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Lots of research

2011-07-27T02:56:32Z

98.216.239.14:

Lots of research

2011-07-27T02:51:51Z

98.216.239.14:

Much research shows that students do better when the key people in their lives communicate about how they are doing and what they can do.

We know that youth do better when they get regular feedback from teachers on their classroom performance (Hattie 2008). Teachers teach better when youth communicate how their teaching is affecting them (Jones and Yonezawa 2008/2009; http://www.tripodproject.org/index.php/about/about_background/). Parents and teachers each support children’s school progress more effectively when they communicate about their children’s performance in the other setting (Taveras et al 2010; González, Moll, and Amanti 2005; Lawrence-Lightfoot 2003). Administrators lead school reforms better if their staff talk about teaching (Daly et al, 2010) and about data on student progress (Boudett et al 2005). Teachers teach better when they talk about teaching with other teachers (Daly et al 2010; Cochran-Smith and Lytle 2009).

Research on organizational learning and behavior (Spence 2009, Jewell-Sherman 2008); data-driven decision-making (Boudett et al 2005); assessment (http://www.tripodproject.org/index.php/about/about_background/), community organizing and “family engagement” (Mediratta et al 2009, Oakes and Rogers 2006; Henderson et al 2007) and youth engagement and motivation (Jones and Yonezawa 2002, 2008, 2009; www.efficacy.org, Grossman and Bulle 2006) all indicates that students are served better if the people in the student’s social network communicate about how youth are doing and what they can do. Each actor in the social network holds a useful “fund of knowledge” (González, Moll, and Amanti 2005) that would help the others serve the young person better: at any moment, each partner knows something that the others need to know in order to promote student success. Information circulation helps supporters attend to the experiences of every learner, reinforce moments of success more quickly and effectively, and reduce moments of failure with more timely and appropriate intervention; communication also helps people build relationships that keep them invested in the work.

So, to partner in young people’s success, people need tools and strategies helping them to communicate about the individual children they share (What does Jose love to learn? How is he doing on credits toward graduation?); about the classrooms they share (what’s the homework? Who has an idea on the assignment?), about the schools they share (what afterschool opportunities are available for children? What actions would improve the school?), and about the resources available in the city they share (where’s the free science fair?).

Finally, supporting young people requires a combination of face to face communications (like a parent-teacher meeting, an afterschool discussion between student and teacher, or a parent coffee hour where people share information and build relationships), print communications (like a handout in a backpack, a sign on the wall informing a parent of an opportunity, or a copy of student work at a parent-teacher conference), and electronic communications (like a student checking her grades online or a parent posting a local resource on a school listserv).

Adding more communication infrastructure in public education means helping to ensure that the people who need to communicate information and ideas to collaborate in young people’s success can do it.

Lots of research

2011-07-20T11:53:15Z

98.216.239.14:

Much research shows that students do better when the key people in their lives communicate about how they are doing and what they can do. We know that youth do better when they get regular feedback from teachers on their classroom performance (Hattie 2008). Teachers teach better when youth communicate how their teaching is affecting them (Jones and Yonezawa 2008/2009; http://www.tripodproject.org/index.php/about/about_background/). Parents and teachers each support children’s school progress more effectively at home when they communicate about their children’s performance in the other setting (Taveras et al 2010; Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti 2005; Lawrence-Lightfoot 2003) Administrators lead school reforms better if their staff discuss pedagogy (Daly et al, 2010) and data on student progress (Boudett et al 2005). Teachers teach better when they talk about teaching with other teachers (Daly et al 2010; Cochran-Smith and Lytle 2009).

Research on organizational learning and behavior (Spence 2009, Jewell-Sherman 2008); data-driven decision-making (Boudett et al 2005); assessment (http://www.tripodproject.org/index.php/about/about_background/), community organizing and “family engagement” (Mediratta et al 2009, Warren et al, forthcoming, Oakes and Rogers 2006; Henderson et al 2007) and youth engagement and motivation (Jones and Yonezawa 2002, 2008, 2009; www.efficacy.org) all indicates that students are served better if the people in the student’s social network communicate about how youth are doing and what they can do.

Each actor in the social network holds a useful “fund of knowledge” (Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti 2005) that would help the others serve the young person better. At any moment, each partner knows something that the others need to know in order to promote student success. If people get better information on how young people are doing and what they can do, they can better attend to the experiences of every learner, reinforce moments of success more quickly and effectively, and reduce moments of failure with more timely and appropriate intervention. Conversely, students fail when people fail to stay on top of their progress and needs, or fail to share opportunities that are available and needed. Think what happens when a parent or service provider is missing from a support team meeting and cannot provide an update, or when a youth himself is missing from class and not explaining why.

So, to partner in young people’s success, people need tools and strategies helping them to share information on the individual children they share (What does Jose love to learn? How is he doing on credits toward graduation?); on the classrooms they share (what’s the homework? Who has an idea on the assignment?), on the schools they share (what afterschool opportunities are available for children?), and on the resources and information in the city they share (where’s the free science fair?).

In any community, supporting young people requires a combination of face to face communications (like a parent-teacher meeting, an afterschool discussion between student and teacher, or a parent coffee hour where people share information and build relationships), print communications (like a handout in a backpack, a sign on the wall informing a parent of an opportunity, or or a copy of student work at a parent-teacher conference), and electronic communications (like a student checking her grades online or a parent posting a local resource on a school listserv).

Adding more communication infrastructure in public education means helping to ensure that the people who need to communicate information and ideas to collaborate in young people’s success can do it.

Lots of research

2011-07-20T11:51:00Z

98.216.239.14: Created page with 'Much research shows that students do better when the key people in their lives communicate about how they are doing and what they can do. We know that youth do better when they g…'

Much research shows that students do better when the key people in their lives communicate about how they are doing and what they can do. We know that youth do better when they get regular feedback from teachers on their classroom performance (Hattie 2008). Teachers teach better when youth communicate how their teaching is affecting them (Jones and Yonezawa 2008/2009; http://www.tripodproject.org/index.php/about/about_background/). Parents and teachers each support children’s school progress more effectively at home when they communicate about their children’s performance in the other setting (Taveras et al 2010; Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti 2005; Lawrence-Lightfoot 2003) Administrators lead school reforms better if their staff discuss pedagogy (Daly et al, 2010) and data on student progress (Boudett et al xx). Teachers teach better when they talk about teaching with other teachers (Daly et al 2010; Cochran-Smith and Lytle 2009).

Research on organizational learning and behavior (Spence 2009, Jewell-Sherman 2008); data-driven decision-making (Boudett et al 2005); assessment (http://www.tripodproject.org/index.php/about/about_background/), community organizing and “family engagement” (Mediratta et al 2009, Warren et al, forthcoming, Oakes and Rogers 2006; Henderson et al 2007) and youth engagement and motivation (Jones and Yonezawa 2002, 2008, 2009; www.efficacy.org) all indicates that students are served better if the people in the student’s social network communicate about how youth are doing and what they can do.

Each actor in the social network holds a useful “fund of knowledge” (Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti 2005) that would help the others serve the young person better. At any moment, each partner knows something that the others need to know in order to promote student success. If people get better information on how young people are doing and what they can do, they can better attend to the experiences of every learner, reinforce moments of success more quickly and effectively, and reduce moments of failure with more timely and appropriate intervention. Conversely, students fail when people fail to stay on top of their progress and needs, or fail to share opportunities that are available and needed. Think what happens when a parent or service provider is missing from a support team meeting and cannot provide an update, or when a youth himself is missing from class and not explaining why.

So, to partner in young people’s success, people need tools and strategies helping them to share information on the individual children they share (What does Jose love to learn? How is he doing on credits toward graduation?); on the classrooms they share (what’s the homework? Who has an idea on the assignment?), on the schools they share (what afterschool opportunities are available for children?), and on the resources and information in the city they share (where’s the free science fair?).

In any community, supporting young people requires a combination of face to face communications (like a parent-teacher meeting, an afterschool discussion between student and teacher, or a parent coffee hour where people share information and build relationships), print communications (like a handout in a backpack, a sign on the wall informing a parent of an opportunity, or or a copy of student work at a parent-teacher conference), and electronic communications (like a student checking her grades online or a parent posting a local resource on a school listserv).

Adding more communication infrastructure in public education means helping to ensure that the people who need to communicate information and ideas to collaborate in young people’s success can do it.

Texting/ahas

2011-07-19T15:25:41Z

98.216.239.14:

''Note: all this is being edited by teachers right now.

Tell us how you figured things out, over time.

'''Note to documenters: This is the main documentation section! Main goal is to share your “ahas.” Consider OneVille’s research questions:

* Who needs to communicate what info to whom, through which media, in order to support young people?

* Which barriers are in the way of such communication, and how might these barriers be overcome?

* How might basic tech help increase community cooperation in young people’s success, by supporting diverse students, teachers, parents, administrators, service providers, and other community members to share ideas, resources, and information and to build relationships?

Share your: COMMUNICATION AHAS. In the process of doing the work, what did the working group realize about improving communications in education?

IMPLEMENTATION AHAS. In the process of doing the work, what did the working group realize about implementing these innovations?

TURNING POINTS. Moments when you redirected the project accordingly, after a communication aha or an implementation aha.

Share visual examples and use photos or videos of people whenever you can!
-----------------------

[[Image:textingresearchday.jpeg|thumb|Students and teachers analyzing (anonymized) examples of student-teacher texts: Research Day at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, April 2011]]

[[Image:Textingjuneresearchday.jpeg|thumb|Analyzing texting again in June 2011.]]

Do a Google search for student-teacher texting and most of what you will find is fear: districts considering bans on texting or teachers quietly posting updates about their own personal experiences with trying it. Many view texting as an inappropriate mode of communication between teachers and students, for several main reasons: Even more a year ago than now, texting feels like a “youth” medium. Also, the sort of support texting could offer immediately seems particularly personal, because it really feels like a private “tube” between two people. Texting also extends the boundaries of potential communication with students outside the school day and into teachers’ own “personal lives.”

Instead of just fearing texting, we – teachers, researchers, and students -- rolled out a texting pilot explicitly with 40 students and put our joint findings on the internet. But in some ways, FC/NW is a special school: all teachers work in what Ted called “teacher-counselor mode” and expect personal support relationships as part of their job. Each teacher has a co-counseling group that meets twice a week, where he/she gets to know more about young people’s personal struggles. They work in a “triangle” “between clinician, academic, teacher-counselor, daily.” But really, teachers at FC/NW are simply encouraged by their school to build teacher-student support relationships, something every teacher has to do but may not have the time or the administrative support to do.

'''COLORED TEXT BOX: Over time, our overall COMMUNICATION AHA would be about the benefits of texting for student-teacher relationship. But we want to tell you how we got there! We taped a lot of our conversations and so we talk about ourselves in the third person (Ted and Mo, Mica and Uche).

===COMMUNICATION AHA: Texting works when you can’t reach young people any other way for time-sensitive information.===

In February, Ted used GoogleVoice this way: he got last minute info in a staff meeting that a ski trip was available to a new student he’d recently met and had been helping with math. The “kid’s voicemail was full.” So, Ted texted the student to tell him to bring needed info and a signed permission slip the next day. The student’s response? “Lots of exclamation points, ‘thank you,’” Ted said. There was now a ‘high level of communication” with the student. The exchange happened “in an 18 hour turnout” and “allowed us to make a strong connection right when he got to the school.” This was a related example:

Me: Bring in your insurance info tomorrow, the company and your policy number, with 10 bucks, yor going skiing thursday! 3:23 PM
Student: Thank you soo much ted! i will .. ill have it all tomarrow! 4:12 PM
Me: Are you going to school tomorrow? 6:59 PM
Student: Yea .. deffintly 9:36 PM
Me: Boxing club tomorrow 6:18 PM
Student: Ok .. should i bring anything? 6:41 PM
Me: Workout clothes 6:42 PM
Student: Ok .. thanks .. 7:03 PM

===COMMUNICATION AHA: Texting helps when students don’t have home phones or literally aren’t in school.===

Another student said that he lacked a home phone, so texting helped:

“Sometimes they call your house when there’s no school, but I don’t have a house phone. They might call my mom but she never picks up. If he (Ted) hadn’t texted me (about the snow day), I wouldn’t have woken up for school.”

In another case, a student who had been kicked out of school texted Ted to find out what his situation was and whether he faced expulsion.

And here’s an e.g. of texting that helped when a student was literally absent from school:

Me: Worried about you!! 8:15 PM
Student: im feeling much better now I will deff see u tmr (: 8:16 PM
Me: Good we miss you!! Can mom right a note for the last 2 days 8:17 PM
Student: she called [School admininstrator] today telling him I was out sick not truent 8:18 PM
Me: Good..see you tomorrow..and glad your feeling better!! 8:19 PM
Student: thanks 8:24 PM

===COMMUNICATION AHA: Texting can support communication about a wide variety of school issues.===

In early March, Uche and Mica got together with Mo and Ted and looked at the GoogleVoice record of all the texts. Our plan: to “pull out examples of texts that you find interesting,” to “label the “type” of communication that occurred,” and to “provide any evidence of any text’s effects on any student’s achievement/motivation/relationship with you.”

It was notable how many different school-related subjects a teacher and student could text about! So far, Mo had primarily been texting with students for wakeup calls, paperwork reminders, discussions of personal updates, updates on other students that students knew about, health check-ins, and discussions of absence. She bantered a lot with the students, too. We laughed often in the pilot about the number of exclamation points Mo tended to use in her texts!!!!!!!!

Ted had reviewed his own Google Voice record and “broke it up into categories – who talks to who about what:

(There’s) a cluster about being on time. Another about dropout prevention, kids who haven’t been to school in a long time, what can we do to transition you out of here easier. And, checkins w/ students about miscellaneous—academics, work, home, if they’re heading toward that dropout prevention category . . . Also snow days, field trips, some kids need to bring attire for electives (gym attire, skates, something they may need for the next day). back to on time, staying a full day – if kids walk out I remind them about the day before. . . . And also, jobs. Kids that want jobs.”

Ted was texting with students about absences and lateness; afterschool activity (he coached a boxing club and led a lot of trips); and for personal checkins, which then often considered academic issues. “New electives, new teachers, new schedules – some confirmations on preparations for the next day – are we going skating, to boxing club tomorrow, to bring in the right clothes.” Students were checking in with him via text about academic issues like credits, the semester change, and their discipline records. One student had texted him to ask how he was doing after a fraught interaction, and how his weekend went. A few kids had texted him for help in class. In some cases he was strongly pushing young people to attend class or keep up their motivation via text. The other texts Ted had been sending in February were “more like routine -- no school, snowstorm, ‘you haven’t been in school where are ya’ type stuff.” “Some kids don’t respond to those at all, some kids do,” he said.

Neither teacher was fielding lots of questions about schoolwork via text. Instead, they were texting more about logistics, reminders, updates, absence explanations -- and in the process, building relationships. As we read all these texts, Ted and Mo expressed surprise and satisfaction with “the language that the kids are using to thank (them)…It’s refreshing to know that they have that capability.” Some students expressed gratitude and other emotions through their texts that Ted and Mo hadn’t experienced with them in the classroom.

===COMMUNICATION AHA: We began to see that students and teachers can build personal relationships via text.===

If you judged texting by the immediate consequences of a given text, it could sometimes look unsuccessful. Ted said in February that the previous week, a doctor showed up at school for testing one of his students, but “the kid didn’t show up for school that day.” Ted texted the student at 10 (the appt was 9-11); he “texted me right back w/ what sounded like a confirmation that he was coming but then didn’t come. So that was almost a success story but not.”

Mo noted that students she texted to wake up still came late. But, the same students were using text to contact her with serious support needs, even during drug rehab placements. Mo was using her texting to support one young person with depression, so that they eventually came in to school.

Mo had a major aha in March: “Success for a depressed student in a sense is the engagement itself. Even having this exchange.” And as Ted said earlier in the year, “In some ways, it comes down to someone paying attention to them.” As Mo explained of one text she sent to a student in March, “I wanted to make her feel good before she went to bed.” And Mo reported in March that she had this talk with a student the previous day:

"I just wanna make sure you’re ok – when I text you I wanna know you’re ok, safe,” she said, adding, “we worry about you!” He had responded, “I know you guys do, I will definitely write you something.”

Over and over in the pilot, we talked about how texts showed not just connection but true caring. Students pointed out a bunch on our April Research Day:

Mo’s text to a student: “worried about you.” “It shows that she really cares,” Shelia explained.

“You had a bad day yesterday”: a particularly caring teacher “check-in.”

“you made 1 day last week” (“I like the encouragement,” said one student)

“you’re a smart kid” (“That’s really nice because some kids might feel doubt and don’t get many compliments from people,” another student said.

Mo pointed out that one student had asked Ted “how was your weekend.”

Shelia pointed out that overall, the texts could build relationship and simultaneously, the motivation to try. “You need to know [teachers] care in order to do stuff. Otherwise what’s the point in trying. If a person is ‘I’m here for you’ – you feel someone else cares, I should care too.”

In the texts below, the youth was still not in school, but a relationship was being built to get him in the next time. Note the three quick appreciative texts back after a compliment, which many students pointed out on Research Day:

Me: Hey is your mom coming in 8:20 AM
Student: Yah bro waiting for her that's y I ain't in school my G G=grandma lmao ur old 8:21 AM
Me: Not funny....lol 8:23 AM
Student: Ii hate the fact u don't apritiate my jokes 8:24 AM
Student: -_- 8:24 AM
Me: But I appreciate you:-) 8:26 AM
Student: Ahhh good made my morning 8:31 AM
Student: =) 8:32 AM
Student: Lol jk jk idc 8:32 AM
Me: Awwwww 8:33 AM

Similarly, in the texts below it was of course not the actual medical help Ted offered via text that could be supportive to the student, but the caring itself:

Hey I dont think im going to come to school tomorw im wicked sick 7:19 PM
Have a glass of o.j. and drink water often. Get some rest, and you'll feel great in the morning, ready for school 7:44 PM
Ive been doing that all day and it hasnt helped one bit 7:58 PM
Lets have a good full 1/2 day tomorrow 9:31 PM
Idont know if im goin to school tomorrow 9:46 PM
You haven't been putting consecutive full days together, push yourself to improve, you can do it! 9:49 PM

===COMMUNICATION AHA: Fundamental academic support, personal support, and light banter can occur in the same conversation.===

Just as in face to face conversation, there’s no either/or.

Here’s an exchange that went from a basic schedule update, to a communication about stickers (Somerville “Villen” gear), to fundamental questions about school deadlines:

Me: No school tomorrow 7:09 PM
Student: -_- aww .... Hey do you have any villen stickers by any chance :) jw 7:11 PM
Me: Haha, no 7:12 PM
Student: Aww :( .... I wish there was school tommorrow .... Hey do you think the school will extend the add drop day .... Like give us another week for add drop o 7:16 PM
Student: r no...??? Jw 7:16 PM
Me: Not sure 7:16 PM
Student: Okaii well I hope you have a nice day or two off :) 7:17 PM
Me: Thanks you too 7:19 PM
Student: Ill try -_- ..... :) 7:20 PM

Communications that started about serious school status questions could then turn into banter that was both joking and academically important:

Student: Ted do u kn how long I am suspened for 9:41 PM
Me: [Principal] wanted to have a meeting this week, I will call you tomorrow, sorry so late 10:48 PM
Student: No I kn that I just need to kn wen is the meeting 10:49 PM
Student: Thow 10:54 PM
Me: [Student,] do you still have the math book I gave you for homework? If you do let me know and [teacher] too 2:38 PM
Student: Ya I do 2:59 PM
Me: Use it! 3:27 PM
Student: Ok. I will 3:31 PM

Another text exchange between Ted and a student mixed banter and serious stuff:

X: I just left my house right now so I'm going to b late 7:47 AM
Me: And I need to know this? 7:48 AM
Me: Hurry up! 7:49 AM
X: Because I don't want you to worry 7:49 AM
Me: You miss school regularly silly goose 7:51 AM
X: I came in all this week and collected points 7:54 AM
Me: Get here, we can celebrate 7:55 AM
X: Hahaha okk I'm on cross street now 7:58 A
X: Noo! almost closest ive been! 7:27 AM
Me: Good try though, we both have some studying to do over vacation 7:28 AM
X: thanks and i know my eyes will be glued to that rmv book 7:29 AM

===COMMUNICATION AHA: Texting can build a relationship for school even if you are not talking about school.===

Several students texted Ted about sports events: even one student (above with "silly goose") who had been asked to leave school a few months earlier, “texted me after lakers beat the celtics last week, at 10:30 pm”:

Student: Lol wat just happend to ur celtics 10:48 PM
Me: Ha 10:57 PM

When a HGSE student asked one of Ted’s students (who had not been responding to Ted’s texts) about whether texting with teachers was useful, he suggested that he “finds (them) useful, but I just don’t want to text back.” But, he added, he’d like to hear from Ted over the weekend once in a while, even if just to “how his weekend was going.” The student wanted to know more about Ted outside of school: for example, “is he working anywhere else, or is he just a teacher?” Talking about this non school-related stuff, the student claimed, would “make their relationship grow even stronger.”

Many students made similar statements in private interviews and group discussions. Obens, another of Ted’s students, summed up the sentiment in our April Research Day: “When you’re texting you feel like you’re closer to the teacher.” Ted agreed with Obens: “(Texting) definitely strengthens our face to face, day to day relationships.”

Folks pointed out this COMMUNICATION AHA: Texting didn’t supplant face to face conversation. Often, the text was really just a portal to a more informed face to face conversation.

For example, Ted texted a student this:

Me: I heard you had a bad afternoon at school. Check in first thing tomorrow 7:03 PM

===COMMUNICATION AHA: Texting relationships could also morph over time from banter to serious exchanges.===

In our March conversation, we realized that it actually could be very useful to a teacher to have an entire “relationship” with a young person documented via texting.

Ted’s first group text that winter prompted this response (Mica’s favorite) from a student who at first did not text at all with Ted. Later, in March, we all realized that she had built a texting and face to face relationship trusting enough that she could reveal serious personal struggles to him:

Me: A reminder that tonight is Parent-Teacher night at NW/FC. Please notify your loved one at home that teachers are at school to meet them from 6:30-7:45pm. 9:05 AM
Student: O please lol 9:10 AM

By March, this student texted Ted about a physical argument with someone; via text, Ted “said we could talk later [in person], and we did.” “She never told me that,” said Mo, adding that it showed real growth in the student-teacher relationship “That she could share something so big, with you, that she trusts you so much that she could tell you that.”

In several other cases, Mo had shown texts with a depressed or self-destructive student to the principal, to say “look, I’m really worried.”

As Ted put it, documenting a relationship helped in less crucial cases as well:

“when I’m texting a kid I creep back up to the history to see what concerns have come up in the past – helpful for me, just so I can keep it all together, keep track. To remind myself – that I would like to help them more, talk to them more frequently.” (Later in the pilot, Ted would also point out the opposite: it became a burden to look back at exchanges that were complicated, and sometimes you just wanted to start clean with a student the next day.)

Shelia agreed on our April Research Day that texts kept a relationship around with you, for later viewing. “With a phone call, it’s out of your head,” Shelia explained. “With a text message it’s still there when you turn on your phone – it still reminds you. You have to delete it if you don’t want it – it’s there to remind you.”

===COMMUNICATION AHA: Normalizing texting as something students and teachers can do makes it easier to strike up a relationship with a young person.===

Mo and Ted agreed that the OneVille Project made student-teacher texting seem normal and acceptable. In the past, for example, Ted probably would not have asked a new student for his texting number so quickly. As Mo put it, “in the past I would wait until I developed a relationship w/ the kid and then get his texting number. I would have waited to overhear a conversation about texting, then say, “oh, you text? You don’t have my number!” and then, start texting.”

Ironically, Ted noted in March that texting could immediately allow more “words” to be exchanged between student and teacher, rather than less: “One word answers [in person] with teenagers are more typical,” but via texting, “This is not one word answers. . .it’s better than “huh.” As Uche put it, “it takes more effort to text than to talk.” Ted added: “even more than they know they are giving – it might seem mindless, just chatting, and next thing you’re their friend!”

“Have good conversations,” Yose advised other teachers considering texting with students as we ended our April Research Day. “Like don’t just talk about school. Also talk about how your day’s going, stuff like that. Don’t just keep it about school.”

Ted finished our Research Day with more overall advice: “It’s up to both people to enhance the texting relationship. If the student is just responding “ok” or “yes” or “no,” that doesn’t allow the texting relationship to develop and to go towards communications that aren’t just ‘be on time.’”

===COMMUNICATION AHA: Politeness and respect while texting! Concerns about students being “inappropriate” with the channel may be overblown.===

On our April Research Day at Harvard, students read transcripts taken from Google Voice (with participants’ permission and anonymized for analysis) and were immediately perceptive about another “pattern in the data”: students and teachers were noticeably polite to each other, texting “thanks and you’re welcome” after texts about permission slips, reminders, and personal check-ins on grades or life. “The kids haven’t been crossing boundaries in any way – no one has been inappropriate,” Mo said that day.

'''VIDEO OF MO HERE FROM RESEARCH DAY?

Obens explained that for texting to be successful, you’ve got to “keep it private, clean, respectful, stuff like that.” When pushed to define respect, he suggested that students should “give the teacher the same respect you’d give them in school. Don’t think that outside you should act different.”

Ted had commented in our March review of texts on the “language the students are using in thanking us – they’re receptive to positive talk that they don’t do verbally with you.”

In person, they don’t necessarily “stop and appreciate you in moments” the way they were doing with texting.

Students were “taking the time to write back, thanking you for letting them know about something – it strengthens the relationship with us and the school.”

In Research Day, several students pointed out the following texting exchange as interesting and important in its level of student-teacher respect. Starting from an unsolicited text from student to teacher, the exchange turned into communications about “putting a grade up” in the class:

Student: Hope your alright man.sorry that happened too u 9:43 PM
Me: I'm cool, thanks tho, have a good weekend 9:47 PM
Student: Alright man have a good n 11:22 PM
Me: Everything ok? 9:30 AM
Student: Ted? 10:39 AM
Me: Yup 11:02 AM
Student: Everythings alright I guess im gonna b in tm .. Is there anything I can do to put my grade up for your class 11:05 AM
Me: Be on time tomorrow, we'll talk then. 11:06 AM
Student: Alright 11:09 AM

In February, Ted reported that “kids are testing limits w/ texting me while they are standing next to me in school, to get a reaction, not get a reaction – b/c they know they can’t use their phone in school. but they’re not abusing it or anything, they are just testing it.“

In March, Mo noted that one student whose “mouth is a gutter” had “corrected himself” after using the “n word” in a text because “he knows I would say something.” In March, Ted also noted that “A good boundary has unintentionally or intentionally been set by the kids or us – a few texts over weekend at night but didn’t start coming in at one in the morning.” Ted and Mo both agreed that kids had done basically nothing inappropriate with the texts -- as our ground rules had requested.

===COMMUNICATION AHA: The style of texts can put students and teachers “on the same level.”===

Shelia and Mo used this phrase on Research Day when looking again at Ted’s text “you need to be in school way more my friend.” Others noted on Research Day that students felt really comfortable with the medium of texting:

“Some people might feel more comfortable saying it via texting more than face to face --- because in person you might feel shy, awkward and not know what to say back,” a student said.

“I’d rather text my parents than call them,” a student added.

