"What we are learning Wednesday," Part II: Putting People First

During remote learning, we have prioritized people as our primary consideration, centering relationship building and creating ongoing connections between staff, students, and families. From the daily morning messages our teachers are sending out (see these great examples from G1, G3 , G10) to weekly phone calls to students and families to daily virtual hangouts, we have found numerous creative ways to build and maintain community. Thank you for centering our students and families during this time and making sure to maintain your connections with each other—I’m looking at all the staff who have played a rousing game of heads-up on an advisory call or pictionary in a team meeting.

While none of these structures are able to truly replicate the in-person experiences that are at the heart of our school, we have seen huge success in the amount of outreach to our students and families. It is a testament to the tenacity of our teachers, leaders, counselors, operations staff, deans, aides, paras, and tutors that we have consistently reached our students and their families in the last seven weeks. Daily morning messages, phone calls and texts home, virtual hangouts, and community building events serve as a way to prioritize our people and make sure no one feels isolated. Families shared in the survey we sent last week that their students are accessing these consistently, and they appreciate your communication. As the adage goes, no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care. Check out all these teachers showing their care with online videos:

We also have worked hard during this remote learning period to put people first by carefully considering the right volume of and methods for work. Both our students and our staff are working in a wide variety of conditions and contexts, many with younger children at home who need time and attention. We have attempted to adjust our work days, responsibilities, and tasks to provide more flexibility in terms of time and volume. While this is a work in progress, we have tried to scale our remote learning to provide more space and opportunities to fit a variety of home situations. Our staff also have provided great support to students in managing their schedules, calendars, tasks, and emails remotely (see this G7 example), many for the first time. Similarly we have modeled learning to work from home by sharing our new work spaces (see Pedro’s) and our own struggles, which have created more empathetic connections by acknowledging the adjustments we are all making. These efforts both consider our people and create paths to the amazing assignments that our teachers are developing.

When we return to school, it will be important to capitalize on the success of our video communications (like this amazing K1 example) and our robust student and family phone call program (SHOUT OUT G4 for your engagement levels). Even during regular school operations these points of personal connection and school-to-home unity could have tremendous benefits. Similarly, exploring the use of videos (like this G8 example) and online events (like this G12 example) as a way to communicate with students and families could potentially be useful during regular operations. We also can learn a lot about adjusting the pace and volume of work to ebb and flow with our changing context as health conditions evolve. 

Thank you for keeping our people front of mind as we engage in remote learning. Using these tools and lessons moving forward can make attendance at events more accessible, preview or review of content more possible, and provide better supports for homework and school work. And they will keep our community vibrant and connected. I can’t wait to be back in person and apply these amazing efforts to our work moving forward.

Emily Stainer, Chief Academic Officer

"What we are learning Wednesday," Part I

On March 12th Match made the decision to close our schools to prevent the spread of COVID19 in Boston. The following Wednesday, after three days of preparation we started our first phase of remote learning, including work like this morning message from Ms. Olukoga. 

Six weeks in, our staff, with the typical Match spirit of innovation, have found a rhythm, have removed a myriad of barriers as a team for both students and adults, and have learned a ton. Thank you for all you have done to be creative, flexible, and student-centered during this time. Because of your hard work each day our students are connected to our school and each other by your amazing outreach and support - check out these videographers at work:

While it is still uncertain what the summer and fall hold, we know that our community and world will be different. I am personally having trouble imagining the future, but I am hopeful that some of the changes to our community are for the better. We are now settling in for a longer remote learning period than first expected. With that in mind, we wanted to capture and share some of the lessons we are learning that I hope can inform the future of our school.

There are certainly still challenges we are solving, but our staff have done so much work of which to be proud. I am excited to celebrate it. Some stand out lessons learned so far are 1) put people first, 2) center student and family feedback, 3) embrace asynchronous learning, 4) slow the pacing of units, lessons, and tasks, and 5) get creative with format and offer choice. In the coming weeks we will share details on these lessons from across our three campuses with some examples to celebrate our work.

Until then, thank you for all that you’re doing to serve our students and families during these uncertain time!

Emily Stainer, Chief Academic Officer

Building Culturally Competent Curriculum

Like most public schools in Boston, the student population at Match is composed primarily of students of color: 93 percent identify as African American or Latino, and 56 percent learned a first language other than English.

Though our efforts to recruit and retain staff and leaders who reflect the diversity of our student body is still a work in progress (and one we think about every day), we have updated our curriculum -- and particularly our English Language Arts curriculum -- to invite greater diversity in our classrooms. 

Now, more than ever, our units intentionally showcase protagonists and historical figures from an array of non-white, non-mainstream backgrounds (meaning: two-parent, middle-income heterosexual households). 

We know from research -- and from our own experience with students -- that when a kid sees him or herself in a novel, on screen, or in a newspaper story, it can influence the complicated process of identity formation and self actualization. If we want our kids to be scientists and legislators, doctors and explorers, it’s on us to show them examples of people from all walks of life who have achieved their dreams. It’s also on us to ensure that our teachers and staff are fluent in array of cultures and comfortable leading these conversations. 

