Spanish-language Professional Development – Adelante Mujeres

by Ashley Walker | Oct 3, 2022

At Adelante Mujeres, many of our teaching staff wanted to continue their education. Most of our teachers’ primary language is Spanish, but college courses were only offered in English. In addition, our teachers needed environments in which they felt welcomed and comfortable learning about Early Childhood Education (ECE).

Often, people who are not fluent in the English language are held back from obtaining a higher education due to the language barrier. They have the knowledge and experience but are first required to learn English. This can deter professionals. In addition to navigating the language barrier, our teachers needed to feel welcomed and supported as they were applying to college as first-generation students. We knew that we needed to find new ways to encourage our teachers and empower them.

Change Idea:

We partnered with Clackamas Community College to ensure that our teachers could have access to ECE courses in Spanish. We also had a specialist help them create their professional learning plan to navigate Oregon’s Early Childhood system.

Our Director of Education Programs advocated for teachers and worked closely with Clackamas Community College to help develop a Spanish language Early Childhood Education associate degree pathway. We also created new workshops that are culturally relevant and true to ancestral knowledge. By honoring our culture and values we reclaim and redefine education.

Teachers have been taking college courses and are on their way to completing an associate’s degree, bachelor’s degree, and/or Child Development Associate credential. In addition, our nonprofit and our partners provide financial aid for courses and professional development in Spanish. Our in-house workshops are tailored to the cultural and holistic needs of our teachers.

We hope this change will mean that language will no longer be a barrier for teachers wanting to further their education. We want them to feel empowered to lead and support children and families. But we understand that navigating the college system was only one part of the challenge.

Currently, Clackamas Community College continues to offer ECE courses in Spanish which is a great opportunity for ECE teachers. We continue to evolve and learn new ways to support our teachers in holistic ways. We understand that systems have been created to dismantle or discourage personal growth for non-white people. It is not enough to provide education in Spanish but to ask ourselves if our teachers feel that they belong and are valued at our center. This change is perpetual and requires constant reflection and refining.

Status of the Change Idea: Adapted, Adopted, or Abandoned?

Adopted

Additional Resources

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire

“One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.”
― Paulo Freire

Helping Latine Families Navigate Early Intervention – Adelante Mujeres

by Ashley Walker | Sep 30, 2022

Adelante Mujeres is a place where parents and children have a sense of belonging in our community. Young children with special needs have the opportunity to connect with several different environments. Not only is it a place where they have the opportunity to develop their skills, but a community where they are able to feel safe and create strong bonds.

Many of our families feel disconnected from the K-12 education system, with many barriers when it comes to integrating their children. Their task is overwhelming because they must find the support to help their children succeed in a system that is not designed for Latine and low-income families, and at the same time often overlooks children with special needs.

Parents should not experience the anguish of looking after the well-being of their children alone. We as an organization have learned to navigate these systems alongside families.

Change Idea:

We provide culturally responsive support to Latine families navigating the Early Intervention system through parent education, emotional support, and resources. We attend evaluations for early intervention, collaboratively adapt services to meet families’ needs, and train everyone who works directly and indirectly with our children to provide a network of support that our families can rely on.

We teach parents to advocate for the well-being of their children in hopes that they get involved in the school, know their child’s teachers well, speak up when something doesn’t feel right, and continue to seek out help and answers. Parents of past students often come back for extra support when they can’t find their way.

Unfortunately, there is still a long way to go before we are able to completely bridge the educational gap many of these families face. However, we continually work hard to ease this transition. A child going into kindergarten is considered new to the educational system, and much like a tree, they begin to form roots and connections with their surroundings. We want to prepare our kids with the tools they need to form those connections and plant their roots before joining the K-12 educational system.

We also work hard to involve kindergarten teachers in this transition, as they play a key part in its success. We make sure they take the time to observe and take notes on how each child connects and learns with the world around them.

We work with many organizations to build a strong community where our families can find the help they need. Some of these groups include NWRESD, Life Works, Hillsboro School District, and Forest Grove School District. We work to find points of union, where we can all help to overcome barriers.

Status of the Change Idea: Adapted, Adopted, or Abandoned?

Adopted, and continually adapted as needed.