We noted many times over the year that texting can handle many “styles” of communication. Ted noted in March that, “Mo is more of a conversationalist with the way she is texting – mine are more announcement style, school 8 a.m. tomorrow, don’t forget boxing tomorrow, stuff they don’t have to respond to. I do that to protect myself a little bit – I don’t want to burden them or feel like I’m waiting for a response from them.” Mo added, “more an FYI type of thing.” Ted agreed: “if they have a follow up they text me back.” Still, Ted later received and sent many joking texts as well and followed up proactively and personally with many a student over the course of the pilot.

By late spring, when Mica asked Ted what his response would be “to a teacher who might say ‘banter’ or misspellings that happen via text are a problem for education,” Ted had this to say, though not all teachers would agree:

Ted: lighten up. Anyone who does text is probably aware that the spellings and capitalization and punctuation are going to be all over the place. So we might need to say, against fear of this tech, ‘get used to this -- this is not going anywhere, this is what people are doing.’ It’s almost unhealthy to fear this at this point; this is where we are going. If you want the perfect sentences, do that in an English class, but that’s not what we’re trying to do.

===COMMUNICATION AHA: The many emotions possible via text can give students and teachers a range of ways to share their feelings.===

Pointing out uses of humor in the texts, Yose made another point about how texting could add to student-teacher relationships: people could communicate even if a student was in a bad mood. A face to face conversation might end with the student “shouting” out of anger, unable to help it; with texting, you could “be mad” and still “send a funny text.” With texting you could show the recipient the “emotions” you wanted them to see, and not necessarily what you felt.

Another student elaborated relatedly from across the room: with texting, you could overcome the “intimidation” of possible “rejection” by the other person, by sending lighthearted texts across the private channel that did not have to be responded to immediately. Emotion was “easier to handle” via texts, another student said.

===COMMUNICATION AHA: Over and over, students noted that texts demonstrated caring because they demonstrated effort by both students and teachers to respond to the other. ===

Texting somebody back “shows you appreciate the person and you’re thankful they helped you out,” Shelia said. Mo added: “They appreciate (Ted, our Full Circle teacher) taking time out of his own private life to send these texts.” Obens said that texts from Ted had gotten him to school on time.

When we analyzed this next example in Research Day, the students first noted the easy but respectful banter between student and teacher (“ahhh jesus ted. Fine 8”). Then, the student who had sent these texts pointed out that he himself was putting in the time to do back and forth texting about attendance rules, and so he was showing he felt motivated to be there on time. He had “put in the effort” with responses, like “fine” and “I’ll make it [to school] by 8:10.” “I sleep a lot – but I made it before 8:10. It did help. I was used to coming in around 8:30,” he said:

Me: School 8:00am manana 7:10 PM
Student: ok boss 9:33 PM
Me: 8am! 6:19 PM
Student: Ok lol 6:22 PM
Student: 8:10? 6:22 PM
Me: Try for 7:55, and get settled with something to read mi amigo 6:24 PM
Student: That's too early ted. I'm make it before 8:10 6:25 PM
Me: Nooooooo, 8! 6:26 PM
Student: Ahhh jesus ted. Fine 8 6:43 PM
Me: Arrive late, leave early, booo 3:26 PM
Student: I made it on time 3:34 PM
Me: School starts at 8, no later 3:36 PM
Me: You can do it! 3:37 PM
Student: But to be late its 8:10 4:00 PM

Wielding her highlighter in again pointing out Ted’s text to another student (“you need to be in school way more my friend”), Shelia explained that “ I feel like it’s genuine concern.” “It shows connection,” Obens added. “It also shows courage.” He pointed out that Ted was “taking time to text people about stuff – taking time to get a person to school on time. That shows courage on the part of the teacher. Also on the student, by replying back.” Shelia agreed, adding, “It takes the courage to make that bond – from the teacher -- and also for the student to participate in the bond.”

The student above (“Ahhh jesus ted") added, “Who would want to text a teacher – there’s a lot you could be doing at that time. A lot of people won’t do it – that they do it means they really care about what they are doing.”

Ted highlighted this same point: student texts to teachers “show a level of investment. Even if (the text is) not school related, the student is checking in, making that contact, when they don’t have to. It’s really important to understand – the value of doing things not only when you have to do things.”

On Research Day, we left sure that texting had “helped” in these teachers’ classrooms but unsure how it might work in “a school of like 600,” as someone put it. Full Circle/Next Wave are particularly “personal” schools, some pointed out: “in other schools it’s less personal, you get five minutes with that teacher,” Shelia said.

We left with a question: does that sort of lack of “personal” time for face to face attention in other schools make something like texting more likely to get traction or not? More likely to help, or less?

'''These thoughts raised a key COMMUNICATION AHA:

===COMMUNICATION AHA: Texting’s time commitment shows caring and builds relationship. But it also -- takes time!===

As Ted put it in March, “if we had serious students who wanted help academically this could get out of control – multiple texts, multiple students, if students do their homework every night and want a question answered every night – so maybe structuring that with a [texting] office hours idea – [a group chat ] a couple days a week.” While computers would be most useful for serious group homework help, “texting is better b/c they don’t need a computer” and many didn’t have them to use.

Further, Ted pointed out that as with any channel, you could just choose how much support you do and don’t offer as a texting teacher.

As Ted put it re. wakeup texts, “I’m going to try not to go as far as the Next Wave (junior high) will go – I’m trying to put more responsibility on the high school student – I’m shying away from the pre-school conversation.”

Students indicated that they were indeed used to getting reminders: “I don’t like getting nagged but it’s what gets me to do stuff,” said a student.

In June, as paperwork and school’s ending takes over, texting began to feel a bit “extra” to the teachers. Mo had stopped doing daily wakeup texts with a few students for now: “The last couple months I haven’t texted as much as I did in the first half of the year,” she said. “There’s so much crap you have to do – paperwork for SPED (Special Education)– time consumed with life,” said Ted, whose wife had just had a baby. “Especially w/ the baby, I haven’t thought about texting kids that much – but I have texted them more on personal stuff b/c I haven’t been in classroom so much. Students were texting him asking “how’s your daughter . .They texted me when the Bruins won.”

While one-to-one relationship-building definitely took time, quick check-ins via text could of course also save time. Some quick check-ins otherwise simply couldn’t happen in person during busy days. Looking at one of Mo’s texts on Research Day, Yose noted, “She’s making sure the kid doesn’t get in trouble – she asks him to call his mom and stuff. She couldn’t do this face to face b/c he wasn’t in school.” Similarly, Mo pointed out a quick student request for useful information that had happened successfully via text: “hey do you think they’re gonna extend the add drop period?” In class, Oben explained, “I don’t feel like bothering (Ted) w/ those types of questions.“

In March, Mo had mentioned that to save time, she really needed a tweaked Google Voice, which typically only allows a text to a group of 5 people. Having “started out texting every Thursday for homework,” she had “got away from it b/c was a pain to do 5 and then 5 – to do all at once will make it a whole lot easier.” Ted argued in June that a texting “blast” to all of his students would save him time, once we worked out the technical kinks.

But time was still a concern in one-to-one texting -- even as for now, the relationship-building made it worth it.

We had some final “ahas” about the use of texting in public schools:

===COMMUNICATION AHA: Of course, if your support network uses your phone to reach you, you need a phone.===

Several times in the pilot, students lost phones, had their phones shut off b/c of not paying bills, or simply ran out of plan minutes. In March, Mo reported a range of “Someone who lost phone, someone who left in cousin’s car, someone who got it taken away – some shut off – [xx] owes 500 on his phone, so doesn’t have his phone any more. . .and they’re always changing numbers.”

In these cases, it was clear that economics matter in using texting for student support and that texting was hardly a foolproof method of reaching students. But this is the case regardless of whether people are using phones. And relying on phones may be more equitable in some ways than relying on people to have the flexibility to meet you for face to face meetings whenever you’re free, or, expecting them to have computers and internet access.

A student who had 78 texting minutes a month, period, put it this way to Mica:

I think I have email on my phone but I have to pay for it. I could check on my mom’s phone, she has a blackberry. If I’m near a computer. . I’ll check my facebook and then my email. [how often do you check your email?] not often. . I could try to check and let you know. . . I don’t have minutes and so I can’t text. Like when you get a cell phone it runs off of minutes, you have to pay for cell phone, internet, texts. When I have no minutes I have no text messages, no phone calls, nothing. [that’s the situation, til when?] till the 8th or 9th of April. [so If I text you you don’t even get it?] nope. . . . I don’t have a lot so it’s easy to run out – 78 minutes.

This student later got a Droid that allowed her to do texting, internet, even “edit papers.”

And students also made their own solutions within economic limits. Another student showed us his ingenious phone arrangement: to save on texting and internet charges, he carried an unactivated iphone (purchased from a friend for xx) that he used to access the internet over the school’s wifi network. He used smartphone apps for different social networks and did texting over the internet, so he was able to approximate having a full-fledged smartphone while saving money. The student also carried a prepaid phone for calls and texts.

===COMMUNICATION AHA: In our brief test of texting between HGSE students and the FC/NW students, we began to see that texting can support ongoing career mentoring, too.===

In February, we decided that the HGSE students needed a clearer “role” with the young people even just to check in with them via text on “how is texting going” or “how are you doing.” The FC/NW students also noted that a relationship was needed first before students could feel comfortable texting with new adults. Our decision: HGSE students would return with new roles as college/career readiness mentors on call as well as co-researchers.

A texting relationship really did blossom between youth and the HGSE folks who headed to the school a number of times for personal conversations (and, as one student put it, to crack a few jokes).

One HGSE student had this exchange with a student at FC/NW:

M: Im happy to help you out. What way do you think I could help you best to be successful?
S: You tell me
M: Well I think your teachers and counselor and fam and friends are a good support team. I could help w advice about graduation and college here and there
S: About geting me in 2 a gud collage for consoler for kids
S: I wonder how u get in 2 harvard
S: I need u 2 tell me where can I go and be a gud consoler wit a gud deagree

Privately, Mica had this extended conversation with one student, two months after we began:

March 15, 2011, 9:17 p.m.

M: Hey there – a mentor signed up with district but she wants to mentor in journalism carers. Not your thing, correct? Still seeking science and math person from them.
And, any questions for me on college/academic stuff? I’m always here to be asked
Student: (immediately!): Do you have any info on culinary arts.
M: I know someone starting a restaurant as a chef.
And someone else who made it as a chef in NYC
S: Do you have anything on culinary colleges?
M:I think the chef in NYC went to one. Want me to ask?
S: Yes thanks
M: What’s your email address or how would I put him in touch with you? I have to go through his dad, etc.
S: (email address deleted)
M: Ps is it chef role you are interested in or something else?
S: chef. But I’m also interested in everything actually.
M: everything in the world or everything about culinary school?
S: Culinary school. Lol
M: How about the science of food btw? There’s a course at Harvard about that; maybe google it
S: I’ll google it.
M: ((having googled it myself too)): How about this to get started too – Harvard lectures online from chefs on science and food! http://scientopia.org/blogs/everydaybiology/2011/03/03/harvard-lectures-the-science-of-cooking-and-molecular-gastronomy
S: (10:31): Awesome thanks. I’ll ttyl. Good night
((I have to google “ttyl” and learn it means “talk to you later” (!!!)))

As it turned out, she had no way to look up these links without going to school to use the computers, because her phone had no access to the internet and she had no internet-linked computer at home. Still, we began a conversation about her career interests that expanded in the months to come -- and she later got a smartphone.

Texting afforded immediate career links and also, highlighted a key IMPLEMENTATION AHA:

===IMPLEMENTATION AHA: Face to face mentoring meetings can be really hard to schedule, making texting even more sensible.===

We promised early on to bring new tutors and mentors on to students’ “teams” if they wanted them. But it took a long time to get recommendations from the district coordinator (who needed clearance from the principal and then, descriptions of students’ precise interests), and it was very hard to schedule the face to face afterschool meetings between the tutors interested and the students. One tutor was only available after 5:00 and on weekends, as she worked. And the student we were seeking this tutor for pointed out that her own work schedule at Kmart changed suddenly “every week”: she never knew how many hours she’d get and when, and she also sometimes had to work on the weekends. In the end, it took several weeks of coordinating texts, emails, and phone calls to try to get one tutor to meet 3 girls face to face in the school. After we finally set up a meeting between the tutor and the girls after school at a nearby Dunkin Donuts, just one student took the tutor up on the opportunity – after Mica sent multiple text messages urging the student to reschedule a conflict and advised the tutor via text through gridlock traffic. No better evidence that face-to-face mentoring just isn't possible all the time!

Overview and key findings: Texting for Rapid Youth Support

2011-07-19T15:05:50Z

98.216.239.14:

[[Image:sheliaphone.jpg|thumb|The joy of a cell phone for communicating whenever]]

'''Documenters: please use these categories to organize your documentation. See [[Vision for OneVille documentation]] for more discussion of what we hope the final wiki will look like and accomplish!

''Note: all this is being edited by teachers right now.

'''Note to documenters

'''Please think about OneVille's project-wide questions as you document your own project:

Who needs to communicate what info to whom, through which media, in order to support young people?

Which barriers are in the way of such communication, and how might these barriers be overcome?

How might basic tech help increase community cooperation in young people’s success, by supporting diverse students, teachers, parents, administrators, service providers, and other community members to share ideas, resources, and information and to build relationships?

==Summary==

'''(This is a bird’s eye view for the quick reader; we’ll flesh out each issue later. Briefly answer these questions with a few sentences each:)

a. Communication we hoped to improve. (What aspect of communicating about or with young people did the project address, or hope to improve?)

(Where did people want to go with the project? When did the project take place? Who was involved in the project and how was time together spent?)

b. Concrete communication improvement(s). What did the project accomplish? How did communication improve? What new support for young people may have been accomplished?

c. Main communication realizations and implementation realizations. (At this point, what's your main realization about improving communications in public education? (Say a few overall words in response to [[OneVille's research questions]], above!)
---------

Over the 2010-11 school year, we worked with two teachers and 40 young people at Somerville’s alternative middle and high school to test texting as a tool for rapid youth support. All 40 students have chosen or been forced to leave Somerville’s mainstream schools and are vulnerable to dropout. They’re also awesome young people, and great research partners!

So far, we have all been testing private texting between teachers and students and secondarily, between students and eight graduate student mentors from HGSE who helped us connect to the students to check in. We’re using Google Voice, a free service that records all of the texts in teachers’ inboxes. This allowed two researchers in the group (Uche and Mica) to review the texts (with students’ advance, overall permission), to see if texting was helpful to students and teachers. GoogleVoice also gives teachers a separate phone number, so they’re not using their personal phone.

'''COLORED TEXT BOX: Here’s our MAIN COMMUNICATION AHA: texting can provide anytime, anywhere, rapid youth support and also glue together student-teacher relationships re. academics and school. The practical benefits of being able to reach people for check-ins and questions go hand in hand with the ability to build relationships outside the school day.

In discussions throughout the year and in several focused data analysis meetings, student and teacher participants argued that texting’s key benefit was individualized, timely student support. Students argued that texts were supporting them to come to school on time, complete homework, remain aware of requirements, and participate in afterschool activities. Texting teachers and students are also having more frequent, and deepening, conversations about school commitments and life struggles, both via text and then in person. Teachers and students said they were experiencing greater trust and strengthened relationship. In reviewing texts between students and university mentors, we have seen that afterschool supporters can also use texting to build stronger relationships with students and to communicate regularly about careers, jobs, and school persistence.

Most school districts are out to regulate and restrict texting and fear student-teacher texting as somehow inappropriate. We’ve seen that texting can simply extend relationship-building and student support outside of school hours.
But this raises several overall questions for public schools. One: adults’ time. If gluing a relationship together outside of the school day helps young people do better in school, is it “worth” teachers’ time? Two: Where do the school walls end? If a teacher supports young people’s school success through wakeup texts or afterschool reminders, is this an appropriate reach into the home or out of the classroom? Three: appropriate student-teacher relationships. If good teaching requires real relationships between students and teachers – a form of friendship with role boundaries-- how can they communicate via today’s most “friendly” media but still within age- and role-appropriate bounds of partnership? It may be that we need to redefine “appropriate” student-teacher relationships in the digital age: as Shelia, age 17, put it in this pilot, texting definitely put students and teachers more “on the same level.” Texting was definitely a “youth medium” when we started, but it may not be for long!

In Phase 1, we’ve seen student-teacher texting after and before school take off successfully with middle and high school youth. We'd now like to test ways to enable youth and a "team" of their chosen supporters (including afterschool providers, peers, and family members) to communicate about any topic via rapid group texting.

We’ve augmented Google Voice with group texting software made with the Twilio API, to afford teacher-whole class and group “team” messaging. (with regular Google Voice, you can only text 5 people at a time.) Before we tweak that further as an open source tool any school could adapt, we’re going to try xxx to see if group texting even works for people. So, in fall 2011, we’ll be continuing teacher-student texting and starting teacher-full class texting with GoogleVoice, and testing group texting between chosen “teams” of supporters around individual youth. We’ll see how and if multiple supporters take the opportunity for rapid communications about students’ personal needs.

==Communication we hoped to improve==

'''Say more. What aspect of existing communication did we hope to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success?
------
In the texting pilot, we wanted to enable supporters in each young person’s life to communicate rapidly with the young person and each other about how young people were doing personally and academically, and what supports they might need to be more successful -- from both the students' and stakeholders' perspectives. Our vision was to support an entire “team” in rapid communication. When we decided to try texting as a rapid communication tool, we started with student-teacher texting and planned to add in new “team” members over the year. We ended up finding student-teacher texting so fruitful that we stayed with it for the entire year. We’ll add next “team” members in fall 2011!

There is often a gap in such rapid communications in schools: people don’t always have time to meet face to face to discuss students’ needs and experiences. Increasingly, people don’t have (or answer!) home phones. Often, teachers don’t know how youth are doing outside of school; tutors don’t know what youth have to work on; parents are unaware of school goings-on, and more. All this in an era when technology could make rapid communication more normal than ever in schools!

It is cell phones that are with us all day. Cell phones allow people to always be connected and available. Texting and other mobile text based communications give people even more control over when and where they communicate. In theory, people can review and respond to texts at their leisure--be it in the evening from home, or over the weekend after sports practice. They can fit communications to their schedules. At the same time, a text is particularly hard to ignore -- which is why in summer 2010, Somerville students told us to try texting for rapid youth support.

==Process: How did the project change and grow over time?==

'''How we realized and redirected things. Two sections, one short and the second long:
------

[[Image:textingteachersteam.jpg|thumb|Mo and Ted, texting teacher pioneers, with Uche and Mica. . .and donuts]]

===Basic History===

The groundwork needed to support the current work.
-------
Design based research is usually about proceeding in very clear “stages” to test something. Our work proceeded in stages but in a more rolling manner, based on ongoing reactions to students’ and teachers’ ideas, interests and efforts.

Throughout this pilot, though, we kept our core questions constant. Who needs to quickly share which information with whom, to support a young person? What are the barriers to that communication, and how might those be overcome? How might texting support needed communications?

We started working on a tech strategy for ongoing youth support in a OneVille-organized afterschool club involving 4th-6th graders at the K-8 Healey School in 2009-10, and then in Somerville’s summer school 2010, with two high school classes of SHS teacher Sabrina Trinca.

In both cases, we learned that media was inherently attractive to youth but it wasn’t enticing if it wasn’t social enough yet. Students in the afterschool club wanted to go on Wee World (http://www.weeworld.com/), where all their local and online friends already were, instead of use our private social network to talk about school. So, we realized that students were used to rapid personal, supportive communications, but that it would be difficult to form a new social network for these without a critical mass of interested members. (One successful exception were “vlogs,” where students spoke into a Flip camera or iPhone video to an intended audience of teachers and administrators about strategies that supported their learning in class. Students took immediately to the medium! [LINK TO VIDEO HERE!]). This thread took off later in the ePortfolio project, where SHS teachers and students realized that certain types of questions about student skills could get students “flowing” in talking about their learning online.)

In summer school 2010, we again tried supporting young people to communicate with each other via a new private social network. Where the previous network was created for a loosely connected group of mixed grade students in a new after school club, this network was created for two summer school classrooms with the explicit purpose of helping the teacher communicate with students daily for six weeks about class and homework. Still, it didn’t work: there still wasn’t enough reason to “go there”! Because the network was computer based, many of the students--who didn’t have computers or internet access--were limited in their ability to connect outside of class time. But beyond this technical obstacle, many of the students also expressed limited interest in interacting with the teacher or peers on class topics via a computer, even when available. There simply weren’t enough online school activities yet to draw them naturally to a separate online site. (Again, the eportfolio project may solve this chicken and egg problem by prompting lots of online assignments, leading students to go online for work and conversations.)

We decided to spend time talking to Trinca’s students about the overall support communications they had normally and how those communications could be improved. We found that:

1) Students focused on connecting with people that they felt close to, regardless of whether those people were “best” placed to provide them with resources and/or help. One student looked for help from his teacher from the previous year on history assignments instead of seeking out his current history teacher, simply because he connected with the previous year’s teacher better.

2) Besides parents, guardians, peers, and key school personnel, students valued connecting (virtually or not) with “older buddies,” near peer mentor-like figures that would advise them on matters both personal and academic.

3) Students told us that they used different technologies to interact with different people. For example, they might talk to their parents over the phone, hang out with their best friend in real life (what some people today call “IRL”!) and text message with individual friends or classmates.

'''ADD GRAPHIC HERE FROM THE SURVEYMONKEY

Also, the students expressed that they preferred texting, phone, and talking in person over other methods such as email, IM, and even Facebook--even though many of them had Facebook accounts. Students told us that texting was the best way for anyone, including teachers, to reach them rapidly and a natural way for them to communicate back. The students initially expressed skepticism at interacting with teachers over the medium, because it was what they typically used with friends. But in the end, they agreed that it was the most reliable way to contact them. So we decided to try assembling texting “teams” around kids one member by one, by starting with student-teacher texting.

A big aha came from a first fumble: at one administrator’s advice, we first asked a “cluster” of teachers at Somerville High if they wanted to work with us to test texting. (Some of these teachers would go on to be key leaders of the ePortfolio project!) The teachers worried that the use of texting between students and teachers might break a longstanding and to them, necessary boundary between the formal/academic classroom sphere and each group’s private, informal social lives. The teachers also thought that using texting to remind students of events, help them with homework, and other transactional uses could result in “babying” the students. These were high school students, they argued, and as such should not need or be given such basic assistance. They also worried about supporting poor grammar and inappropriate language in texts.

We then called Mr. Willey, principal at FC/NW, who had already told us months earlier that he had major trouble reaching his youth’s parents and supporters and at times, youth themselves. He agreed immediately that young people seemed more likely to pick up texts than any other form of communication. He invited us to come in and talk to his teachers, and Mica and Uche gave a basic presentation where we discussed what students had said about texting as a key channel for youth support. One of the teachers around the table was Ted. “When can we start?” Ted asked. He and Mo, respectively high school and middle school teachers at Full Circle/Next Wave, were excited to try it out, and we began.

'''MAJOR IMPLEMENTATION AHA/TURNING POINT: go with those who are excited. In terms of motivation, it’s crucial to work with people who really want to communicate in a particular way! They are most likely to innovate the new piece of communication infrastructure.

Rather than put an entire “team” together at once, we decided to start with private student-teacher communication. In January 2011, Mo and Ted and we held an open meeting with all of their students to see who would be interested. We brainstormed ground rules (e.g., don’t expect a text back before 7 and after 10 p.m.; no inappropriate language; no sharing of anyone else’s business), gave students the teachers’ new GoogleVoice numbers, invited students to share their numbers with teachers, and invited them all to text whenever they wanted. GoogleVoice recorded all of the texts for the teachers and allowed them to type from their computers (Mo and Ted still mostly used their phones). Young people received texts on their phones.

Note: Unlike in our ePortfolio pilot, where the goal was to create ePortfolios that would succeed and stick, we decided in this case not to “make sure texting works, by doing whatever is necessary to make it work.” Instead, we wanted to explore how teachers and students would use (or NOT use) texting in youth support, if they were just explicitly invited to text for school-related communication. We also wanted to know if some series of communications made a young person more connected to school or more successful academically.

Some students already texted teachers at the school (“If I'm having problems at home I text Maureen, or Maryanne or Edith,” one student told us; she did this rather than have her own parents “"know her business."). Some had never texted teachers before and found the idea weird. Texting to them felt like something you did with friends or relatives. But as students would tell us later in June, there were two kinds of texting relationships with teachers that felt OK – businessy ones for school related things you had to get done, and more revealing personal texts sent to people you really trusted.

So, in a nutshell, we offered the channel and waited to see what everyone would do with it. We didn’t push any particular use of the texting, but instead kept talking about actual uses. Mo, Ted, and the students became a research team with Uche, Mica, and the HGSE students, together exploring the use of texting in rapid youth support. We put our Ford support resources into stipending teachers $25/hr (2 hrs/week max) for their time piloting the tool, paying kids back with food and $25/each for a formal ‘research day,’ and supporting Uche to coordinate the pilot; for course credit, HGSE students checked in on the students and acted as anytime mentors for young people with questions or thoughts they wanted to share via texts. We also agreed to line up tutors or mentors for anyone who wanted one and did for several students—though as we mention later, logistics and low interests later fizzled that plan.

We held regular conversations with students and teachers to analyze how the texting was going for them. Eight HGSE students informally interviewed the FC/NW students a few times a month, over donuts; Uche and Mica talked with Ted and Mo, Uche texted regularly with Ted and Mo himself, and Mica took a “team” of students on as a texting partner. All were invited to analyze the texting conversations together in two research events, the first held at Harvard and the second held at the FC/NW building.

===Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!===

'''Over the course of the project, we had the following communication and implementation ahas, and project turning points. An “aha” refers to the moments when we said “Aha! we’ve figured out something really helpful!” Or, “Aha! Now we understand!” “Turning points” refer to moments when we used these ahas to make changes to our work. To read the full accounting (our main documentation of this project!), see main article: [[Texting/ahas]]

==Findings/Endpoints==

'''Please describe final outcomes and share examples of final products, with discussion! Three sections below:

===Concrete communication improvements===

'''What is the main communication improvement we made? What new support for young people may have resulted?
-------
We have successfully supported a pilot of student-teacher texting and have dozens of students and more teachers excited about continuing. The principal is interested in exploring texting with more of his teachers. And both students and teachers say that we’ve all demonstrated that texting is a possible tool for serious school support that mixes personal support, academic support, and everyday banter.

===Main communication realizations and implementation realizations===

'''At this point, what's your main realization about improving communications in public education? (Give us your main thoughts on [[OneVille’s research questions]]. What big changes would you recommend re. improving the “communication infrastructure” of public education, so that more people can collaborate in student success?)

What’s the main thing you’d recommend to other communities or schools implementing similar innovations? (What would you expand or do differently were you to do this again?)

What do you plan to do next?
-------
We want to repeat two core “ahas” we stated earlier:

'''Here’s our MAIN COMMUNICATION AHA: texting can provide anytime, anywhere, rapid youth support and also glue together student-teacher relationships re. academics and school. The practical benefits of being able to reach people for check-ins and questions go hand in hand with the ability to build relationships outside the school day.

'''MAJOR IMPLEMENTATION AHA: go with those who are excited. In terms of motivation, it’s crucial to work with people who really want to communicate in a particular way! They are most likely to innovate the new piece of communication infrastructure.

