Rose Ferrero School

This month KUDOS go out to our Employees of the Month – September 2024. Our Certificated Employee of the month is Sixth Grade Teacher, Amanda Bassetti. Ms. Bassetti began her teaching career at Main Street Middle School in 1989 – teaching fifth grade “in the basement.” (That’s what she told me … her very first classroom was a converted storage room that was located “in the basement”. You can ask her about it … have her tell you the story of the “spiders” and the “spider deciders” her class built … the ones in which the actual spiders that were in the basement, connected these “deciders” together with webs! It’s a great story. Next, she can tell you about how she showed up on a Saturday, set off the alarm, and was confronted by two of Soledad’s finest! Good times.) Anyway, when Rose Ferrero opened in 2001, Ms. Bassetti was assigned to teach third grade (in an actual classroom – not in a basement). And when I arrived at Rose in 2015, Ms. Bassetti was teaching sixth grade, where she has been ever since. Ms. Bassetti’s consistent drive and determination to ensure that her students receive the best education possible and are prepared and ready to go whenever they are faced with a challenge is her strength. Furthermore, her students read – constantly – they write – all the time – and they have academic conversations about what they have read and what they have written. They create presentations and sometimes do so while sipping on hot chocolate during what she refers to as “the Starbucks Hour.” She also creates trusting relationships with her students and has zero discipline problems because her students know that their classroom is a safe environment where mistakes are cherished and that their teacher cares about them as a person. She is just an all-around great teacher that constantly strives to get better at what she does each and every day. At this point we must let the reader know that this will be Ms. Bassetti’s final year, and one is sure that all who have had the pleasure to work with and alongside her know that she has been a “treasure” to the Soledad Unified School District.

Our Classified Employee of the Month is Transitional Kindergarten Instructional Aide, Isela Godoy. Mrs. Godoy began her career in Soledad in 2016, as a Pupil Supervisor, and then later became an Instructional Aide, at Frank Ledesma. She came to Rose Ferrero as one of our Transitional Kindergarten Instructional Aides in 2022. If you ask Mrs. Godoy, she will tell you that in a Transitional Kindergarten class, “every day is something new … there is always a challenge, and it is never the same.” Mrs. Godoy’s is highly motivated and interested in being her best every day, and it shows in everything she does. As an Instructional Aide, she possesses all the knowledge necessary to assist the teachers and the very young students in the classroom she serves. Her open-mindedness and patience help her approach all matters in a professional and caring manner. Throughout her time at Rose Ferrero, Mrs. Godoy has made a great impact on the quality of instruction that has taken place with our youngest students. And knowing that she has established herself as a fixture in Ms. Moreno’s Transitional Kindergarten classroom, I imagine it would be difficult for Mrs. Moreno to think about being at school without Mrs. Godoy alongside her in the classroom. Her desire to be at her best at all times, her commitment to excellence, along with her willingness to do whatever needs to be done when it needs to be done, has made Mrs. Godoy virtually irreplaceable.

Congratulations to both of you – our Employees of the Month. Having both of you on our team helps Rose Ferrero be the best it can be.

Independent reading is the heartbeat of the reading work done in classrooms. Students need opportunities to practice what they are taught during instructional time in texts they choose and find relevant. Independent reading puts students at the center of thinking about and engagement with texts. Fostering an independent reading routine offers myriad benefits to students’ identities and habits as readers, writers, and learners:

• Readers grow in their abilities to make meaning and analyze appropriately complex texts by practicing reading.
• Readers can discover their own opinions, perspectives, and ideas about issues presented in fiction and nonfiction texts.
• Readers can learn about perspectives that may be different from their own.
• Readers make choices about what they read and how they read, leading them to develop agency and self-efficacy.
• Readers create personal reading plans that they monitor and reflect on to grow in how they manage their time and academic work.
• Readers learn by reading. They build schema about the world and its complexities.
• Readers can make recommendations to other readers through discussions and by creating posts in physical and virtual space to help foster a reading community.

