The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Best practices, tips, and stories to help you be extraordinary in your classroom and beyond, featuring Curriculum Associates' Manager, Voice of the Customer, Hayley Browning.
The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Understanding Acceleration and Remediation with Mara Rodriguez
Ever wonder how to get the most out of your time when it comes to education? Mara Rodriguez, Senior Director of Educator Success at Curriculum Associates, joins us to share her insights on how acceleration in education is all about maximizing minutes and crafting creative schedules. We explore ways to balance student learning and level content as we aim to provide the best experience, without overwhelming them. Mara emphasizes the importance of understanding grade level standards and truly knowing the curriculum to ensure a well-rounded educational experience.
In the second part of our discussion, we dive into practical strategies for educators. Mara guides us through effective instruction and remediation tactics, reminding us that progress trumps perfection. She drives home the point that educators need not walk this journey alone, highlighting the power of collaboration. Finally, we turn our attention to embracing technology, and how data can be used to inform instruction. Imagine a future where every minute in the classroom is optimized for student success - that's the promise of this enriching conversation. Don't miss out - subscribe, join the conversation, and transform your approach to education.
Read Mara's Blog: CurriculumAssociates.com/blog/learning-acceleration
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Have feedback, questions, or want to be a guest? Email ExtraordinaryEducators@cainc.com to connect with us!
Curriculum Associates presents the Extraordinary Educators Podcast with hosts Danielle Sullivan and Sari Laberis. H tips, best practices and successes to improve your teaching and leadership and drive student growth and learning. We're here for you.
Danielle Sullivan:Hi everyone, Welcome to the Extraordinary Educator Podcast. This is Danielle.
Sari Laberis:And this is Sari. This week, we are joined by one of our amazing colleagues, Mara mara Rodriguez, who is the Senior Director of Educator Success at Curriculum Associates.
Danielle Sullivan:And I love talking with Mara. Mara does such a good job framing what we need to do in education but making it really tactical and practical in how we apply it to our classrooms. Like something that can be so nebulous, like acceleration, she just really has a good way of breaking it down in a way that's easy to understand and also hopeful of just look at how many minutes we can save. Like it's great. I think you'll find a lot of helpful things to consider listening to this podcast.
Sari Laberis:Absolutely, so here is our conversation with Mara. Welcome back to the podcast, Mara. It's so great to have you here. Great being here.
Danielle Sullivan:So, Mara, you recently wrote a blog. Can you kind of summarize what you shared in the blog and then we'll use that to launch our conversation here?
Mara Rodriguez:Absolutely so. The blog, the impetus for this blog, was caused by a little bit of what we're seeing. We have the privilege, as you know, of being exposed to what many classrooms and winning schools and many districts are doing, and we were starting to see a trend that we actually see often in education, which is the I call it a little bit of the fool in the shower of like, oh it's too cold, oh it's too hot, oh it's too cold, and then we move the temperature too abruptly and sort of swing the pendulum. And one thing that we've been seeing is that, with this drive to accelerate student learning because we know that so many of our students have so much to go to beyond grade level there was this acceleration or bust, right, and let's accelerate, let's accelerate, which, if you think of the word accelerate, it just means to go fast, right.
Mara Rodriguez:And in that desire to do something that is very valid, which is get students to grade level faster, we've been seeing a little bit of overcorrection in the sense of oh, then all we can put in front of every single student is on grade level content, and anytime that you have a student that is not doing grade level content, that is bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Never do that again. Only put them on on grade level content. And when we started seeing sort of the request and questions came in, we had a lot of pause. We're like whoa, wait a second, the fool in the shower is overcorrecting. And so the gist of the blog is really we want to accelerate, we need to accelerate. We have too many students too far below grade level, but how do you accelerate?
Mara Rodriguez:How do you go about that without being that fool in in the shower? And how do you do that? How do you go about balancing, providing on grade level content while remediating that essential conte nt that they need to access that grade level content? So we keep on saying, I keep on saying that it's a yes and and not an either or. But of course, yes and is hard because the reaction is like, well, we have 180 school days and we have the hours in the day. So I think, acknowledging that that yes and is really hard, but we need to do it mindfully and not sort of overcorrect, because that can lead to things that are not what our initial intent is.