Texting is of course not a panacea for other needed youth supports. But it can definitely help. At our April Research Day, students noted that texts could get a student to come in on time; to focus on his classes; to care. Obens summed it up, arguing for “continuing” the texting the following year: “it shows connection. It’s really helpful --- it gets you like focused in school. It puts your mind on something and gets you focused. I’m passing (Ted’s) class – it gets you focused on this schoolwork. Like when Ted told me [via text] that I gotta come to school on time, get some reading credits – I started pushing myself, getting credits. That really helps.”

Later in the school year, Obens would point out that texting got him to school, but couldn’t keep him focused in class – that was his next frontier for self-improvement.

One student made clear that student-teacher texting was a start, but next “links” in her life were needed: “She has been building a better relationship w/ Ted via texting. Dad doesn't have a phone, she says, and she doesn't want Ted texting him. Dad doesn't text, but she does seem to lean on him for some support. Girlfriends not helpful to her for graduation she says. She doesn't know how to apply to college, either. No guidance counselor??”

But, we have realized so far that texting is a very natural and important channel not only for check-ins and updates not possible during the school day, but for a key, perhaps ultimate support: building a relationship between student and teacher or adult mentor.

'''Next COMMUNICATION QUESTION: Is the privacy and personal nature of communication via one-to-one text a key to its use for rapid student support? If so, can a group text together for youth support, or not?

We grappled with this core issue of privacy in envisioning our next step, texting “teams”: Which communications should be private, which public to the “team”? As Ted put it, “which communications should go to parents? Which to kids? which to both? He wants to honor the kids’ sense of privacy.” Ted was interested at the beginning in adding parents to the tool. As we wrote in January 2011,

“Ted definitely thinks we should have parents on. He wants to get more parents in w/ the tool. He thinks it won’t happen w/ all the kids, but would like to push to get more parents hooked in.”

Later, he would be more convinced of the need for private student-teacher communication. As one student said, she was up for texting teachers but not for having her mom aware of her school related “business.” Mo raised the same question in late spring 2011, envisioning mistakenly sending a text about “your teen pregnancy!” to a student’s mom.

Earlier in the year, Ted had noted that digital communication of any type could be “forever,” especially if the recipient forwarded it: staff as well as students already warned students that, “when you send it out there, it’s forever. Don’t send anything you wouldn’t want your mother to see.”

Throughout the pilot, one-to-one texting continued to feel particularly private -- which was, perhaps, why so much relationship-building was possible over it. At the same time, the privacy of one-to-one texting is exactly what scares some teachers about it. Ted noted the benefits of private messaging throughout the pilot but also said in June that, “One thing that concerns me with the benefits of privacy is the risk that comes with it. The more private it is, the more risk because there’s evidence of [the communication and, the student need] going on . . .”

It was also unclear when keeping information private was helpful and harmful. For example, Ted was texting one boy who was checking in on his brother’s appearance in school; the brother had left home for school that morning but hadn’t shown up. “Now looking back on it, should I be sharing that example w/ his brother?” Ted asked aloud. “‘We’re much looser around here, in a regular public school they might not share that information.” Still, to support students fully, it often felt necessary to tell person A about an issue facing person B. As Mica wrote to herself in February after a group conversation that followed texts with several individual girls, “note: several times in this conversation I felt the need to tell others in the school, things that I was texting about w/ an individual kid, so that others could be pulled in for the collective support.”

This will remain our core inquiry in Phase 2 as we move forward to actually test “team” texting. Who needs to share which information with whom on the “team,” and can a group texting tool support a complex “team” conversation?

The principal is interested in expanding teams to include other current and former teachers within the school. For some students, a parent would be problematic to have on a “team”; for others, it could be helpful. Interns there briefly, then gone after a while, would be less useful on a team, he thought. While many teachers didn’t know how to use a cell phone, some were newly starting to text. We joked that maybe the principal himself would start using our texting “blast” to message his entire staff!

When we asked who they’d want on their “teams,” young people suggested a range of people, from parents to best friends to inspiring older buddies who were “making it” in work and school (one student mentioned such a “get it done person” cousin who was a role model). Some wanted adults who had inspired them at summer jobs, or counselors or teachers also at the school. While we’d love to get local youth workers on students’ “teams” so they too can learn first hand the potential of texting for rapid youth support, we’ve learned by now that you can’t just add people in and start texting – real relationship building gets texting started and texting takes the relationship further. So, we’re going to go with youth-constructed teams as planned and we’ll see where they take it.

Again, we’ll offer youth and “team” the channel and learn together what they do with it!

===Technological how-tos===

'''Describe "how to" use every tool you used, so that others could do the same. Describe "how to" make every tool you made!
-----
SETH AND UCHE ADD HERE

Setting up Google Voice (screen shots, etc.!) IT'D BE COOLEST IF TED OR MO DESCRIBED THIS, FROM A TEACHER'S PERSPECTIVE. MAYBE THEY/UCHE COULD DO A POWERPOINT WITH A VOICEOVER?

Google Voice: Google Voice is a free web based phone and text messaging service provided by Google. With Google Voice, teachers can view and send texts from a computer without incurring texting charges. Teachers can also view texts arranged by student or time, and easily search through their history of texts. Teachers can also choose to have the service forward any texts received to their phones’ regular text messaging accounts. Or, they can check those messages directly on their phones via smartphone apps.

Google Voice also provides a separate phone number that teachers can give out to students. The use of a separate number helps preserve the privacy of teachers’ personal phone numbers. This separate number, coupled with some of the service’s advanced features, such as number blocking, provide the teacher with an added sense of privacy and security. Finally, we chose the Google Voice service because it allowed multiple people—teacher and researchers—access to the same account, providing a general transparency and accountability and allowing Uche and Mica as researchers to review the teachers’ text communications by agreement.

The simplest add on to Google Voice so far was to create a one to many “blast” that the teachers could use to message their entire class. (SETH EXPLAIN HERE?)

Using the Twilio API, Seth then created a many to many group “chat” tool that we came over time to call a “reply to all” tool. Technologically, it was hard for Seth to quickly create a tool where people could choose to text some in the “team” but not others. A student already noted that getting your own text back in group chat felt a bit weird. Kinks to be worked out! In the meantime, before we seriously tweak an open source version, we’ll test xxx software just to see if group texting even works in personal terms!

===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live===

'''If you wanted to replicate any of this, what would you need to think about? Contact us to learn/talk more!
-------------
Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to tackle similar things in your school:

In your school, when students have personal questions or needs, are there ways for them to rapidly reach their supporters?

Could texting help with rapid youth support? What are your reservations about texting, and how might these be addressed?

Overview and key findings: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network

2011-07-08T18:24:56Z

98.216.239.14:

NOTE: THIS NEEDS COLOR (COLORED TEXT BOXES AROUND EVERY "AHA"), PHOTOS, INTERVIEW CLIPS, AND MORE GOOD QUOTES! AND IT'S STILL TOO WORDY

==Summary==

'''Note to documenters: In this summary, quickly tell the reader a, b, and c:

a. Communication we hoped to improve. (What aspect of communication did we hope to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success?)

b. Main communication improvement(s). (What is the main communication improvement we made? What new support for young people may have resulted?)

c. Main communication realization. (What's your main realization about needed improvements to the communication infrastructure of public education? Who needs to communicate what information to whom, through which media, in order to support youth in a diverse community? Which barriers are in the way of such communication, and how might these barriers be overcome?)

------------------

The Parent Connector Network was a key 2010-11 effort of an overall Working Group exploring Schoolwide Communication. In this Working Group, we have been working to help ensure that all parents in a multilingual and class-diverse school can access important information about and from their school and share ideas with other parents. Over the course of two years, we met parents particularly committed to improving communication in their K-8 school and continuously pulled them into this Working Group.

In the past year, we have particularly worked to include immigrant parents in this loop of school info and input. We focused on creating a "Parent Connector Network," in which bilingual parents ("Connectors") use phones, Googleforms, and a hotline to help get information to and from more recently immigrated parents who speak their language.

We now are working with 3 Spanish-speaking, 3 Portuguese-speaking, and 2 Haitian Creole-speaking Connectors. Each Connector is asked to call approximately 10 other families once a month, to share key information from the principal/school and to ask questions about any issues parents are facing. The Connectors are also on call for questions from these parents at any time.

The Connectors have also become key innovators of translation and interpretation infrastructure schoolwide. We spent late spring 2011 finishing a [["infrastructure" for low-cost translation and interpretation in a school|full list of components of such infrastructure!]]

UPLOAD THAT AS JPEG

We've had countless ahas about improving schoolwide communications, and particularly, about improving the infrastructure for interpretation and translation.

(COLORED TEXT BOX: Here's ONE MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION from the Parent Connector Network: improving translation and interpretation in a multilingual school and district in part requires getting more organized about effectively using a key local resource: bilingualism.

==Communication we hoped to improve==

Say more. What aspect of communication did we want to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success?
------------------------

At Somerville’s Healey School (K-8), as in many U.S. schools, parents hail from across the globe and speak many languages. In addition to barriers of language, disparities in tech access, tech training, and time -- and gaps in personal relationship and connections -- keep parents from being equally informed about school issues, events, and even educational opportunities. Throughout the schoolwide communication working group, we operated from a central principle already core to the Healey School: a child can’t be educated as effectively if parents aren’t included as key partners in the project. So, we reasoned, schools should ensure equal access to school information and dialogue, in order to promote inclusive participation in school life.

Because language barriers particularly exclude parents from full participation, the Parent Connector Network has focused on reaching out to parents who speak the district's 3 main languages other than English: Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole.

Begun in earnest in Winter 2011, the Parent Connector Network is a parent-led effort (in partnership with school administrators and staff) to support translation and parent-school relationships, by connecting bilingual parents (“Connectors”) to more recently immigrated parents via a phone tree. The Connectors have come to also use Google forms/Google spreadsheets, and a multilingual hotline we made, to help ensure that information reaches immigrant and low-income families who share a school.

We've also been working to build personal relationships between bilingual parents and immigrant parents in order to bring more voices into school debates and more people into school events and leadership, as well as help the school to respond more quickly to parent needs.

Because each innovation the Connectors started needed other components to work effectively, we have come to think in terms of creating an "infrastructure" for low-cost translation and interpretation in a school. Over the 2010-11 school year, we've been fleshing out a full list of such systemic supports. The Parent Connector Network is a key component, but it's not the only one!

==Process==

How we realized and redirected things, over time.

===Basic History===

The groundwork needed to support the current work.

--------

As a multilingual group of parents (a few of whom speak only English), it has taken us two years to fully understand the barriers in the way of English learners' participation in English-dominant schools, and the full communication "infrastructure" necessary to include more immigrant parents as full partners in the project of supporting young people.

Before we started creating the Parent Connector Network in Winter 2011, we worked with families and teachers in several other design efforts to improve parent-school and parent-parent connections more broadly. Work to shape the Parent Connector Network actually began in Reading Night, our Parent Dialogues, and the Multilingual Coffee Hour, which we now lump together as initial innovation efforts of the Schoolwide Communication Working Group.

In 2009 when we began our work, the K-8 Healey had 4 historically separated programs: a magnet K-6 program drawing disproportionately middle-class families from Somerville; a "Neighborhood" K-6 program disproportionately enrolling low income and immigrant families living around the school, including from the housing development a few steps away; a Special Education program, also disproportionately enrolling low income students of color and immigrants; and a middle school (7-8).

With parents from across the first three programs in a Kindergarten hallway at the Healey, we began in fall 2009 creating Reading Nights to link parents in face to face efforts to share information on reading with young children. (PHOTOS) Several of these parents formed the early core of the parents who would continue to work on schoolwide communication for two straight years. We worked together on a multilingual coffee hour, and some parent dialogues. Finally, a subset of bilingual parents forged forward on the Parent Connector Network. From the beginning, we wrestled with the particular issue of connecting English-speaking parents and staff with speakers of other languages. Over time, we realized the particular need for improving the communication infrastructure for translation and interpretation and focused full force on the Parent Connector Network in winter/spring 2011.

===Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!===

Over the course of the project, we had the following communication and implementation ahas, and project turning points. To read the full accounting, see main article: [[Parent connector network/ahas]]

==Findings/Endpoints==

Please describe final outcomes and share examples of final products, with discussion!

===Concrete communication improvements===

What is the main communication improvement we made? What new support for young people may have resulted?

----------------------

We are proud to say that the Parent Connector vision and project is now part of the unified Healey School's school site plan. We have a core of volunteer Connectors making calls and ready for fall, and we have two great leaders, one of whom, already a Creole-speaking staff member, we hope will be supported by the school 10 hrs/week as a part-time parent liaison to handle parent needs forwarded by the Connectors and to handle the information translation process we’ve come up with.

INFRASTRUCTURE JPEG HERE.

We are finishing our hotline so that Translators of the Month can easily upload updates and, we are honing a Googledoc for collecting schoolwide information for them to translate. We’re also teaming up with the PTA, who will begin to offer email training/listserv enrollment to parents to address this key barrier to schoolwide communication.

===Main communication realizations and implementation realizations===

What is your main realization about needed improvements to the communication infrastructure of public education? (Who needs to communicate what information to whom, through which media, in order to support youth in a diverse community? Which barriers are in the way of such communication, and how might these barriers be overcome?)

What is your main realization about implementing these innovations in education?

(ADDING QUESTION HERE FROM BELOW: What would you expand or do differently were you to do this again?)

-----------------------------

MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: All schools need systems for getting information to everyone; diverse schools particularly do. Structural improvements can help include everyone and send the message that everyone is to be included.

The Healey School enrolls a full U.S. range of families. Some are middle-class parents who email the principal and Superintendent constantly; some are left out of the most basic communications of schooling. Some parents have no computers and no internet. One parent told her Connector she’d been trying for a year to meet with her child’s teacher. A listserv has long enrolled only some. Robocalls home go in four languages; handouts home often don't. For many, parent teacher conferences require interpreters, and scheduling those interpreters itself is a structural communication problem.

Time is also key to school-home communication: some families have time to volunteer countless hours during the school day. In contrast, one Portuguese-speaking dad we knew of worked such long hours he didn't even have time to come to school to post a sign saying he wanted to pay someone to help him drive his daughter to school after he left for work. His "Connector" made the sign for him.

Communication from school to home is a huge issue in any diverse school, particularly across boundaries of language and tech access/training.

Today, getting information to all families and get input from all families requires using some technology that isn’t so complicated it keeps parents out. It also requires creating a thoughtful infrastructure tapping (and in some cases, paying for) a key local resource: bilingualism. The principal made clear that he needs to think in terms of “systems” for translation. Commitment to fully including all parents is key, but structural disorganization certainly can block communication too.

MAIN IMPLEMENTATION REALIZATION: Overall, we’ve learned that committed and diverse parents can be expert innovators of school infrastructure for including all parents because they have a full range of experiences from which to brainstorm those supports. The Connectors themselves are a key local resource, as people willing to be on call to answer other parents' questions in their language and to monthly share information that requires additional explanation.

Together, the Connectors (with advice from many other parents and staff consulted over the two years) fleshed out other [[components of the necessary “infrastructure”]] to make schoolwide translation efficient, and to make the Connectors' volunteer role not overly time-consuming. We’re using a Googledoc as one organized place where the principal and school leaders put info that most needs translation each month; Google spreadsheets for lists of approved parent numbers; and some Google forms for Connectors to record parents’ needs. We’re experimented with robocalls home, using the district’s existing system for school-home calls (ConnectEd), but targeting the calls to be specific to language groups and at times, recorded by friendly parent voices.

MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: A key issue we addressed was the line between translation/interpretation that bilingual parents can/will do as volunteers to serve their community, and when the district has to pay professionals. A parent in a federally funded district has a civil right to translation and interpretation if she needs it to access important parent information (including at parent-teacher conferences). But all districts are strapped for money and bilingual skills are true community resources. Some of this may be simply about organizing resources most effectively. Turlock Unified School District in California has a model where parents are trained and paid as professional interpreters and translators. Somerville’s Welcome Project already trains young people this way in their LIPS program, to translate at public events (http://www.welcomeproject.org/content/liaison-interpreters-program-somerville-lips). But adults are most comfortable with certain one on one communications from other adults. So, we’ve been exploring a combination of volunteer efforts to “connect” to other parents and more streamlined staff efforts to then address individual parents’ needs.

MAIN IMPLEMENTATION REALIZATION: Our final aha of the year was that the core "loop" of communication on serious parent needs may have to be covered by paid staff, freeing volunteers to be friends, info-sharers and connectors to paid staff. Volunteers shouldn't be asked to ensure that parents get Special Education services for their kids or legal assistance for their families; paid staff in any district should be on top of such 'case management.' So, how can districts create a hybrid of volunteer and paid roles? TBD next fall!

MAIN IMPLEMENTATION REALIZATION: Nothing can stop a creative group of committed parents.

===Technological how-tos===

Describe "how to" use every tool you used, so that others could do the same. Describe "how to" make every tool you made!

------------------
As a group of non-technologists, [[Googleform]] and [[Googlespreadsheet]] setup took us a bit of learning!

[[Hotline]] setup was a task for Seth. In April, we were still sitting at Seth’s computer talking into it, or, those of us with Audacity on our computers could record from home and send Seth the files. Over the summer, we xxxxx. SETH ADD HERE!

===Things we’d expand/do differently===

OR, REPLACE WITH, ===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live”

If you wanted to replicate any of this, what would you need to think about? Contact us to learn/talk more!

-Consider the current and needed schoolwide communication infrastructure at your school. Can everyone who needs to get and share important school information, get and share it? If not, what barriers are in the way and how can those be overcome?

-How can local bilingualism be treated as a key resource?

-How can you organize volunteers to pitch in on translation and interpretation in a way that doesn't take much of their time?

-What tech training do volunteers need? What relationships do they need to form with each other so the work is personally rewarding?

-How could you make the translation/interpretation/parent liaison efforts an efficient task of school staff? (In our case, we streamlined a way of getting school information out to everyone and then argued for one of our Connectors to be made a staff liaison/Lead Connector for 10 hrs/week. Her part-time job will include running the Connector project!)

Overview and key findings: Texting for Rapid Youth Support

2011-07-08T11:10:12Z

98.216.239.14: /* Basic History */

[[Image:sheliaphone.jpg|thumb|The joy of a cell phone for communicating whenever]]

'''Documenters: please use these categories to organize your documentation. Please see the drafted [[Parent connector network]] page for explanation of each category. See [[Vision for OneVille documentation]] for more discussion of what we hope the final wiki will look like and accomplish!

==Summary==

'''(Note to documenters: In this summary, quickly tell the reader a, b, and c:
'''a. Communication we hoped to improve. (What aspect of communication did we hope to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success?)

'''b. Main communication improvement(s). (What is the main communication improvement we made? What new support for young people may have resulted?)

'''c. Main communication realization. (What's your main realization about needed improvements to the communication infrastructure of public education? Who needs to communicate what information to whom, through which media, in order to support youth in a diverse community? Which barriers are in the way of such communication, and how might these barriers be overcome?)'''
---------

Over the 2010-11 school year, we worked with two teachers and 40 young people at Somerville’s alternative middle and high school to test texting as a tool for rapid youth support. All 40 students have chosen or been forced to leave Somerville’s mainstream schools and are vulnerable to dropout. They’re also awesome young people, and great research partners!

So far, we have all been testing private texting between teachers and students and secondarily, between students and eight graduate student mentors from HGSE who helped us connect to the students to check in. We’re using Google Voice, a free service that records all of the texts in teachers’ inboxes. This allowed two researchers in the group (Uche and Mica) to review the texts (with students’ advance, overall permission), to see if it was helpful to students and teachers. GoogleVoice also gives teachers a separate phone number, so they’re not using their personal phone.

'''COLORED TEXT BOX: Here’s our MAIN COMMUNICATION AHA: texting can provide anytime, anywhere, rapid youth support and also glue together student-teacher relationships re. academics and school. The practical benefits of being able to reach people for check-ins and questions go hand in hand with the ability to build relationships outside the school day.

In discussions throughout the year and in several focused data analysis meetings, student and teacher participants argued that texting’s key benefit was individualized, timely student support. Students argued that texts were supporting them to come to school on time, complete homework, remain aware of requirements, and participate in afterschool activities. Texting teachers and students are also having more frequent, and deepening, conversations about school commitments and life struggles, both via text and then in person. Teachers and students said they were experiencing greater trust and strengthened relationship. In reviewing texts between students and university mentors, we have seen that afterschool supporters can also use texting to build stronger relationships with students and to communicate regularly about careers, jobs, and school persistence.

Most school districts are out to regulate and restrict texting and fear student-teacher texting as somehow inappropriate. We’ve seen that texting can simply extend relationship-building and student support outside of school hours. But this raises several overall questions for public schools. One: adults’ time. If gluing a relationship together outside of the school day helps young people do better in school, is it “worth” teachers’ time? Two: Where do the school “walls” end? If a teacher supports young people’s school success through “wakeup texts” or afterschool reminders, is this an appropriate “reach” into the home or out of the classroom? Three: appropriate student-teacher relationships. If good teaching requires real relationships between students and teachers – a form of friendship with role boundaries-- how can they communicate via today’s most “friendly” media but still within age- and role-appropriate bounds of partnership? It may be that we need to redefine “appropriate” student-teacher relationships in the digital age: as Shelia, age 17, put it in this pilot, texting definitely put students and teachers more “on the same level.” Texting was definitely a “youth medium” when we started, but it may not be for long!

In Phase 1, we’ve seen student-teacher texting after and before school take off successfully with middle and high school youth. We'd now like to test ways to enable youth and a "team" of their chosen supporters (including afterschool providers, peers, and family members) to communicate about any topic via rapid group texting.

We’ve augmented Google Voice with group texting software made with the Twilio API, to afford teacher-whole class and group “team” messaging. (with regular Google Voice, you can only text 5 people at a time.) So, in fall 2011, we’ll be testing teacher-full class texting, tutor-student texting, and group texting between chosen “teams” of supporters around individual youth. We’ll see how and if supporters take the opportunity for rapid communications about students’ personal needs.

==Communication we hoped to improve==

Say more. What aspect of communication did we want to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success?
------------------------

In the texting pilot, we wanted to support a team of people in each young person’s life to communicate rapidly with the young person and each other about how young people are doing personally and academically, and what supports they might need to be more successful -- from both the students' and stakeholders' perspectives. There is often a gap in such rapid communications in schools: people don’t always have time to meet face to face to discuss students’ needs and experiences. Increasingly, people don’t have (or answer!) home phones. Often, teachers don’t know how youth are doing outside of school; tutors don’t know what youth have to work on; parents are unaware of school goings-on, and more. All this in an era when technology could make rapid communication more normal than ever in schools!

It is cell phones that are with us all day. Cell phones allow people to always be connected and available. Texting and other mobile text based communications give people even more control over when and where they communicate. In theory, they can review and respond to texts at their leisure--be it in the evening from home, or over the weekend after sports practice. They can fit communications to their schedules. At the same time, a text is particularly hard to ignore -- which is why in summer 2010, Somerville students told us to try texting for rapid youth support.

==Process==

How we realized and redirected things, over time.

[[Image:textingteachersteam.jpg|thumb|Moe and Ted, texting teacher pioneers, with Uche and Mica. . .and donuts]]

===Basic History===

The groundwork needed to support the current work.

-------
Design based research is usually about proceeding in very clear “stages” to test something. Our work proceeded in stages but in a more rolling manner, based on ongoing reactions to students’ and teachers’ ideas, interests and efforts.

Throughout this pilot, though, we kept our core questions constant. Who needs to quickly share which information with whom, to support a young person? What are the barriers to that communication, and how might those be overcome? How might texting support needed communications?

We started working on a tech strategy for youth support in a OneVille-organized afterschool club involving 4th-6th graders at the K-8 Healey School in 2009-10 and then in Somerville’s summer school 2010, with two high school classes of SHS teacher Sabrina Trinca. In both cases, we learned that media was inherently attractive to youth but it wasn’t enticing if it wasn’t social enough yet. Students in the afterschool club wanted to go on Wee World (http://www.weeworld.com/), where all their local and online friends already were, instead of use our private social network to talk about school. So, we realized that it was quite necessary, but difficult to form a social network without a critical mass of interested members. (One successful exception were “vlogs,” where students just spoke into a camera to an intended audience of teachers and administrators, about strategies that supported their learning in class. [LINK TO VIDEO HERE!]). This thread took off later in the [[eportfolio]] project, where SHS teachers and students realized that certain types of questions about student skills could get students “flowing” in talking about their learning.)

In summer school 2010, we again tried supporting young people to communicate with each other via a new private social network. Where the previous network was created for a loosely connected group of mixed grade students in a new after school club, this network was created for two Summer school classrooms with the explicit purpose of helping the teacher communicate with students about class and homework. Still, it didn’t work: there still wasn’t enough reason to “go there”! Because the network was computer based, many of the students--who didn’t have computers or internet access--were limited in their ability to connect outside of class time. But beyond this technical obstacle, many of the students also expressed limited interest in interacting with the teacher or class topics via a computer, even when available. There simply weren’t enough online school activities yet to draw them to a separate social network. (Again, the eportfolio project may solve this chicken and egg problem by prompting lots of online assignments, leading students to go online for work and conversations.)

We decided to spend time talking to students about the overall support communications they had normally and how those communications could be improved. We found that:

# 1) Students focused on connecting with people that they felt close to, regardless of whether those people were best placed to provide them with the resources and/or help. One student looked for help from his teacher from the previous year instead of seeking out his current history teacher, simply because he connected with the previous year’s teacher better.

# 2) Besides parents, guardians, peers, and key school personnel, students valued connecting (virtually or not) with “older buddies,” near peer mentor-like figures that would advise them on matters both personal and academic.

# 3) Students told us that they used different technology to interact with different people. For example, they might talk to their parents over the phone, hang out with their best friend in real life (what some people today call “IRL”!) and text message with individual friends or classmates.

'''GRAPHIC HERE FROM THE SURVEYMONKEY

Also, the students expressed that they preferred texting, phone, and talking in person over other methods such as email, IM, and even Facebook--even though many of them had Facebook accounts. The students initially expressed skepticism at interacting with teachers over the medium, because it was what they typically used with friends. But in the end, students told us that texting was the best way for anyone, including teachers, to reach them rapidly and a natural way for them to communicate back. So we decided to try assembling texting “teams” around kids one member by one, by starting with student-teacher texting.

A big aha came from a first fumble: at one administrator’s advice, we first asked a “cluster” of teachers at Somerville High if they wanted to work with us to test texting. (Some of these teachers would go on to be key leaders of the eportfolio project!) The teachers worried that the use of texting between students and teachers might break a longstanding and to them, necessary boundary between the formal/academic classroom sphere and each group’s private informal social lives. The teachers also thought that using texting to remind students of events, help them with homework, and other transactional uses could result in “babying” the students. These were high school students, they argued, and as such should not need, or be given, such basic assistance. They also worried about supporting poor grammar and inappropriate language in texts.

We then called Mr. Willie, principal at FC/NW, who had already told us months earlier that he had major trouble reaching his youth’s parents and supporters and at times, youth themselves. He agreed immediately that young people seemed more likely to pick up texts than any other form of communication. He invited us to come in and talk to his teachers, and we gave a basic presentation where we discussed what students had said about texting as a key channel for youth support. One of the teachers around the table was Ted. “When can we start?” Ted asked. He and Mo, respectively high school and middle school teachers at Full Circle/Next Wave, were excited to try it out, and we began.

