Showing posts with label Ethics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ethics. Show all posts

Monday, November 30, 2020

Building equitable practices in schools in the midst of COVID-19

by Team XQ, XQ Rethink Together:  https://xqsuperschool.org/rethinktogether/equitable-practices-schools-covid19/

Image: thelearningcounsel.com

Last spring, the global pandemic interrupted schools and brought concerns over equity to the forefront of education discourse. The shift to remote and hybrid learning highlighted inequitable truths and provided a chance to rethink equitable practices — ones that recenter relationships, reinvent how they use time, and focus on deep learning experiences.

Equity in a school building doesn’t just happen, it is purposefully cultivated. 

As part of a panel hosted by the 2020 Aurora Institute Symposium, leaders from several XQ schools shared their ideas and practices on “How Intentional Equity Serves All Students.” The panel included incredible leaders from four XQ schools across America and offered clear takeaways for how to build equity into your remote and hybrid learning models. We wanted to extend the lessons from this workshop to those who attended and anyone else interested in being more intentional about building equitable practices.

Tips for Building and Maintaining Relationships with Students

Building caring relationships with students in a time when our regular social infrastructure is critical to the success of all students. 

  • Explain and reiterate that this is a mutual experience to create a commonality within the school community, including and especially with families
  • Ensure every student has at least one adult responsible and point-person for their academic and social wellbeing 
  • Leverage tools like Brooklyn Lab’s Success Coaching Playbook to embrace strength-based mindsets that cultivate motivation and engagement in academics
  • Reduce the advisor-to-student ratio to create close relationships in group settings quickly
  • Expand the advisory model to span multiple grades as a way to facilitate relationships between incoming students and upperclassmen 
  • Follow up daily — or multiple times a day — with students who have individualized education plans and may need help navigating complicated schedules 

Focuses on What Matters Most in Virtual and In-Person Classrooms

  • Focus on depth over breadth — challenge teachers to break away from traditional pressures and timelines to go in-depth on specific content.
  • Create work time throughout the virtual school day to give students an opportunity to concentrate on school work
  • Allow students to engage in different learning models — including whole group sessions and smaller group learning opportunities — and provide options when possible
  • Hold virtual office hours so students can access staff members regularly
  • Leverage technology, including social media, to expand access to professionals and experts in diverse fields for students 

Learn More From XQ School Leaders Who Are Committed to Equity 

Eric Collazo

Principal, Washington Leadership Academy

Eric is passionate about creating more equitable urban education. He mentors students and develops effective teachers in order to benefit the greater community. Eric attended the College of the Holy Cross. After graduating, Eric joined Teach For America. While teaching, Eric attended American University and earned a Master of Arts in Teaching. He now serves as the principal of Washington Leadership Academy.

Lillian Hsu

Principal, Latitude High School 

Lillian’s work is rooted in the belief that all students are capable of doing incredible things when given the right opportunity and support. Lillian has worked in a variety of educational settings such as Teacher Magazine and the television show Sesame Street. Lillian earned her B.A. in psychology from Yale University, her Master of Arts in Teaching from Brown University, and her Master’s in Education in School Leadership from the High Tech High Graduate School of Education.

Andy MacMannis

Assistant Head of School and Special Education Director,  Trinity Academy for the Performing Arts

Andy MacMannis has been at TAPA since 2010 and currently serves as assistant head of school and special education director. These jobs entail overseeing support services like special education, TAPA’s Title One programming, and all after-school programming. He also handles all fund development initiatives and “big-picture” planning, such as the management of TAPA XQ + RI. Prior to TAPA, Andy attended Providence College, majoring in Elementary and Special Education. While at PC, he worked for the YouthRAP after-school program in Providence. From there, he attended Brown University, where he received a Master’s degree in Urban Education Policy. 

Bennison Ntsakey

Director of Academics at Brooklyn Laboratory Schools

Bennison is a school leader who is driven by results that transform lives in the 21st century. He’s eager and wants to ensure that all of his learners master the skills needed to excel in college and their professional lives as ethical leaders. Bennison attended Syracuse University and earned a Master of Education in School Leadership Design from Columbia University. 