There are elements to independent reading that make it universal and necessary across grades. Establishing guiding principles in your classroom and school community to facilitate a commitment to an independent reading practice helps the process. Examples of guiding principles are:

• Reading is a priority in your classroom and the school community
• Students’ personal choices about reading are important
• Time for reading in school is valued

A thriving reading culture can help kids stay motivated, interested, and supported in reading. But, in the context of discussing reading culture events, one may ask, “How do I get my students started with independent reading?” What follows are some ways educators can prepare for and launch independent reading:

1. Organize your classroom library: For emergent and early readers, classroom libraries could be divided into sections according to book types—such as emergent, concept, pattern, decodable, phonics and comprehension, or alphabet books—or organized by favorite author, popular characters, or topics of interest or curricular relevance.

Other classrooms might arrange their library around specific genres, authors, series, themes, or formats like prose, poetry, or illustrated. You might also choose a few fun library prompts, like “books with teacher or community recommendations,” “books you’ll like if you like XYZ,” or “books that elicit certain emotional reactions.” Students could even create their own library categories and help design labels for shelves or bins!

2. Contact your school librarian: Since our school has a librarian, plan to collaborate with her throughout the year. Make sure to bring your class to the library on your scheduled day/time, and if possible, plan to integrate library visits into your reading routines throughout the year.

3. Develop a system for students to manage their reading materials: Teacher and student management are essential to how independent reading functions in a classroom. Choose a system that works for you and your students. In my classroom, I had one or students that were my “classroom librarians” – they kept the classroom library organized and kept track of who checked out books.

4. Make a plan to share more about independent reading and the reading culture in your classroom with parents: It’s important to value parents when developing a reading culture. They are partners in fostering success for kids. For example, when parents visit the school and meet teachers early in the school year, like on Back to School Night, or the November Parent Conferences, explain to parents how important independent reading is to their child’s overall academic success, and then explain your classroom independent reading system and the expectations you have for their child in regard to reading at home.

5. Read books that your students read: The more you read, the more you’ll be able to recommend books, talk up books (like a salesperson!), engage students in dialogue about reading, and organize books in your classroom appropriately since you know the content. I did this all the time as a teacher. It not only made it easier for me to recommend books for my students to read, but I could also have book discussions with students (sometimes to ensure they actually read the book!)

6. Prepare to learn the identities of your students: Knowing about your students’ identities may impact how you support them while engaging with text throughout the year. Some identity components are: interests and hobbies, first language, race, ethnicity, family structure, goals, achievements, and abilities. Consider having students create identity webs, culture maps, or personal collages to share with you about who they are and what is important to them. This information will also help you in organizing your classroom library to ensure that students are represented in the space.

7. Plan a series of read alouds: No matter the age of the readers, read alouds can serve to coach students for independent reading. Teachers can not only model accurate reading, but also ways to think about ideas, information, and perspectives. Consider the skills, thinking routines, and curricular topics that are in your scope and sequence. Choose picture books and/or short excerpts to serve as mentor texts in a series of mini-lessons to launch independent reading at the start of the school year. After each mini-lesson with a mentor text, students can practice what was taught in their independent reading books. Structured time early in the year allows for all students to begin their new reading journeys in a supportive space together before they venture off on their own independent reading journeys. A structured beginning also helps the teacher to manage learning about a new group of readers through reading conferences, small group meetings, and assessment conferences.

Finally: Building a love of reading takes time and patience. This is no easy task. Facilitating independent reading requires planning, patience, and flexibility. It may not look the same each year or even in each class. However, independent reading forms and grows in response to the readers in the reading community.

On Thursday evening, September 5th, Rose Ferrero held its annual Back to School Night. After the Title I presentation took place in the Multipurpose Room, and teachers were introduced to the crowd, classrooms were opened from 6:00-7:00PM. Teachers described the Essential Standards they would focus on throughout the year, and described to parents, the routines, procedures and expectations they have of their students this year.