'''COLORED TEXT BOX: MAJOR IMPLEMENTATION AHA/TURNING POINT: go with those who are excited. In terms of motivation, it’s crucial to work with people who really want to communicate in a particular way! They are most likely to innovate the new piece of communication infrastructure.

Rather than put an entire “team” together at once, we decided to start with private student-teacher communication. In January 2011, Mo and Ted and we held an open meeting with all of their students to see who would be interested. We brainstormed ground rules (e.g., don’t expect a text back before 7 and after 10 p.m.; no inappropriate language; no sharing of anyone else’s business), gave students the teachers’ new GoogleVoice numbers, invited students to share their numbers with teachers, and invited them all to text whenever they wanted. GoogleVoice recorded all of the texts for the teachers and allowed them to type from their computers (Mo and Ted still mostly used their phones). Young people received texts on their phones.

Note: Unlike in our ePortfolio pilot, where the goal was to create ePortfolios that would succeed and stick, we decided in this case not to “make sure texting works, by doing whatever is necessary to make it work.” Instead, we wanted to explore how teachers and students would use (or NOT use) texting in youth support, if they were just explicitly invited to text for school-related communication. We also wanted to know if some series of communications made a young person more connected to school or more successful academically.

Some students already texted teachers at the school (“If I'm having problems at home I text Maureen, or Maryanne or Edith,” one student told us; she did this rather than have her own parents “"know her business."). Some had never texted teachers before and found the proposition weird. Texting to them felt like something you did with friends or relatives. But as students would tell us later in June, there were two kinds of texting relationships with teachers that felt OK – businessy ones for school related things you had to get done, and more revealing personal texts sent to people you really trusted.

So, in a nutshell, we offered the channel and waited to see what everyone would do with it. We didn’t push any particular use of the texting, but instead kept talking about actual uses. Mo, Ted, and the students became a research team with Uche, Mica, and the HGSE students, together exploring the use of texting in rapid youth support. We put our Ford support resources into stipending teachers $25/hr (2 hrs/week max) for their time piloting the tool, paying kids back with food and $25/each for a formal ‘research day,’ and supporting Uche to coordinate the pilot; for course credit, HGSE students checked in on the students and acted as anytime mentors for young people with questions or thoughts they wanted to share via texts. We also agreed to line up tutors or mentors for anyone who wanted one and did for several students—though as we mention later, logistics and low interests later fizzled that plan.

We held regular conversations with students and teachers to analyze how the texting was going for them. Eight HGSE students informally interviewed the FC/NW students a few times a month, over donuts; Uche and Mica talked with Ted and Mo, Uche texted regularly with Ted and Mo himself, and Mica took a “team” of students on as a texting partner. All were invited to analyze the texting conversations together in two research events, the first held at Harvard and the second held at the FC/NW building.

===Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!===

Over the course of the project, we had the following communication and implementation ahas, and project turning points. To read the full accounting, see main article: [[Texting/ahas]]

==Findings/Endpoints==

Please describe final outcomes and share examples of final products, with discussion!

===Concrete communication improvements===

What is the main communication improvement we made? What new support for young people may have resulted?

----------------------
We have successfully supported a pilot of student-teacher texting and have dozens of students and more teachers excited about continuing. The principal is interested in exploring texting with more of his teachers. And both students and teachers say that we’ve all demonstrated that texting is a possible tool for serious school support that mixes personal support, academic support, and everyday banter.

===Main communication realizations and implementation realizations===

What is your main realization about needed improvements to the communication infrastructure of public education? (Who needs to communicate what information to whom, through which media, in order to support youth in a diverse community? Which barriers are in the way of such communication, and how might these barriers be overcome?)

What is your main realization about implementing these innovations in education?

-----------------------------

We want to repeat two core “ahas” we stated earlier:

'''COLORED TEXT BOX: Here’s our MAIN COMMUNICATION AHA: texting can provide anytime, anywhere, rapid youth support and also glue together student-teacher relationships re. academics and school. The practical benefits of being able to reach people for check-ins and questions go hand in hand with the ability to build relationships outside the school day.

'''COLORED TEXT BOX: MAJOR IMPLEMENTATION AHA: go with those who are excited. In terms of motivation, it’s crucial to work with people who really want to communicate in a particular way! They are most likely to innovate the new piece of communication infrastructure.

Texting is of course not a panacea for other needed youth supports. But it can definitely help.

At our April Research Day, students noted that texts could get a student to come in on time; to focus on his classes; to care. Obens summed it up, arguing for “continuing” the texting the following year: “it shows connection. It’s really helpful --- it gets you like focused in school. It puts your mind on something and gets you focused. I’m passing (Ted’s) class – it gets you focused on this schoolwork. Like when Ted told me [via text] that I gotta come to school on time, get some reading credits – I started pushing myself, getting credits. That really helps.”

Later in the school year, he’d point out that texting got him to school, but couldn’t keep him focused in class – that was his next frontier for self-improvement.

One student made clear that a school taking on texting still couldn’t do it all: “She has been building a better relationship w/ Ted via texting. Dad doesn't have a phone, she says, and she doesn't want Ted texting him. Dad doesn't text, but she does seem to lean on him for some support. Girlfriends not helpful to her for graduation she says. She doesn't know how to apply to college, either. No guidance counselor??”

But, we have realized so far that texting is a very natural and important channel not only for check-ins and updates not possible during the school day, but for a key, perhaps ultimate support: building a relationship between student and teacher or adult mentor.

Next KEY COMMUNICATION QUESTION: Is the privacy and personal nature of communication via text one key to its use for rapid student support? If so, can a group text together for youth support, or not?

Throughout the pilot, texting continued to feel particularly private -- which was exactly why so much relationship-building was possible over it. At the same time, the privacy of texting is exactly what scares some teachers about it. Ted noted the benefits of private messaging throughout the pilot but also said in June that, “One thing that concerns me with the benefits of privacy is the risk that comes with it. The more private it is, the more risk because there’s evidence of [the communication and, the student need] going on . ..”

It was also unclear when keeping information private was helpful and harmful. For example, Ted was texting one boy who was checking in on his brother’s appearance in school; the brother had left home for school that morning but hadn’t shown up. ““Now looking back on it, should I be sharing that example w/ his brother?” Ted asked aloud. “‘We’re much looser around here, in a regular public school they might not share that information.” Still, to support students fully, it often felt necessary to tell person A about an issue facing person B. As Mica wrote to herself in February after a group conversation that followed texts with several individual girls, “note: several times in this conversation I felt the need to tell others in the school, things that I was texting about w/ an inividual kid, so that others could be pulled in for the collective support.”

We grappled with this same core issue of privacy in envisioning our next step, texting “teams”: Which communications should be private, which public to the “team”? As Ted put it, “which communications should go to parents? Which to kids? which to both? He wants to honor the kids’ sense of privacy.” Ted was interested at the beginning in adding parents to the tool. As we wrote in January 2011,

Ted definitely thinks we should have parents on. He wants to get more parents in w/ the tool. He thinks it won’t happen w/ all the kids, but would like to push to get more parents hooked in.

Later, he would be more convinced of the need for private student-teacher communication. As one student said, she was up for texting teachers but not for having her mom aware of her school related “business.” Mo raised the same question in late spring 2011, envisioning mistakenly sending a text about “your teen pregnancy!” to a student’s mom. Earlier in the year, Ted had noted that digital communication of any type could be “forever,” especially if the recipient forwarded it: staff as well as students already warned students that, “when you send it out there, it’s forever. Don’t send anything you wouldn’t want your mother to see.”

'''This will remain our core inquiry in Phase 2 as we move forward to actually test “team” texting. Who needs to share which information with whom on the “team,” and can a group texting tool support that multifaceted “team” conversation?

The principal is interested in expanding teams to the social network within the school – other current and former teachers. For some students, a parent would be problematic to have on a “team”; for others, it could be helpful. Interns there briefly, then gone after a while, would be less useful on a team, he thought. While many teachers didn’t know how to use a cell phone, some were newly starting to text. We joked that maybe he himself would start using our texting “blast” to message his entire staff!

When we asked who they’d want on their “teams,” young people suggested a range of people, from parents to best friends to inspiring older cousins who were “making it” in work and school (one student mentioned a “get it done person” who was a role model). Some wanted adults who had inspired them at summer jobs, or counselors or teachers also at the school. While we’d love to get local youth workers on students’ “teams” so they too can learn first hand the potential of texting for rapid youth support, we’ve learned by now that you can’t just add people in and start texting – real relationship building gets texting started and texting takes the relationship further. So, we’re going to go with youth-constructed teams as planned and we’ll see where they take it.

Again, we’ll offer youth and “team” the channel and learn together what they do with it!

===Technological how-tos===

Describe "how to" use every tool you used, so that others could do the same. Describe "how to" make every tool you made!

------------------
SETH AND UCHE ADD HERE

Setting up Google Voice (screen shots, etc.!)

Google Voice: google voice is a free web based phone and text messaging service provided by google. With google voice, teachers can view and send texts from a computer without incurring texting charges. Teachers can also view texts arranged by student or time, and easily search through their history of texts. Teachers can also choose to have the service forward any texts received to their phones’ regular text messaging accounts. Or, they can check those messages directly on their phones via smartphone apps. Google voice also provides a separate phone number that teachers can give out to students. The use of a separate number helps preserve the privacy of teachers’ personal phone numbers. This separate number, coupled with some of the service’s advanced features, such as number blocking, provide the teacher with an added sense of privacy and security. Finally, we chose the google voice service because it allowed multiple people—teacher and researchers—access to the same account, providing a general transparency and accountability and allowing us, the researchers, to review the teachers’ text communications by agreement.

In xx, we decided to ask Seth to create a GROUP CHAT TOOL: hardly used this spring.

The simplest add on to googlevoice so far was to create a one to many “chat” using the Twilio API. We then created a many to many group “chat” tool that we came over time to call a “reply to all” tool. Technologically, it was hard for Seth to create a tool where people could choose to text some in the “team” but not others. A student already noted that getting your own text back in group chat felt a bit weird. Kinks to be worked out!

===Things we’d expand/do differently===

If you wanted to replicate any of this, what would you need to think about? Contact us to learn/talk more!

----------------------------

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to tackle similar things in your school:

In your school, when students have personal questions or needs, are there ways for them to rapidly reach their supporters?

Could texting help with rapid youth support? What are your reservations about texting, and how might these be addressed?

Overview and key findings: Texting for Rapid Youth Support

2011-07-06T20:06:46Z

98.216.239.14:

Overview and key findings: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network

2011-07-06T17:42:43Z

98.216.239.14: /* Summary */

NOTE: THIS NEEDS COLOR (COLORED TEXT BOXES AROUND EVERY "AHA"), PHOTOS, INTERVIEW CLIPS, AND MORE GOOD QUOTES!

==Summary==

'''Note to documenters: In this summary, quickly tell the reader a, b, and c:

a. Communication we set forth to improve. (What aspect of communication did we set forth to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success?)

b. Main communication improvement(s). (What is the main communication improvement we made? What new support for young people may have resulted?)

c. Main communication realization. (What's your main realization about needed improvements to the communication infrastructure of public education? Who needs to communicate what information to whom, through which media, in order to support youth in a diverse community? Which barriers are in the way of such communication, and how might these barriers be overcome?)

------------------

The Parent Connector Network was a key 2010-11 effort of an overall Working Group exploring Schoolwide Communication. In this Working Group, we have been working to help ensure that all parents in a multilingual and class-diverse school can access important information about and from their school and share ideas with other parents. Over the course of two years, we met parents particularly committed to improving communication in their K-8 school and continuously pulled them into this Working Group.

In the past year, we have particularly worked to include immigrant parents in this loop of school info and input. We focused on creating a "Parent Connector Network," in which bilingual parents ("Connectors") use phones, Googleforms, and a hotline to help get information to and from more recently immigrated parents who speak their language.

We now are working with 3 Spanish-speaking, 3 Portuguese-speaking, and 2 Haitian Creole-speaking Connectors. Each Connector is asked to call approximately 10 other families once a month, to share key information from the principal/school and to ask questions about any issues parents are facing. The Connectors are also on call for questions from these parents at any time.

The Connectors have also become key innovators of translation and interpretation infrastructure schoolwide. We spent late spring 2011 finishing a [["infrastructure" for low-cost translation and interpretation in a school|full list of components of such infrastructure!]]

UPLOAD THAT AS JPEG

We've had countless ahas about improving schoolwide communications, and particularly, about improving the infrastructure for interpretation and translation.

(COLORED TEXT BOX: Here's ONE MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION from the Parent Connector Network: improving translation and interpretation in a multilingual school and district in part requires getting more organized about effectively using a key local resource: bilingualism.

==Communication we set forth to improve==

Say more. What aspect of communication did we want to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success?
------------------------

At Somerville’s Healey School (K-8), as in many U.S. schools, parents hail from across the globe and speak many languages. In addition to barriers of language, disparities in tech access, tech training, and time -- and gaps in personal relationship and connections -- keep parents from being equally informed about school issues, events, and even educational opportunities. Throughout the schoolwide communication working group, we operated from a central principle already core to the Healey School: a child can’t be educated as effectively if parents aren’t included as key partners in the project. So, we reasoned, schools should ensure equal access to school information and dialogue, in order to promote inclusive participation in school life.

Because language barriers particularly exclude parents from full participation, the Parent Connector Network has focused on reaching out to parents who speak the district's 3 main languages other than English: Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole.

Begun in earnest in Winter 2011, the Parent Connector Network is a parent-led effort (in partnership with school administrators and staff) to support translation and parent-school relationships, by connecting bilingual parents (“Connectors”) to more recently immigrated parents via a phone tree. The Connectors have come to also use Google forms/Google spreadsheets, and a multilingual hotline we made, to help ensure that information reaches immigrant and low-income families who share a school.

We've also been working to build personal relationships between bilingual parents and immigrant parents in order to bring more voices into school debates and more people into school events and leadership, as well as help the school to respond more quickly to parent needs.

Because each innovation the Connectors started needed other components to work effectively, we have come to think in terms of creating an "infrastructure" for low-cost translation and interpretation in a school. Over the 2010-11 school year, we've been fleshing out a full list of such systemic supports. The Parent Connector Network is a key component, but it's not the only one!

==Process==

How we realized and redirected things, over time.

===Basic History===

The groundwork needed to support the current work.

--------

As a multilingual group of parents (a few of whom speak only English), it has taken us two years to fully understand the barriers in the way of English learners' participation in English-dominant schools, and the full communication "infrastructure" necessary to include more immigrant parents as full partners in the project of supporting young people.

Before we started creating the Parent Connector Network in Winter 2011, we worked with families and teachers in several other design efforts to improve parent-school and parent-parent connections more broadly. Work to shape the Parent Connector Network actually began in Reading Night, our Parent Dialogues, and the Multilingual Coffee Hour, which we now lump together as initial innovation efforts of the Schoolwide Communication Working Group.

In 2009 when we began our work, the K-8 Healey had 4 historically separated programs: a magnet K-6 program drawing disproportionately middle-class families from Somerville; a "Neighborhood" K-6 program disproportionately enrolling low income and immigrant families living around the school, including from the housing development a few steps away; a Special Education program, also disproportionately enrolling low income students of color and immigrants; and a middle school (7-8).

With parents from across the first three programs in a Kindergarten hallway at the Healey, we began in fall 2009 creating Reading Nights to link parents in face to face efforts to share information on reading with young children. (PHOTOS) Several of these parents formed the early core of the parents who would continue to work on schoolwide communication for two straight years. We worked together on a multilingual coffee hour, and some parent dialogues. Finally, a subset of bilingual parents forged forward on the Parent Connector Network. From the beginning, we wrestled with the particular issue of connecting English-speaking parents and staff with speakers of other languages. Over time, we realized the particular need for improving the communication infrastructure for translation and interpretation and focused full force on the Parent Connector Network in winter/spring 2011.

===Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!===

Over the course of the project, we had the following communication and implementation ahas, and project turning points. To read the full accounting, see main article: [[Parent connector network/ahas]]

==Findings/Endpoints==

Please describe final outcomes and share examples of final products, with discussion!

===Concrete communication improvements===

What is the main communication improvement we made? What new support for young people may have resulted?

----------------------

We are proud to say that the Parent Connector vision and project is now part of the unified Healey School's school site plan. We have a core of volunteer Connectors making calls and ready for fall, and we have two great leaders, one of whom, already a Creole-speaking staff member, we hope will be supported by the school 10 hrs/week as a part-time parent liaison to handle parent needs forwarded by the Connectors and to handle the information translation process we’ve come up with.

INFRASTRUCTURE JPEG HERE.

We are finishing our hotline so that Translators of the Month can easily upload updates and, we are honing a Googledoc for collecting schoolwide information for them to translate. We’re also teaming up with the PTA, who will begin to offer email training/listserv enrollment to parents to address this key barrier to schoolwide communication.

===Main communication realizations and implementation realizations===

What is your main realization about needed improvements to the communication infrastructure of public education? (Who needs to communicate what information to whom, through which media, in order to support youth in a diverse community? Which barriers are in the way of such communication, and how might these barriers be overcome?)

What is your main realization about implementing these innovations in education?

(ADDING QUESTION HERE FROM BELOW: What would you expand or do differently were you to do this again?)

-----------------------------

MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: All schools need systems for getting information to everyone; diverse schools particularly do. Structural improvements can help include everyone and send the message that everyone is to be included.

The Healey School enrolls a full U.S. range of families. Some are middle-class parents who email the principal and Superintendent constantly; some are left out of the most basic communications of schooling. Some parents have no computers and no internet. One parent told her Connector she’d been trying for a year to meet with her child’s teacher. A listserv has long enrolled only some. Robocalls home go in four languages; handouts home often don't. For many, parent teacher conferences require interpreters, and scheduling those interpreters itself is a structural communication problem.

Time is also key to school-home communication: some families have time to volunteer countless hours during the school day. In contrast, one Portuguese-speaking dad we knew of worked such long hours he didn't even have time to come to school to post a sign saying he wanted to pay someone to help him drive his daughter to school after he left for work. His "Connector" made the sign for him.

Communication from school to home is a huge issue in any diverse school, particularly across boundaries of language and tech access/training.

Today, getting information to all families and get input from all families requires using some technology that isn’t so complicated it keeps parents out. It also requires creating a thoughtful infrastructure tapping (and in some cases, paying for) a key local resource: bilingualism. The principal made clear that he needs to think in terms of “systems” for translation. Commitment to fully including all parents is key, but structural disorganization certainly can block communication too.

MAIN IMPLEMENTATION REALIZATION: Overall, we’ve learned that committed and diverse parents can be expert innovators of school infrastructure for including all parents because they have a full range of experiences from which to brainstorm those supports. The Connectors themselves are a key local resource, as people willing to be on call to answer other parents' questions in their language and to monthly share information that requires additional explanation.

Together, the Connectors (with advice from many other parents and staff consulted over the two years) fleshed out other [[components of the necessary “infrastructure”]] to make schoolwide translation efficient, and to make the Connectors' volunteer role not overly time-consuming. We’re using a Googledoc as one organized place where the principal and school leaders put info that most needs translation each month; Google spreadsheets for lists of approved parent numbers; and some Google forms for Connectors to record parents’ needs. We’re experimented with robocalls home, using the district’s existing system for school-home calls (ConnectEd), but targeting the calls to be specific to language groups and at times, recorded by friendly parent voices.

MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: A key issue we addressed was the line between translation/interpretation that bilingual parents can/will do as volunteers to serve their community, and when the district has to pay professionals. A parent in a federally funded district has a civil right to translation and interpretation if she needs it to access important parent information (including at parent-teacher conferences). But all districts are strapped for money and bilingual skills are true community resources. Some of this may be simply about organizing resources most effectively. Turlock Unified School District in California has a model where parents are trained and paid as professional interpreters and translators. Somerville’s Welcome Project already trains young people this way in their LIPS program, to translate at public events (http://www.welcomeproject.org/content/liaison-interpreters-program-somerville-lips). But adults are most comfortable with certain one on one communications from other adults. So, we’ve been exploring a combination of volunteer efforts to “connect” to other parents and more streamlined staff efforts to then address individual parents’ needs.

MAIN IMPLEMENTATION REALIZATION: Our final aha of the year was that the core "loop" of communication on serious parent needs may have to be covered by paid staff, freeing volunteers to be friends, info-sharers and connectors to paid staff. Volunteers shouldn't be asked to ensure that parents get Special Education services for their kids or legal assistance for their families; paid staff in any district should be on top of such 'case management.' So, how can districts create a hybrid of volunteer and paid roles? TBD next fall!

MAIN IMPLEMENTATION REALIZATION: Nothing can stop a creative group of committed parents.

===Technological how-tos===

Describe "how to" use every tool you used, so that others could do the same. Describe "how to" make every tool you made!

------------------
As a group of non-technologists, [[Googleform]] and [[Googlespreadsheet]] setup took us a bit of learning!

[[Hotline]] setup was a task for Seth. In April, we were still sitting at Seth’s computer talking into it, or, those of us with Audacity on our computers could record from home and send Seth the files. Over the summer, we xxxxx. SETH ADD HERE!

===Things we’d expand/do differently===

OR, REPLACE WITH, ===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live”

If you wanted to replicate any of this, what would you need to think about? Contact us to learn/talk more!

-Consider the current and needed schoolwide communication infrastructure at your school. Can everyone who needs to get and share important school information, get and share it? If not, what barriers are in the way and how can those be overcome?

-How can local bilingualism be treated as a key resource?

-How can you organize volunteers to pitch in on translation and interpretation in a way that doesn't take much of their time?

-What tech training do volunteers need? What relationships do they need to form with each other so the work is personally rewarding?

-How could you make the translation/interpretation/parent liaison efforts an efficient task of school staff? (In our case, we streamlined a way of getting school information out to everyone and then argued for one of our Connectors to be made a staff liaison/Lead Connector for 10 hrs/week. Her part-time job will include running the Connector project!)

Parent connector network/ahas

2011-07-06T17:40:59Z

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Tell us how you figured things out, over time.

'''Note to documenters: please share the following:

COMMUNICATION AHAS. In the process of doing the work, what did the working group learn about improving communications in education? (Who needs to share which information with whom, via which media, to support a young person? What are the barriers to that communication, and how can those barriers be overcome?)

IMPLEMENTATION AHAS. In the process of doing the work, what did the working group learn about implementing innovations (and specifically, communication solutions) in education?

TURNING POINTS. Moments when you redirected the project accordingly, after a communication aha or an implementation aha.

Share visual examples and use photos or videos of people whenever you can!'''

-----------------------
ADD QUOTES AND PHOTOS TO BRING THIS ALIVE.

In fall 2009, we began building relationships among parents interested generally in schoolwide communication improvements. Mica and Consuelo, both parents at the Healey School, met at a coffee hour with the principal in fall 2009 and discovered a mutual interest in starting conversations across language and program. Mica invited Consuelo to help do parent outreach for the OneVille Project, and a design partnership at the Healey began!

SCHOOLWIDE COMMUNICATION INNOVATION EFFORT 1: READING NIGHT

Our first effort to focus on parent relationships and schoolwide communication infrastructure was to hold a monthly [[Reading Night]] designed to link parents across programs in communications about supporting children’s literacy. To get people to Reading Nights at all, we had to practice communicating between school and home, to advertise events in multiple languages. (Create Reading Night page that has the photos and LINK TO CONSUELO'S DOCUMENT HERE.)

COLORED TEXT BOX: COMMUNICATION AHA: the success of any school event relies on school-home communication!

A listserv for the school’s K-6 magnet program linked two classrooms of parents in the hallway, but not the other two classes (Special Education and, the "Neighborhood" program). Many immigrant and lower-income parents in the magnet program weren't on the listserv anyway. So, we moved forward with paper and face to face communication.

We put up multilingual signs outside of the classroom doors, where parents would see them. Some did, but not all parents dropped off their kids at school themselves. Consuelo's giant pizza, put up on the wall a few days before each Reading Night, worked particularly well to entice kids who then brought their parents!

[[Image:consuelopizza.jpg|thumb|Consuelo's pizza: our best Reading Night advertisement]]

Had we known that the school's "robocall" system could call a targeted subset of parents in their language, perhaps we could have used that to invite more people! It wasn't until the following year, with a new principal, that we realized we could help shape the content of [[robocalls]]. (But this most obvious channel-home is often used only for the "most important" of communications, so we may not have been allowed to use it.)

Face to face invitations on the playground before school were often the thing that brought some people to Reading Night, in part because parents got the message that they would be welcome. But face-to-face invitations were particularly time-consuming, and our energy for standing outside to invite parents personally to events waned over the year. At teachers’ urging, we continued to also announce Reading Nights to kids in classrooms, who would then invite their parents. One of our most well-attended Reading Nights involved an entire class, who did a play together with their teacher.

As we tried to then share out tips from Reading Nights, we again realized the need for better communication infrastructure for reaching parents! We tried to post our reading tips as paper sheets on a hallway bulletin board and stuck them in every backpack.

Reading Nights were in part about getting families excited about reading together in new ways (parents told us their children left talking all night about reading). One main innovation was to also make time to get parents together on the side to talk together as our children did activities. In part from listening to parents who ended up doing child care, missing the parent-to-parent conversation, and getting frustrated, we realized something else about necessary communications in schools:

COLORED TEXT BOX: COMMUNICATION AHA: What many parents most needed (or wanted!) was a chance to talk quietly to other parents!

SCHOOLWIDE COMMUNICATION INNOVATION EFFORT 2: MULTILINGUAL COFFEE HOUR

In order to support more communication between the school's diverse parents, we focused on improving a typical "slot" for parent-parent and parent-administrator communication: the typically English-dominated "coffee hours" with the principal, held monthly on Friday mornings in the PTA room. Relatively few immigrant parents came regularly to this event.

In partnership with the principal in fall 2009, we created a slot for a [[multilingual coffee hour]] model, a brainstorm of Consuelo (PHOTO), always committed to finding creative ways of empowering and including immigrant parents. In the multilingual coffee hour, parents voluntarily translated for other parents wanting to ask questions and hear information from the principal. The experience quickly clued us into a key local resource:

COLORED TEXT BOX: MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: The massive local resource of parent bilingualism!).

At several points over that school year and the next, we considered combining the multilingual coffee hour back into the "regular" coffee hour with the principal. In fall 2010, the Healey's next principal first suggested that every coffee hour should de facto be multilingual. But, then he decided to keep a distinct "multilingual" coffee hour. Since typical coffee hours were so obviously dominated by questions and comments from English-speaking parents, it still felt important to have a space focused actively on multilingual communication. The multilingual coffee hour with the principal is now an established place where people take extra time for translation and purposefully amplify languages other than English, by ensuring that speakers of other languages get priority in asking and answering questions. Main needs: a coffee pot; some Brazilian sweet break; the principal; and attendees!

(ADD MINI COMMENT BLURB OR VIDEO INTERVIEW HERE WITH LUPE OR IRMA and DAVE, ON WHAT IT HAS MEANT TO HAVE AN EXPLICITLY MULTILINGUAL COFFEE HR?)

New community developments at the Healey in 2009-10 shaped our next ahas about needed improvements to communication infrastructure. Halfway into the 2009-10 school year, the school committee put on its agenda a key task: deciding whether to integrate the Healey's magnet and "Neighborhood" K-6 programs into one school. In response, we used our multilingual coffee hour for a number of parent dialogues to facilitate conversation about this choice. We also held an organized parent dialogue on a Saturday at the nearby Mystic Housing Development’s activity center (link to blog post here).

