Promising Practices

Promising Practices Event 11/5/16
11/12/16

On Saturday November 5th I attended the Promising Practices event at RIC. The two workshops I attended were Fostering Resiliency: Strength-Based Interventions that Support Diverse Learners on the Path to Standardized Test Success and Building Resiliency Through Play. The keynote speaker was Dr. Robert Brooks who was a great presenter with interesting information and personal stories.

Workshop I- In this workshop, the presenters shared four ways to help students to take a standardized test successfully. Those four ways are:
1.) Loaning confidence- to frame the challenge in a positive way and find where there was success in the test taken. Also, to identify change to have a better outcome the next time.
2.) Reverse Scaffolding- to go with what the student knows and work off of that. Sometimes you just have to use your better judgement on a test question.
3.) Meta Testing- take the student behind the scenes, and be aware of themselves as a test taker. Help them in areas they say they are not good.
4.) Strength in Numbers- phone a friend. Practice in a group setting and get support from others in trying to answer a test question.(Learn off of each other).
I enjoyed this workshop because it applied to me personally. I am in the middle of studying and getting tutored for my core math test so it was interesting to hear about testing strategies. Here is a bit of information on standardized testing. This workshop could be connected to Kozol's individuals vs. institutions. Is it the individual student failing the test because they do not know the information or is it the school institution not preparing their students well enough to pass a standardized test?

Workshop II- In the second workshop, we learned about resiliency through play. I did not enjoy this workshop as much as the first because we only played games and briefly talked about resiliency and play. I like to have a powerpoint or some sort of notes when learning but we did not get anything. I did learn that games are a good way of getting students to interact with each other and through play they can overcome challenges of solving problems, working as a group, etc. In one of the games, I entered it after they had already started playing therefore I had no idea what was going on. This can connect to Delpit because I did not know the rules of the game until someone explained them to me. Delpit argues that you need to explicitly teach those rules and codes of power and someone did that for me so I could play. I could also connect this to Kristof's USA Land of Limitations. Was I "limited" before I learned the rules of the game? I had no idea what was going on so I could not play to the best of my ability. This article is interesting as it talks about the importance of play for children's development which is what we learned about in this workshop.