Additional Resources about Equity and Education 

As we constantly say, we are better when we work together. We are deeply committed to building and sharing resources from schools across the country. Check out these additional resources to learn how to build an equitable practice in your school both in a remote setting and a hybrid one: 

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Monday, October 26, 2020

How to listen — really listen — to someone you don’t agree with

by Tania Israel, Ideas TED.com: https://ideas.ted.com/how-to-listen-really-listen-to-someone-you-dont-agree-with/

    Image: Avalon Nuovo

This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Listening may not be the most exciting part of conversation, but it’s essential if you want to have a meaningful exchange with another person.

Think about a time you felt misunderstood by somebody. Did you defend yourself? Correct them? Or simply disengage? Regardless of your response, you likely didn’t feel comfortable with them.

Now think of how it feels to be understood — you can relax, you want to open up, you feel more trusting. When you listen in a way that makes the other person feel heard, they are more likely to share information with you. And when you are actively listening, you are also more likely to take it in.

In my training as a psychologist, I spent a lot of time learning how to actively listen. I can tell you from years of experience that having a productive dialogue is not possible without active listening.

The 1st active listening skill is nonverbal attending

Nonverbal attending means giving someone your full attention without speaking. Here are some of the basics:

Keep your body open to the other person. Try to be relaxed but attentive. If you’re sitting, lean forward a bit rather than slouching back.

Maintain moderate levels of eye contact. Look at the speaker but not like you’re in a staring contest with them.

Use simple gestures to communicate to the other person that you’re listening and encouraging them to continue. Head nods are one way — just don’t do it continuously. Occasionally say “Mm-hmm” to communicate encouragement.

The final key to nonverbal attending is staying silent. But remember: You can’t listen very well if you’re talking. In fact, if you rearrange the letters of the word “listen,” it spells “silent.” I can’t believe it took me 20 years of teaching to discover this, but it’s a useful reminder!

Offering somebody uninterrupted time to talk, even a few minutes, is a generous gift that we seldom give each other. It doesn’t mean you have to keep your mouth shut for hours and hours, but I encourage you to see how long you can simply listen to somebody without wanting to interrupt.

Some people find the most difficult part of listening is not talking. There’s a deep humility in listening, because your focus is on understanding the other person rather than on saying everything that comes into your mind. Your aim is to understand and help the speaker feel understood, and reserve your speech for what moves you closer to either of these goals.

The 2nd active listening skill is reflecting

Reflecting means repeating or rephrasing key content or meaning from the other person.

A reflection communicates that you heard what the other person said. Rather than saying, “I hear you,” you show you’ve heard them by sharing back what they said. It also confirms that you have an accurate understanding of their thoughts.

If you’re a little off target, it gives them an opportunity to correct you. This can be useful if you didn’t quite understand what they were saying.

For example, let’s say a friend tells you, “I just came from a PTA meeting, and I’m so frustrated with charter schools! They’re draining money from the school system which is already stretched, so we don’t have the funds to support students and teachers. Plus, they’re weakening the teachers’ union. I wish the charter school parents would put all that energy into supporting existing schools instead of creating new ones.”

If you said, “You think charter schools are ruining the educational system,” your friend could clarify, “Well, not exactly ruining it as much as creating challenges for the existing schools.”

Now you may be wondering, “Won’t that be weird to just repeat back what they’re saying?” Or you may think, “They just said it. How can it be helpful for me to say it back?”

Reflecting typically feels more awkward for the person doing it — i.e., you — than for the person hearing it. What I know, and what’s supported by considerable research, is that people like having their thoughts and feelings reflected back to them.

Just don’t repeat them back word for word. Use fewer words and summarize rather than transcribe. I call this “nuggetizing.” Get at the nugget of what they’re saying, and say it briefly so you don’t interrupt the flow. Focus on something that seems meaningful to the other person; pull out an idea that gets to the heart of what they’re saying. You could preface your reflection with one of these: “I hear that you’re saying,” “It sounds as though,” “So….”

The crucial role of reflection is to help people feel heard, and to make sure you understand them. It’s more important for you to simply be present than to be brilliant.