In our work to support such organized parent dialogues, we realized how irregular it was for parents to just speak to each other across "groups" about their children's education. Many parents had never talked to parents from the other “groups.” It became important later in the Healey's unification debate to be able to report that everyone we talked to - across lines of class, race/ethnicity, and language - wanted a more rigorous learning experience for their children.

In the parent dialogue work, we also realized again just how central problems of communication were to all parents being fully included in the school. School committee members used the magnet program's listserv to advertise school committee meetings about the Unification debate, and the parents who came to meetings were disproportionately those on the listserv. Those on the magnet program's listserv also emailed the superintendent or principal regularly with their opinions about whether the programs should integrate. Three months into the debate, when we walked around the nearby Mystic Development (the housing project literally down a flight of stairs from the school) to invite parents to a school committee meeting, we realized that many – again, those not on the listserv -- were unaware that the possibility of integration was even up for debate at their school at all.

In the end, the School Committee voted to "unify" the Healey's K-6 programs and hired a consultant to steer that process through the following school year.

COLORED TEXT BOX: TURNING POINT: With the Healey in the midst of brainstorming all sorts of changes to its everyday structures, we focused for 2010-11 on improving infrastructure for schoolwide communication, and for reaching and including immigrant parents in particular.

As school ended in June 2010, supporting communication of important school information across lines of language, class, and also tech access/training became our key focus at the school. As we continued work to flesh out a [[schoolwide communication toolkit,]] including supporting the creation of a [[wiki]] for school reform notes, we focused on questions of language barriers and brainstormed a key response in Fall 2010: the Parent Connector Network.

MAIN SCHOOLWIDE COMMUNICATION INNOVATION: THE PARENT CONNECTOR NETWORK

In the cafeteria one morning in fall 2010, Consuelo and Mica were sitting with several parents from the PTA, talking about how to improve schoolwide communication. Consuelo, whose phone was constantly ringing with calls from Spanish-speaking parents with questions and needs, took out a piece of paper and started to draw triangles, linked to other triangles in a pyramid structure. Parents could be links to other parents, she explained. In the car together going home, Mica named the role: "Connectors."

We began to share out the basic idea of “parents linking to other parents” with the school council and other school leaders, to see what people thought of it. People immediately liked the idea. There were already "room parents" in the magnet program, but these parents primarily had signed on just to email other parents in their classroom once in a while, about things like parent breakfasts, field-trip chaperones, or school supply needs, not to explain the more important issues going on at the school.

Importantly, we learned from others that paid Parent Liaisons for each major language in each school had existed previously in Somerville, under a grant; when the grant finished, the Liaisons ended too. We agreed to see what volunteers could do with their bilingual skills – without carrying the burden of paid employees. The project took the idea of “liaisons” and asked parents, as friends, to “liaison” to a few other parents at a time.

(COLORED TEXT BOX: Parents’ power?: Ongoing communication innovation!)

We started brainstorming the components of the Connector project with the principal, at meetings with a "Parent, Student, and Teacher Partnership" working group at the unifying Healey, and with those parents who came to our Multilingual Coffee Hours. Parents from our first Reading Nights also remained key brainstorming partners.

POST HERE: FIRST PARENT CONNECTOR DIAGRAM.

Our first question was how the principal would respond to serious complaints from parents. This was Consuelo’s concern in particular; ironically and frustratingly, weeks later she herself would feel compelled to leave the school after a never-fully-resolved incident in which a white parent yelled at her and other immigrant parents using a school space for a parent gettogether. In her case, the loop of parent complaint/school response/issue resolution -- a loop affecting every school in the country -- did not go smoothly and ended up destroying relations of trust in all directions. The loop was particularly important to figure out.

As we worked on this loop after Consuelo’s departure, our second concern was logistical: how would volunteers “connect” to a reasonably sized group of parents? Should they have their pictures in the hallway, for calls at any time from whoever? Should Connectors specifically be bilingual people, or just kind people? And should all parents (including English-speaking parents) have a “Connector,” or particularly some of them?

TURNING POINT: we brainstormed the idea of focusing the Connectors first on bilingual parents communicating with immigrant parents.

We also decided to link each Connector by phone to 10 parents who spoke their language. Starting in winter 2011, we recruited Connectors -- bilingual parents (and one young staff member) who had, over the prior year, shown particular interest in reaching out to immigrant parents or translating public information so others could access it. We also recruited parents who had shown some interest in bilingual or parent-parent events, such as our coffee hour, Reading Night, and public dialogues! Soon, we had Sofia, Lupe, Tona, Angela, Marcia, Maria, and Veronaise (PHOTOS IF POSSIBLE!). And, we reached out to Gina, a young staff member and Creole speaker who as it turned out wanted to develop a career as a parent liaison. We used some Ford funding to stipend her to help coordinate the project.

As a team of parents, we met with each other in one of the school's conference rooms and started using our multilingual coffee hours to get ongoing advising from parents schoolwide. The Parent Connector concept was approved early, in the school's formal unification plan in early spring. But we still had to flesh it out by doing it!

Our goal became to "just start," so we could test ways parents could reach out to other parents. We needed also to figure out what info we would and would not translate for free, how many school-home communications were necessary a month, how to use existing school channels or create new simple tools for parent outreach, and more.

(COLORED TEXT BOX: Experimenting with Communication Solutions!)

Our first parent-parent communication experiment was a new use for the school’s “robocalls.” Having received many robocalls for snow closures (!) and school events in the district’s four main languages (typically English, Spanish, Portuguese, then Creole, in that order), one Connector, Lupe, had suggested we “flip” the typical script by asking a parent to record a Spanish-only message targeted directly to Spanish speakers. So, Lupe, Gina, and Marcia translated the invitation into Spanish, Creole, and Portuguese and we recorded each message Monday morning in the Healey principal’s office, using his phone. Somerville’s call-home [[robocall]] system, ConnectEd, allows for this sort of targeted messaging. In the robocall, we invited parents to our first gettogether to introduce the Connector project before a Healey PTA night. Nearly 30 parents showed up. We ate food from Somerville’s Maya Sol (pupusas), Fiesta bakery (Haitian patties) and the Panificadora Modelo (Brazilian pastry). Two students from the Mystic Learning Center babysat for parents while they then attended parent-teacher conferences.

In a diverse group of Healey parents and the principal at our next multilingual coffee hour, we shared some information needs immigrant parents had expressed at our launch event (How do I get my child tutoring or help with homework? How do I find scholarships and slots for afterschool? How do I enroll my child in an afterschool sport?) and brainstormed ways Connectors could respond. One goal articulated was to make all parents feel more comfortable approaching school staff themselves, with interpreters as needed.

Our core concern remained: how to avoid a situation where parents mentioned needs to Connectors and never received a response (a classic situation in many schools!). In xxx (date), we created this [[Googleform]] for Connectors to use to keep tabs on parent calls and, for a Connector coordinator and the principal to track. We edited it together, adding more detailed information on how to tell parents to request translators, but the system still didn’t feel right: for one, we kept advising Connectors to tell parents to approach English-speaking staff with their questions! But this was because we knew volunteer connectors couldn’t go get answers to every parent’s question themselves.

COLORED TEXT BOX: One implementation stumbling block raised a COMMUNICATION AHA abou thte need for “systems”: better systems are needed to get parents’ numbers to other parents!

Because our Connector project started mid-year, we had no beginning of the year form for all parents, saying “do you want a Connector? Check here to release your number to them!” Only staff were allowed to have all parents’ numbers automatically. So, it took months to figure out how to get Parent Connectors other parents’ phone numbers.

We first tried handing out paper permission slips at the PTA Night. In the end, that proved way too time-consuming. So, we asked district Parent Information staff to call all of the parents and get their permission to release their numbers to parent connectors. (and we used some Ford funding to stipend them). But to facilitate that, school staff first tried to figure out how to download a spreadsheet of language-specific numbers for PIC staff from X2, the district’s “student information system”; that took some time. Then the PIC staff had to make the calls home to get parents’ permission to release numbers to the Connectors; then, finally, Connectors got lists and could start calling.

COLORED TEXT BOX: COMMUNICATION AHA: No wonder why so many people don't put in the effort to reach out to parents! It's real work that takes real time – and at times, money.

COLORED TEXT BOX: COMMUNICATION AHA: Privacy and trust are of course key issues to be navigated in broadening school home communications.

The magnet program had a great directory with parents’ phone numbers, home addresses, and emails in it, collected via paper sign-ups in classrooms when school began. Whenever we raised the issue of getting more parents' numbers to other parents, somebody would relate that many working-class parents were afraid of sharing personal phone numbers with other parents because of restraining orders and personal safety fears. This wasn’t totally true: many parents put down their numbers on signup sheets at Reading Nights or coffee hours. But issues of distrust do go deep: who is willing to share basic personal information with other parents, especially in an era of ramped-up deportation of undocumented immigrants and legal interventions in households?

But if unaddressed, what do such barriers to parent-parent contact mean? Children unable to be invited to birthday parties or playdates; parents who cannot be invited personally to gettogethers; missed opportunities to pull parents together as partners.

All this is an important example of the need for '''infrastructure''' to normalize communications between school and home, while considering dynamics of trust and privacy. An official form enabling parents to easily offer permission to have a Connector get her number is one example; a beginning of year personal, non-threatening invitational call from a Connector as a peer (instead of a school official) is another.

COLORED TEXT BOX: Another COMMUNICATION AHA: volunteers need communication infrastructure themselves, in order to make their own work easier.

One implementation issue to consider was whether we turned off a few Connectors by immediately using technology in our own infrastructure to communicate among Connectors. For example, we had to split up the list of approved parent names among the Connectors, but we wanted to think a bit about who should be paired with whom based on the grade of the children and prior personal relationship. We decided this at the end of a lengthy face to face meeting and so, we chose to use a Google Spreadsheet to divide up the names from home. This cost us several weeks as some confusion reigned: Connectors who had Yahoo accounts rather than gmail accounts couldn't open the Google spreadsheets and for a couple of weeks, didn't know why or ask! Some Connectors took immediately to using the Google spreadsheet to choose "their" parents and get their numbers. Other Connectors needed multiple calls to get them to come to training sessions on the Google spreadsheet, and some may have turned off to the project thinking that tech savviness was a barrier to it. (One Connector has her daughter help her get her email; another uses her husband's computer to check hers. Another checks email regularly but doesn't write back via it!). One Connector tried the Google forms and in the end, wanted to use paper and asked Gina to retype her notes. But over time, we've realized what training is needed (how to use a Google spreadsheet!), and, which tech uses aren't really that necessary (possibly, the complex Googleform recording parent issues, unless the volume of parent needs increases). In general, we’ve simplified the Googleform to just take basic notes next to parents’ names and started instead to push for a 10 hr/week parent liaison to play the role of following up in detail on parents’ issues.

Unsurprisingly, emails between the Connectors linked Connectors who used email for their jobs far more successfully than those who didn't like to access it routinely (this broke down along class lines, as well). Some Connectors who speak primarily in Spanish were fine to read long emails in English, but didn’t want to write back in English. Some Connectors themselves required regular phone calls to stay glued to the project. Gina, our youngest member, preferred texts, as well. And, we all needed occasional face to face meetings to brainstorm ideas more effectively and to stay interested in the project! Our core summer 2011 plan: a Connector party, with tequila.

COLORED TEXT BOX: COMMUNICATION AHA: parents need help with ongoing resource questions.

As we began our calls home, we realized that Connectors were getting asked key resource questions that were time-sensitive (e.g.: can I enroll my child in summer school voluntarily or, does she have to be referred?). So, a key "information loop" became how to get such FAQs answered regularly on public channels.

At a coffee hour, we asked people about methods of getting information out to a lot of parents at once. Michael Quan (PHOTO) suggested a hotline as a solution.

COLORED TEXT BOX: TURNING POINT: We decided to make a hotline, to get translated information more easily to all parents!

No free or open source hotlines seemed to exist in “plug and play” form, so Seth (PHOTO) prototyped a hotline (using open source software and the Twilio API. Tona, Maria, and Gina came in to record updates from the principal and answers to parents' Frequently Asked Questions collected by the Connectors, by speaking into Seth’s computer (see photo!). We planned to hone the hotline over the summer, so that translators can record to it from home. (PHOTO OF MARIA AND LINK TO THE FIRST SET OF FAQS?)

After Seth prototyped the hotline, the question became how to regularly get translated information, on to it! As piles of paper in backpacks demonstrated, the school had a blast of information heading toward parents at all times. How to triage this info and have point people translate in an organized manner? The school typically referred most important documents to the PIC for paid translation and, parents sometimes asked other parents to translate info for parent-related events; most of the everyday info coming from the school wasn’t translated.

COMMUNICATION AHA: effectively using the local resource of bilingualism: Volunteer Translators of the Month?

We came up with the idea of asking volunteer Translators of the Month (also bilingual parents, and maybe, students) to verbally translate information all parents needed to know that month into Haitian Creole, Portuguese, and Spanish. Bilingual parents and staff noted at our coffee hour that translating material into their languages verbally – so, speaking it on to a hotline -- was easier than doing it word for word from paper to paper.

We came up with this infrastructure: school leaders would dump information for possible translation onto a Googledoc; principal and Lead Connector/part-time Parent Liaison would triage it in a monthly meeting and decide what should be translated for the Hotline and what go “out” via a Connector call; volunteer Translators of the Month would translate the top priority information for the hotline; Then, Connectors would tell parents the highlights and refer them to the Hotline. (We decided that Connectors also needed a [[standing info page]] Googledoc with links of local resources, so they knew what to tell parents looking for public services (e.g., legal or family services.) Connectors would also ask parents if they had individual questions or personal needs, get some of parents’ preferred meeting times if they needed to meet with someone, and refer them to the Lead Connector/part-time parent Liaison.

ADD HERE: OVERALL JPEG OF DIAGRAM.

COMMUNICATION AHA: effectively using the local resource of bilingualism: scheduling interpreters!

We suggested that last piece after a few Connectors were asked to come be translators at parent-teacher meetings; we also kept hearing ongoing stories from parents who lacked interpretation and translation at the teacher meetings when they most needed it. Figuring out this piece of the infrastructure became another goal. Some parents didn’t know how to request translators for scheduled meetings with teachers (we were told that they were supposed to ask the Vice Principal); some educators didn’t know how to find translators to talk in emergencies to parents (Gina herself couldn't find a Spanish speaker one day to explain to a mother her son's injury). At other times, both told us, translators were requested by both parents and educators, but not actually present in the final meeting! While the District has a list of interpreters to call and also has bilingual staff at the PIC, getting interpreters to the right place at the right time is the core resource-use problem. (One Portuguese-speaking Connector, Maria, suggested based on her experience working in hospitals that the schools try an interpreter "on call" by the phone during certain hours.) Our [[dashboard]] family report card view will also have a calendar at its end, helping parents schedule meetings with teachers themselves!

We hope to join brainstorming forces with parents from Somerville's Welcome Project (a nonprofit focused on empowering immigrants in Somerville, housed in the Mystic Housing Development down the hill from the Healey school). A parent group has formed there that also wants to focus on translation and interpretation in Somerville (one is already a Connector).

In June 2011, we had finished this full list of components of the "infrastructure" for low-cost translation and interpretation in a school. The Parent Connector Network is one of the key "components" -- it's connection, human-style!

POST HERE: FINAL CONNECTOR INFRASTRUCTURE DIAGRAM.

IMPLEMENTATION AHA: Our final aha of the year was that the core "loop" of communication on serious parent needs had to be covered by paid staff, freeing volunteers to be friends, info-sharers and connectors to paid staff.

To clarify roles, we pressed for a Lead Connector/part-time Parent Liaison slot at 10 hrs/week. Volunteers shouldn't be asked to ensure that parents get Special Education services for their kids or legal assistance for their families; paid staff in any district should be on top of such 'case management.' So, how can districts strapped for money create a hybrid of volunteer and paid roles? TBD next fall!

Hear some words here from our Connectors: (VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH TONA OR GINA or MARIA?)

P.S. In a multilingual community where not everyone uses computers, some lack access to information because of translation gaps and some because of a gap in basic tech knowledge. We learned early on in our work in Somerville that the problem is not necessarily one of computer access (the nearby housing project has many computers) as much as one of training. Even many parents in the school’s magnet program didn't know how to get on its listserv. Now that the school is creating a schoolwide listerv, these issues will rise to the fore. And having people equally speak up on the common listserv, in whatever language, will be the next frontier!

In Winter 2011, we attempted to hold a "get an Email" night at the Healey, but it wasn't well attended; this crucial puzzle piece needs further development. Ironically, if there isn't a good multilingual communication infrastructure, it's hard to get people out for any face to face tech training event! This is what we mean by each infrastructure “component” being connected – and fueled by an overall commitment to including all parents. Combining the Connector network with email training by the PTA may be a good solution, especially as the school goes from having a listserv only for the magnet program to a listserv for all. Especially in a community where there are many community-oriented technologists, there's really no reason why everyone eventually shouldn't have basic tech skills. See [[Computer Infrastructure.]]

Overview and key findings: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network

2011-07-06T17:38:46Z

98.216.239.14:

NOTE: THIS NEEDS COLOR (COLORED TEXT BOXES AROUND EVERY "AHA"), PHOTOS, INTERVIEW CLIPS, AND MORE GOOD QUOTES!

==Summary==

(Note to documenters: In this summary, quickly tell the reader a, b, and c:

a. Communication we set forth to improve. (What aspect of communication did we set forth to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success?)

b. Main communication improvement(s). (What is the main communication improvement we made? What new support for young people may have resulted?)

c. Main communication realization. (What's your main realization about needed improvements to the communication infrastructure of public education? Who needs to communicate what information to whom, through which media, in order to support youth in a diverse community? Which barriers are in the way of such communication, and how might these barriers be overcome?)

------------------

The Parent Connector Network was a key 2010-11 effort of an overall Working Group exploring Schoolwide Communication. In this Working Group, we have been working to help ensure that all parents in a multilingual and class-diverse school can access important information about and from their school and share ideas with other parents. Over the course of two years, we met parents particularly committed to improving communication in their K-8 school and continuously pulled them into this Working Group.

In the past year, we have particularly worked to include immigrant parents in this loop of school info and input. We focused on creating a "Parent Connector Network," in which bilingual parents ("Connectors") use phones, Googleforms, and a hotline to help get information to and from more recently immigrated parents who speak their language.

We now are working with 3 Spanish-speaking, 3 Portuguese-speaking, and 2 Haitian Creole-speaking Connectors. Each Connector is asked to call approximately 10 other families once a month, to share key information from the principal/school and to ask questions about any issues parents are facing. The Connectors are also on call for questions from these parents at any time.

The Connectors have also become key innovators of translation and interpretation infrastructure schoolwide. We spent late spring 2011 finishing a [["infrastructure" for low-cost translation and interpretation in a school|full list of components of such infrastructure!]]

UPLOAD THAT AS JPEG

We've had countless ahas about improving schoolwide communications, and particularly, about improving the infrastructure for interpretation and translation.

(COLORED TEXT BOX: Here's ONE MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION from the Parent Connector Network: improving translation and interpretation in a multilingual school and district in part requires getting more organized about effectively using a key local resource: bilingualism.

==Communication we set forth to improve==

Say more. What aspect of communication did we want to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success?
------------------------

At Somerville’s Healey School (K-8), as in many U.S. schools, parents hail from across the globe and speak many languages. In addition to barriers of language, disparities in tech access, tech training, and time -- and gaps in personal relationship and connections -- keep parents from being equally informed about school issues, events, and even educational opportunities. Throughout the schoolwide communication working group, we operated from a central principle already core to the Healey School: a child can’t be educated as effectively if parents aren’t included as key partners in the project. So, we reasoned, schools should ensure equal access to school information and dialogue, in order to promote inclusive participation in school life.

Because language barriers particularly exclude parents from full participation, the Parent Connector Network has focused on reaching out to parents who speak the district's 3 main languages other than English: Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole.

Begun in earnest in Winter 2011, the Parent Connector Network is a parent-led effort (in partnership with school administrators and staff) to support translation and parent-school relationships, by connecting bilingual parents (“Connectors”) to more recently immigrated parents via a phone tree. The Connectors have come to also use Google forms/Google spreadsheets, and a multilingual hotline we made, to help ensure that information reaches immigrant and low-income families who share a school.

We've also been working to build personal relationships between bilingual parents and immigrant parents in order to bring more voices into school debates and more people into school events and leadership, as well as help the school to respond more quickly to parent needs.

Because each innovation the Connectors started needed other components to work effectively, we have come to think in terms of creating an "infrastructure" for low-cost translation and interpretation in a school. Over the 2010-11 school year, we've been fleshing out a full list of such systemic supports. The Parent Connector Network is a key component, but it's not the only one!

==Process==

How we realized and redirected things, over time.

===Basic History===

The groundwork needed to support the current work.

--------

As a multilingual group of parents (a few of whom speak only English), it has taken us two years to fully understand the barriers in the way of English learners' participation in English-dominant schools, and the full communication "infrastructure" necessary to include more immigrant parents as full partners in the project of supporting young people.

Before we started creating the Parent Connector Network in Winter 2011, we worked with families and teachers in several other design efforts to improve parent-school and parent-parent connections more broadly. Work to shape the Parent Connector Network actually began in Reading Night, our Parent Dialogues, and the Multilingual Coffee Hour, which we now lump together as initial innovation efforts of the Schoolwide Communication Working Group.

In 2009 when we began our work, the K-8 Healey had 4 historically separated programs: a magnet K-6 program drawing disproportionately middle-class families from Somerville; a "Neighborhood" K-6 program disproportionately enrolling low income and immigrant families living around the school, including from the housing development a few steps away; a Special Education program, also disproportionately enrolling low income students of color and immigrants; and a middle school (7-8).

With parents from across the first three programs in a Kindergarten hallway at the Healey, we began in fall 2009 creating Reading Nights to link parents in face to face efforts to share information on reading with young children. (PHOTOS) Several of these parents formed the early core of the parents who would continue to work on schoolwide communication for two straight years. We worked together on a multilingual coffee hour, and some parent dialogues. Finally, a subset of bilingual parents forged forward on the Parent Connector Network. From the beginning, we wrestled with the particular issue of connecting English-speaking parents and staff with speakers of other languages. Over time, we realized the particular need for improving the communication infrastructure for translation and interpretation and focused full force on the Parent Connector Network in winter/spring 2011.

===Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!===

Over the course of the project, we had the following communication and implementation ahas, and project turning points. To read the full accounting, see main article: [[Parent connector network/ahas]]

==Findings/Endpoints==

Please describe final outcomes and share examples of final products, with discussion!

===Concrete communication improvements===

What is the main communication improvement we made? What new support for young people may have resulted?

----------------------

We are proud to say that the Parent Connector vision and project is now part of the unified Healey School's school site plan. We have a core of volunteer Connectors making calls and ready for fall, and we have two great leaders, one of whom, already a Creole-speaking staff member, we hope will be supported by the school 10 hrs/week as a part-time parent liaison to handle parent needs forwarded by the Connectors and to handle the information translation process we’ve come up with.

INFRASTRUCTURE JPEG HERE.

We are finishing our hotline so that Translators of the Month can easily upload updates and, we are honing a Googledoc for collecting schoolwide information for them to translate. We’re also teaming up with the PTA, who will begin to offer email training/listserv enrollment to parents to address this key barrier to schoolwide communication.

===Main communication realizations and implementation realizations===

What is your main realization about needed improvements to the communication infrastructure of public education? (Who needs to communicate what information to whom, through which media, in order to support youth in a diverse community? Which barriers are in the way of such communication, and how might these barriers be overcome?)

What is your main realization about implementing these innovations in education?

(ADDING QUESTION HERE FROM BELOW: What would you expand or do differently were you to do this again?)

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MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: All schools need systems for getting information to everyone; diverse schools particularly do. Structural improvements can help include everyone and send the message that everyone is to be included.

The Healey School enrolls a full U.S. range of families. Some are middle-class parents who email the principal and Superintendent constantly; some are left out of the most basic communications of schooling. Some parents have no computers and no internet. One parent told her Connector she’d been trying for a year to meet with her child’s teacher. A listserv has long enrolled only some. Robocalls home go in four languages; handouts home often don't. For many, parent teacher conferences require interpreters, and scheduling those interpreters itself is a structural communication problem.

Time is also key to school-home communication: some families have time to volunteer countless hours during the school day. In contrast, one Portuguese-speaking dad we knew of worked such long hours he didn't even have time to come to school to post a sign saying he wanted to pay someone to help him drive his daughter to school after he left for work. His "Connector" made the sign for him.

Communication from school to home is a huge issue in any diverse school, particularly across boundaries of language and tech access/training.

Today, getting information to all families and get input from all families requires using some technology that isn’t so complicated it keeps parents out. It also requires creating a thoughtful infrastructure tapping (and in some cases, paying for) a key local resource: bilingualism. The principal made clear that he needs to think in terms of “systems” for translation. Commitment to fully including all parents is key, but structural disorganization certainly can block communication too.

MAIN IMPLEMENTATION REALIZATION: Overall, we’ve learned that committed and diverse parents can be expert innovators of school infrastructure for including all parents because they have a full range of experiences from which to brainstorm those supports. The Connectors themselves are a key local resource, as people willing to be on call to answer other parents' questions in their language and to monthly share information that requires additional explanation.

Together, the Connectors (with advice from many other parents and staff consulted over the two years) fleshed out other [[components of the necessary “infrastructure”]] to make schoolwide translation efficient, and to make the Connectors' volunteer role not overly time-consuming. We’re using a Googledoc as one organized place where the principal and school leaders put info that most needs translation each month; Google spreadsheets for lists of approved parent numbers; and some Google forms for Connectors to record parents’ needs. We’re experimented with robocalls home, using the district’s existing system for school-home calls (ConnectEd), but targeting the calls to be specific to language groups and at times, recorded by friendly parent voices.

MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: A key issue we addressed was the line between translation/interpretation that bilingual parents can/will do as volunteers to serve their community, and when the district has to pay professionals. A parent in a federally funded district has a civil right to translation and interpretation if she needs it to access important parent information (including at parent-teacher conferences). But all districts are strapped for money and bilingual skills are true community resources. Some of this may be simply about organizing resources most effectively. Turlock Unified School District in California has a model where parents are trained and paid as professional interpreters and translators. Somerville’s Welcome Project already trains young people this way in their LIPS program, to translate at public events (http://www.welcomeproject.org/content/liaison-interpreters-program-somerville-lips). But adults are most comfortable with certain one on one communications from other adults. So, we’ve been exploring a combination of volunteer efforts to “connect” to other parents and more streamlined staff efforts to then address individual parents’ needs.

MAIN IMPLEMENTATION REALIZATION: Our final aha of the year was that the core "loop" of communication on serious parent needs may have to be covered by paid staff, freeing volunteers to be friends, info-sharers and connectors to paid staff. Volunteers shouldn't be asked to ensure that parents get Special Education services for their kids or legal assistance for their families; paid staff in any district should be on top of such 'case management.' So, how can districts create a hybrid of volunteer and paid roles? TBD next fall!

MAIN IMPLEMENTATION REALIZATION: Nothing can stop a creative group of committed parents.