Further Resources:

Early Childhood Inclusion: a Joint Position Statement from the Division for Early Childhood and the NAEYC

Culturally Responsive Transition Celebrations – Adelante Mujeres

by Ashley Walker | Sep 30, 2022

Graduations or transition celebrations are typically planned by school staff, and they do not always reflect the culture and values of the families we serve. Adelante Mujeres was inspired by our community and our beautiful Latina culture, and we wanted to find ways to celebrate the accomplishments of children and families in a culturally responsive way.

Change Idea:

We would involve families in the planning of transition celebrations.

Families collaborated with the Family Engagement team and the teachers to plan a graduation event. The families chose foods like birria, rice, beans, cakes, aguas, homemade salsas, churros, etc. There was enough food for families to eat twice and take leftovers home!

One class decided that during the ceremony the families would walk alongside their children, as it was a joint accomplishment. Another class decided to have games and activities that the parents created. A different class had an Aztec dancer who performed a special dance to honor the children.

Our celebrations should resonate with families, and we hoped this change idea would help them feel seen, heard, and excited to share in these celebrations.

Families collaborated well together and even built relationships outside of school. They had a budget, created a plan, executed it, and celebrated in the process. We learned that our budget needs to be abundant for these events. Why wouldn’t we invest in these accomplishments? All year we have been talking about the importance of milestones. Now we had the opportunity to celebrate all the growth that happened during the school year!

The pandemic taught us that life is precious and must be lived to the fullest. We must invest in celebrations as much as we invest in the other parts of education. Big or small, the milestones of our children and families should be celebrated in a way that is meaningful. When we come from a place of abundance and community, we can find the resources to endorse our celebrations.

Status of the Change Idea: Adapted, Adopted, or Abandoned?

Adopted

Developing & Testing Change Ideas

by Ashley Walker | Sep 21, 2022

Once a need is established, the team should design and determine a small change to test that can start to address this need. Be sure that anyone expected to participate in a test of the change idea is part of the design. The change should be small enough that an educator can implement it within a few days, easily measure the impact of the change, and know within 3-6 weeks if the change should be adopted, adapted, or abandoned.

Because testing a change this small tends to be counter-cultural in education, there are a few useful mindsets to consider. The first mindset is to keep the change small. In the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, the author identifies the importance of tiny changes to create lasting impact. We use the metaphor of grain size. Often educators want to overhaul the entire grain silo. We encourage them to think about a tiny bushel, or even each grain, as a tiny change.

To help you plan and test your change idea we propose using a simple planning sheet that will help your team get specific about your idea. This planning sheet is broken down into 3 sections as seen in the example below.

Section A: The Idea

Get clear on what specifically you want to try by taking your prioritized ideas from conceptual to specific. When you can clearly predict the impact of your idea on the needs you are addressing, your planning will become more intentional and your data collection methods will more easily fall into place. Remember, we are hoping that our ideas and actions are not just different but result in an improvement.

Example:

Change Idea Concept: Give children an opportunity to express themselves

Specifically, our idea is to: Provide sidewalk chalk to a group of children to put a piece of art on the common walkway at the entrance of the school

The goal of the change idea: If we allow children to share who they are through art, we predict there will be an increased sense of belonging throughout our school community.

Section B: The Plan

Remember to start small and then grow the idea as you learn. Build out a plan with as much detail as possible. This will help you stay organized and will also help you make adaptations to your idea after you have tried it and collected data to analyze.

Example:

Who: Children in first grade to start

What: Each class will get a bucket of sidewalk chalk and guidance to “Stay positive and express yourself!”

Where and When: September 13, 20, 27. We will divide each 1st-grade classroom into three groups, using parent volunteers and support staff to supervise the activity. Each group will spend 15 minutes after lunch on their assigned date decorating a portion of the walkway into the school.

How:

Alicia will buy 12 buckets of sidewalk chalk from Dollar Tree
Devon, Alicia, and Mario will pitch the idea to the Principal
Alexander and Ale will check in with each 1st-grade teacher this week to explain the idea and coordinate times
Only those with teachers who agree will participate

Section C: Data and Measurement

How will you know if your prediction came true? There are many different ways to collect data as you test your idea. You can send an electronic survey, post a piece of chart paper in the front of your classroom and have children mark their responses, or interview those who participated. The key is to keep it simple and collect only the data you need.

