oneSMFC
Superintendent Diego Ochoa bringing together teachers, students, administrators, community members. decision makers, to discuss the San Mateo-Foster City School District.
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From Balanced to Structured Literacy: Teaching Practice and Growth
In this episode of the oneSMFC podcast, Superintendent Ochoa is joined by two Teachers on Special Assignments for Literacy, Ms. Nicole Habeeb and Ms. Larissa Kenny, and the Director of Curriculum Instruction for Elementary Schools Pam Bartfield.
The three discuss our focus in early literacy at the San Mateo-Foster City School District, highlighting system changes, professional development, and an upcoming 1st Grade Literacy Summit by teachers, for teachers!
Interested in learning more? Check out our recent On the Road to Year 3 Annual Report!
Like. No teacher wants to not do right by their student. But now that we're learning that maybe we weren't doing right by them, what do we do now? Because we didn't have something that students were able to navigate themselves and own. That.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're embedded, and went like this and like how this shock looked on their face like did I just do that? And I was like, yeah, you just run that work, keep going.
Speaker 3:It's called a teaching practice for a reason, and it's not just something you kind of quickly put in place and then walk away. It's something that you have to support and commit to, and you know grow.
Speaker 4:Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for being with us again today on the One SMFC podcast. This is a program that we put together here in the San Mateo Foster City School District. We do it actually to get in touch with our families and with our community. We want everybody who has a stake in this school district to know what's going on in our schools. My name is Diego Ochoa and I'm the superintendent of the district, and it's my honor to be with three of my colleagues, who I'm going to allow to introduce themselves, starting with our director of curriculum.
Speaker 3:Hi everybody, Pam Bartfield, director of curriculum instruction for our elementary schools. Yeah, why did I try to chop your title in half? You can, it's fine. People know.
Speaker 4:This is your 14th appearance on the bottom.
Speaker 1:So you're an old player, you don't know.
Speaker 4:OK.
Speaker 1:My name is Nicole Habib and I'm the language and literacy toset Bearsford.
Speaker 4:Yay, such as if you haven't been to Bearsford, go to Bearsford If you want some. Yeah, exactly. If you want some social emotional support, just go for a lovely walk up and down the playground. It's just an absolutely wonderful place and glad to have you on the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you. My name is Larissa Kenny. I'm the language and literacy toset at Bayside Academy.
Speaker 4:So we're going to have some parents who listen to this and say Tosa, Larissa, do you want to explain what that is?
Speaker 2:A toset is an acronym for teacher on special assignments.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so basically Nicole and I I'm sharing that same role at two different sites. We both specialize in language and support literacy instruction at our sites in the elementary side. So Bayside is also a middle school, but I primarily focus on working with the elementary side.
Speaker 4:And I think you might, larissa. You might have, let's say, 18 elementary teachers at Bayside, something like that. So in a typical elementary teacher's day they might have 22, 23, 24 kids that they have all day long and they're on their roster, they're taking attendance. Your job is different, right? You're not? You don't have that roster of kids who start the day with you and end the day with you.
Speaker 2:No, I don't have my own like class roster. Attendance roster yeah, I don't take attendance for a class of kids that are with me all day.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:I have kids who move in and out of working with me across grade levels from K to third grade.
Speaker 4:Yeah, pam, you're the director of curriculum and instruction. Why do that? Why do we set up the system of having experts like Nicole and Larissa be, I guess, flexible in that way to be able to work with kids who might need more support? Why do we do that?
Speaker 3:To move with the students. Part of our strategy in having these language and literacy toasters across our school sites is to support teachers that support students with intervention, tier one, instruction, coaching, modeling, whatever the need is at the school After we assess students when we implement our program. Students have different needs, and so the TOSA's role needs to be flexible to be able to provide that. In some cases and I know Nicole and Larissa they sometimes act as a additional teacher at that grade level. So during the literacy time, when we're focusing on our structured literacy program, they might be working with a group of students while another teacher is working with a different group of students, so we can meet the students where they are.
Speaker 4:So, nicole, to use Beresford as an example, you might have, let's say, 40 kids in second grade and you have two teachers teaching those 40 kids. Are there times where you might have a group out of that 40? And what might you do with those kids?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean. So we're very grateful that we have a lot of support, and I'll kind of talk about who they are on campus. But, we really are through the support of PAM and as a program we're really looking at all students are our students.
Speaker 1:Instead of like this is just this classroom, or this is just for this teacher, or this is just this grade level. We're really starting to look at. Every one of these students in our school belongs to all of us and the responsibility of their success is a part of all of our responsibility, whether we're a kindergarten teacher or a fifth grade, and so when we go into a second grade classroom or grade level and we have those 40 students, we're really looking at the data to help us drive how we put these students into groups.
