Strengthening Teaching Skills – Giving Children Growth Opportunities

Pilot of Learning Lenses Course

This is a story of passion, provoking thought, and pushing ideas beyond the usual boundaries. Driven by passion and proudly citing her participation as a marcher with Martin Luther King, Laurel Shoshani, a 3rd Grade teacher, explained, ” I’m saving lives. I want to give all children the opportunity to growth, and I need to grow, too. ”

Unraveling the problems of struggling children, passionate teachers looked below the surface of classroom behaviors and troubled kids. Questioning and challenging, Hidden Sparks’ educators probe the different reasons children struggle to succeed in the classroom. Recognizing that children struggle for different reasons, this summer Hidden Sparks convened a series of workshops for educators – principals and teachers – to probe ways of helping teachers improve poor performance that plagues so many children.

Shoshani participated in the pilot of a new course , Learning Lenses, designed to help teachers learn how to observe, reflect, assess, and plan for all students in their classrooms using multiple lenses —developmental, behavioral, temperamental, and ecological. Using real-life case studies, teachers learned strategies for all learners, including those who struggle academically and present challenging social-emotional issues. This new opportunity was made possible through a collaboration of Hidden Sparks and The Churchill School and Center.

A mix of Jewish day school educators and public school teachers, this diverse workshop gave teachers a rich vocabulary for sharing information and talking about students in manageable components. Alisa Scharf, a middle school teacher, felt that “Breaking things into pieces helped to pinpoint the source of a child’s problem.”

Beyond a venue to share their insights, ideas, methods and expertise with fellow teachers, the teachers delved into issues of self-awareness. Andrea Rousso, an educational consultant and mentor, said, “We’re working to build better teachers. Teachers need to understand how their own behaviors impact the classroom environment.”

How a teacher discusses students with one another, how a teacher interacts with a struggling child, and how a teacher’s behavior affects the attitude and the social climate at all levels of the school setting is critical to a child’s success. “The school is a laboratory for teaching social skills. Or, from another perspective, how to connect and care for each other – the school is a collaborative problem-solving lab,” Claire Wurtzel, Hidden Sparks, Educational Co-Director and Workshop Leader, said as she introduced a number of social cognition and behavioral issues.

Looking back, Wurtzel reflected that when she was 6 years old, she taught some of her peers how to read. She realized then that teaching was inspiring. This was the beginning of her life-long passion to help learners.

During the workshop, Wurtzel encouraged teachers to listen to themselves, to ‘hear’ what they say both to their students and in conversations about their students. Her objective was clear: to move the conversation to a different new level and to elevate the language so that it is more descriptive and meaningful. “What do you pay attention to in your classroom? How do you give instructions? How do you talk about your students? And, how do we characterize students as we talk about them? Is it possible to frame the conversation in a positive language?”

Success of the Hidden Sparks model can be measured in some sense through the numbers. Today, this six-year-old old organization works with teachers in 28 schools in New York, New Jersey and Boston. Since inception, it has worked with more than 400 teachers, reaching roughly 4,300 children. And, expansion of the Hidden Sparks coaching program to other cities and adaptation of the Learning Lenses curriculum for Judaic Studies is being supported through a generous grant from The Covenant Foundation.

Additional schools are served through workshops and school-based coaching with funding from No Child Left Behind. Hidden Sparks Without Walls (HSWOW) also offers audio and online classes, at no cost, to educators nationwide. To date, HSWOW has offered 44 courses, reaching nearly 650 participants from coast to coast. All courses can be downloaded from the Hidden Sparks website.

“The potential impact is enormous,” explained Debbie Niderberg, Hidden Sparks executive director. “I strongly believe that by increasing the understanding and support for educators, children with learning differences reach their full potential in school and life.”

Explore more Hidden Sparks programs at www.hiddensparks.org.