Example:

Who will we collect data from? Children in first grade who participated
When will we collect the data? In the first week of October
What data collection method will we use? We will survey the children orally; an adult will use a Google Form to capture responses.
What are the questions we are going to ask?
The survey will include these statements:

I was able to express myself during the sidewalk chalk activity (not at all, a little, somewhat, very much)
I learned something new about someone by looking at the sidewalk chalk expressions (not at all, a little, somewhat, very much)
I would like to see this activity continue and spread (yes, no). Why?
I think this activity built a sense of community or belonging (not at all, a little, somewhat, very much)

Keep in mind that we are testing if a change is an improvement. In order to know this, we must keep consistent data on both process and outcomes. For example, if an educator is testing a new pair-share strategy, the process measure might be: Did the educator implement the pair-share strategy (daily, weekly, or on any agreed-upon schedule)? The outcome measure might be: Did students talk more? Did they stay on topic? This might be measured by focusing on 1-2 pairs in the classroom including students who have struggled the most with oral vocabulary.

The obvious benefit of testing a small change is that it mitigates cost – both in educator energy and in school and district resources. Full-scale adoption of a change, without knowing if it works, for whom, and under what conditions, is expensive. By testing first, we learn a tremendous amount about the conditions for success.

Continuous Cycles

The term “continuous improvement” implies that testing ideas and learning from them never stops. Once a change idea cycle is complete, a new cycle starts. Following the adopt, adapt, abandon guidance, new cycles may build upon what has already been tested, or may start in an entirely new content area or grade level. The beauty of this process is its flexible nature.

Next: Using the Chang Library

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Build a Team

by Ashley Walker | Sep 13, 2022

To design or strengthen a high-quality early learning system, we need a team that is diverse in perspectives and skill sets and has high levels of trust in each other. Developing this type of team happens over time, with intentional routines, in the process of doing the work. A first step is to recruit members of your early learning team, considering the following roles:

- - Community members
  - Culturally specific organizations
  - Family members
  - School board members
  - Early learning educators within and beyond the district (licensed and classified)
  - Early Intervention/Early Childhood Special Education providers
  - K-2 educators (licensed and classified)
  - English language development, Title I, and special education staff
  - Elementary principal
  - District staff (early learning, teaching and learning, elementary and/or special services)
  - Instructional coaches and/or teachers on special assignment

Once the team is gathered, we recommend addressing team members’ hopes and fears and using those to develop team norms. If members of the team already know each other or have worked together before, it might be tempting to skip this step. We encourage your team to review hopes and fears and create norms no matter your level of familiarity. As a new team with a new purpose, this is your best opportunity to lay the foundation for a productive group with healthy communication.

Activity: Hopes & Fears + Norm Setting

Time: 30 minutes

Materials:

In Person: whiteboard or chart paper, markers
Digital: Mural, Google Jamboard, or Microsoft Teams whiteboard

People: Experienced facilitator and Early Learning team members

Purpose: Name aspirations for this work and name concerns about achieving those aspirations. Come to consensus about how you and your teammates will work together to maximize your hopes and minimize your fears.

Process:

4 min: Ask participants to write down their greatest fear for this team experience: “If this is the worst experience you’ve had, what will have happened (or not happened)?” Then they write their greatest hope: “If this is the best team experience you’ve ever participated in, what will be its outcome(s)”?

10 min: Participants call out fears and hopes as the facilitator lists them on separate pieces of chart paper. List all fears and hopes exactly as expressed, without editing, comment, or judgment. Encourage folks to be concise when they share their hope or fear—keep it to 1 line for the chart paper and 2 sentences for explanation because we want to have time to hear from everyone. No need for you to respond to each one, except to say, “thank you,” and solicit ideas from other people.

1 min: Transition to norms by explaining: “In order to maximize our hopes and minimize our fears, what norms will we need?” Explain that norms are guidelines for interaction/meeting, and can include both process (like start and end on time) and content (like taking risks with our questions and ideas).

2 min: What are norms? Why do we need them? What purpose do they support?