Speaker 4:And so they may not all be second graders Right, and you might have kids from multiple teachers Exactly In a group with you.
Speaker 1:Right, and it takes a lot of trust. Right, because all of us care so deeply about the students that are in our four walls of our classroom. But we are building the trust within each other so that we can send some students over to another classroom and then earning their trust that they can also send them to me.
Speaker 4:And it's true that in our profession you do feel a little bit of that ownership, like when I was a teacher. I would say my kids you know like and I think sometimes we actually take that literally like these are my students, my students don't leave my classroom without me. We're setting up some possibilities of kids being able to go next door and be in a group in Mrs Kenny's class or go down the hall and be in Mrs Habib's class, and the event that we have coming up February 8th is our first grade teachers literacy summit that we're hosting in San Mateo and Foster City School District and in some ways it's sort of similar to what we just talked about, in that we're inviting teachers Pam, do you know the districts that are gonna be represented who are coming to visit us?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so far we have, I think, 11 different districts and teachers from those districts and teachers from those districts. So we have Redwood City, hillsborough, hayward, palo Alto, santa Cruz, monterey.
Speaker 4:San Bruno, san Bruno.
Speaker 3:Pacifica. Cabrillo a bunch of districts.
Speaker 4:And so these are folks that teach kids who live in different cities, but they're coming to our district to find out what we're doing in our first grade classrooms. Nicole, when they get here, what are they gonna see?
Speaker 1:They're going to see, first and foremost, a lot of passion. I think there's every teacher, especially with PAF, our new reading program that we're using. Every teacher has made it their own but also was really trying to be lock and step with a lot of the language in the way that we're facilitating the learning. So I think that no matter what school site our guests are coming to, they're gonna see a lot of consistency, which is important especially for our students that are multilingual or have different, you know, other factors that, no matter where they go, there's gonna be a lot of consistency for those students Right, and we'll see a lot of passion in the lessons and fun.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's a joy they're all looking online and they're seeing these videos we put out just the other day. Larissa, you're somewhat of a star in the community right now. You got a video with a first grade teacher from Bayside, the school that you're serving this year, and you know the instruction that's happening in that first grade classroom. It's different than what we would have seen five years ago. Can you talk a little bit about that difference?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the first grade teacher that I kind of was like, hey, let's do this filming in your classroom. She's a first year teacher, brand new to California. She came here from another state and it's her first year teaching and I kind of told her, hey, we're gonna, just don't worry, there'll be music overlaid, you don't have to talk it's. And then it turned into something different. But she's amazing and I think that actually it's interesting to me because I never really had the conversation with her before we started working together, like what's your background in literacy? What did it look like? Where you did your student teaching and what was the curriculum classes that you took in college when you were getting your credential? And she definitely, like there was evidence of her coming from very much a balanced literacy instruction background in her. You know practicum and things like that.
Speaker 4:And that would have meant significantly less instruction in phonics and then phonemic awareness and things like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean teaching kids to read and using the queuing system, which is just talking to them about meaning, structure, visual. It doesn't make sense. Look at the first sound. And not really talking about decoding and letter sounds and and that's a big debate right now in education.
Speaker 4:I think Ed Soros published an article today about Berkeley Unified School Dish. They've had a hard time making the shift from balance literacy to structured literacy and we mean that change two years ago.
Speaker 2:And I actually came from San Francisco Unified where we were all balance.
Speaker 4:literacy and I was a literacy coach there for 10 years and how did?
Speaker 2:that. So I was, but I was slowly making those shifts while I was still there.
Speaker 4:Actually, one of our teachers that we interviewed in earlier today said the same thing. She actually she was after what she said. Is it OK that I said that and I said, yeah, we like the controversy. So you were already starting to see we need to do some.
Speaker 2:I had all these kids in front of me for so long and I would watch them in the classrooms and we'd be doing the same instruction and we would be looking at data and thinking about what can we do differently. And we weren't doing it differently enough. We were making subtle changes, but we were doing the same things over and over again and getting the same results. And so for me, with some of my other colleagues there, we started to really look at other ways and we did foundations up there some of us and so we were starting to implement some of those things. And then, when I came here, well, we were still using LLI and stuff. As soon as we talked about making the shift and like, oh, if you want to take the Orton-Gillingham training, which is a structured literacy, training program.
Speaker 2:I was like yes.
Speaker 4:And that was like my first week on the job. Yeah, I was like 100%. Did you know that story, Nicole?
Speaker 1:I did not. No, no, it was my first week on the job.