With this curriculum, we are saying to our students: “We see you. You matter. You are important.” 

There isn’t a month at Match where a student isn’t reading widely, but February -- the month we all celebrate Black History -- lends itself especially well to a short piece like this. A few specific examples: just this past month, our kindergartners completed a unit on segregation, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks; our sixth graders read "A Raisin in the Sun" by Lorraine Hansberry and explored the Harlem Renaissance through poetry; and our ninth graders read Chimamanda Adichie's "Purple Hibiscus,” the story of two Nigerian teenagers who question the societal ideals of their upbringing alongside an evolving culture.

Our mission, as an institution, is to prepare our students for college and beyond. But we also want to give our kids the space and tools to engage in discussions about race and class, and to learn how to advocate for themselves. Whether it’s simply starting to think about the ways in which people are similar and different, including skin color, and how those differences should not define who we are or how we are treated (as we teach our youngest students), to a more more complex interrogation of identity and the rule of law, our curriculum aims to empower students to stand up for themselves and for what’s right.

Match kindergartners recently read “Martin’s Big Words” by Doreen Rappaport. Our teacher, Ms. Kat Brea, read the book to students, then lead them through a series of questions designed to get kids to pull out the most important lessons from Martin Luther King, Jr. (They did a similar exercise after reading about Rosa Parks.) 

What’d our five and six year olds come up with?

Lesson 1: Show courage even when it hard. 

Lesson 2: Solve problems with words, not fists. 

Lesson 3: Always show love. 

We think that’s pretty good analysis. 

Visit Match Fishtank to access our ELA curriculum, where we’ve made all of our unit, lesson plans and assessments available.

Reimagining the Classroom at Match Next

Garrett Schilling works with one of his students.

Garrett Schilling is a tutor at Match Next this year. He has hipster beard and a brown leather notebook with refillable paper he carries from class to class. Garrett grew up all over the United States, but calls Oklahoma home. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Science from Southwestern Oklahoma State University and after several stints as an outdoor educator, decided he wanted to become a teacher. He applied to the Match Teacher Residency – the first year of Match’s Sposato Graduate School of Education – and asked to be placed at Match Next, because he knew it would require even more one-on-one interaction with students than Match Corps tutors do. 

Match Next is Match Education’s latest K12 innovation: it’s our effort to reimagine how to organize the human resources in a school. Instead of the traditional classroom, with one teacher in a room of 25 students, we’re building a new model. In one grade, three master teachers oversee 30 tutors (all AmeriCorps members), who work with 100 students. In a typical class period, students are organized into groups of three or four, overseen by one tutor. 

To see Match Next in action is to see a totally different kind of classroom, one with a lot more adults than a normal classroom has. Students and tutors sit at desks configured into pods. Every kid has a Chromebook and all of the class materials – lessons, assessments, classwork, homework, etc. – are housed in the cloud, on Google Classroom. Master teachers check in on students individually and spend a few minutes with each pod of kids to see spot-check their progress and check for understanding.  

This year, Garrett has worked one-on-one with 10 fifth graders in English and social studies. He spends hours with his kids each day working through the day’s lessons and independent work. He talks and texts regularly with their parents. As a result of spending so much time in close proximity, Garrett and his kids know all sorts of things about each other: favorite bands, interests, food, weekend plans, siblings, struggles at home.

Garrett spends a lot of time on his right knee during the day, kneeling down next to his students as they get to work. “About 60 percent of my job is poking and prodding and course correction,” he says. The group of four boys he’s working with today have diverse needs – one student is a plodder; another works fast (Garrett describes him as a “grumpy old man in a 10-year old body”); the third boy is capable, but has a hard time staying on task; and the fourth boy, who is new to Match this year, is catching up academically and adjusting to the high expectations of his new school. 

He has a few constant refrains (he must say these things hundreds of times a week): “What are you having a hard time with?” “What is this trying to teach us?” “You can do it, try again.” “I’m not telling you – look it up.” “Ok, that’s pretty good!”  

The big lesson students are working on today is identifying and interpreting poetic devices in songs. Each student was supposed to bring in a song from home to analyze – those who forgot to pick a song are given a copy of “Happy” by Pharrell. As class gets underway, Garrett reminds his students to pull out their poetry glossaries to use as a reference tool. He pushes them to think through the use of things like repetition, metaphor and simile to influence the mood, tone, theme and point of view of the song. 

Garrett has learned a lot about teaching and about how to connect with kids this year. But one of his biggest lessons has to do with how he presents himself. At the beginning of the year, Garrett’s eyebrows were permanently furrowed, his mouth fixed in a perpetual grimace. It was a look of concentration, and he was concentrating a lot! Sposato faculty identified this tendency and gave him feedback. “I think I was scaring the kids,” he says.  Now he smiles more and tries to ensure his “resting face” is a friendly one. It seems to be making a difference in his daily interactions with his students. 