===Technological how-tos===

Describe "how to" use every tool you used, so that others could do the same. Describe "how to" make every tool you made!

------------------
As a group of non-technologists, [[Googleform]] and [[Googlespreadsheet]] setup took us a bit of learning!

[[Hotline]] setup was a task for Seth. In April, we were still sitting at Seth’s computer talking into it, or, those of us with Audacity on our computers could record from home and send Seth the files. Over the summer, we xxxxx. SETH ADD HERE!

===Things we’d expand/do differently===

OR, REPLACE WITH, ===Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live”

If you wanted to replicate any of this, what would you need to think about? Contact us to learn/talk more!

-Consider the current and needed schoolwide communication infrastructure at your school. Can everyone who needs to get and share important school information, get and share it? If not, what barriers are in the way and how can those be overcome?

-How can local bilingualism be treated as a key resource?

-How can you organize volunteers to pitch in on translation and interpretation in a way that doesn't take much of their time?

-What tech training do volunteers need? What relationships do they need to form with each other so the work is personally rewarding?

-How could you make the translation/interpretation/parent liaison efforts an efficient task of school staff? (In our case, we streamlined a way of getting school information out to everyone and then argued for one of our Connectors to be made a staff liaison/Lead Connector for 10 hrs/week. Her part-time job will include running the Connector project!)

Overview and key findings: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network

2011-07-02T13:29:57Z

98.216.239.14: /* Things we’d expand/do differently */

NOTE: THIS NEEDS COLOR (COLORED TEXT BOXES AROUND EVERY "AHA"), GRAPHICS, PHOTOS, INTERVIEW CLIPS AND TO BE CUT DOWN SO IT'S NOT SO WORDY.

==Summary==

(Note to documenters: In this summary, quickly tell the reader a, b, and c:

a. Communication we set forth to improve. (What aspect of communication did we set forth to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success?)

b. Main communication improvement(s). (What is the main communication improvement we made? What new support for young people may have resulted?)

c. Main communication realization. (What's your main realization about needed improvements to the communication infrastructure of public education? Who needs to communicate what information to whom, through which media, in order to support youth in a diverse community? Which barriers are in the way of such communication, and how might these barriers be overcome?)

------------------

In this Working Group, we have been working to help ensure that all parents in a multilingual and class-diverse school can access important information about and from their school and share ideas with other parents. Over the course of two years, we met parents particularly committed to improving communication in their K-8 school and continuously pulled them into this Working Group.

In the past year, we have particularly worked to include immigrant parents in this loop of school info and input. We focused on creating a "Parent Connector Network," in which bilingual parents ("Connectors") use phones, Googleforms, and a hotline to help get information to and from more recently immigrated parents who speak their language.

We now are working with 3 Spanish-speaking, 3 Portuguese-speaking, and 2 Haitian Creole-speaking Connectors. Each Connector is calling approximately 10 other families once a month, to share key information from the principal and to ask questions about any issues parents are facing. The Connectors are also on call for questions from these parents at any time.

The Connectors have also become key innovators of translation and interpretation infrastructure schoolwide. We spent late spring 2011 finishing a [["infrastructure" for low-cost translation and interpretation in a school|full list of components of such infrastructure!]]

We've had countless ahas about improving the communication infrastructure of public education, and particularly, about improving the infrastructure for interpretation and translation.

(COLORED TEXT BOX: Here's ONE MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: improving translation and interpretation in a multilingual school and district in part requires getting more organized about effectively using a key local resource: bilingualism.

==Communication we set forth to improve==

Say more. What aspect of communication did we want to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success?
------------------------

(COLORED TEXT BOX: In the Parent Connector Network, as in our broader efforts to create a schoolwide communication toolkit, our goal was to figure out ways to better include all parents in a multilingual, class-diverse K-8 school.

At Somerville’s Healey School (K-8), as in many U.S. schools, parents hail from across the globe and speak many languages. In addition to barriers of language, disparities in tech access, tech training, and time -- and gaps in personal relationship and connections -- keep parents from being equally informed about school issues, events, and even educational opportunities.

Because language barriers particularly exclude parents from full participation, the Parent Connector Network has focused on reaching out to parents who speak the district's 3 main languages other than English: Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole.

Begun in earnest in Winter 2011, the Parent Connector Network is a parent-led effort (in partnership with school administrators and staff) to support translation and parent-school relationships, by connecting bilingual parents (“Connectors”) to more recently immigrated parents via a phone tree. The Connectors have come to use phones, Google forms, and a hotline to help ensure that information reaches immigrant and low-income families who share a school.

In the Parent Connector network, we operated from a central principle: a child can’t be educated as effectively if parents aren’t included as key partners in the project. So, schools should ensure equal access to school information and dialogue, in order to promote inclusive participation in school life. We've also been working to build personal relationships between bilingual parents and immigrant parents in order to bring more voices into school debates and more people into school events and leadership, as well as respond more quickly to parent needs.

Because each innovation the Connectors started needed other components to work effectively, we have come to think in terms of creating an "infrastructure" for low-cost translation and interpretation in a school. Over the 2010-11 school year, we've been fleshing out a full list of such systemic supports. The Parent Connector Network is a key component, but it's not the only one!

==Process==

How we realized and redirected things, over time.

===Basic History===

The groundwork needed to support the current work.

--------

As a multilingual group of parents (a few of whom speak only English), it has taken us two years to fully understand the barriers in the way of English learners' participation in English-dominant schools, and the full communication "infrastructure" necessary to include more immigrant parents as full partners in the project of supporting young people.

Before we started creating the Parent Connector Network in Winter 2011, we worked with families and teachers in several other design efforts to improve parent-school and parent-parent connections more broadly. Work to shape the Parent Connector Network actually began in [[Reading Night]], our [[Parent Dialogues]], and the [[Multilingual Coffee Hour]].

We first focused our work at the Healey on parent relationships and schoolwide communication infrastructure, through trying several forms of face to face parent get-together to connect parents across lines of language, income, and program. In 2009 when we began our work, the K-8 Healey had 4 historically separated programs: a magnet K-6 program drawing disproportionately middle-class families from Somerville; a "Neighborhood" K-6 program disproportionately enrolling low income and immigrant families living around the school, including from the housing development a few steps away; a Special Education program, also disproportionately enrolling low income students of color and immigrants; and a middle school (7-8).

With parents from across the first three programs in a Kindergarten hallway at the Healey, we began in fall 2009 creating Reading Nights to link parents in face to face efforts to share information on reading with young children. (PHOTOS) Several of these parents formed the early core of the parents who would continue to work on schoolwide communication for two straight years. We worked together on a [[multilingual coffee hour]], and some [[parent dialogues]], and, finally, the Parent Connector Network. From the beginning, we wrestled with the particular issue of connecting English-speaking parents and staff with speakers of other languages. Over time, we realized the particular need for improving the communication infrastructure for translation and interpretation and focused full force on the Parent Connector Network in winter/spring 2011.

===Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!===

Over the course of the project, we had the following communication and implementation ahas, and project turning points. To read the full accounting, see main article: [[Parent connector network/ahas]]

==Findings/Endpoints==

Please describe final outcomes and share examples of final products, with discussion!

===Concrete communication improvements===

What is the main communication improvement we made? What new support for young people may have resulted?

----------------------

We are proud to say that the Parent Connector vision and project is now part of the unified Healey School's school site plan. We have a core of volunteer Connectors making calls and ready for fall, and we have two great leaders, one of whom, already a Creole-speaking staff member, we hope will be supported 5 hrs/week.

***ADD also: hotline key

googledocs really a huge help to our joint effort, becoming normalized

ADD: Full infrastructure map here. And, leaders from within!

ADD: filling holes. EMAIL TRAINING BY PTA now a plan!

===Main communication realizations and implementation realizations===

What is your main realization about needed improvements to the communication infrastructure of public education? (Who needs to communicate what information to whom, through which media, in order to support youth in a diverse community? Which barriers are in the way of such communication, and how might these barriers be overcome?)

What is your main realization about implementing these innovations in education?

-----------------------------

MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: All schools need systems for getting information to everyone; diverse schools need them in particular. Structural improvements can both send the message that everyone is to be included, and, actually help include everyone.

Here's ANOTHER MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: improving translation and interpretation in a multilingual school and district in part requires getting more organized about effectively using a key local resource: bilingualism.

The Healey School enrolls a full U.S. range of families. Some are deeply empowered in their home-school communications (e.g., middle-class parents who email the principal and Superintendent constantly, and some are left out of the most basic communications of schooling (some have no computers and no internet.; one told her Connector she’d been trying for a year to meet with her child’s teacher.) A listserv has long enrolled only some. Robocalls home go in four languages; handouts home often don't. For many, parent teacher conferences require interpreters, and scheduling those interpreters itself is a structural communication problem.

Time is also of the essence: some families have time/resource to volunteer countless hours during the school day. In contrast, one Portuguese-speaking dad we knew of worked such long hours he didn't even have time to come to school to post a paper sign saying he wanted to pay someone to help him drive his daughter to school after he left for work. His "Connector" made the sign for him. (INTERVIEW WITH MARIA ON THIS?)

Communication from school to home is a huge issue in any diverse school, particularly across boundaries of language and tech access/training. In an era when most people work too much to talk face to face very often, getting information to all families and get input from all families requires using some technology but also creating a thoughtful infrastructure tapping (and in some cases, paying for) a key local resource: bilingualism.

MAIN IMPLEMENTATION REALIZATION: Overall, we’ve learned that committed and diverse parents can be expert innovators of school infrastructure if they care deeply about all parents having a full range of supports. That’s because they have a full range of experiences from which to brainstorm those supports.

Together, the Connectors (with advice from many other parents and staff consulted to over the two years) fleshed out other [[components of the necessary “infrastructure”]] to make schoolwide translation efficient, and to make the Connectors' volunteer role not overly time-consuming: a Googledoc as one organized place where the principal and school leaders put info that most needs dissemination/translation each month, by Translators of the Month and Connectors; Google forms for Connectors to record parents’ needs; Google spreadsheets for lists of approved parent numbers. Robocalls (ADD SCREEN SHOT?) home, using the district’s existing system for school-home calls, but targeting the calls to be specific to language groups and at times, recorded by friendly parent voices.

Small infrastructural “moves” can help: one parent noted that at another school, they put information at the top of every handout indicating where you can go to get a translated version of the information (over time, our Hotline).

MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: A key issue we’re still trying to understand is where the line is between translation/interpretation that bilingual parents can/will do as volunteers to serve their community, and when the district has to pay professionals. A parent in a federally funded district has a civil right to translation and interpretation if she needs it to access important parent information (including at parent-teacher conferences). But all districts are strapped for money and bilingual skills are true community resources. Some of this may be simply about organizing resources most effectively. Turlock Unified School District in California has a model where parents are trained and paid as professional interpreters and translators. Somerville’s Welcome Project already trains young people this way in their LIPS program, to translate at public events (http://www.welcomeproject.org/content/liaison-interpreters-program-somerville-lips). But adults are most comfortable with certain one on one communications from other adults. So, which communications could trained adults handle particularly effectively, and at a lower cost than sending everything to the PIC?

The Connectors themselves are a key local resource, as people willing to be on call to answer other parents' questions in their language and to monthly share information that requires additional explanation.

MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: Along with will, systems are needed or material just doesn’t get translated.

The principal made clear that he needs to think in terms of “systems” for translation. Otherwise, disorganization means that things don’t get translated! Commitment to fully including all parents is key, but structural disorganization certainly can block communication too.

P.S.: In a multilingual community where not everyone uses computers, some lack access to information because of translation gaps and some because of a gap in basic tech knowledge. We learned early on in our work in Somerville that the problem is not necessarily one of computer access (the nearby housing project has many computers) as much as one of training. Even many parents in the school’s magnet program didn't know how to get on its listserv. Now that the school is creating a schoolwide listerv, these issues will rise to the fore. And having people equally speak up on the common listserv, in whatever language, will be the next frontier!

In Winter 2011, we attempted to hold a "get an Email" night at the Healey, but it wasn't well attended; this crucial puzzle piece needs further development. If there isn't a good multilingual communication infrastructure, it's hard to get people out for any face to face tech training event! Combining the Connector network with email training may be a good solution, especially as the school goes from having a listserv only for the magnet program to a listserv for all. Especially in a community where there are many community-oriented technologists, there's really no reason why everyone eventually shouldn't have basic tech skills. See [[Computer Infrastructure.]]

MAIN IMPLEMENTATION REALIZATION: Nothing can stop a creative group of committed parents.

OTHER MAIN IMPLEMENTATION REALIZATION: At the same time, our final aha of the year was that the core "loop" of communication on serious parent needs may have to be covered by paid staff, freeing volunteers to be friends, info-sharers and connectors to paid staff. Volunteers shouldn't be asked to ensure that parents get Special Education services for their kids or legal assistance for their families; paid staff in any district should be on top of such 'case management.' So, how can districts create a hybrid of volunteer and paid roles? TBD next fall!

===Technological how-tos===

Describe "how to" use every tool you used, so that others could do the same. Describe "how to" make every tool you made!

------------------
As a group of non-technologists, [[Googleform]] and [[Googlespreadsheet]] setup took us a bit of learning!

[[Hotline]] setup was a task for Seth. Learning how to record on it: In April, we were still sitting at the computer talking into it, or, those of us with Audacity on our computers could record from home and send Seth the files. Over the summer, we xxxxx.

===Things we’d expand/do differently===

If you wanted to replicate any of this, what would you need to think about? Contact us to learn/talk more!

----------------------------
Questions to ask yourself

-Consider the current and needed infrastructure at your school. Can everyone who needs to get and share important school information, get and share it? If not, what barriers are in the way and how can those be overcome?

-How can local bilingualism be treated as a key resource?

-How can you organize volunteers to pitch in on translation and interpretation in a way that doesn't take much of their time?

-What tech training do volunteers need? What relationships do they need to form with each other so the work is personally rewarding?

-How could you make the translation/interpretation/parent liaison efforts of school staff, more efficient? (In our case, we streamlined a way of getting school information out to everyone and then argued for one of our Connectors to be made a staff liaison/Lead Connector for 10 hrs/week. Her part-time job will include running the Connector project!)

Overview and key findings: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network

2011-07-02T13:23:22Z

98.216.239.14: /* Summary */

NOTE: THIS NEEDS COLOR (COLORED TEXT BOXES AROUND EVERY "AHA"), GRAPHICS, PHOTOS, INTERVIEW CLIPS AND TO BE CUT DOWN SO IT'S NOT SO WORDY.

==Summary==

(Note to documenters: In this summary, quickly tell the reader a, b, and c:

a. Communication we set forth to improve. (What aspect of communication did we set forth to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success?)

b. Main communication improvement(s). (What is the main communication improvement we made? What new support for young people may have resulted?)

c. Main communication realization. (What's your main realization about needed improvements to the communication infrastructure of public education? Who needs to communicate what information to whom, through which media, in order to support youth in a diverse community? Which barriers are in the way of such communication, and how might these barriers be overcome?)

------------------

In this Working Group, we have been working to help ensure that all parents in a multilingual and class-diverse school can access important information about and from their school and share ideas with other parents. Over the course of two years, we met parents particularly committed to improving communication in their K-8 school and continuously pulled them into this Working Group.

In the past year, we have particularly worked to include immigrant parents in this loop of school info and input. We focused on creating a "Parent Connector Network," in which bilingual parents ("Connectors") use phones, Googleforms, and a hotline to help get information to and from more recently immigrated parents who speak their language.

We now are working with 3 Spanish-speaking, 3 Portuguese-speaking, and 2 Haitian Creole-speaking Connectors. Each Connector is calling approximately 10 other families once a month, to share key information from the principal and to ask questions about any issues parents are facing. The Connectors are also on call for questions from these parents at any time.

The Connectors have also become key innovators of translation and interpretation infrastructure schoolwide. We spent late spring 2011 finishing a [["infrastructure" for low-cost translation and interpretation in a school|full list of components of such infrastructure!]]

We've had countless ahas about improving the communication infrastructure of public education, and particularly, about improving the infrastructure for interpretation and translation.

(COLORED TEXT BOX: Here's ONE MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: improving translation and interpretation in a multilingual school and district in part requires getting more organized about effectively using a key local resource: bilingualism.

==Communication we set forth to improve==

Say more. What aspect of communication did we want to improve, so that more people in Somerville could collaborate in young people's success?
------------------------

(COLORED TEXT BOX: In the Parent Connector Network, as in our broader efforts to create a schoolwide communication toolkit, our goal was to figure out ways to better include all parents in a multilingual, class-diverse K-8 school.

At Somerville’s Healey School (K-8), as in many U.S. schools, parents hail from across the globe and speak many languages. In addition to barriers of language, disparities in tech access, tech training, and time -- and gaps in personal relationship and connections -- keep parents from being equally informed about school issues, events, and even educational opportunities.

Because language barriers particularly exclude parents from full participation, the Parent Connector Network has focused on reaching out to parents who speak the district's 3 main languages other than English: Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole.

Begun in earnest in Winter 2011, the Parent Connector Network is a parent-led effort (in partnership with school administrators and staff) to support translation and parent-school relationships, by connecting bilingual parents (“Connectors”) to more recently immigrated parents via a phone tree. The Connectors have come to use phones, Google forms, and a hotline to help ensure that information reaches immigrant and low-income families who share a school.

In the Parent Connector network, we operated from a central principle: a child can’t be educated as effectively if parents aren’t included as key partners in the project. So, schools should ensure equal access to school information and dialogue, in order to promote inclusive participation in school life. We've also been working to build personal relationships between bilingual parents and immigrant parents in order to bring more voices into school debates and more people into school events and leadership, as well as respond more quickly to parent needs.

Because each innovation the Connectors started needed other components to work effectively, we have come to think in terms of creating an "infrastructure" for low-cost translation and interpretation in a school. Over the 2010-11 school year, we've been fleshing out a full list of such systemic supports. The Parent Connector Network is a key component, but it's not the only one!

==Process==

How we realized and redirected things, over time.

===Basic History===

The groundwork needed to support the current work.

--------

As a multilingual group of parents (a few of whom speak only English), it has taken us two years to fully understand the barriers in the way of English learners' participation in English-dominant schools, and the full communication "infrastructure" necessary to include more immigrant parents as full partners in the project of supporting young people.

Before we started creating the Parent Connector Network in Winter 2011, we worked with families and teachers in several other design efforts to improve parent-school and parent-parent connections more broadly. Work to shape the Parent Connector Network actually began in [[Reading Night]], our [[Parent Dialogues]], and the [[Multilingual Coffee Hour]].

We first focused our work at the Healey on parent relationships and schoolwide communication infrastructure, through trying several forms of face to face parent get-together to connect parents across lines of language, income, and program. In 2009 when we began our work, the K-8 Healey had 4 historically separated programs: a magnet K-6 program drawing disproportionately middle-class families from Somerville; a "Neighborhood" K-6 program disproportionately enrolling low income and immigrant families living around the school, including from the housing development a few steps away; a Special Education program, also disproportionately enrolling low income students of color and immigrants; and a middle school (7-8).

With parents from across the first three programs in a Kindergarten hallway at the Healey, we began in fall 2009 creating Reading Nights to link parents in face to face efforts to share information on reading with young children. (PHOTOS) Several of these parents formed the early core of the parents who would continue to work on schoolwide communication for two straight years. We worked together on a [[multilingual coffee hour]], and some [[parent dialogues]], and, finally, the Parent Connector Network. From the beginning, we wrestled with the particular issue of connecting English-speaking parents and staff with speakers of other languages. Over time, we realized the particular need for improving the communication infrastructure for translation and interpretation and focused full force on the Parent Connector Network in winter/spring 2011.

===Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!===

Over the course of the project, we had the following communication and implementation ahas, and project turning points. To read the full accounting, see main article: [[Parent connector network/ahas]]

==Findings/Endpoints==

Please describe final outcomes and share examples of final products, with discussion!

===Concrete communication improvements===

What is the main communication improvement we made? What new support for young people may have resulted?

----------------------

We are proud to say that the Parent Connector vision and project is now part of the unified Healey School's school site plan. We have a core of volunteer Connectors making calls and ready for fall, and we have two great leaders, one of whom, already a Creole-speaking staff member, we hope will be supported 5 hrs/week.

***ADD also: hotline key

googledocs really a huge help to our joint effort, becoming normalized

ADD: Full infrastructure map here. And, leaders from within!

ADD: filling holes. EMAIL TRAINING BY PTA now a plan!

===Main communication realizations and implementation realizations===

What is your main realization about needed improvements to the communication infrastructure of public education? (Who needs to communicate what information to whom, through which media, in order to support youth in a diverse community? Which barriers are in the way of such communication, and how might these barriers be overcome?)

What is your main realization about implementing these innovations in education?

-----------------------------

MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: All schools need systems for getting information to everyone; diverse schools need them in particular. Structural improvements can both send the message that everyone is to be included, and, actually help include everyone.

Here's ANOTHER MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: improving translation and interpretation in a multilingual school and district in part requires getting more organized about effectively using a key local resource: bilingualism.

The Healey School enrolls a full U.S. range of families. Some are deeply empowered in their home-school communications (e.g., middle-class parents who email the principal and Superintendent constantly, and some are left out of the most basic communications of schooling (some have no computers and no internet.; one told her Connector she’d been trying for a year to meet with her child’s teacher.) A listserv has long enrolled only some. Robocalls home go in four languages; handouts home often don't. For many, parent teacher conferences require interpreters, and scheduling those interpreters itself is a structural communication problem.

Time is also of the essence: some families have time/resource to volunteer countless hours during the school day. In contrast, one Portuguese-speaking dad we knew of worked such long hours he didn't even have time to come to school to post a paper sign saying he wanted to pay someone to help him drive his daughter to school after he left for work. His "Connector" made the sign for him. (INTERVIEW WITH MARIA ON THIS?)

Communication from school to home is a huge issue in any diverse school, particularly across boundaries of language and tech access/training. In an era when most people work too much to talk face to face very often, getting information to all families and get input from all families requires using some technology but also creating a thoughtful infrastructure tapping (and in some cases, paying for) a key local resource: bilingualism.

MAIN IMPLEMENTATION REALIZATION: Overall, we’ve learned that committed and diverse parents can be expert innovators of school infrastructure if they care deeply about all parents having a full range of supports. That’s because they have a full range of experiences from which to brainstorm those supports.

Together, the Connectors (with advice from many other parents and staff consulted to over the two years) fleshed out other [[components of the necessary “infrastructure”]] to make schoolwide translation efficient, and to make the Connectors' volunteer role not overly time-consuming: a Googledoc as one organized place where the principal and school leaders put info that most needs dissemination/translation each month, by Translators of the Month and Connectors; Google forms for Connectors to record parents’ needs; Google spreadsheets for lists of approved parent numbers. Robocalls (ADD SCREEN SHOT?) home, using the district’s existing system for school-home calls, but targeting the calls to be specific to language groups and at times, recorded by friendly parent voices.

Small infrastructural “moves” can help: one parent noted that at another school, they put information at the top of every handout indicating where you can go to get a translated version of the information (over time, our Hotline).

MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: A key issue we’re still trying to understand is where the line is between translation/interpretation that bilingual parents can/will do as volunteers to serve their community, and when the district has to pay professionals. A parent in a federally funded district has a civil right to translation and interpretation if she needs it to access important parent information (including at parent-teacher conferences). But all districts are strapped for money and bilingual skills are true community resources. Some of this may be simply about organizing resources most effectively. Turlock Unified School District in California has a model where parents are trained and paid as professional interpreters and translators. Somerville’s Welcome Project already trains young people this way in their LIPS program, to translate at public events (http://www.welcomeproject.org/content/liaison-interpreters-program-somerville-lips). But adults are most comfortable with certain one on one communications from other adults. So, which communications could trained adults handle particularly effectively, and at a lower cost than sending everything to the PIC?

The Connectors themselves are a key local resource, as people willing to be on call to answer other parents' questions in their language and to monthly share information that requires additional explanation.

MAIN COMMUNICATION REALIZATION: Along with will, systems are needed or material just doesn’t get translated.

The principal made clear that he needs to think in terms of “systems” for translation. Otherwise, disorganization means that things don’t get translated! Commitment to fully including all parents is key, but structural disorganization certainly can block communication too.

P.S.: In a multilingual community where not everyone uses computers, some lack access to information because of translation gaps and some because of a gap in basic tech knowledge. We learned early on in our work in Somerville that the problem is not necessarily one of computer access (the nearby housing project has many computers) as much as one of training. Even many parents in the school’s magnet program didn't know how to get on its listserv. Now that the school is creating a schoolwide listerv, these issues will rise to the fore. And having people equally speak up on the common listserv, in whatever language, will be the next frontier!

In Winter 2011, we attempted to hold a "get an Email" night at the Healey, but it wasn't well attended; this crucial puzzle piece needs further development. If there isn't a good multilingual communication infrastructure, it's hard to get people out for any face to face tech training event! Combining the Connector network with email training may be a good solution, especially as the school goes from having a listserv only for the magnet program to a listserv for all. Especially in a community where there are many community-oriented technologists, there's really no reason why everyone eventually shouldn't have basic tech skills. See [[Computer Infrastructure.]]

MAIN IMPLEMENTATION REALIZATION: Nothing can stop a creative group of committed parents.

OTHER MAIN IMPLEMENTATION REALIZATION: At the same time, our final aha of the year was that the core "loop" of communication on serious parent needs may have to be covered by paid staff, freeing volunteers to be friends, info-sharers and connectors to paid staff. Volunteers shouldn't be asked to ensure that parents get Special Education services for their kids or legal assistance for their families; paid staff in any district should be on top of such 'case management.' So, how can districts create a hybrid of volunteer and paid roles? TBD next fall!

===Technological how-tos===

Describe "how to" use every tool you used, so that others could do the same. Describe "how to" make every tool you made!

------------------
As a group of non-technologists, [[Googleform]] and [[Googlespreadsheet]] setup took us a bit of learning!

[[Hotline]] setup was a task for Seth. Learning how to record on it: In April, we were still sitting at the computer talking into it, or, those of us with Audacity on our computers could record from home and send Seth the files. Over the summer, we xxxxx.

===Things we’d expand/do differently===

If you wanted to replicate any of this, what would you need to think about? Contact us to learn/talk more!

----------------------------
-Consider the current and needed infrastructural components at your school. Can everyone who needs to get and share important school information, get and share it? If not, what barriers are in the way and how can those be overcome?

-What key infrastructural “moves” would get the most people, the most information?

-How can bilingualism be treated as a key resource?

-What tech training do these volunteers need?

Vision for OneVille documentation

2011-05-25T15:03:09Z

98.216.239.14:

==Vision for the wiki documentation:==

Documentation should be coherent -- glued to our core research questions, throughout.

Documentation should be visually inviting. Think of enticing a teacher or young person or parent to tackle (or document!) similar issues where they live.

Documentation should in the end be downloadable, and distributable by people; something they can email around their school.

The documentation should also include our contact info, so that people can ask questions of us and our participants. Maybe we and our participants can offer our contact emails and urge people to “please contact us!”

The site should be hypertextual: in sentences, we put in links to relevant/research/prior information.

We should offer an index that also talks about other things to read.

The documentation should include the voices of our participants.

==Including participant voices==

We hope that the more direct quotes and videos we have from youth, parents, and kids, the better we will convey what we've been doing. We are curious about including short video interviews that enrich the content but aren’t required by site visitors to watch if they want to understand what we've been doing.