Speaker 4:When I came. When you join the district as a superintendent, you do a lot of research and I was sort of anticipating we would arrive at some place where I would be in a meeting where we would say are we going to stick with this, Are we going to consider a change? And it happened really fast. A group of teachers from Meadow Heights and Park reached out to me and said we need to do this, we need training, and I said, OK, that was actually the first canva I sent out to the whole district.
Speaker 1:It's the most horrifying.
Speaker 4:Any graphic designer would give it an F, a capital F grade. But we said no, let's send this out. 100 teachers signed up. 100 teachers.
Speaker 3:On their own time.
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 3:Over summer.
Speaker 4:So I said we really have something here. We, you know. It was sort of like a reflection of what you were talking about and that feeling of I do this and I kind of get the same result. I do this and I still see the lack of growth. What do you think has been the hardest part of implementing a new curriculum? Because we substituted the stress and the struggle of not making the kind of progress that we had hoped with we're going to do something completely new. So, from your perspective, larissa, what has been the hardest part of the shift that we made?
Speaker 2:I'm really lucky because at my side at Bayside there was already a collaboration. There was a lot of collaboration happening, like with grade level partnerships, and so being part of that has really helped facilitate kind of. And also all the teachers at the time did the OG training. So that was they had buy-in too. And I think one of the most challenging parts was we had a teacher shift from an upper grade down to second grade this year and she's phenomenal at teaching benchmark. She really is, but I think it's been a hard shift for her. But I will say that we were just looking at data because we had our most recent and so I pulled data and was doing that right before I came here and we looked at in first grade and second grade. The two teams met with me and we looked at the data of that.
Speaker 4:We just collected and you saw some right.
Speaker 2:And she was like I just have to talk about the growth that these students have made and she and I share the most struggling years in that grade and second grade, and so she was just, she was just bragging about it, and so I feel like it just took that for her to really cause. She was like this isn't really that, it's not the most dynamic thing to teach. I get that, but at the same time, when you see-.
Speaker 4:It's methodical.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so when you see that, to have her see that, I was like, oh, now she's born, you got the passion in life.
Speaker 3:But the thing I always find interesting about that comment around, it is methodical. But kids, any of our classrooms, they love it. They love it because it is methodical and it's routine and they can actually lift the words off the page, which I think gets them the most excited. Because I think for years and I was a teacher in the district too and years ago, and I think we always were looking at our students and we did the best we could with the way we were taught to teach reading and we had many students that just were not learning how to read and we didn't know what to do and we just did like you said, laura said, did the same thing over and over and it wasn't working. And now we go in classrooms and we see students going oh, I could read that Right from the beginning, like the first week they're in the program or like the first couple of weeks. They learn three sounds, c, act, and they learn how to read, cat, I mean. So that's how it moves and then it goes from there. It's really exciting.
Speaker 2:I have a little anecdote a kid that I was assessing on the test for single word reading and it was a younger kid and they sat down to read the words and they blended the word together and read it and went like this and how this shock looked on their face like did I just do that? And I was like, yeah, you just read that word, keep going, you know. But it was just like one of those things that just touches my heart because that kid maybe didn't think they were a reader and they were gonna leave that space knowing that they were reading.
Speaker 4:Yeah, in our profession it's literally watching the light bulb turn on. Nicole, do you see the same thing at your school?
Speaker 1:Definitely. And going back to your question about what was sort of the hardest thing and I think one of the hardest things for my colleagues was releasing the guilt of no teacher in the podcast sold a story. She talks about it. No teacher wants to not do right by their student. But now that we're learning that maybe we weren't doing right by them, what did we do now? And we all had to sit in that space for a little bit and kind of reflect on what we were feeling and then also knowing that when we know about it we're going to do better. And so that was one of the hardest kind of challenging pieces of pushing through and then moving on to now it's moving to action.
Speaker 4:Yeah, giving permission to move on from it.
Speaker 1:Definitely and yeah, and so we're continuing to see that, the growth, and I think the other part is that we didn't have before sort of the autonomy and then the accountability piece for each student to track on their own, and PAF really allows students to visually see their growth, so they'll be in a book called Pals, which is the second book in the series and then they say, okay, when am I getting to Dragons, which is the last book, and what they're really saying?
Speaker 1:they're not really just trying to collect them all like Pokemon, but they're really saying like, when can I read that book? I want access to it because now I believe that I can get there, and so I think that has been a really cool shift to see whereas that challenge before was we didn't have something that students were able to navigate themselves and own. That pride.
Speaker 4:And you know we have this group of educators coming to visit us. Actually, many of our own teachers, teachers from our district that want to see literacy and action in other schools, a lot of our principals. Were you surprised by how many principals signed up?
Speaker 3:Of course not.