The 3rd active listening skill is asking open-ended questions

As you listen, questions will pop into your head, and you’ll want answers. While asking questions is very appealing, they have the potential to interrupt the other person’s thinking, shift the focus to your agenda, interfere with connection and derail a conversation.

To use questions effectively, keep a few things in mind:

Always attend and reflect before you ask a question. Understanding the other person and helping them feel understood provides a strong foundation. If you haven’t communicated that you heard someone, they may not be inclined to open up to your question.

You might feel like asking questions is how you best communicate your interest. That may be true but if you attend and reflect first, a question says, “I’m interested in what you just said” rather than “I’m interested in your response to what I want to hear about.”

When you do ask a question to promote dialogue, it’s most effective to use questions that are open-ended and cannot be answered simply with a “yes” or “no”. For example, rather than asking “Do you think public charter schools should receive the same level of funding as other public schools?” which can be answered “yes” or “no,” you might ask, “How do you think public charter schools should be funded?” Open-ended questions promote elaboration and exploration.

Just as in reflecting, you want to keep your questions simple. Resist the urge to try to guide or impress the other person with your exceptionally astute question.

One of my favorite and most concise ways to ask questions is simply to repeat back a key word with an upward intonation. For example, if somebody says, “I just feel like the world is so dangerous,” you can say “Dangerous?” By using the upward intonation, the word becomes a question. It says, “Tell me more about how the world is dangerous.”

It’s important to stay neutral in both tone and content. Judgment and opinion can come across loud and clear in your tone. Saying “Is that where you’re going on vacation?” is more contentious than “Tell me how you decided to go there for vacation” (which is a statement that’s really a question).

It’s also important to think about when to ask your question. Don’t interrupt the other person just to ask something.

The final thing to keep in mind about attending, reflecting and open-ended questions is that these tools are intended to help promote understanding by developing greater connection. Connection is the most important thing.

So if the tools aren’t working in a situation or if you’re able to have connection without these tools, don’t force them. That said, don’t underestimate them either. They’re backed by research and experience, and they can help you to navigate the unpredictable, challenging waters of dialogue with others.

Excerpted from the new book Beyond Your Bubble: How to Connect Across the Political Divide, Skills and Strategies for Conversations That Work by Tania Israel, PhD. Reprinted with permission from the American Psychological Association. Copyright © 2020 by American Psychological Association.

Watch Tania Israel‘s TEDxUCLA Talk here: 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tania Israel PhD is a professor in the department of counseling, clinical and school psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She leads dialogue skill-building workshops to help people connect across political differences and teaches about helping skills, leadership and community collaboration. She has also facilitated educational programs and difficult dialogues on a range of topics, including abortion, law enforcement, religion and sexual orientation.

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Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Free Courses in Ancient History, Literature and Philosophy

by Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/free-courses-in-ancient-history-literature-philosophy

Image by Barcex, via Creative Commons
History & Literature

Philosophy

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Friday, March 22, 2019

Oxford’s Free Course Critical Reasoning For Beginners Teaches You to Think Like a Philosopher

by Ilia Blinderman, Open Culture:  http://www.openculture.com/2019/03/oxfords-free-course-critical-reasoning-for-beginners-teaches-you-to-think-like-a-philosopher.html
When I was younger, I often found myself disagreeing with something I’d read or heard, but couldn't explain exactly why. Despite being unable to pinpoint the precise reasons, I had a strong sense that the rules of logic were being violated. 

 After I was exposed to critical thinking in high school and university, I learned to recognize problematic arguments, whether they be a straw man, an appeal to authority, or an ad hominem attack. Faulty arguments are all-pervasive, and the mental biases that underlie them pop up in media coverage, college classes, and armchair theorizing. Want to learn how to avoid them? Look no further than Critical Reasoning For Beginners, a top rated collection of lectures led by Oxford University’s Marianne Talbot.

 Talbot builds the course from the ground up, and begins by explaining that arguments consist of a set of premises that, logically linked together, lead to a conclusion. She proceeds to outline the way to lay out an argument logically and clearly, and eventually, the basic steps involved in assessing its strengths and weaknesses.