We may use prompts in video interviews or on the wiki itself that ask our participants to create testimonials: to report out specific examples of what they have done and learned. (in video, or in text.)

===Testimonials might include:===

What interested you in doing this in the first place? What did you think might be gained?

What are particularly thought-provoking stories from your project, that say something about improving communication in public education?

What are continuing barriers to needed communications?

What's your current take on how youth, parents, and teachers can participate in improving communications in public education, and creating new uses for basic technologies? Should others do what you have been doing?

Vision for OneVille documentation

2011-05-25T15:01:12Z

98.216.239.14:

Vision for the wiki documentation:

Documentation should be coherent -- glued to our core research questions, throughout.

Documentation should be visually inviting. Think of enticing a teacher or young person or parent to tackle (or document!) similar issues where they live.

Documentation should in the end be downloadable, and distributable by people; something they can email around their school.

The documentation should include the voices of our participants.

I think the more direct quotes and videos we have from youth, parents, and kids, the better we will do! I am curious about including short video interviews that enrich the content but aren’t required by site visitors if they want to understand what we've been doing.

We might have prompts on the wiki that ask our participants to create testimonials: to report out specific examples of what they have done and learned. (in video, or in text.)

Testimonials might include:

What interested you in doing this in the first place? What did you think might be gained?

What are particularly thought-provoking stories from your project, that say something about improving communication in public education?

What are continuing barriers to needed communications?

What's your current take on how youth, parents, and teachers can participate in improving communications in public education, and creating new uses for basic technologies? Should others do what you have been doing?

The documentation should also include our contact info, so that people can ask questions of us and our participants. Maybe we and our participants can offer our contact emails and urge people to “please contact us!”

The site should be hypertextual: in sentences, we put in links to relevant/research/prior information.

We should offer an index that also talks about other things to read.

Vision for OneVille documentation

2011-05-25T14:59:45Z

98.216.239.14: Created page with 'Vision for the wiki documentation: documentation should be coherent -- glued to our core research questions, throughout. documentation should be visually inviting. Think of en…'

Vision for the wiki documentation:

documentation should be coherent -- glued to our core research questions, throughout.

documentation should be visually inviting. Think of enticing a teacher or young person or parent to tackle (or document!) similar issues where they live.

documentation should in the end be downloadable, and distributable by people; something they can email around their school.

the documentation should include the voices of our participants.

**I think the more direct quotes and videos we have from youth, parents, and kids, the better we will do! I am curious about including short video interviews that enrich the content but aren’t required by site visitors if they want to understand what we've been doing.

We might have prompts on the wiki that ask our participants to create testimonials: to report out specific examples of what they have done and learned. (in video, or in text.) Testimonials might include:

-what interested you in doing this in the first place? What did you think might be gained?

-what are particularly thought-provoking stories from your project, that say something about improving communication in public education?

-What are continuing barriers to needed communications?

-What's your current take on how youth, parents, and teachers can participate in improving communications in public education, and creating new uses for basic technologies? Should others do what you have been doing?

the documentation should also include our contact info, so that people can ask questions of us and our participants. Maybe we and our participants can offer our contact emails and urge people to “please contact us!”

The site should be hypertextual: in sentences, we put in links to relevant/research/prior information.

We should offer an index that also talks about other things to read.

Overview and key findings: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network

2011-05-25T14:53:47Z

98.216.239.14: /* Process */

At the Healey School in Somerville, parents hail from xx countries. Some have no computers and no internet. A listserv has long enrolled only some, in a former magnet program now unifying with the rest of the school. Robocalls home go in four languages; handouts home often don't. Communication from school to home is a huge issue, particularly across boundaries of language and tech access/training. We've been working on a range of school-home and parent-parent communication strategies. In particular, the Parent Connector Network was an idea to link bilingual parents to parents who speak their languages, to support translation and personal relationships by phone. As part of the Parent Connector project, then made a [[hotline]] to answer FAQs from parents and [[Googleforms]] to collect info on how parents are doing.

We also supported a schoolwide [[wiki]] to be made to support information-sharing during the unification process, and near the end of spring 2011, a [[Googlecalendar.]]

===Process===

Our design process has also been importantly collaborative. We've been working with young people, families and teachers in design efforts to improve the core communication infrastructure of their public schools/community. So, we want to also document: how has that co-design effort worked, and what of that process might others, elsewhere, want to replicate? What have been the stumbling blocks in the process?

We began in fall 2009 creating [[Reading Nights]] to link parents across a Kindergarten hallway in face to face efforts to share information on reading with young children. Our events were social, and academic; we met parents who formed the core of the working group that continued to work on schoolwide communication.

We also created a [[multilingual coffee hour]] model under the guidance of Consuelo Perez, to supplement the typically English-dominated meetings with the principal.

In a number of [[community dialogues]], we realized just how pervasive problems of communication were to parents being fully included in schools.

===Communication infrastructure/communications made possible===

CUT THIS DOWN ***!

In our final meetings in Spring 2011 after several months of testing aspects of the Connector Project, we came up with the following list of infrastructural needs.

Mica, Ana, Tonia, Gina

**next steps on the connector project: infrastructure and tools in the kit

-We need a clear definition of the connector’s job, because there is so much information coming from the school. The quantity of stuff needing to get out is so huge, otherwise. We can’t call families every week to say “there’s this coming up next week.” :

so, the job of the Connectors is to be a conduit for info to and from the school.

So, we need a clear process of getting info FROM school, to get out to parents. And, we will otherwise be available to parents who need to speak out to the school about something.

Too many requests are likely to come to Connectors for translating public information, etc. So, we have to set some ground rules: Connectors can realistically only make calls 1x/month, but also be available for questions.

INFRASTRUCTURE WE NEED TO GET IN PLACE

1. hotline. Plan: first day of each month, a new hotline recording goes up.

TO DO: Seth needs to finish it so it is easy to use for fall, with people able to record on it via phone from home.

-TO DO: We need to advertise hotline in the front of the school first thing in the fall. AND get it on the radar of the PTA, others who need to advertise things.

2. Connectors will make a monthly call during the 3rd week of every month.

3. Develop a googledoc as one organized place where principal, school leaders, put info that most needs dissemination/translation each month. (people recording on the hotline and making Connector calls, will check the googledoc first.) This googledoc can also be a place where school leaders put questions that require immigrant parent input, that Connectors can ask when they call home.

The googledoc can hold two kinds of information (Note: this googledoc will be for events and basic information that everyone needs to know. We won’t translate high-level official documents that require professional translation.)

Info for connector calls: = info that requires personal translation/explanation, or questions that need to be asked of all parents.

Deadline for getting this info into Connector calls: by Friday of second week of every month.

Info for the hotline: = events and stuff that everyone needs to know about.

Deadline for getting that info on the hotline: by the Friday of the last week of every month.

-We propose that a translator of the month be appointed in each language. This would be a parent who might not have the time to be a connector but would do translation of the googledoc material. (see the Connector spreadsheet for a list of "Choice" parents who expressed willingness to do translation.) That person will translate the info on the googledoc, by the deadlines above.

4. TO DO: We need to appoint a person to fill a key year-long role as Information Coordinator: (paid staff?), who willl coordinate the EVENT AND INFO TRANSLATION effort above.

**The Information Coordinator will coordinate people to record the information on the hotline and will also help monitor the info going on the googledoc. The Information Coordinator can also put the translated info from the googledoc on an online calendar and the purple calendar. A weekly email from DeFalco can also go out w/ the translated info from the Googledoc, via ConnectEd.

**Note: TO DO: create a google calendar for the school? (needs to be run by someone central.) ((current calendar is not very effective – Tona can’t find events even when she tries.))

5. TO DO: appoint a person to fill another key year-long role as Lead Connector. This could perhaps be a volunteer parent – who is helping to coordinate the other Connector parents.

-Connector calls will happen the 3rd week of each month.

- So, in the first week of every month, the Lead Connector calls the connectors together with the principal to discuss what they have learned.

The Lead Connector also needs to:

-keep track of the actual Connectors: (e.g.: so far, Marcia and Ivanete have not called any parents, or selected “their” parents on the google spreadsheet. Ivanete is ready to be called and trained on the forms; she has been having dizziness problems. Marcia has been extremely busy at work but is also ready to make calls. Someone, a Lead Connector, has to reach out to them.

-go on the googledoc or make a call to principal, to decide before the 3rd week’s Connector calls what the theme/purpose of the month’s calls will be.

-keep tabs on the googleform we’ve created for keeping tabs on parent calls. Tona reworked it so it wasn’t set up as if there was a serious issue each time, but is more of a general recording space. (**question: this role of monitoring parent needs seems larger and suggests that the Lead Connector should perhaps be paid staff. . .TBD.)

-***convene the multilingual coffee hour – PTA is ready to offer coffee for it.

(TO DO: ASK THE CONNECTORS what they want to do w/ the coffee hour slot. Could be used for a quick update on Connector efforts but mostly, to hear immigrant parents with their issues and to introduce immigrant parents to non-immigrant parents. It could become a routine part of the Connector calls each month to invite parents to the coffee hour.)

Emails with questions at any time can go to the Information Coordinator and the Lead Connector. Mica will be an ongoing partner in such email exchange as well.

TO DO BEFORE THE END OF THE YEAR:

A. pick roles.

Appoint a Lead Connector: Tonia is interested. (TBD: On the one hand, it seems important to have it be a parent, since it'll be natural for them to contact other parents (like the Room Parent Coordinator from the Choice Program). Or, if it's too big a role, does it need to be paid staff?)

Appoint an Information Coordinator: (TBD: Is Gina interested in this role, while being a Creole Connector to practice the parent liaison role for her career?)

Support and documentation: Ana

Remote partner in the whole thing, included on emails: Mica

B. Plan a face to face meeting between all of the Connectors. E.g., Gina, or Tona, should reach out to Ivanete and Veronaise ASAP and show them the forms. (TBD: who will do?)

Gina should find out everyone’s best meeting times for that meeting. (Sunday with kids?)

C. let’s still pursue a call home by all Connectors before the year ends – to gather information on “how are the interactions w/ your teachers going? How is translation and interpretation going?”

D. Lead Connector and Information Coordinator will need to organize a summer training for Connectors, by principal, on how the school functions.

Things for other people to do:

-Email training? (PTA or Welcome Committee.)

-actual employed translators/interpreters (Welcome Project)

Overview and key findings: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network

2011-05-25T14:51:23Z

98.216.239.14: /* History */

At the Healey School in Somerville, parents hail from xx countries. Some have no computers and no internet. A listserv has long enrolled only some, in a former magnet program now unifying with the rest of the school. Robocalls home go in four languages; handouts home often don't. Communication from school to home is a huge issue, particularly across boundaries of language and tech access/training. We've been working on a range of school-home and parent-parent communication strategies. In particular, the Parent Connector Network was an idea to link bilingual parents to parents who speak their languages, to support translation and personal relationships by phone. As part of the Parent Connector project, then made a [[hotline]] to answer FAQs from parents and [[Googleforms]] to collect info on how parents are doing.

We also supported a schoolwide [[wiki]] to be made to support information-sharing during the unification process, and near the end of spring 2011, a [[Googlecalendar.]]

===Process===

Our design process has also been importantly collaborative. We've been working with young people, families and teachers in design efforts to improve the core communication infrastructure of their public schools/community. So, we want to also document: how has that co-design effort worked, and what of that process might others, elsewhere, want to replicate? What have been the stumbling blocks in the process?

We began in fall 2009 creating [[Reading Nights]] to link parents across a Kindergarten hallway in face to face efforts to share information on reading with young children. Our events were social, and academic; we met parents who formed the core of the working group that continued to work on schoolwide communication.

We also created a [[multilingual coffee hour]] model under the guidance of Consuelo Perez, to supplement the typically English-dominated meetings with the principal.

===Communication infrastructure/communications made possible===

CUT THIS DOWN ***!

In our final meetings in Spring 2011 after several months of testing aspects of the Connector Project, we came up with the following list of infrastructural needs.

Mica, Ana, Tonia, Gina

**next steps on the connector project: infrastructure and tools in the kit

-We need a clear definition of the connector’s job, because there is so much information coming from the school. The quantity of stuff needing to get out is so huge, otherwise. We can’t call families every week to say “there’s this coming up next week.” :

so, the job of the Connectors is to be a conduit for info to and from the school.

So, we need a clear process of getting info FROM school, to get out to parents. And, we will otherwise be available to parents who need to speak out to the school about something.

Too many requests are likely to come to Connectors for translating public information, etc. So, we have to set some ground rules: Connectors can realistically only make calls 1x/month, but also be available for questions.

INFRASTRUCTURE WE NEED TO GET IN PLACE

1. hotline. Plan: first day of each month, a new hotline recording goes up.

TO DO: Seth needs to finish it so it is easy to use for fall, with people able to record on it via phone from home.

-TO DO: We need to advertise hotline in the front of the school first thing in the fall. AND get it on the radar of the PTA, others who need to advertise things.

2. Connectors will make a monthly call during the 3rd week of every month.

3. Develop a googledoc as one organized place where principal, school leaders, put info that most needs dissemination/translation each month. (people recording on the hotline and making Connector calls, will check the googledoc first.) This googledoc can also be a place where school leaders put questions that require immigrant parent input, that Connectors can ask when they call home.

The googledoc can hold two kinds of information (Note: this googledoc will be for events and basic information that everyone needs to know. We won’t translate high-level official documents that require professional translation.)

Info for connector calls: = info that requires personal translation/explanation, or questions that need to be asked of all parents.

Deadline for getting this info into Connector calls: by Friday of second week of every month.

Info for the hotline: = events and stuff that everyone needs to know about.

Deadline for getting that info on the hotline: by the Friday of the last week of every month.

-We propose that a translator of the month be appointed in each language. This would be a parent who might not have the time to be a connector but would do translation of the googledoc material. (see the Connector spreadsheet for a list of "Choice" parents who expressed willingness to do translation.) That person will translate the info on the googledoc, by the deadlines above.

4. TO DO: We need to appoint a person to fill a key year-long role as Information Coordinator: (paid staff?), who willl coordinate the EVENT AND INFO TRANSLATION effort above.

**The Information Coordinator will coordinate people to record the information on the hotline and will also help monitor the info going on the googledoc. The Information Coordinator can also put the translated info from the googledoc on an online calendar and the purple calendar. A weekly email from DeFalco can also go out w/ the translated info from the Googledoc, via ConnectEd.

**Note: TO DO: create a google calendar for the school? (needs to be run by someone central.) ((current calendar is not very effective – Tona can’t find events even when she tries.))

5. TO DO: appoint a person to fill another key year-long role as Lead Connector. This could perhaps be a volunteer parent – who is helping to coordinate the other Connector parents.

-Connector calls will happen the 3rd week of each month.

- So, in the first week of every month, the Lead Connector calls the connectors together with the principal to discuss what they have learned.

The Lead Connector also needs to:

-keep track of the actual Connectors: (e.g.: so far, Marcia and Ivanete have not called any parents, or selected “their” parents on the google spreadsheet. Ivanete is ready to be called and trained on the forms; she has been having dizziness problems. Marcia has been extremely busy at work but is also ready to make calls. Someone, a Lead Connector, has to reach out to them.

-go on the googledoc or make a call to principal, to decide before the 3rd week’s Connector calls what the theme/purpose of the month’s calls will be.

-keep tabs on the googleform we’ve created for keeping tabs on parent calls. Tona reworked it so it wasn’t set up as if there was a serious issue each time, but is more of a general recording space. (**question: this role of monitoring parent needs seems larger and suggests that the Lead Connector should perhaps be paid staff. . .TBD.)

-***convene the multilingual coffee hour – PTA is ready to offer coffee for it.

(TO DO: ASK THE CONNECTORS what they want to do w/ the coffee hour slot. Could be used for a quick update on Connector efforts but mostly, to hear immigrant parents with their issues and to introduce immigrant parents to non-immigrant parents. It could become a routine part of the Connector calls each month to invite parents to the coffee hour.)

Emails with questions at any time can go to the Information Coordinator and the Lead Connector. Mica will be an ongoing partner in such email exchange as well.

TO DO BEFORE THE END OF THE YEAR:

A. pick roles.

Appoint a Lead Connector: Tonia is interested. (TBD: On the one hand, it seems important to have it be a parent, since it'll be natural for them to contact other parents (like the Room Parent Coordinator from the Choice Program). Or, if it's too big a role, does it need to be paid staff?)

Appoint an Information Coordinator: (TBD: Is Gina interested in this role, while being a Creole Connector to practice the parent liaison role for her career?)

Support and documentation: Ana

Remote partner in the whole thing, included on emails: Mica

B. Plan a face to face meeting between all of the Connectors. E.g., Gina, or Tona, should reach out to Ivanete and Veronaise ASAP and show them the forms. (TBD: who will do?)

Gina should find out everyone’s best meeting times for that meeting. (Sunday with kids?)

C. let’s still pursue a call home by all Connectors before the year ends – to gather information on “how are the interactions w/ your teachers going? How is translation and interpretation going?”

D. Lead Connector and Information Coordinator will need to organize a summer training for Connectors, by principal, on how the school functions.

Things for other people to do:

-Email training? (PTA or Welcome Committee.)

-actual employed translators/interpreters (Welcome Project)

Next Steps

2011-05-25T14:48:50Z

98.216.239.14: /* The Last Layer: Facilitating Public Knowledge-Sharing on Education Innovation */

= The Last Layer: Facilitating Public Knowledge-Sharing on Education Innovation=

Our PI is moving to CREATE (the Center for Research on Equity, Assessment, and Teaching Excellence) at UCSD. There, we'll explore the "layer" of regional and city-wide information-sharing, and, explore analogous efforts in SD to improve individual-level, school-level, and district-level communication infrastructure a la OneVille. Goals:

1. Continue to improve the local communication infrastructure of public education. Create and test tools for supporting the people who share children, to communicate re. improving young people's lives.

2. Create direct usable access to knowledge about improving and increasing learning opportunities for young people. (Twitter? Video documentation? Wikis?)

OneVille has been an attempt to create communication infrastructure within a district and schools, but the same infrastructure can support [[information-sharing nationally and beyond.]] Indeed, the ultimate scalable intervention in education may be organized local inquiry into ways of improving local education. And the most potent accountability model may be knowledgeable local stakeholders pressing each other toward doing “what works.”
So, what forms of information-sharing would help the public see existing education innovation, and catalyze more of it?

Policy efforts alone cannot “fix” education from above; nor does knowledge on “what works” automatically get shared across localities. Instead, educators, mentors, families, and students themselves need direct access to the best knowledge available about improving and increasing learning opportunities for young people. So what forms of information-sharing would make this possible? We'll be exploring this.

----

A few e.g.s of info-sharing models:

Edutopia.

Peer 2 Peer University.

Connexions: http://cnx.org/content/m37276/latest/?collection=col11292/latest

IBM’s Reinventing Education initative (see Kanter’s “Change Toolkit.”).

Open Learning Initiative (“Learn how to do xxx” videos – [stuff w/ right answers.] use for CREATE? http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/forstudents/freecourses/visual-communication-design

MIT Open Software program

Lesley: e learning

Flossmanuals are a nice example of simple, somewhat visual documentation:

http://en.flossmanuals.net/audacity/

-Susan’s wiki is a nice example of the visual "pop" I'd love our wiki to have:

http://learn2teach.pbworks.com/w/page/15779288/Learn-2-Teach,-Teach-2-Learn

----
=

EXCESS HERE For example: how would such information best be organized, to avoid the information overload of the internet? We had an idea called an
=== Interaction Map ===
Create:

Graphic diagram with hyperlinks that will organize usable knowledge about exciting ways to improve education:

Parent – Child Caregiver – Child
Neighbor – Child Mentor - Child
Child – Child Youth - Youth
Teacher – Child Administrator – Child
Social worker - Child
Parent –Teacher
Parent – Administrator
Community organizer - Legislator

[[Other information-sharing efforts]]: [[Code for America]]: could a 311 line and citywide "dashboard" be used in education, to show quant data and, to support youth and adults to use cellphone and internet technology to make qualitative suggestions to improve schools?

Next Steps

2011-05-25T14:42:56Z

98.216.239.14: /* The Last Layer: Facilitating Public Knowledge-Sharing on Education Innovation */

= The Last Layer: Facilitating Public Knowledge-Sharing on Education Innovation=

Our PI is moving to CREATE (the Center for Research on Equity, Assessment, and Teaching Excellence) at UCSD. There, we'll explore the "layer" of regional and city-wide information-sharing, and, explore analogous efforts in SD to improve individual-level, school-level, and district-level communication infrastructure a la OneVille. Goals:

1. Continue to improve the local communication infrastructure of public education. Create and test tools for supporting the people who share children, to communicate re. improving young people's lives.

2. Create direct usable access to knowledge about improving and increasing learning opportunities for young people. (Twitter? Video documentation? Wikis?)

OneVille has been an attempt to create communication infrastructure within a district and schools, but the same infrastructure can support [[information-sharing nationally and beyond.]] Indeed, the ultimate scalable intervention in education may be organized local inquiry into ways of improving local education. And the most potent accountability model may be knowledgeable local stakeholders pressing each other toward doing “what works.”
So, what forms of information-sharing would help the public see existing education innovation, and catalyze more of it?

Policy efforts alone cannot “fix” education from above; nor does knowledge on “what works” automatically get shared across localities. Instead, educators, mentors, families, and students themselves need direct access to the best knowledge available about improving and increasing learning opportunities for young people. So what forms of information-sharing would make this possible? We'll be exploring this.

----

A few e.g.s of info-sharing models:

Edutopia.

Peer 2 Peer University.

Connexions: http://cnx.org/content/m37276/latest/?collection=col11292/latest

IBM’s Reinventing Education initative (see Kanter’s “Change Toolkit.”).

Open Learning Initiative (“Learn how to do xxx” videos – [stuff w/ right answers.] use for CREATE? http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/forstudents/freecourses/visual-communication-design

MIT Open Software program

Lesley: e learning

----
=

EXCESS HERE For example: how would such information best be organized, to avoid the information overload of the internet? We had an idea called an
=== Interaction Map ===
Create:

Graphic diagram with hyperlinks that will organize usable knowledge about exciting ways to improve education:

Parent – Child Caregiver – Child
Neighbor – Child Mentor - Child
Child – Child Youth - Youth
Teacher – Child Administrator – Child
Social worker - Child
Parent –Teacher
Parent – Administrator
Community organizer - Legislator

[[Other information-sharing efforts]]: [[Code for America]]: could a 311 line and citywide "dashboard" be used in education, to show quant data and, to support youth and adults to use cellphone and internet technology to make qualitative suggestions to improve schools?

Next Steps

2011-05-25T14:11:38Z

98.216.239.14: /* The Last Layer: Facilitating Public Knowledge on Education Innovation */

= The Last Layer: Facilitating Public Knowledge-Sharing on Education Innovation=

Our PI is moving to CREATE (the Center for Research on Equity, Assessment, and Teaching Excellence) at UCSD. There, we'll explore the "layer" of regional and city-wide information-sharing, and, explore analogous efforts in SD to improve individual-level, school-level, and district-level communication infrastructure a la OneVille. Goals:

1. Continue to improve the local communication infrastructure of public education. Create and test tools for supporting the people who share children, to communicate re. improving young people's lives.

2. Create direct usable access to knowledge about improving and increasing learning opportunities for young people. (Twitter? Video documentation? Wikis?)

OneVille has been an attempt to create communication infrastructure within a district and schools, but the same infrastructure can support [[information-sharing nationally and beyond.]] Indeed, the ultimate scalable intervention in education may be organized local inquiry into ways of improving local education. And the most potent accountability model may be knowledgeable local stakeholders pressing each other toward doing “what works.”
So, what forms of information-sharing would help the public see existing education innovation, and catalyze more of it?

Policy efforts alone cannot “fix” education from above; nor does knowledge on “what works” automatically get shared across localities. Instead, educators, mentors, families, and students themselves need direct access to the best knowledge available about improving and increasing learning opportunities for young people. So what forms of information-sharing would make this possible? We'll be exploring this.

----
----
=

For example: how would such information best be organized, to avoid the information overload of the internet? We had an idea called an
=== Interaction Map ===
Create:

Graphic diagram with hyperlinks that will organize usable knowledge about exciting ways to improve education:

Parent – Child Caregiver – Child
Neighbor – Child Mentor - Child
Child – Child Youth - Youth
Teacher – Child Administrator – Child
Social worker - Child
Parent –Teacher
Parent – Administrator
Community organizer - Legislator

[[Other information-sharing efforts]]: [[Code for America]]: could a 311 line and citywide "dashboard" be used in education, to show quant data and, to support youth and adults to use cellphone and internet technology to make qualitative suggestions to improve schools?

Next Steps

2011-05-25T14:07:54Z

98.216.239.14:

= The Last Layer: Facilitating Public Knowledge on Education Innovation=

What forms of information-sharing would help the public see existing education innovation, and catalyze more of it? Policy efforts alone cannot “fix” education from above; nor does knowledge on “what works” automatically get shared across localities. Instead, educators, mentors, families, and students themselves need direct access to the best knowledge available about improving and increasing learning opportunities for young people. So what forms of information-sharing would make this possible?

OneVille has been an attempt to create communication infrastructure within a district and schools, but the same infrastructure can support information-sharing nationally and beyond. Indeed, the ultimate scalable intervention in education may be organized local inquiry into ways of improving local education. And the most potent accountability model may be knowledgeable local stakeholders pressing each other toward doing “what works.”

----
----
= Our PI is moving to CREATE at UCSD and will be exploring regional and city-wide information-sharing, as well as exploring efforts there to improve individual-level, school-level, and district-level communication infrastructure a la OneVille. Goals:

1. Create direct usable access to knowledge about improving and increasing learning opportunities for young people. (Twitter? Video documentation? Wikis?)

2. Continue to improve the local communication infrastructure of public education. Create and test tools for supporting the people who share children, to communicate re. improving young people's lives.

(How would such information best be organized, to avoid the information overload of the internet? We had an idea called an
=== Interaction Map ===
Create:

Graphic diagram with hyperlinks that will organize usable knowledge about exciting ways to improve education:

Parent – Child Caregiver – Child
Neighbor – Child Mentor - Child
Child – Child Youth - Youth
Teacher – Child Administrator – Child
Social worker - Child
Parent –Teacher
Parent – Administrator
Community organizer - Legislator

[[Other information-sharing efforts]]: [[Code for America]]: could a 311 line and citywide "dashboard" be used in education, to show quant data and, to support youth and adults to use cellphone and internet technology to make qualitative suggestions to improve schools?

Wiki

2011-05-25T13:57:21Z

98.216.239.14:

(EDIT/REPLACE AFTER WILL APPROVES)

Using a Wiki for a Parent-Teacher-Administration Partnership in School Redesign:
Lessons Learned from a K-8 School.
Written by Will Thalheimer, a parent and the wiki creator.