Danielle Sullivan:Yeah, that's a big. This is a big present to unwrap because it's I mean, we want to be able to allow students the opportunities so they can grow and thrive in school. But I've seen the same thing in my travels that a really great best practice like acceleration turns into a poster and dies on the wall or turns into a mandate that is unclear. So let's break this down a little bit. What should educators be thinking about? Because this is hard, or you have to do this in 45 minutes for math, or you only have 90 minutes to catch everybody up. So how do we begin to approach supporting educators and thinking about this?
Mara Rodriguez:So I think you said one of the first things which is one of the things we recommend is to acknowledge that this is difficult and that's like a first step of like, oh, we're just going to go about this and we're going to accelerate in a month and we're going to put these things, no.
Mara Rodriguez:So I think the very first step is acknowledging that this is difficult, that this might be something that you didn't learn in education school, that you haven't done before, so I think that's that might feel very basic, but that like getting into the mindset of like, okay, here we go, we're about to embark on something that's really hard and we have to try new things. I think the other is having that mindset that every minute counts right, and actually I would say like every second counts, because if you realize that you're trying to do more in the same amount of time, then that's the second thing that you have to think about is time is of the essence, so how we use that time is really important. And what does that look like? That looks like almost tearing apart your class schedule for the week and for the day and saying where am I really spending my minutes right, where am I spending my minutes and that for teachers, might mean lobbying administration to say this is what I'm doing with my minutes, but can we look at what the school calendar and schedule is doing with the minutes in the schedule? And I keep on saying minutes because it's a, it's a game of minutes and we've seen schools that have done this right and have been really creative about I shaved off a minute from every passing time and if you do that, that's all of a sudden 10 minutes because there are 10 transitions. You got 10 minutes back to do either remediation or to do more longer math.
Mara Rodriguez:So I think it's what, how do you look at your minutes? And then, a third thing I think that's really important is you need to be intimate with your curriculum, right, because if you're going to what we recommend, which is strategically scaffold right, then you need to know only what the skills that you need to remediate on that will help them access the grade level content. And in order to do that, you have to keep the end in mind, and the end is I need to know that this third grader, by the end of third grade, needs to do x. That means that I should definitely remediate x and y. Those are our first three. I think that there's a couple of more, but I think those three bring a lot. The really recognizing this is hard. Mind your minutes. Mind your minutes and lobby for the school to mind their minutes and then really know the end, which is the grade level standards.
Sari Laberis:Thanks so much for breaking it down and providing those three buckets. I think the mindset one really resonates with me. This is a slightly different topic but I remember in the classroom, when I was learning how to facilitate discourse for math, my principal said to me like this is not going to be easy. It's not just a quick hit that you can just implement tomorrow. It's going to take time. But that really helped me understand that like that, a little progress was actually the right thing, day by day right, and it's not just going to change overnight. And so going into this with you know I might try things and get it wrong or I might do things that don't work the first time, but just but just knowing that it's not going to be easy, I think I think we'll really help teachers.
Mara Rodriguez:The other thing that that does sorry, is it's not just this is hard, this is difficult, and we say a phrase of like progress over perfection. Just make a little bit of progress. It doesn't have to be perfect this school year. But the other thing that that hopefully makes teachers recognize is you cannot do this alone, right? So when you embark on something difficult, it's a lot easier to be successful if you have a crew. And so if you're trying to do this, like the things that I mentioned of your schedule or knowing your, your curriculum and the grade level standards, how great is it if you're doing it with your entire third grade cohort? You're looking at your minutes as a group and you are dissecting your grade level standards as a group, so maybe you can do a little bit of divide and conquer, right? So I think that's another piece of recognizing that it's difficult. It's also recognizing you can't do it alone.
Sari Laberis:Definitely.
Danielle Sullivan:So I have a tactical question around once to say you, they, they mastered their minutes, they're on board for that. So how do we maximize that 50 minutes of instruction? Because the biggest pain point that I had as a teacher when my students would say done, I hated it, they're like done, I was like learning is never finished, so what else can we do? So what are some recommendations that that you can give educators once if they have the extra time? How do they maximize it within that time?
Mara Rodriguez:Yeah, so it's funny, because they're not going to match, they're never going to have extra time. I was like I wish I had extra time, but with the minutes that they've carved out right because, you're not getting more.
Mara Rodriguez:I think one of the things that's really important, that it was basically the fourth thing, which is you now have to know your curriculum, but you really have to know your students and you have to know where your students are relative to each part of the grade level content, right, and so, if you're, it can't be like, oh, I get to know my students at the beginning of the year and that helps me inform the rest of my planning. No, I'm about to teach geometry. Well, where are my students relative to geometry? And maybe Danielle doesn't have as many learning gaps in geometry and maybe Sari does. So you need to know that before you're going to teach every unit. The same in literacy, right, like, maybe they're not so great at main idea, but some people are.