This school year, Rose Ferrero, along with the other elementary schools in Soledad, is proud to announce that we are now a “Community School.” As a Community School our site received a five-year grant, and along with this grant, we have hired a Community Schools Coordinator to oversee this program. Therefore, I would like to introduce Analaura Perez – Rose Ferrero’s new Community Schools Coordinator. Her role as the Community Schools Coordinator is to establish meaningful communication between the school, our parents, and the community to ensure the educational achievement of all students with identified needs. Her goal is to help transform Rose Ferrero into a full-service Community School with the assistance of a core team by bringing in support services for both students and families. As a Community School we will be able to offer expanded enriched learning times, collaborative leadership, as well as create a neighborhood hub for parents and our community. I know Mrs. Perez is really looking forward to starting this new journey of the implementation of Community Schools at Rose Ferrero with the support of our principal, our parents, our students, our entire staff, and all of our community members. Please feel free to stop by Rose Ferrero at anytime to introduce yourself to Mrs. Perez or contact her at alperez@soledad.k12.ca.us.

As we begin the 2024-25 school year, it should be common knowledge among educators that ability grouping – where a universal screener (in Math or ELA) is most often used to place students in “high, medium, or low groups” – can be particularly harmful to the future learning progress of students – especially those placed in low-attainment groups. Yet, we still see and hear about it.

Most educators are aware of the research done by John Hattie in regard to “effect size” – that we are always looking for strategies and practices that have an effect size of 0.4 or greater. Hattie gives ability grouping an effect size of 0.12, which should tell one all you need to know about this outdated practice. One reason for this low score is that the learning culture ability grouping creates inhibits learning opportunities for some students and can leave them stuck at a level of learning they have potential to advance from. In other words, for low-attaining students, group-specific teaching can limit their learning opportunities and create a ‘cycle of restricted opportunity’.

When teachers employ different pedagogical practices for different attainment levels, this can

unintentionally create a barrier to a low-attaining student’s opportunity to develop as a learner. So, once a student has been placed in a lower attainment group, the structures of grouping practices and the accompanying school cultures may constrain the extent to which attention is given to each student’s past and present factors of low attainment, and crucially how these contributing factors may be countered to enable future learning progress.

Ability Grouping also harms students in other ways as well. As Jo Boaler, Professor of Mathematics Education at Stanford University describes in her book, Mathematical Mindsets, “If students are placed into ability groups, even if they have innocuous names such as the red and blue groups, students will know, and their mindsets will become more fixed.” And these messages the students placed in the lower groups receive about their potential as learners are devastating for them. Students who are placed in low ability groups achieve at low levels, partly because of the low-level work they are given and partly because they give up once they realize they have been placed in a low group and labeled a low achiever.

However, what many people fail to realize is that the students placed in the highest group are also disadvantaged by grouping. These students feel the pressure from being in the top group, and as the pace quickens and the lessons get harder, they feel uneasy about asking questions because they do not want to appear as if they do not understand (a fixed mindset trait starting to set in) and many of these students begin to dread school and show a dislike for subjects like mathematics.

If the practice of ability grouping is still going on somewhere, it needs to cease, not only because of the inequity provided to students placed in the “low” groups, but also for the harmful fixed mindset messages this practice sends to all students.

1) Teachers: Please remember to use the What, Why, & How regarding your Learning Targets at some point in every lesson … explaining to students What we are going to learn, Why we are going to learn this, and How they (the students) will know when they have learned it.

2) Teachers: Number Talks involve mental math. During a number talk, we present our students with a math problem and ask them to mentally solve it without the use of writing tools or manipulatives. Then we ask our students to share not only their answers but the thought processes and strategies they used while problem-solving. It’s important to note that the purpose of Number Talks is not in finding the “right answer” but is the process our students go through. During Number Talks, students are always asked to explain their thinking. When they do this, it gives them a chance to self-correct, which further deepens their number sense.

3) Teachers: Please remember to check your mailboxes periodically – at least once before lunch. And on that note, check your email from time to time as well. Thanks.