Oakland Teacher Leadership on Display

On Saturday, May 5, Agency by Design Oakland concluded this year's Teacher Fellowship with 30 Oakland educators. Over 100 attendees came together to engage with fellows' inquiry work and leadership, through a morning of presentations, workshops, and documentation booths.

"This was both the most applicable and inspiring teacher event I've ever been to." - Jane Lee, Instructional Coach & Math Teacher, Roots International Academy

The event kicked off by welcoming Agency by Design Oakland’s new Fellowship Director, Paula Mitchell. Paula is a Teacher on Special Assignment at Grass Valley Elementary and has been an educator in Oakland for 25 years. She joined the Agency by Design Oakland community during the second phase of research, which commenced in 2016. Check out this video about Paula’s work at Grass Valley to learn more.

Four powerful Ignite Talks from Teacher Fellows Cicely Day, Roxanne Martínez, Reina Cabezas, and Ed Crandall set the tone for the event, providing incisive research perspectives on the ways the fellows have demonstrated leadership in their maker-centered work. Look for full videos of the talks on our site soon!

Teacher Fellow Reina Cabezas, a CTE Engineering Coach with OUSD, focused on decolonizing STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, & Making), and how she has experimented and explored this idea with students.

Teacher Fellow Roxy Martínez, Resource Specialist at Grass Valley Elementary School, OUSD, in her talk entitled, "Students of Color Sustaining and Creating Identities in Maker Education," spoke to the importance of maker education not being another tool to oppress our students, and instead a means of liberation.

"Using maker education, we can demonstrate how to question the systems we live in and show students that they wield the power to change inequities in these systems." - Roxy Martínez

Teacher Fellow Ed Crandall, the Science, Making and Robotics Teacher from Lighthouse Community Charter School, spent his time in the fellowship focused on the Agency by Design thinking routines by consistently incorporating them into his classes. In his talk entitled, "Thinking Routines Work - If Used Routinely," he described thinking routines as a powerful tool for shifting the way our students engage with ideas.

"Thinking routines are a strategy that will change your students forever." -  Ed Crandall

Images from Teacher Fellow Amy Dobras' workshop, "Agency by Design 101: Parts, Purposes, & Complexities," in which participants collaboratively took apart an object through the usage of a core Agency by Design thinking routine. Amy Dobras is the Middle School Making Teacher at Lighthouse Community Charter School.

On the left, Zaretta Hammond, author of "Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain," attending Teacher Fellow Tim Bremner's packed workshop titled "How are cognitive thinking routines a tool for culturally responsive teaching?" Participants used an Agency by Design thinking routine to become  familiar with Ms. Hammond's Ready for Rigor tool. Tim Bremner is a Pathway Coach at Castlemont High School, OUSD. 

"Yes, cognitive routines are social justice. Getting a kid on reading level—that's social justice." - Zaretta Hammond

Images above from Teacher Fellow Aáron Heard's workshop, "Think, Feel, Care: Using the TFC Thinking Routine to Gain Insight Into Your Students' Experiences." Ms. Heard is the Drama Teacher at Alliance Academy of Integrated Learning, OUSD.

"I thought Agency by Design was just about "maker" stuff and would have nothing to do with me, but it's about so much more. It's applicable to everything I do in the classroom and think about in my practice."  - Attendee

Participants collaboratively building during a design challenge in "Building Collegiality around Maker-Centered Learning - BRING THE FUN BACK TO LEARNING," with Teacher Fellows Clayton Evans, Physics and Engineering Teacher & Leah Jensen, Teacher Librarian, McClymonds HIgh School, OUSD

In "Ancestral Tech/Making: Making as Ancestral Work," attendees learned how to make a medicinal skin salve while exploring the intersections of ancestral tech and health in modern times. This workshop was led by Teacher Fellow Crystal Barajas Barr, Art and STE(A)M Teacher at Urban Promise Academy Middle School, OUSD.

Teacher Fellow Angelica Rubi, along with students, led a community making circle throughout the event, in which participants created Ojos de Dios, to represent the power of seeing. Rubi's inquiry in the fellowship focused on students' development of maker identity and empowerment. Angelica Rubi is a Work Based Learning Liaison, at Castlemont High School, OUSD 

Teacher Fellow Susan Wolf designed and distributed zines titled "Making/Un-Making Memoir," for participants to fold and engage with. Susan is an Artist, Educator, and Integrated Learning Specialist with ACOE. She works with teachers at Roots International Academy and Alliance Academy of Integrated Learning to develop integrated interdisciplinary curriculum.  

Documentation Booths throughout the event invited viewers to learn about fellows' inquiry work. "Super Learners" tells the story of Teacher Fellow Stephanie Taymuree, Special Education Teacher for Moderate/Severe students, at Redwood Heights Elementary School, OUSD. To read more about Stephanie's work in the fellowship this year check out her blog posts.

Thank you to everyone who attended and engaged in the day's activities, but a special thanks to the hardworking educators who shared their thinking and leadership at the event! 

Photos by Nabil Alwan, Carrie Hott, Brooke Toczylowski, Aaron Vanderwerff, Sarah Chung, & Angi Chau 

Exploring Complexity with the Help of Thinking Routines

By Paula Mitchell, Senior Fellow, Agency by Design Oakland & Teacher on Special Assignment at Grass Valley Elementary School, OUSD 

How do you spark curiosity? How do you get your learners to understand complexities? How can a teacher use thinking routines to show what’s going on in a child’s mind? What’s the best way to use thinking routines with moderate to severe handicapped students?

These are all questions that Agency by Design Oakland fellows tackled in the Thinking Routines and Capacities inquiry group, which I had the opportunity to facilitate and coach over the past few months. This group, which includes educators from Alliance Academy of Integrated Learning, Lighthouse Charter School, Redwood Heights Elementary, and Oakland International High School, focused on exploring the role of Agency by Design thinking routines in deepening their learners' understanding of academic content and skill building.

Capacities for developing Maker Empowerment within the Agency by Design Framework 

More specifically, these fellow focused on the Parts, Purposes, and Complexities thinking routine and the capacity of Exploring Complexity. Below are examples of three of the fellows in my inquiry group and some of the interventions they’ve experimented with in the classroom over the last three months.

Amy Dobras, Lighthouse Community Charter School’s middle school making teacher, focused on Parts, Purposes, & Complexities in a pen take apart. After using this thinking routine several times with students, Amy noticed that her students struggled with identifying complexities. Amy says she realized she needed to find a way to scaffold the concept of complexities through modeling and the use of sentence starters, in order to get greater student understanding and participation.

Redwood Heights teacher Colleen Gravelle hacked two thinking routines: Parts, Purposes, & Complexities and Imagine If, to create her own thinking prompts that asked her first graders to think more deeply about the purpose of the use of a particular space in their classroom. Colleen’s goal is to have her students think critically about how everyday objects are designed and what the purpose is behind the design.

Redwood Heights special education teacher Stephanie Taymuree’s MakerSpace display board focuses on the Parts of a machine. In this experience, Stephanie’s students learned that the choice of materials for the parts affects how the machine moves. This is a key scientific concept for moderate to severe special education students that was made more accessible with the use of the Parts, Purposes, & Complexities thinking routine.

To learn more about where these teachers’ inquiries led them and see the other inquiry groups, make sure to come to our Culminating Event on Saturday, May 5. And if you’re new to Agency by Design ideas, don’t miss Amy Dobras’s workshop at the event, “Agency by Design 101: Parts, Purposes, Complexities,” in which participants will be exploring the complexity of everyday objects through a take apart experience, using the PPC thinking routine.