reflections, opinions and enabling them to make personal contributions is not only motivating but also builds the confidence, agency, academic language, investment, and skill students need to join wider communities of learners and doers in the world outside of school.

Yvette Jackson – Author of Pedagogy of Confidence, NUA Senior Scholar

Professional Development Virtually and On-Site

National Urban Alliance collaborated with teachers, school leaders, district coaches and district leaders in April and May on weekly professional development sessions via the Zoom platform. These interactive sessions were for both Cohort 1 educators (2019—current) and Cohort 2 educators (May 2020—forward).

The following are feedback from the many of the participants during the many virtual professional development sessions during April and May 2020 with both Cohort 1 and 2 educators.

“Community, how caring Robert, Maria and Stephanie and Eric are, and how much love was sent out to us and filled our bucket to build better relationships with kiddos.”

“They asked us to be introspective.”

“The ability and opportunities we still have to build community even online.”

“I enjoy the community building activities on Zoom and will use these activities with my students.”

“The idea that all students need to learn in an environment where the expectations are high for everyone.”

“I really enjoyed the new strategies and how to use them for remote learning. With the probability that we will be continuing distance learning in the fall, to some degree, I was really glad to see how to incorporate the strategies into the digital format.”

“I liked the more explicit instruction and modeling of new strategies and how we could incorporate them in the PFM. The break out sessions were fantastic because we were able to share and learn across schools and grade levels.”

“Putting students needs/thinking first.”

“Importance of following steps of priming, teaching and retention.”

“The importance of relationship building….ESPECIALLY on a digital platform.”

“Let the student discover their learning. Situate the learning in their lives. Find ways to amplify their voices. Be less teacher centered and mover towards Student centered teaching. Listen to what your students say, need, and let the guide your teaching.”
Read more reflections

Critical Thinking Tools Manual and Guide

The Critical Thinking Tools Guidebook by Robert Seth Price, Senior Scholar with National Urban Alliance, is a practical guide to support student centered learning with high level thinking skills. This guide is being used by all participating educators. These tools support K-12 across all subject areas as a common thinking language. Each section includes practical descriptions for using the models and strategies, visuals and steps to model practical implementation, research to support understanding and QR codes to video examples.
Download the Redwood City Critical Thinking Tools Guidebook.

The following four pillars of critical thinking are models of practical methods that are the core of developing critical thinking skills.

  • Collaborative Communities are three supporting methods of collaborative tools for individual and collaborative success. These include:  community building exercises and models, collaborative learning methods and peer-to-peer coaching.
  • Questioning Methods are used to engage students in curiosity, exploration, discovery and discussions. This includes effective methods for developing questioning skills leading to inquiry based shared inquiry.
  • Open Source Visual Mapping is for organizing and understanding thinking individually and collaboratively. The maps support recognizing patterns of thinking along with the frame of reference to understand different perspectives.
  • Thinking Environments is an awareness, understanding and a process focused on the design, interface and implementation of a thinking environment. This includes people and proximity, choice of materials and objects, and an environment of belief.

Research and Beliefs

Research on Relationships in School Communities
Why Relationships, Not Just Money, Are The Key To Improving Schools
Study Finds Social Capital Has 3-5 Times The Impact Of Funding
by Jeff Grabmeier, The Ohio State University News

Goddard conducted the research with Serena Salloum of Ball State University and Dan Berebitsky of Southern Methodist University. The study appears online in the Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk and will be published in a future print edition. The study involved 5,003 students and their teachers in 78 randomly selected public elementary schools in Michigan. The sample is representative of the demographics of all elementary schools in the state. Teachers completed a questionnaire that measured levels of social capital in their schools. They rated how much they agreed with statements like “Parent involvement supports learning here,” “Teachers in this school trust their students” and “Community involvement facilitates learning here.”

State data on instructional expenditures per pupil was used to measure financial capital at each school. Finally, the researchers used student performance on state-mandated fourth-grade reading and mathematics tests to measure student learning. Results showed that on average schools that spent more money did have better test scores than those that spent less. But the effect of social capital was three times larger than financial capital on math scores and five times larger on reading scores.

Serena J. Salloum, Roger D. Goddard & Dan Berebitsky (2018):
Resources, Learning, and Policy: The Relative Effects of Social and Financial Capital on Student Learning in Schools, Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk (JESPAR),  DOI:10.1080/10824669.2018.1496023

Full Article on the Research The Ohio State News 
Research including the Abstract

Amplifying Student Voice

In education, student voice refers to the values, opinions, beliefs, perspectives, and cultural backgrounds of individual students and groups of students in a school, and to instructional approaches and techniques that are based on student choices, interests, passions, and ambitions. Generally speaking, student voice can be seen as an alternative to more traditional forms of governance or instruction in which school administrators and teachers may make unilateral decisions with little or no input from students.
—Glossary of Education Reform, www.edglossary.org

Goal
Amplifying Student Voice focuses students on exploring, understanding and collaboratively sharing the How of Learning with peers as learners across all content areas. Amplifying Student Voice will use the critical thinking tools (HOPs) being implemented with the teachers to support student engagement. The students will use the HOPs tools and skills to explore the guiding questions:  How do we learn? Who are we? Who are we is relevant culture centered content that is reflective of the student’s respective diverse backgrounds. This provides teachers, staff and leadership a greater insight to the students as learners and who they are in creating and sustaining a successful learning experience.

Process
The students will use critical thinking methods (High Operational Practices) to determine what the How of Learning means and reflectively supports their learning. They will then continue use of the critical thinking methods to develop how they will use video to document the how do we learn and who are we in their classrooms and schools.
Read more in the Redwood City NUA Critical Thinking Tools Guide

See examples on video from Amplifying Student Voice NUA collaborations in Redwood City School District:

Roosevelt School – Amplifying Student Voice

Garfield Community School – Amplifying Student Voice

Hoover Community School – Amplifying Student Voice