- Norms are how the purpose gets “lived” in the team
- Specific behaviors that the team agrees to and commits to uphold in order to achieve real team and real work
- Build trust, clarify group expectations of one another, and establish points of “reflection” to see how the group is doing regarding process
- Supports team to achieve hopes and minimize fears

Review example of team norms (have these written on board)

1. Take an inquiry stance: speak up, raise questions
2. Ground statements in evidence
3. Assume positive intentions: argue the idea, not the person
4. Stick to protocol and agenda
5. Start and end on time
6. Be engaged: use devices to support the work, not to distract from it

10 min: Brainstorm this team’s norms: “How” will we work together to achieve our purpose and goals?

Think time:

- What do I personally need to work well on a team?
- Which norms of the example teams to I want to adapt?
Share out and chart:

- Personal needs and those to adapt from examples

Step back and consider:

- What’s missing? Are these all behaviors we can monitor?
- Do we need any additional norms, specific to our team to achieve our mission and purpose?

3 min: How will we hold ourselves accountable?

- What routines do we need in place to ensure we all understand the norms?
- How will the team make the norms live?
- What happens when the norms are broken?

Notes & Tips:

If you are feeling pressed for time, you can choose to not write hopes and fears out on chart paper.

Hopes & Fears activity adapted by Northwest Regional ESD’s 9th Grade Success Network from DataWise at HGSE.

Understanding how our Identities Shape our Perspective on a Team

We think about social identities as the groups to which we belong. These groups may be shaped by race, ethnicity, nationality, language, gender, sexual orientation, age, geography, ability, religion, class, or another affiliation. They’re also shaped by our communities, families, careers, interests, and talents. Social identities are both overlapping and fluid – we belong to many groups and our identities related to these groups are always changing.

Understanding our social identities helps us to figure out our positionality*. It helps us to know who we are in relation to each other. Most importantly, it helps us to know which perspectives we’re bringing to our team and helps us to uncover which perspectives we may be missing.

When we build an inclusive team it is important to name the power that we have on the team due to our positionality. The team will be more likely to share decision-making and prevent tokenizing the voices of community members, families, and/or students who historically do not have as much power in the system. When we own our own power, which is often unearned, we can work to relinquish it to create more equitable teams.

The graphic below provided by Equity Meets Design shows 11 ways that power might show up on teams. The assumption is that in our culture, the characteristic on the top is given more power in most spaces. Spend time noticing and owning what other positionalities might be on your team that bring a power differential, such as role in the organization, years of experience, or team facilitator.

Activity: Explore Social Identities

Time: 30-45 minutes

Materials:

In Person: single sheets of 8.5×11 or larger paper per person
Digital: Mural, Google Jamboard, or Microsoft Teams whiteboard

People: members of the Early Learning team

Purpose: This activity is used for individual and group exploration of social identities, privileges, and belief systems. It is intended to help members of the early learning team better understand how their identities and perspectives shape the systems they design for young learners, and to reflect on if the team adequately represents the social identities of the children and families for whom they are designing.

Process:

10 min: Each team member draws a molecule diagram with 6-7 circles around a central circle. The person writes their name in the center circle. In each additional circle, the person writes words that describe parts of their identity – words that describe who the person is and how they interact in the world. For example, one circle might contain the word “Indigenous” and another might be “midwestern.” As an additional step, participants can add a layer of circles with words others use to identify them.

10 min: Partners or triads share their circles with each other, giving each participant equal time to share, uninterrupted.

10 min: Whole-group debrief. The facilitator asks:

With which descriptors do you identify most strongly? Why?
With which do others identify you most strongly? How does that feel?
Have any of the elements of your identity worked to your advantage? Disadvantage?
How do my identities hold power and privilege?

Notes & Tips:

Social identities can be sensitive or painful topics for people from non-dominant backgrounds. We strongly recommend using your team’s norms for this activity.

The facilitator may start the activity by sharing their molecule and talking through their various social identities.

Credit to: National School Reform Faculty

Organizing Your Team on the Problem of Practice

A theory of improvement is essentially a hypothesis about the conditions and changes needed to achieve an aim. Children’s Institute has worked with a diverse set of districts to build and start testing a theory of improvement to help school districts get started on their early learning alignment goals. The figure above is a visual representation of this theory.