 The six-part series, which was recorded in 2009, shows no sign of wear, and Talbot, unlike some philosophy professors, does a terrific job of making the content digestible. If you’ve got some time on your hands, the lectures, which average just over an hour in length, can be finished in less than a week. That's peanuts, if you consider that all of our knowledge is built on the foundations that this course establishes. If you haven’t had the chance to be exposed to a class on critical thought, I can’t recommend Critical Reasoning For Beginners with enough enthusiasm: there are few mental skills that are as underappreciated, and as central to our daily lives, as critical thinking.
Critical Reasoning For Beginners is currently available on the University of Oxford website in both audio and video formats, and also on iTunes and YouTube. You can find it listed in our collection of Free Online Philosophy Courses, part of our collection of 1300 Free Online Courses from top universities.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writing at the Huffington Post.
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Monday, March 18, 2019

Philosophers Name the Best Philosophy Books: From Stoicism and Existentialism, to Metaphysics & Ethics for Artificial Intelligence

by Josh Jones, Open Culture:  http://www.openculture.com/2018/10/philosophers-name-the-best-philosophy-books.html


 As an English major undergrad in the 90s, I had a keen side interest in reading philosophy of all kinds. But I had little sense of what I should be reading. I browsed the library shelves, picking out what caught my attention. Not a bad way to make unusual discoveries, but if you want to get a focused, not to mention current, view of a particular field, you need to have a knowledgeable guide.

 Back in those days, the internet was, as they say, in its infancy. How much better I would have fared if something like Five Books had existed! The site's general idea, as it trumpets on its homepage, is to recommend “the best books on everything.” Argue amongst yourselves about whether any one resource can deliver on that promise, but let’s keep our focus on the excellent space of their Philosophy section, curated by freelance philosopher-at-large Nigel Warburton.

 You may know Dr. Warburton from his many forays in public philosophy. Whether it’s the Philosophy Bites podcast, or its spin-offs Free Speech Bites and Ethics Bites, or his work on the BBC’s animated history of ideas series, or any one of his books, he has a rare knack for bringing the obscure and often difficult concepts of academic philosophy to light with both conversational good humor and intellectual rigor. Most of that work takes place in dialogue, the original form of classical philosophy.

 The Five Books forum is no exception. In the latest post, Warburton interviews University of Sheffield’s Keith Frankish on the five best books on Philosophy of Mind. What is “Philosophy of Mind”? Read Frankish’s answer to that question here. What are his five picks? See below:

A Materialist Theory of the Mind, by D.M. Armstrong

Consciousness Explained, by Daniel C. Dennett

Varieties of Meaning: The 2002 Jean Nicod Lectures, by Ruth Garrett Milikan

The Architecture of the Mind, by Peter Carruthers

Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension, by Andy Clark

 What about the best books on Ethics for Artificial Intelligence? It's a far more pressing question than it was when Arthur C. Clarke published 2001: A Space Odyssey, which happens to be one of the books on Oxford academic  Paula Boddington’s list. In his interview with Boddington, Warburton asks for, and receives, a clarification of the phrase ethics for artificial intelligence.” In her choice of books, Boddington recommends those below. You may not find some of them shelved in philosophy sections, but when it comes to our sci-fi present, it seems, we may need to expand our categories of thought.

Heartificial Intelligence: Embracing Our Humanity to Maximize Machines, by John Havens

The Technological Singularity, by Murray Shanahan

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, by Cathy O’Neil

Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong, by Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen

2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke

 There are dozens more enlightening interviews and lists of five best books—on Nietzsche, Marx, and Hegel, on  Existentialism, Stoicism, Consciousness, Chinese Philosophy ... too many to directly quote here. There are lists from Warburton himself, on the best philosophy books from 2017, and best introductions to philosophy. 

 The whole experience is a little like visiting, virtually, a couple dozen or so highly-regarded philosophers in every field, listening in on an informative chat, and getting a booklist from every one. You’ve still got to find and buy the books yourself (and read and talk about them), but this kind of guidance from living philosophers currently working in the field has never before been so widely and freely available outside of academia.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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