All Faculty and Staff Papers and Presentations

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  The Center on Culture, Race & Equity: A Case Study on Systemic Change

  Veronica Benavides, Lisa Gordon, and Faith Lamb-Parker

  This video offers a look at the Bank Street Center on Culture, Race & Equity’s partnership with District of Columbia Public Schools to address educational disparities for African American boys. The center’s work focused on helping school staff examine their own implicit biases, stereotypes, and microaggressions and learn to shift from deficit- to strengths-based attitudes to support system level change.

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  Descriptive Inquiry at Bank Street: Building Intellectual Community while Responding to Accreditation

  Jessica Charles

  Over the 2016-17 academic year, Bank Street Graduate School faculty and staff participated in a school-wide Descriptive Inquiry process to examine their programs and pedagogy. As part of the process, faculty met regularly to share their practices and to strengthen their well-established programs in teacher and leader preparation, museum education, and child life. Dean Cecelia Traugh initiated this process, drawing on her extensive experience implementing Descriptive Inquiry in higher education settings, in order to help faculty reflect on their practice, improve program quality, and build organizational coherence.

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  The Restaurant Study

  Jessica Charles

  Bank Street faculty and staff regularly work in partnership with public schools to support teachers and leaders sustain and strengthen their progressive educational practice. At Midtown West, a public elementary school founded in 1992 as a collaboration between parents in New York City’s District 2 and Bank Street faculty, Peggy McNamara has worked as a coach and thought partner with teachers across every grade.

  Over the course of developing and teaching one signature Midtown West curriculum unit called The Restaurant, we followed Peggy and the teachers as they made teaching decisions to engage and educate students through a study of food and community.

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  District-wide Instructional Initiative Framework

  Jessica Charles, Tracy Fray Oliver, Doug Knecht, and Emily Sharrock

  Describes the Bank Street Education Center's District-wide Instructional Initiative Framework, a tool that guides the Center's partnership work with school districts who are engaged in a process of instructional improvement. The Framework was developed out of research on district improvement, organizational development, school leadership, and professional learning, as well as the Center's own experience implementing large-scale district reform in the largest school district in the nation: New York City.

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  Coaching: How a Focus on Adult Development Leads to Improvements in Student Learning

  Jessica Charles, Milenis Gonzalez, and Emily Sharrock

  The Bank Street Education Center partners with schools and districts across the country to help improve teaching and learning at scale. This publication documents the professional learning processes, tools, and activities used by Bank Street facilitators in their coaching work with teachers and leaders and brings to light what strengths-based, developmentally meaningful teaching and learning looks like for both adults and children.

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  Following the Money: Exploring Residency Funding through the Lens of Economics

  Karen DeMoss and Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College

  Following the Money digs into how the system for funding teacher preparation fuels a host of shortcomings: subpar routes to teaching, inadequate practice before entering the classroom, shortages in high need areas, underprepared teachers. Following the Money finds that financial barriers limit our ability to grow to a universally high-quality teacher preparation system, calling for a stronger knowledge base about the economics of teacher preparation to understand how we can realize the quality we need.

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  An Inquiry Into Creating and Supporting Engagement in Online Courses

  Robin Hummel, Genevieve Lowry, Troy Pinkney, and Laura Zadoff

  In this chapter, authors offer what they have discovered about creating and facilitating structures that support active engagement that promote social construction of knowledge in online interactions.

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  Schooling for and with Democracy

  Douglas R. Knecht

  Given the current challenges facing our democracy in the United States, the role of public schools in forming habits of democratic practice in our citizenry is as important today as ever. To explore this urgent topic, the author interviewed 13 leaders of 10 New York City public schools committed to educating for and with democracy. Six patterns of beliefs and practices emerged from the conversations, including commitments to intentionally developing informed, empathic, inclusive, inquiry-minded, confident, vocal, and involved citizens through parallel democratic structures for both adults and students. A seventh pattern was also identified; however, it took the shape of the absence of an intentional naming of democracy as it is being practiced. This raised a question for further discussion: To what degree is making this connection explicit in school communities important? Implications of these patterns are briefly discussed, and a few recommended next steps are offered for the consideration of educational leaders and policy makers. It is the hope and plan of the author to bring the group of interviewed school leaders together to discuss these patterns and dig more deeply into the work of schooling for and with democratic participation.

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  Bringing Joy to Uninspired Teachers of Math

  Hal Melnick

  This publication explores how to inspire teachers to find the joy in math so they can help their students do the same. Through a variety of tools, techniques, and helpful hints, the resource illustrates what high quality math instruction looks like and how teachers can reframe their own thinking about math to create deeper learning opportunities for their students.

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  Learning to Teach: Observing and Reflecting

  Nancy Nager

  This video series, “Learning to Teach,” provides a platform for professional development in early childhood education. It introduces viewers to compelling early childhood classroom footage accompanied by facilitated discussions about observations and teaching practices. You will get a hands-on look at how beginning teachers learn to closely observe children and engage in reflective conversations about children, materials, the classroom environment and themselves.

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  Learning to Look, Looking to Learn

  Karen Rothschild, Marvin Cohen, Babette Babette Moeller, Barbara Dubitsky, Nesta Marshall, and Matt McLeod

  In order to plan and implement lessons that will be effective for a wide variety of learners, teachers must assess what students know and how they know it. They must also know students’ academic strengths, challenges, and preferences. Careful observation of what students do and say as they work provides a rich source of data about both their knowledge and ways of learning. We highlight three strategies we use to help teachers refine their understanding of individual students:

  (a) building teachers’ skills in observing without making judgements; (b) teaching teachers to use a shared, neurodevelopmental framework through which to view student learning and behavior; and (c) facilitating collaboration among general education and special education teachers in using these tools to assess student learning and plan lessons.