The hardest part of the work for Garrett has been learning to not give kids the answers. His teacher persona is athletic coach – firm, but fair, and caring. “I’ve learned that it’s a long game to get kids to do the work themselves,” Garrett explains. “At the beginning of the year I was doing too much scaffolding - too much work for my students - but now they’re developing enough stamina to do their own work.”  

Next year, as a second year graduate student at Sposato, Garrett will be teaching middle school science at UP-Boston in South Boston. Meanwhile, the work at Match Next will continue. Over the next couple of years, we’ll integrate some of the best practices we’ve learned about technology in the classroom and individualized learning at Next across all our grade levels.

Becoming a Teacher

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Miranda-Gomez directs students in her class.

At barely five feet, Brenda Miranda-Gomez is smaller than most people. But she moves faster, and with much more purpose. Trailing her around Match High School is to see a young woman who has found her calling: teacher. 

She’s already developed eyes in the back of her head. During the four minute transition time between classes she doles out a series of instructions, reprimands and encouragement to students as she weaves her ways through the crowded hallways: “Tuck in your shirt, Israel.” “I’ll see you in tutorial later, right?” “Where are you supposed to be right now?” “Hey, I consider freakin’ a bad word.” “High-five, let’s go.” 

Brenda has two little brothers. She credits this with her natural tendency to be in charge. Brenda grew up with her two brothers, and her mom, in an urban and largely Latino neighborhood in Riverside, CA. Brenda knew from an early age that she wanted to move away from her home city, in her words, “to get out and be successful.” She excelled in high school and attended UC-Berkeley, where she majored in math.  

As graduation approached, she started researching education-focused organizations and got curious about charter schools. “I wished I’d had the ‘no excuses’ charter model for myself growing up,” she says. She had friends who’d done Teach For America, but nobody she knew stuck with teaching after they’d completed their two-year TFA commitment. She knew she wanted to try something different. And she knew she wanted to live on the East coast. So, she applied and was accepted to the Match Teacher Residency (MTR), the first year of the Sposato Graduate School of Education. 

Miranda-Gomez meets with her Sposato coach, Jawad Brown.

MTRs spend the first year of Sposato’s two-year Master’s program working full-time as a tutor at a Match campus or teaching assistant at one of our partner schools, and completing coursework and practice (including Group of Six) on the weekends. During the spring semester of the school year, MTRs also teach at least two full class periods a week. During the second year of the program, Sposato graduate students work as full-time teachers, continuing their coursework online and receiving regular feedback and coaching from Sposato faculty.  (Brenda has accepted a job teaching 9th grade math and Excel Academy High School next year.) 

The culture of continuous feedback is one of Brenda’s favorite things about Sposato, along with her students, the good friends she’s made and the opportunity to live in a new city. (Her first time in Boston was when she moved here.) “I love how immediate and specific the feedback is,” she says. “I can implement it quickly and keep getting better.” 

The day we visit, Brenda has several tutoring sessions and is student teaching a 9th grade algebra class. Brenda can do high school math in her sleep, but during tutorial, she slows down the pace of her kids.  She bounces her right knee under the table as she works and clicks her four-color ballpoint pen from red to blue ink. “We’re going to go through it step by step so it sinks in a little more,” she says.  Together, they work through math problems that require students to factor out the leading coefficient, write equations as binomials, identify the vertex and write quadratic equations for given points on a graph. 

In class, Brenda immediately gets her kids to work on a “do now.” She gives a kid with the sniffles a tissue (early-spring colds are hanging on), and walks to the back of the classroom to stand next to a student who looks disengaged, slumped over in his chair. The aim of the day’s lesson is to transform quadratic equations. Her class is an energetic mix of lecture and independent practice. It’s orderly and you can see how hard she works to put the thinking work – the cognitive load – back on her students. 

Being a teacher, especially a new teacher, is hard for many reasons. But it’s especially hard because of the thousands of decisions teachers are required to make every hour. Sposato gives its students lots of on-the-job and simulated practice to help many of those decisions start to feel instinctual. Before every student teaching day, Brenda’s faculty coach from Sposato gives her something specific to concentrate on- an instructional move or a classroom management technique called a big takeaway – during class. On this day, Brenda is working on setting clear expectations by being more intentional about how she uses the white board at the front of the class.  This is the kind of nitty-gritty, specific feedback she loves, because it’s so actionable. 

After her lesson, Brenda has a 45-minute feedback session with her Sposato coach, Jawad Brown. (Jawad was a 7th and 8th grade math teacher for several years before joining Match).  He starts off the coaching session by asking Brenda how she thinks the class went – what went well, what could have gone better, what she was thinking and feeling at certain moments in the lesson.  He congratulates Brenda on a great day.  Her big takeaway for the next lesson? Challenging students to use more mathematical vocabulary. She’ll implement it during the following day’s lesson. 

“In middle and high school my teachers kept me going,” Brenda says. “They helped me believe I could go to Cal, that I could major in math. When I look at my kids, I know I want to do the same thing for them.”