Speaker 4:I was surprised. I thought like I thought, oh, maybe we'll get one or two. We have like 13 principals that want to go and see first grade instruction at other schools and you know I speak to principals. They're proud of everything that's happening at their schools but it's sort of it tells you how inquisitive they are about what might be happening at another school and just seeing it across town or seeing it at you know these principals are friends with each other. I'm gonna go to my friend's school and see what's happening there and we have people from all over the peninsula coming to visit Nicole. What's your the thing that you hope they walk away from after they spend the day with us?
Speaker 1:I hope they walk away from our school feeling that they're in community with us that no matter kind of what district they're coming from. We all have the same goal of wanting to make sure that every student that comes through our education system has accessibility and is successful.
Speaker 4:Building that connection.
Speaker 1:Exactly so, building that connection and knowing that and I'm really hopeful that we'll continue to have relationships with all of these districts, that we can continue to learn together. I think collaboration is where growth happens.
Speaker 4:Yeah, Larissa, how about you?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I think, Pick something else. Nicole picked a good one, but there's more out there.
Speaker 2:When I think about it. I think about it's called a teaching practice for a reason right.
Speaker 1:There's never a.
Speaker 2:I'm done, I'm done.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, like there's always more there's other shifts to make.
Speaker 4:Many people would say that mine was almost like a teaching perfection, but that was. I left that up to other people as far as the overall analysis went, but I just you know. I still felt like you said, it was a practice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think, Pam, it was last week when we were meeting that like it was this idea that we're not in this implementation phase where we're like, oh, we got this, it's like we got it on lockdown. We're kind of in the middle of figuring it out. There's still kinks that we're ironing out, there's still learning we're doing and I think we'll probably always be doing.
Speaker 4:And don't you think the visit from all these colleagues of ours is going to actually help us in that process?
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I think it addresses the vulnerability right. The piece of letting people into our space takes vulnerability and bravery, and so we appreciate all those teachers that are opening their classrooms in a few weeks, but I think that that vulnerability allows us to continue to grow too, because we're releasing that judgment like feeling like, oh, my colleagues coming in to watch me, but instead they're like they're coming in to collaborate with me, and I think that that vulnerability is going to, it's working in our favor. Brené Brown would agree.
Speaker 4:Yeah, totally Pam. What's something you hope people leave?
Speaker 3:Our tagline is learning from each other. So I was thinking about the people leave with a sense of I can try this too, or I had an opportunity to share what we're doing. I think that we're in the beginning of our journey. I love telling our story. I can't wait to tell our story every year for the next however many years, because I know we'll continue to grow and I want people to walk away with a sense of that. It's not just something you kind of quickly put in place and then walk away. It's something that you have to support and commit to and you know grow. And you only do it with teacher leaders whether you're a teacher leader from the classroom or a teacher leader of the TOSA and with the right system in place.
Speaker 4:A couple of days ago we invited partners from both of our cities and from the county to come and visit three schools Borrell, leed and Audubon and we had the Chief of Police of Foster City, two Foster City council members, multiple San Mateo either, directors of departments, the mayor, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker they were all here CEOs of nonprofits, some of our students we have a group called Empowering Student Voices some of our teenagers. They went and visited schools and we went into a second year teachers classroom at Audubon and this teacher we had visited the year before, ironically teaching math at the same time. Right, we saw this teacher in her first year teaching math and we went back and saw her in her second year teaching math, which made me actually think the principal's kind of mean to take the superintendent to a first year teacher's class. That's messed up. But we saw this teacher and I'm actually upset with myself that I didn't video record what I saw. So this teacher is standing in the front of the room and she has multiple fraction-based math equations on the board and she's asking the kids who can explain to me what you think about these two math equations and how you might solve for them and this group of 28 or so fifth grade students. They start answering and each student that gives a response, she writes their name on the board and she explains. She visually explains what they said. She had seven different responses from kids for one math problem and how comfortable she was, how in command she was.
Speaker 4:And Miranda, our math tosa, was there and you know she and I had an offline conversation. She said she's just blossomed and I think that's happening in our primary classes too with a lot of our teachers and it leads us to being able to host a math teachers conference in May that we're planning. We're basing it after the literacy summit and what I really hope happens. What I hope people take away from here is they go back to their district and say we should invite everybody to come and see how we do counseling. We should invite everybody to come and see how we do science, how we do enrollment, because we have to learn from each other. That's the spirit of this. The positions that the two of you put your heart and soul into every day with our teachers and our kids is about learning from each other. The theme for the district is teaching and learning for the year, and I'm excited for February to get here, so much more ahead, and thank you both for being on the one SMFC podcast. You.