  The combination of careful observations, a neurodevelopmental lens through which to see and interpret the observations, and the different perspectives of general and special education teachers, builds a foundation for planning appropriately leveled and rigorous lessons that leverage students’ strengths while supporting them in their weaker areas.

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  Promoting Shared Decision Making through Descriptive Inquiry

  Rachel Seher, Cecelia Traugh, and Alan Cheng

  This article describes the process through which faculty members at City-As-School, a progressive public high school in New York City, recently began to use descriptive inquiry to more fully actualize one of the school’s core values: a commitment to “democracy as a way of life” (Dewey 1939, 2).

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  Implementing NH ChILD: A Comprehensive Approach to Professional Learning to Reach All New Haven Early Childhood Educators

  Emily Sharrock and Courtney Parkerson

  New Haven Children’s Learning District (NH ChILD) envisions a city where all children have access to high quality early learning experiences. In order to turn this vision into reality for the 14,800 children ages 0-8 living in New Haven, NH ChILD is working to increase the number of spaces in high quality programs while simultaneously improving the quality of early learning experiences in existing programs. The following paper outlines NH ChILD’s beliefs, commitments, and plan for action with respect to NH ChILD’s citywide efforts for in-service professional learning.

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  Conceptualizing the Problems and Possibilities of Interprofessional Collaboration in Schools

  Susan I. Stone and Jessica Charles

  Recent educational programs and initiatives hinge on effective collaboration between education professionals, such as school social workers, school psychologists, teachers, and principals. The authors seek to build on prior conceptual work to explore the range of collaborative practices school social workers engage in with other school professionals. Drawing on conceptual frameworks related to interprofessional and other collaborative work in schools, the authors examined how school social workers (N=39) report collaborating with other professionals based on a hypothetical case designed to elicit collaborative practices. To triangulate the findings, the authors also draw on responses by 14 teachers, five school psychologists, and four principals. The authors identified five modes of collaboration: initiator/coordinator, assessor, intervener, whistleblower, and collaborator. The article concludes with a discussion o the implications for theory and practice.

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  Building Strong Partnerships for Preparation

  Bank Street College of Education

  When strong partnerships are established, districts and preparation providers make changes to the way they work and and the way they work together. The result is a system transformation through the kinds of shifts illustrated below. These partnerships enable IHEs and districts to bring existing resources to bear on work in new, mutually beneficial ways.

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  Cost-Saving Partnership Structures

  Bank Street College of Education

  Residency partnerships can create structures that save dollars in the long run.

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  Cost Savings through Reduced Turnover

  Bank Street College of Education

  Residency-trained teachers stay in the classroom longer, reducing district spending on recruitment, training, and on-boarding.

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  All Hands In Interactive Resource Guide

  Veronica Benavides

  This guide is a culmination of a year long All Hands In community-based project where the working team of staff from Bronxworks, Highbridge Advisory Council, and Bank Street College of Education co-identified, co-developed, and co-designed the project and content around family engagement practices and community strengths and needs.

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  The Way Will Open: A Study of the Presidency of Jack Niemeyer at Bank Street College of Education

  John S. Borden

  A biography of John H. Niemeyer who served as president of Bank Street College of Education from 1955 through 1973.

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  Structures & Supports: Building a Throughline Approach to District Partnerships

  Jessica Charles

  Bank Street College is committed to collaborative, systematic district reform that supports every layer of the school system so that districts are able to thoughtfully plan and implement large-scale instructional improvement initiatives to achieve maximum impact on student learning. The Bank Street Education Center “Education Center,” has developed a “Throughline” approach to district reform, designed to support districts across the system to foster conditions that enable schools to act as units of change and embed strong instructional practices through teacher leaders and teams.

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  Clearing the Path: Redesigning Teacher Preparation for the Public Good

  Karen DeMoss and Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College

  Clearing the Path: Redesigning Teacher Preparation for the Public Good, offers lessons from innovative partnerships, sharing sustainable funding models that can provide stipends to teacher candidates in full-time residency placements.

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  Investing in Residencies, Improving Schools: How Principals Can Fund Better Teaching and Learning

  Brigid Fallon and Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College

  Investing in Residencies, Improving Schools: How Principals Can Fund Better Teaching and Learning, examines the feasibility for school-level funding for resident stipends including a description of a financial model that enables schools to fund co-teaching positions for novice teachers.

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  Celebrating Bank Street's First 100 Years

  Hal Melnick and Robie Harris

  This book conveys in words and images the essence of Bank Street and the very real ways the institution approaches education for adults as well as for children from infancy through forever.

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  Selected Research Supporting Sustainable Funding for Quality Teacher Preparation

  Bank Street College

  In countries where school systems have improved dramatically, pre-service teacher education has become more integrated with the regular school system. Aspiring teachers, while studying for their certification, are paid to practice under the guidance of an effective classroom teacher for a full year before seeking certification. Increasingly, evidence from the U.S. also indicates that such a model is effective. In fact, four persistent teacher quality challenges facing schools and districts can be positively impacted through the establishment of funded year-long pre-service clinical placement.

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  The ESSA Opportunity for Residencies

  Bank Street College of Education

  The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides states and districts with a renewed opportunity to strengthen the quality of teaching and learning in schools by explicitly incorporating well-designed year-long pre-service co-teaching placements (“residencies”) into state ESSA applications as an allowable and encouraged use of funds. While “preservice” teacher preparation is not frequently conceptualized as an allowable use of these federal funds, when well designed preparation programs include funded, year-long co-teaching residencies, they address many of the goals contained within ESSA and contribute to the systemic educational improvements sought by states and districts.