Elizabeth Bondy

Creating Environments of Success and Resilience: Culturally Responsive Classroom Management and More.

Creating safe and productive environments with a diverse student population requires more than the strategies recommended in the original classroom-management literature. Drawing from the literature on culturally responsive classroom management, psychologically supportive classroom environments, and building resilience, the authors describe the practices used by three effective novice teachers in urban elementary classrooms during the first 2 hours of the first day of school. The study was based on videotape and interview data that were qualitatively analyzed using an inductive approach. The novice teachers focused on developing relationships and establishing expectations through the use of “insistence” and a culturally responsive communication style. The study provides clear pictures of the ways in which teachers teach and insist on respectful behavior and establish a caring, task-focused community. As such, it demonstrates how teachers create environments of success and resilience for students who have historically floundered in school.

Practicing Collaboration: What We Learn from a Cohort That Functions Well

Students in the Unified Elementary/Special Education Program at the University of Florida are organized into cohort groups, a common recommendation within the special education teacher education literature. Although highly effective in some instances, the literature also documents numerous problems in the use of cohorts. The current study was designed to gain insight into strategies that might help students and faculty build positive cultures and collaboration skills in cohorts. Drawing on student interviews with members of a particularly cohesive cohort, we identify and explain five strategies that students utilize to assist a cohort in developing a strong sense of community and positive group dynamics. These include: keeping an academic focus, pulling ones own weight, taking care of the community, being willing to move outside ones comfort zone, and including everyone. The specific examples will be useful for teacher educators using or considering the use of student cohort groups.

Getting Beyond the Research to Practice Gap: Researching Against the Grain

Special education researchers have used considerable financial and human resources to work with teachers to close the gap between knowledge of research-based practices and their sustained use in classrooms. While some researchers have been successful in collaborating with teachers to achieve sustained use of classroom interventions, the gap between research and practice has remained a source of considerable concern to the special education community. In this paper, we use Cochran-Smith and Lytles (1999) conceptual analysis of teacher learning to argue that the perceived research to practice gap may be the result of how many educational researchers have conceptualized and operationalized their research with teachers. Instead, we propose a more collaborative way of approaching research that involves teachers in the generation of new knowledge, not just its application to the classroom. We offer this collaborative approach as a way to transform practices in schools and classrooms and better meet the substantive intent of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Becoming Warm Demanders: Perspectives and Practices of First Year Teachers

In the literature on culturally responsive pedagogy warm demanders are teachers who embrace values and enact practices that are central to their students’ success. Few scholars have examined the experience of novice teachers who attempt to enact this stance. In this study of two first-year, female, European American teachers who attempted to be warm demanders for their predominantly African American elementary school students, the authors answer the question, “How do the teachers think about and enact warm demanding?” The teachers’ contrasting experiences have implications for administrators and teacher educators.

Critical pedagogy for critical mathematics education

This article provides a brief introduction to critical pedagogy and further discussion on critical mathematics education. Critical mathematics education enables students to read the world with mathematics. Three emerging domains of mathematics education related to critical mathematics education are discussed in this manuscript: ethnomathematics, equity in mathematics education and culturally responsive teaching. All three of these domains share the purpose of creating just and democratic classrooms while they provide different means to reach this purpose. Ultimately, the goal of the critical mathematics education is to empower students with knowledge, skills and dispositions needed to create democratic communities embracing social justice in and outside of school.

Guidelines for portfolio preparation: Implications from an analysis of teaching portfolios at the University of Florida

An analysis of 73 portfolios, prepared by University of Florida faculty as part of the Teaching Improvement Program competition, revealed tremendous variability in the quantity, quality, and coherence of the evidence presented to support claims of excellence in teaching. By analyzing portfolios prepared by faculty members representing different colleges and different types of teaching assignments, the researchers developed seven common guidelines for portfolio construction.

Like Being at the Breakfast Table: The Power of Classroom Morning Meeting.

Elizabeth Bondy is Associate Professor, School of Teaching and Learning, College of Education, University of Florida, Gainesville. Sharon Ketts is a Cum’culum Resource Teacher and former 3rd-grade teacher, Duval Elementary School, Gainesville, Florida. “Like Being at the B W m t Table’’ The Power of Classroom Morning Meeting W ith 12 years of elementary teaching experience, four years of teaching music, two grown childrenof her own, and a master’s degree, Sharon was confident about her teaching skills. Nevertheless, she was astounded when the news broke that her students had scored higher on all sub-tests of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) than students in the three other 3rd-grade classrooms in her school. Of course she was thrilled, but how could she explain their performance? The class seemed no different from other classes she had taught. They were a racially and ethnically heterogeneous group; 84 percent of the children were eligible for free or reduced price lunches, and a majority read at or below grade level. What made this year different for Sharon and her students? She could identify one change that characterized the past year. Throughout the year, Sharon had faithfully led her class in daily Morning Meetings. Developed and disseminated by teachers at the Northeast Foundation for Children, Morning Meeting is a structured way to begin each day “as a community of caring and respectful learners” (Kriete, 1999, p. 3). Sharon and her colleagues had participated in several inservice training sessions to learn about Morning Meeting and related teaching practices associated with the ”Responsive Classroom” approach (Charney, 1991). Among the teachers on the 3rd-grade team, however, only Sharon implemented the practice in her classroom. Although her students’ performance on the ITBS surprised her, she eventually became convinced that Morning Meeting was the impetus behind their success.

Creating Communities of Culturally Relevant Critical Teacher Care.

ABSTRACT This article draws on the literature on effective African American teachers of African American students to investigate the enactments of culturally relevant critical teacher care (CRCTC) in two fifth-grade teachers’ (one White and one Black) classrooms in a large, urban school district. Using interview and observation data, the findings illustrate the teachers’ knowledge of potential constraints upon their students’ futures. This knowledge catalyzed their enactment of a particular kind of care designed to prepare their students with the dispositions, knowledge, and skills to construct what Carl Grant has called “flourishing lives.” The teachers’ practices illustrate classroom spaces ripe for high quality teaching, learning, and liberation of students of color. The study reveals the transformative potential of culturally relevant critical teacher care, a form of care that is explicitly linked to a larger social justice agenda.

No! I Won't! Understanding and Responding to Student Defiance

,c tudent defiance, or resisting the authority of the teacher, is commonplace. In fact, some researchers have reported that the vast majority of discipline referrals are due to defiance (Gregory, 2005; Kohl, 1994). Due to the prevalence of childhood defiance and its potential for bringing instruction to a grinding halt, it is essential for educators to be prepared to understand it and respond to students who exhibit it. The authors will examine defiant behavior and the strategies that can minimize and manage it effectively.

The Pals Program Intergenerational Remotivation

Social isolation is a major problem for the institutionalized elderly. An intergenerational geriatric remotivation program is one method to stimulate social awareness and functioning. Data analysis revealed the construct of invitational work as describing the social behaviors of children and elders during the program sessions, and the basic social psychological process of reconnecting as referring to what certain elders did in the Pals Program and to what the program meant to the elders. Although touted as a panacea for social isolation of elders, intergenerational remotivation programs are revealed in this research to be quite complex and even problematic. To be successful in decreasing social isolation, such programs require ongoing staff monitoring and interventions.