Author Archives: Woody

Jessica Raugitinane Meets the Challenge of Teaching Remotely

Covid-19 has turned teaching upside down.

But Jessica Raugitinane, who is teaching her fourth-graders remotely, has found a way to create a familiar, positive classroom culture despite the distance.

We honored Ms. Raugitinane in 2012 when she was an undergraduate at UConn’s Neag School of Education. She earned her master’s degree in 2014 and has been teaching dual-language English and social studies at Mount Vernon Community School in Alexandria, Va., for several years.

She also trains teachers in her school district in strategies from Project GLAD® (Guided Language Acquisition Design), which promotes English language learning and high academic achievement in a positive classroom culture.

Converting to Remote Learning

Educators have recognized that implementing remote learning requires much more than just placing a computer in front of the teacher.

When the pandemic forced the Alexandria schools to convert to remote learning, Ms. Raugitinane realized she would have to make significant changes. She was determined to ensure that her students would still receive the education they need and deserve. She committed to continue using her successful best practices while adapting them to the virtual world.

“When my school shut down, I had to learn how to command an in-person job through a computer screen,” she said. “Fortunately, my school helped me discover the RULER approach developed at Yale and Larry Ferlazzo’s Seven Tips for Remote Teaching.

“Combined, these techniques solidified my decision to focus on the social emotional needs of my students before diving into academic content. However, applying Project GLAD® strategies enabled me to address my students’ social emotional needs while continuing to develop their language learning.”

Quite a bit of preparation was required. Ms. Raugitinane completed the RULER online training in four hours, then devoted her spring break (10 eight-hour days) to creating the 10-lesson mini-unit plan using the interactive Nearpod website. This included creating the lessons on Google Slides first and then making them interactive with Nearpod.

“I was motivated to invest the time in creating this 10-lesson mini-unit plan so that I would have a reusable template for plugging in future content,” she said. “Later I plugged in the Social Studies content to teach about Jim Crow Laws and segregation. That 10-lesson mini unit plan took me four days, compared to the original 10 days for the first unit plan.

“I wanted to make sure I was applying my knowledge of Project GLAD® strategies and Nearpod to make an interactive, language-rich academic environment, while creating a routine for myself and my students.”

Sharing Her Experience

She recently shared her experience in distance learning in an article in Soleado, a publication of Dual Language Education of New Mexico.

The article provides a wealth of techniques and strategies that will be useful to teachers intent on meeting the needs of their students during this stressful and demanding time. Read the full article.

As she wrote in the article:

“With the global pandemic taking us all on an emotional roller coaster, helping my students navigate their own emotions within this new quarantined world became paramount.

“Fortunately, at the start of the closure, I learned about RULER, an evidence-based, systemic approach to social-emotional learning developed at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence (www.ycei.org/ruler).

“RULER stands for the five skills of emotional intelligence: recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing and regulating. The RULER online training taught the importance of developing students’ emotional literacy. Essentially, providing students with the language of emotions enables them to better identify and express their feelings.

“I also learned the value of asking students the simple question: ‘How are you feeling?’ before beginning a lesson as a way to regulate emotion and encourage more on-task behavior. Undoubtedly, helping students understand and express their emotions during these uncertain times became the heart of my remote teaching.”

Additional Lessons

Among the other lessons she learned in preparing to teach remotely:

  • Establishing an equitable and accessible routine provided much-needed consistency for my students and myself.
  • Three tips from Larry Ferlazzo’s Seven Tips for Remote Teaching are essential: 1) emphasize social-emotional learning; 2) minimize synchronous online meetings: 3) keep things simple.
  • Both RULER and Ferlazzo’s advice prioritize social-emotional connections as a necessary ingredient to academic success, especially during distance learning.
  • Ferlazzo’s advice further encouraged me to deliver learning both synchronously and asynchronously in order to provide equity of access to students. And to keep things simple, I focused on teaching a unit’s main concepts rather than attempting to cover a myriad of information.

Congratulations to Jessica Raugitinane for rising to the challenge of remote learning, cultivating new knowledge and skills, and sharing her learnings with fellow professionals who are facing the same daunting challenge.

  • Woody Exley

Alma Exley Scholar Growing as a Leader in Meriden

Orlando Valentin Jr., whom we honored in 2016, has emerged as a leader in educational equity issues in the Meriden public schools.