A theory of improvement is not intended to be an exhaustive list of everything you might do to meet your goals, nor is it a comprehensive to-do list. Its purpose is to help you:

- Prioritize among the many possible strategies for accomplishing your goals
- Organize the different parts of a system to ensure that system change is effective and sustainable
- Organize the efforts of different parts of your team working on this goal
- Select the best ways to measure toward your goals
- Capture what is occurring by revisiting and revising your theory

To use this theory of change with your team, start by identifying your strengths in the secondary drivers, or the specific aspects that your systems need to design or improve in order to meet your aim. Have all team members reflect on evidence of strengths. From there, have your team members discuss opportunities for improvement. It is important to remember that “Every system is perfectly designed to get the outcome it gets” and keep the discussion focused on the system and not on individuals or groups of individuals. Listing growth opportunities can be overwhelming, so be sure to elevate a starting position once you’re done.

Some suggestions for prioritizing a starting place are to identify:

- Where does this team have access?
- Where is there improvement work already happening?
- Where are there currently resources?
- Where is the will of the team?

Be Problem-Specific

Once you have prioritized a starting place it is helpful to name the problem your team seeks to solve related to your prioritized starting place. A problem means an issue or outcome that is negative – something that you want to improve. A good problem statement is critical to guide and focus the work as well as to create a shared understanding of what we hope to improve. There is not a single path to developing a problem statement. Some teams may identify a problem quickly and early and move on to a root cause analysis. Other teams may need to spend more time investigating local data and research before identifying a specific problem.

Being problem-specific helps teams avoid three key improvement missteps:

1. “Solutionitis”: Solutionitis occurs when solutions are named with little input from the children, families, and communities experiencing the problem. This practice often leads to solutions that are misaligned with community needs, resulting in damaged community trust and resources wasted on a solution that does not match needs.
2. Blame: Blaming people or community behavior and not the environments that enabled those behaviors to happen
3. Believing the barriers: There are so many perceived structures and rules that stand in the way of improvement. When we believe that all obstacles are immobile, improvement is limited from the beginning.

When your team is drafting various problems, ask the following questions:

- Is the problem blame-free?
- Is the problem solution-free?
- Who is experiencing this problem?
- Is the problem a reasonable size and level of complexity for our team to tackle?

Some examples of problem statements in our work are:

- Students do not have opportunities to apply mathematical learning in an authentic and meaningful way.
- Young students’ mental and behavioral needs are not being addressed in school.
- Our system is not designed to fully include our children with disabilities in all early learning classrooms.
- Our system is not designed to provide culturally sustaining, anti-bias early learning instruction.

Adjusting Your Team

Teams must examine their own role in the current system and how they might be part of the power structures that perpetuate the status quo. We must ensure that we have included diverse perspectives from the community who have had different experiences in the system on our team. We know which perspectives are included on our team, and when we think about the problem of practice we will be working on, it is important to acknowledge which perspectives we’re missing.

Examples:

Problem: Families don’t feel welcome at school.
Perspectives: Family perspectives are needed, mostly from families who are not feeling welcome.

———

Problem: The preschool teacher does not feel part of a teaching team.
Perspectives: Preschool and early elementary teacher perspectives are needed; they should be part of the problem-solving.

To adjust or expand the team, we encourage you to invite and center those marginalized by the system, instead of planning for the “average” child or “average” educator. Those who are being disenfranchised or ignored have important perspectives and insights for designing solutions. If we center those marginalized by the system, everyone benefits.

As we learn more about our system and notice that perspectives are missing, we may need to add new members to the problem-solving team. When this is challenging due to time or resource constraints, we need to find creative ways for people to participate, using technology, translation, transportation, food, and child care to support inclusion. We need to remove barriers to participation.

Not every social identity may be represented on this problem-solving team. What is important is that the team acknowledges the existing positionality, and finds ways to bring in perspectives that are missing.

Additional Resources

Stages of Team Development © Elena Aguilar, The Art of Coaching Teams: Building Resilient Communities that Transform Schools. Jossey-Bass, 2016.

Tips for Inclusion

- Expect discomfort. New members will have different ways of thinking about a problem, describing it, different solutions, and even different ways of just participating in a group.
- Be adaptable. Multiple perspectives may take you off your agenda to attend to issues that others feel may need to be addressed first.
- Plan for uncommon meeting times based on family schedules.
- Speak First, Speak Last: Give the first and last opportunity to speak to the people who are typically least represented.
- Think through how time, technology, transportation, food, and child care can support an inclusive team.

Next: See the System

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