Mara Rodriguez:When you know your students, then I love that you said the word tactical, because then you can get tactical. Tactical in where you sit them right, like where, where you sit them. Like if these are the students that are going to struggle in this unit, you might want to sit them closer to you and easier for you to get to as you're walking around the room. How do you pair them up? How do you do pair ups for when they're doing partner work. And then what are the tools and scaffolds that you want to give them? Again, specific to that unit or that skill. You're about to do something related to work problems and you know that students are struggling with multiplication and their multiplication facts. If you know that, you can say you know what this skill is not about you knowing the multiplication facts. So I'm going to give you a table with all the multiplication facts, because this skill is really about you mastering word problems and I don't want that to hold you back from this grade level skill. Eventually, in my remediation block I will get to have you strengthen your multiplication facts, but right now I want you to focus on this grade level skill. The same for literacy. If there are some vocabulary words that you know are going to hold them back from this grade level content, know it ahead of time and you slip them a little glossary on the side or you pre-teach the vocabulary words so that they can access the grade level content and not feel frustrated. So I think those are a couple of things.
Mara Rodriguez:If you know your students and you know your content, then I always call them the 1% solutions. Teaching is all about being tactical. Where do you sit the students? What is your path? Who's going to be on your list of the three or four students that you're going to really want to be over the shoulder with? How are they going to partner? Those 1% solutions are really important and you don't have to do them all. Try one, try one. Progress over perfection.
Sari Laberis:Right, and you even sort of embedded another one in there which is front load to your students what the focus is for the day right, so that they can really narrow their thinking in terms of what their goal is for that class period.
Mara Rodriguez:It's great that you said that Sari because I think our mindset for remediation has been always the kidney table in the back of the room right.
Mara Rodriguez:And when 80% of your class has the same skill gap, that's a lot of kidney tables, right? So if you know that ahead of time and you say wait a second. So if 80% of my students are struggling with this prerequisite skill that they're going to need for grade level content, I always say it's pay now versus pay later or invest now, right. So spending 10 minutes with the entire class to cover that prerequisite skill and sort of shore it up because they might have forgotten or they might not have gotten it, those 10 minutes or 15 minutes, you might think, oh no, I'm going to get off pace because this is not in my curriculum. Those 10 minutes are time well invested, because guess what that's going to do when you do cover on minute 16, you start covering the on grade level skill. They don't have that gap. They're like oh yes, I can do this because you just refreshed my memory of that one skill that I needed to access this grade level content. So it's really a mind shift and, again, this is also really important for me.
Mara Rodriguez:So I focused on middle school in my career and I learned so much from teachers that have had come up from the elementary world, because for middle school teachers. This doesn't come naturally. I wasn't taught to do small groups and go on the kidney table. And when, as a sixth grade teacher, you recognize that so many of your students need that scaffolding, then if you start thinking like an elementary school teacher of, what do each of them need, how do I do stations, how do I maximize my time with a small group of students to give them what they need? It really takes middle school teaching to the next level. If you bring in some of those strategies that are thought about as middle school strategies, they're just good teaching strategies that middle school teachers can adopt.
Danielle Sullivan:Well, Mara, thank you so much as always for dropping your wisdom, sharing some tactical, practical strategies for educators to think about this. This is the next wave of what we need to do, and we just so appreciate you. Unfortunately, that's all the time we have for today, but if you want to learn more from Mara, you can link we're linking her blog in the show notes. Please subscribe to this podcast. If you like what you're hearing, you can learn a lot more. We appreciate you, Mara, and thanks again.
Sari Laberis:Thank you. Get inspired by following us on social media and please tag us in your posts on Twitter, @curriculumassoc, and on Instagram at @myiready. If you have feedback about the podcast, a topic of interest or want to be a guest, email extraordinaryeducators@ cainc. com. Subscribe where you listen to podcasts and if you'd like to help more educators like you, join the conversation.
Danielle Sullivan:Please leave a review and remember, be you be true, be extraordinary. The Extraordinary Educators podcast is produced by Curriculum Associates. Editing by Whiteboard Geeks, social media by Atziri Hannon, guest booking by Sari Laberis, production by Hayley Browning. This podcast is copyright, material and intellectual property of Curriculum Associates.