He has been teaching fourth grade at Casimir Pulaski School in his hometown of Meriden since earning his master’s degree from UConn. He is in his second and final year in the UConn Administrator Preparation Program (UCAPP). I expect we will see Mr. Valentin go on to a distinguished career as an educational leader in the not-too-distant future.

Mr. Valentin sends a heartfelt message to the students he hasn’t seen in-person in months.

In the past two years he has received about $5,000 in grant funds from an alliance of Regional Education Service Centers (RESCs) to enable him to focus on the recruitment and retention of teachers of color in Meriden. He has used these funds to set up an affinity group for educational professionals of color in the central Connecticut community.

“The affinity group gives the professionals the opportunity to network with their colleagues of color who likely have shared life experiences,” he said. “The group also has had various professional development opportunities such as a book study, attending a conference and training with an equity consultant.

“The program also enables them to take the DISC leadership assessment. This allows them to evaluate their leadership potential and create a roadmap for professional development.” (The DISC tool evaluates behavior in terms of Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Conscientiousness.)

Team of Equity Leaders

Mr. Valentin is entering his second year as one of 12 equity leaders in the district. These leaders train with an external consultant, Dr. David Cormier, and deliver turnkey modules to their colleagues which focus specifically on racial equity. Dr. Cormier, Mr. Valentin and two other equity leaders delivered a 75-minute presentation in August to Meriden’s cohort of new hires for 2020. 

He is active in the community as well. He has been coaching youth football teams since he was fresh out of UConn, and is entering his fourth year as head coach of the Meriden Raiders. He began as an assistant coach, then became a head coach and has led the same group of athletes in successive years as they have moved up to higher levels of competition.

A football player holding a bat on a baseball field Description automatically generated
Coach Valentin giving a pep-talk to his team (prior to Covid-19).

Mr. Valentin said he is grateful to the scholarship program and its supporters who have helped him to launch his career in education.

“Thank you for putting this scholarship together and creating a network of professionals of color here in Connecticut,” he said. “Thank you for the scholarship opportunity which I and many others have benefited from.”

Our selection committee really knows how to pick ‘em. We’re delighted to see Mr. Valentin advancing in his career, taking on greater responsibility and making a difference in his hometown. He is one of many illustrious Alma Exley Scholars who are having an impact in Connecticut and across the country.

  • Woody Exley

Future Teachers Mistake Black Students as ‘Angry’ More Than White Students, Study Shows

A new study finds that prospective teachers, most of whom are white, are more likely to identify Black children than white children as angry, even when they’re not.

Madeline Will reported on the study in the July 8 issue of Education Week.

The study examines teacher-candidates’ “racialized anger bias”—a term coined by the researchers that means seeing anger when none exists. One of the researchers, Amy Halberstadt, had previously done a study that looked at how teacher-candidates perceived the facial expressions of Black adults.

“In that first study, we discovered what Black people already know largely—that people perceive Black adults as angry even when they’re not,” said Halberstadt, who is a professor of psychology at North Carolina State University. “[In this new study], we found that even older elementary school children are also experiencing racialized anger bias. With prospective teachers who care deeply for children, this is still happening.”

Future Teachers Tested

In this study, researchers studied 178 prospective teachers who were enrolled in education programs at three southeastern universities. Most of the future teachers in the study were white women, which is in line with the national teaching force.

Both white candidates and candidates of color were equally likely to misidentify Black children as angry, Halberstadt said.

Participants were shown 72 short video clips of child actors’ facial expressions and were asked to identify the emotion being displayed. The clips were equally divided between Black and white children and between boys and girls. The children in the clips were between the ages of 9 and 13.

Racialized Anger Bias

Researchers recorded the number of errors that participants made, especially seeing anger when there was none. The study notes that the findings were “clear and robust”: Prospective teachers were 1.36 times more likely to exhibit racialized anger bias against Black children than against white children and incorrectly view the Black child as angry.

Future teachers were 1.74 times more likely to incorrectly identify a Black girl’s facial expression as angry than a white girl’s. Participants were 1.16 times more likely to mistake a Black boy’s expression as angry than a white boy’s.

Black Boys More Likely Perceived as Angry

Overall, Black boys were the most likely to be incorrectly assumed to be angry by future teachers, Halberstadt said. White girls were the least likely. Past research has found that adults view Black girls, aged 5 to 14, as less innocent and more adult-like than white girls.

Researchers said they would expect to see even higher levels of anger bias in the actual classroom, when teachers have to make split-second judgments of the situation.