The Question
Is a wiki an effective means for school redesign when the whole community is invited to help redesign the school?
Background
Our K-8 school is in an urban environment. We have a diverse population of students – according to state stats, that means approximately one third Hispanic, one third White, 14% African American (primarily Haitian), 10% Asian American, with visible Native American, Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and multiracial populations. The top four languages in use are English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole.
In the Spring of 2010, our city school board voted that we should “unify” our school’s two main elementary programs. Previously, one program drew students primarily from nearby the school and included many immigrants and working-class families. The second, magnet program—about twice as big—drew students through a city-wide lottery to a program known for its progressive-constructivist practices and strong parent involvement and commitment. It included a majority of students from middle class and upper-middle class families with a significant white majority combined with a substantial group of minority families. (WILL, DO YOU WANT TO USE THE WORD ‘MINORITY’ IN SOMERVILLE, OR USE “FAMILIES OF COLOR”?)
The decision to unify the school was highly controversial and emotions were raw in most of the school community in the 2009-2010 school year. Especially visible were the frustrations of those who were heartbroken at the thought of losing the progressive-constructivist lottery program. There were also frustrations from those from the second, neighborhood-enrolled program, who were concerned about being swallowed up by the larger program.
The principal of the school in 2009-2010 was leaving the school at the end of the Spring. A new principal was being hired during this timeframe.
The 2010-2011 school year was used for planning this “unification process.” This was carried out by a largely-elected school site council represented by teachers, parents, community partners, the new principal , and an outside consultant.
The Need for a Wiki
The unification school redesign process took place in a background of highly-charged emotions. The controversy from the previous year had splintered the school into two or more camps. A new principal was coming on board. If George Bush had been president of the school, we would have been in an Orange-Alert mode.
The school site council began forming in September and October (elections were required) and the council ended up being comprised of about 24 members. The council members were trained in group process skills because they would be facilitating many meetings with members of the school community at large.
The school board had asked that the unification process be one that was transparent and open for all stakeholders to have input. The school site council informally adopted the following communication principles—the TRUST principles:
• T = Transparency (So everyone can see what's going on)
• R = Redundancy (Multiple communications through multiple channels)
• U = Universality (So everyone can be joined in the network of communication and inquiry)
• S = Stakeholder Empowerment (so parents, teachers, staff, students, and community partners can have a voice)
• T = Timeliness (Provide the information in a manner that is timely)
The school site council subdivided into five working groups. The working groups each had a core team made up of the school site council members and invited teachers, parents, and community members to join one or more working groups. These working groups were charged with looking into different issues and making recommendations. In addition to the working groups, the school council formed an “Organizing Team” to organize and administer the process. The Organizing Team consisted of the principle, the consultant, one teacher, and one parent (the writer of this article).
The wiki was created in first-draft form over two days of experimentation after several inspirations came together. Here are those inspirations:
1. By early October, there were clear signs that people in the school community began didn’t know what was happening, how the process worked, or how they could get involved. (WILL, DO YOU HAVE examples in addition to “people began complaining?”)
2. Only a few people had access to modify the school’s official website, and its interface was awkward to use. It was therefore not suitable for posting meeting times, minutes, etc.
3. Our reform principles required transparency and a way to enable people to have input into the process (even if they didn’t speak English as their first language, had little time to come to meetings, etc.)
4. The new principal needed a way to communicate with the school community. While he engaged in an exhaustive number of meetings with parents, he could not reach those without flexible schedules.
5. The findings compiled by the working groups needed to be stored somewhere.
6. While the progressive-constructivist program had an excellent email list of its parents, the other program had no list of its own. The school had a list, but it was limited to only one email per household and it wasn’t fully populated with email addresses.
7. Email and the bulletin board software were not adequate to create a public storage area or a communication channel.
8. The OneVille project was testing ways to increase and improve parent communication and I had the privilege to confer with them often. In fact, it was during a meeting with the OneVille technology team that I was inspired to try a little wiki experimentation.
9. I work in the workplace learning field where wikis, blogs and other social media had been in discussions for years. I had also previously created several other social media interfaces, and witnessed the implementation of even more, all with poor to mediocre results (for example, I tried to start a social network in my daughter’s grade using Ning; nobody seemed motivated to be part of a new network!). So, I had some sense of possibilities and potential obstacles.
The Wiki Development
The first draft of the wiki really began as an experimental play space. I searched around for a wiki-development tool that was free to use, simple, and robust enough to enable the following functionality:
1. Tool that was stable, reliable.
2. Tool that was free (preferably).
3. Backed by an organization that was likely to continue to support the product into the future.
4. Had a wiki page interface where anyone could modify content.
5. Offered a way to have threaded discussions.
6. Offered a calendar interface so we could post meeting times.
7. Enabled customizable look and feel (enough to enable branding).
I searched through Google for “free wikis” or similar and came across Wikispaces, which I had used many years earlier in my work. WikiSpaces offered a free education version so I signed up and began experimenting. By the end of two days, I was pretty sure the wiki would work to meet our needs. The calendar feature was not found within WikiSpaces but was hyperlinked. As a bonus, I figured out a way for Google Translate to automatically translate the wiki into the four major languages used at the school, requiring only small additional edits by human translators.
The Wiki Rollout
Ideally, we would have rolled out the wiki with fanfare and preparation. Unfortunately, there was no time to do this the right way. Instead, I demoed the wiki at a school council meeting, created a how-to-page, offered some individual tutoring, did one or two online meetings to show how to use the wiki, etc.
The wiki navigation was designed to highlight its major components. This is the current navigation, but the major categories haven’t changed from the original rollout. You can actually click on the links below to go to the actual wiki. WILL: DO YOU OR ANOTHER PERSON WANT TO ‘CLEAN UP’ THE WIKI AND, GET IT READY FOR CONTINUED USE IN THE FALL?
Essentials
Home
Calendar Link
Ideas-Examples-Inspiration
Principal DeFalco's Page
Language Translation
Volunteering and Donations
MAJOR CURRENT ACTIVITIES
ISSUE DISCUSSIONS
Getting Started
First You Must Join
How a Wiki Works
Best Practices for Wikis
Why Use a Wiki?
Play in the Sandbox
Scavenger Hunt
Working Groups
Working Group Overview
WG----Culture-Climate-Community
WG----Parents-Staff-Students
WG----Structures-and-Operations
WG----Teaching-and-Learning
WG----Vision-and-Mission
Middle Grades Design Group
After School Programs Group

Healey Council
Healey Council Work
Who is the Healey Council?
Organizing Team Notes
Each working group was given their own wiki page. In order for each group to see what it was possible to display on the page, the wiki was originally filled in with dummy data—information that obviously needed to be changed once the working groups began using the wiki.
As co-leader of one working group, I began modeling one way that a working group might utilize their page. The consultant also offered a great deal of content, especially research findings, etc., early on.
As I was on the school council’s organizing team, the organizing team made constant references to the wiki, so it was encouraged in this way too.
Of the five working groups, three began using the wiki early with great enthusiasm, posting members’ names, meeting times, minutes, decisions made, decisions-to-be made, etc. Another group eventually joined in using the wiki, but the final group never did use the wiki. All during this time there were many encouragements to all the groups to use the wiki.
To augment the text-based messaging available on a wiki, we created a narrated PowerPoint presentation available on the web and linked through the wiki that provided a visual model for how the unification process would work. You can view that on the school principal’s page: https://healeyschool.wikispaces.com/Principal+DeFalco%27s+Page. Note that the principal was so busy during the unification process that he did not have/take time to learn how to best use the wiki.
Note that we discovered early on that because YouTube was blocked within the school system, we had to use a different online video platform to present any videos or narrated PowerPoints if we wanted the teachers to be able to view the videos while at the school. We used Vimeo.
We got regular pushback from parents, particularly middle-class, middle-aged parents, that the wiki was not an ideal communication tool. There were many reasons for this pushback. Some were simply not comfortable using any computer technology other than email. Many had never encountered the wiki concept before. They may have gone to Wikipedia, but didn’t understand that anyone—especially them—could actually edit it. Some people were concerned that we would not be able to reach people who didn’t have computers. We had assurances that the school would be able to provide parents with access, but such access never happened. (A plan to get a computer in the PTA room of the school is still underway; it’s been slowed by concerns about people inadvertently putting viruses into the school’s network). Note that most wikis require that those who want to edit the wiki have an email address, so that the wiki to be monitored for vandalism or abuse—and people can be blocked for infringements. As explained above, though, not all parents had email accounts (and, some “get an email” nights held by OneVille didn’t have a great turnout, possibly because the rationale for getting online was still not clear!). We also didn’t do sufficient paper-based advertising of the wiki.
We assured everyone from the beginning that the wiki was not meant to replace other forms of communication. The redundancy principle (of the TRUST principles) makes this claim specifically. Still, among a vocal minority, grumblings continued and we defended the wiki’s use with some regularity.

Wiki Results
When evaluating any piece of communication technology, it’s critical to compare the process using the technology to what the process would be like without the technology. So for example, in evaluating the benefits of the wiki, we need to look at the kind of process we would have without the wiki. This seems to be a particularly difficult thing for people to wrap their heads around. People look at the wiki and have complaints, but they don’t naturally think about what the process would look like without the wiki. As you’ll see in our communication strategy below, we had to specifically highlight the benefits of a wiki.
We advertised the following potential benefits on the wiki and in correspondence in other communication channels, like the listserv in existence for one of the school’s programs:
Potential Benefits of the Wiki Technology
1. Enables everyone to view the activity of the unification process.
2. Enables more people to have a voice and get involved in the unification process.
3. Enables more busy parents, teachers, students, and administrators to engage in Healey business when their schedules allow.
4. Enables those who are intimidated working in public or in groups to express their voices more easily.
5. Enables those who are intimidated speaking in groups of people demographically different from themselves to express their voices more easily.
6. Enables a wider group of parents, teachers, and students to get involved in the work of the Healey – IF issues of computer training and access get addressed.
7. Through Google translate, we could enable participants who speak different languages to speak to each other more effectively without human translators being required.
8. Makes it at least a little less likely that a small unrepresentative sample of our community makes or influences all/most of the decisions.
9. Overcomes the bottleneck problem where information does not get disseminated to a centralized website because it is simply too much work for one or a few people to keep up with the demand.
10. Enables the community to feel empowered to speak out, share views, etc. Such empowerment has subsequent benefits:
o Better ability to understand each other’s' views.
o Fewer offline gripe sessions that undermine school morale.
o More opportunities to collaborate and share enthusiasms.
o Better ability to coordinate actions.
o More visibility regarding the issues of importance to parents, teachers, and students.
After several months of wiki use, the grumblings diminished—at least publicly or to us. Throughout the process, the wiki was used mainly by the folks most involved in the working group work [meaning only the working groups, or some additional collaborators? Maybe get more specific], rather than by the full school community,
Despite its limited reach, the wiki enabled its users - teachers, parents, and community members to work together in ways that would not otherwise have been possible.
Some specific benefits:
1. Because of the wiki’s sheer presence—that it looked reasonably nice, that it seemed well organized, that its translation function seemed almost magical, that it gave a sense of thoughtful activity—it sent a message that the unification process was in good hands.
2. The wiki bolstered the “brand image” of the school, creating a buzz throughout the community at large and generating at least one article in a nearby town that praised our work (see http://tinyurl.com/6evmb4s).
3. The wiki enabled working groups to capture multiple sources of relevant information in one place, without requiring any one person to compile and post everything on their own. It particularly helped when we were seeking research examples of “how x is done in other schools.”
4. Enabled group members to reflect and/or comment on issues between meetings. The following shows a posting that enabled everyone to consider issues before discussing them at a following meeting: https://healeyschool.wikispaces.com/message/view/WG----Teaching-and-Learning/32808780. This post, as you may have seen, was not successful in getting others to reply.
5. Enabled in-depth discussions that would not have occurred in any other way because they were a low-priority of the collective, though still centrally important to a small minority. See for example, this discussion: https://healeyschool.wikispaces.com/message/view/Homework/31616317. Face-to-face meetings didn’t allow such a conversation because meeting time was at a premium and other things were discussed.
6. Enabled issues that weren’t resolved in the timeframe allowed (in our case before the final report was due in March) to still maintain a presence, for possible future consideration.
7. Enabled the many meetings that were scheduled, to be posted in one place, without stressing a bottleneck of having one person keep track of everything.
Some Wiki shortcomings:
1. People did not take to the wiki quickly.
2. A large number of the school community did not engage the wiki at all.
3. An unrepresentative sample of school community members utilized the wiki.
4. Items were not always kept up to date.
5. The sheer size of the wiki may have kept some people away from the process. Just as many people don’t engage elections until there are only a few candidates still in the running, perhaps people felt it easier to stay disengaged until the work of the working groups boiled down to specific recommendations.
6. The wiki-master (your author) became stretched too thin and didn’t always engage the wiki as much as might have been needed.
7. The wiki became something of a forest of disorganized information, because people just posted reams of information without really understanding the capability of a wiki to post small chunks and link between them. (I ADDED THIS B/C THIS WAS HOW I HELPED SCREW UP THE WIKI!)
8. Good threaded discussions were very rare. The discussion tab was used extensively for posting and viewing, but was almost completely unsuccessful in having good back-and-forth discussions (except for the one linked to above). Whether this was a matter of training, comfort, or something else is not clear.
9. The working groups did not usually post their deliberations in a way that would make participation easy. Even within the school council—the most active group—things that were going be voted on in a coming meeting were not always posted in advance. Sometimes they were sent around in emails directly to council members, but this subverted the ideal of complete transparency and stakeholder involvement.
10. Some of the working groups did an inadequate job of keeping the school community informed, letting them know when the next meetings were, or inviting them to comment on their work-in-progress.
11. Teachers—who should be at the heart of the school redesign work—did not participate in the wiki, except for those who were actively involved in the working groups. The principal initiated lots of teacher input and discussion during professional-development time, but we didn’t do anything to involve teachers with the wiki early, and they didn’t jump in.
12. There were no students who used the wiki—at least as far as could be discerned.
13. The principal could have been utilized more to align his messaging with the wiki. He mentioned the wiki during teacher meetings and parent get-togethers, but to really draw people to specific wiki content, he could have mentioned more specifics.
14. The findings gathered on the wiki was compiled and/or interpreted mostly by people without a background in doing educational research. As might be expected, some of the research conclusions drawn from this work were lacking in rigor and perspective. I’M NOT SURE YOU WANT TO INCLUDE THIS ONE; IT SEEMS LIKE A RED HERRING/SOMEHOW UNRELATED TO WIKI’S, PERIOD
15. Despite the translation mechanism, virtually no non-English text was offered on the wiki (except as a demonstration).
Lessons learned (things we might do better for next time):
1. More outreach, more training, more hand-holding early to get more people using the wiki earlier, and to improve the way the wiki is understood to be used.
2. Find a team of wiki facilitators/coaches who would volunteer to monitor the wiki and coach the most-active wiki users to improve the way the wiki is being used. The central idea is that training and getting people started is not enough, but that someone needs to monitor wiki use early and gently make recommendations for improvements.
3. More direction at the school council level to create specific plans for wiki use and wiki outreach.
4. Because of the large number of navigation options, people got a bit lost. Eventually we put up an ISSUE DISCUSSIONS page to drive people’s attention to the key issues under discussion by the working groups. This was a good idea to focus people’s attention, but we needed more compliance from the working group leaders to utilize it. Not all the issues were placed on this page.
5. Use a narrated presentation to add some personal messaging to help people learn how to use the wiki. The instructions were clear, but by adding a human voice to the instructions, people might have been more willing to engage the wiki itself. Note: This was planned, but the wiki creator never got around to it.[You say on p.5 that you created a narrated PowerPoint presentation. Did this not end up happening?]
6. Create more alignment between the principal’s messaging and the wiki. For example, during a parent coffee, the principal could have pointed out wiki pages to pay close attention to.

Bottom Line
The wiki was essential to our work, but it was certainly no panacea.
Our redesign process was under incredible stress from a ridiculously constrained timeline and we just couldn’t do the wiki right. Of course, even if we had added all the supports suggested above, there is still no guarantee that we would have engaged more people in wiki use and school redesign work.
The wiki did create a positive buzz and ameliorated somewhat the incredible schisms that had been previously formed.
The negatives linger in mind. Those of us in the process might even say something like, “The wiki is the worst communication tool in the world today for participatory school redesign work, except for all other communication tools, which would be worse.” Others of us would add, “wikis can be amazing – if people get trained to use them.”

Wiki

2011-05-25T13:56:55Z

98.216.239.14: Created page with '(EDIT AFTER WILL APPROVES) Using a Wiki for a Parent-Teacher-Administration Partnership in School Redesign: Lessons Learned from a K-8 School. Written by Will Thalheimer, a par…'

(EDIT AFTER WILL APPROVES)

Using a Wiki for a Parent-Teacher-Administration Partnership in School Redesign:
Lessons Learned from a K-8 School.
Written by Will Thalheimer, a parent and the wiki creator.

The Question
Is a wiki an effective means for school redesign when the whole community is invited to help redesign the school?
Background
Our K-8 school is in an urban environment. We have a diverse population of students – according to state stats, that means approximately one third Hispanic, one third White, 14% African American (primarily Haitian), 10% Asian American, with visible Native American, Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and multiracial populations. The top four languages in use are English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole.
In the Spring of 2010, our city school board voted that we should “unify” our school’s two main elementary programs. Previously, one program drew students primarily from nearby the school and included many immigrants and working-class families. The second, magnet program—about twice as big—drew students through a city-wide lottery to a program known for its progressive-constructivist practices and strong parent involvement and commitment. It included a majority of students from middle class and upper-middle class families with a significant white majority combined with a substantial group of minority families. (WILL, DO YOU WANT TO USE THE WORD ‘MINORITY’ IN SOMERVILLE, OR USE “FAMILIES OF COLOR”?)
The decision to unify the school was highly controversial and emotions were raw in most of the school community in the 2009-2010 school year. Especially visible were the frustrations of those who were heartbroken at the thought of losing the progressive-constructivist lottery program. There were also frustrations from those from the second, neighborhood-enrolled program, who were concerned about being swallowed up by the larger program.
The principal of the school in 2009-2010 was leaving the school at the end of the Spring. A new principal was being hired during this timeframe.
The 2010-2011 school year was used for planning this “unification process.” This was carried out by a largely-elected school site council represented by teachers, parents, community partners, the new principal , and an outside consultant.
The Need for a Wiki
The unification school redesign process took place in a background of highly-charged emotions. The controversy from the previous year had splintered the school into two or more camps. A new principal was coming on board. If George Bush had been president of the school, we would have been in an Orange-Alert mode.
The school site council began forming in September and October (elections were required) and the council ended up being comprised of about 24 members. The council members were trained in group process skills because they would be facilitating many meetings with members of the school community at large.
The school board had asked that the unification process be one that was transparent and open for all stakeholders to have input. The school site council informally adopted the following communication principles—the TRUST principles:
• T = Transparency (So everyone can see what's going on)
• R = Redundancy (Multiple communications through multiple channels)
• U = Universality (So everyone can be joined in the network of communication and inquiry)
• S = Stakeholder Empowerment (so parents, teachers, staff, students, and community partners can have a voice)
• T = Timeliness (Provide the information in a manner that is timely)
The school site council subdivided into five working groups. The working groups each had a core team made up of the school site council members and invited teachers, parents, and community members to join one or more working groups. These working groups were charged with looking into different issues and making recommendations. In addition to the working groups, the school council formed an “Organizing Team” to organize and administer the process. The Organizing Team consisted of the principle, the consultant, one teacher, and one parent (the writer of this article).
The wiki was created in first-draft form over two days of experimentation after several inspirations came together. Here are those inspirations:
1. By early October, there were clear signs that people in the school community began didn’t know what was happening, how the process worked, or how they could get involved. (WILL, DO YOU HAVE examples in addition to “people began complaining?”)
2. Only a few people had access to modify the school’s official website, and its interface was awkward to use. It was therefore not suitable for posting meeting times, minutes, etc.
3. Our reform principles required transparency and a way to enable people to have input into the process (even if they didn’t speak English as their first language, had little time to come to meetings, etc.)
4. The new principal needed a way to communicate with the school community. While he engaged in an exhaustive number of meetings with parents, he could not reach those without flexible schedules.
5. The findings compiled by the working groups needed to be stored somewhere.
6. While the progressive-constructivist program had an excellent email list of its parents, the other program had no list of its own. The school had a list, but it was limited to only one email per household and it wasn’t fully populated with email addresses.
7. Email and the bulletin board software were not adequate to create a public storage area or a communication channel.
8. The OneVille project was testing ways to increase and improve parent communication and I had the privilege to confer with them often. In fact, it was during a meeting with the OneVille technology team that I was inspired to try a little wiki experimentation.
9. I work in the workplace learning field where wikis, blogs and other social media had been in discussions for years. I had also previously created several other social media interfaces, and witnessed the implementation of even more, all with poor to mediocre results (for example, I tried to start a social network in my daughter’s grade using Ning; nobody seemed motivated to be part of a new network!). So, I had some sense of possibilities and potential obstacles.
The Wiki Development
The first draft of the wiki really began as an experimental play space. I searched around for a wiki-development tool that was free to use, simple, and robust enough to enable the following functionality:
1. Tool that was stable, reliable.
2. Tool that was free (preferably).
3. Backed by an organization that was likely to continue to support the product into the future.
4. Had a wiki page interface where anyone could modify content.
5. Offered a way to have threaded discussions.
6. Offered a calendar interface so we could post meeting times.
7. Enabled customizable look and feel (enough to enable branding).
I searched through Google for “free wikis” or similar and came across Wikispaces, which I had used many years earlier in my work. WikiSpaces offered a free education version so I signed up and began experimenting. By the end of two days, I was pretty sure the wiki would work to meet our needs. The calendar feature was not found within WikiSpaces but was hyperlinked. As a bonus, I figured out a way for Google Translate to automatically translate the wiki into the four major languages used at the school, requiring only small additional edits by human translators.
The Wiki Rollout
Ideally, we would have rolled out the wiki with fanfare and preparation. Unfortunately, there was no time to do this the right way. Instead, I demoed the wiki at a school council meeting, created a how-to-page, offered some individual tutoring, did one or two online meetings to show how to use the wiki, etc.
The wiki navigation was designed to highlight its major components. This is the current navigation, but the major categories haven’t changed from the original rollout. You can actually click on the links below to go to the actual wiki. WILL: DO YOU OR ANOTHER PERSON WANT TO ‘CLEAN UP’ THE WIKI AND, GET IT READY FOR CONTINUED USE IN THE FALL?
Essentials
Home
Calendar Link
Ideas-Examples-Inspiration
Principal DeFalco's Page
Language Translation
Volunteering and Donations
MAJOR CURRENT ACTIVITIES
ISSUE DISCUSSIONS
Getting Started
First You Must Join
How a Wiki Works
Best Practices for Wikis
Why Use a Wiki?
Play in the Sandbox
Scavenger Hunt
Working Groups
Working Group Overview
WG----Culture-Climate-Community
WG----Parents-Staff-Students
WG----Structures-and-Operations
WG----Teaching-and-Learning
WG----Vision-and-Mission
Middle Grades Design Group
After School Programs Group

Healey Council
Healey Council Work
Who is the Healey Council?
Organizing Team Notes
Each working group was given their own wiki page. In order for each group to see what it was possible to display on the page, the wiki was originally filled in with dummy data—information that obviously needed to be changed once the working groups began using the wiki.
As co-leader of one working group, I began modeling one way that a working group might utilize their page. The consultant also offered a great deal of content, especially research findings, etc., early on.
As I was on the school council’s organizing team, the organizing team made constant references to the wiki, so it was encouraged in this way too.
Of the five working groups, three began using the wiki early with great enthusiasm, posting members’ names, meeting times, minutes, decisions made, decisions-to-be made, etc. Another group eventually joined in using the wiki, but the final group never did use the wiki. All during this time there were many encouragements to all the groups to use the wiki.
To augment the text-based messaging available on a wiki, we created a narrated PowerPoint presentation available on the web and linked through the wiki that provided a visual model for how the unification process would work. You can view that on the school principal’s page: https://healeyschool.wikispaces.com/Principal+DeFalco%27s+Page. Note that the principal was so busy during the unification process that he did not have/take time to learn how to best use the wiki.
Note that we discovered early on that because YouTube was blocked within the school system, we had to use a different online video platform to present any videos or narrated PowerPoints if we wanted the teachers to be able to view the videos while at the school. We used Vimeo.
We got regular pushback from parents, particularly middle-class, middle-aged parents, that the wiki was not an ideal communication tool. There were many reasons for this pushback. Some were simply not comfortable using any computer technology other than email. Many had never encountered the wiki concept before. They may have gone to Wikipedia, but didn’t understand that anyone—especially them—could actually edit it. Some people were concerned that we would not be able to reach people who didn’t have computers. We had assurances that the school would be able to provide parents with access, but such access never happened. (A plan to get a computer in the PTA room of the school is still underway; it’s been slowed by concerns about people inadvertently putting viruses into the school’s network). Note that most wikis require that those who want to edit the wiki have an email address, so that the wiki to be monitored for vandalism or abuse—and people can be blocked for infringements. As explained above, though, not all parents had email accounts (and, some “get an email” nights held by OneVille didn’t have a great turnout, possibly because the rationale for getting online was still not clear!). We also didn’t do sufficient paper-based advertising of the wiki.
We assured everyone from the beginning that the wiki was not meant to replace other forms of communication. The redundancy principle (of the TRUST principles) makes this claim specifically. Still, among a vocal minority, grumblings continued and we defended the wiki’s use with some regularity.

Wiki Results
When evaluating any piece of communication technology, it’s critical to compare the process using the technology to what the process would be like without the technology. So for example, in evaluating the benefits of the wiki, we need to look at the kind of process we would have without the wiki. This seems to be a particularly difficult thing for people to wrap their heads around. People look at the wiki and have complaints, but they don’t naturally think about what the process would look like without the wiki. As you’ll see in our communication strategy below, we had to specifically highlight the benefits of a wiki.
We advertised the following potential benefits on the wiki and in correspondence in other communication channels, like the listserv in existence for one of the school’s programs:
Potential Benefits of the Wiki Technology
1. Enables everyone to view the activity of the unification process.
2. Enables more people to have a voice and get involved in the unification process.
3. Enables more busy parents, teachers, students, and administrators to engage in Healey business when their schedules allow.
4. Enables those who are intimidated working in public or in groups to express their voices more easily.
5. Enables those who are intimidated speaking in groups of people demographically different from themselves to express their voices more easily.
6. Enables a wider group of parents, teachers, and students to get involved in the work of the Healey – IF issues of computer training and access get addressed.
7. Through Google translate, we could enable participants who speak different languages to speak to each other more effectively without human translators being required.
8. Makes it at least a little less likely that a small unrepresentative sample of our community makes or influences all/most of the decisions.
9. Overcomes the bottleneck problem where information does not get disseminated to a centralized website because it is simply too much work for one or a few people to keep up with the demand.
10. Enables the community to feel empowered to speak out, share views, etc. Such empowerment has subsequent benefits:
o Better ability to understand each other’s' views.
o Fewer offline gripe sessions that undermine school morale.
o More opportunities to collaborate and share enthusiasms.
o Better ability to coordinate actions.
o More visibility regarding the issues of importance to parents, teachers, and students.
After several months of wiki use, the grumblings diminished—at least publicly or to us. Throughout the process, the wiki was used mainly by the folks most involved in the working group work [meaning only the working groups, or some additional collaborators? Maybe get more specific], rather than by the full school community,
Despite its limited reach, the wiki enabled its users - teachers, parents, and community members to work together in ways that would not otherwise have been possible.
Some specific benefits:
1. Because of the wiki’s sheer presence—that it looked reasonably nice, that it seemed well organized, that its translation function seemed almost magical, that it gave a sense of thoughtful activity—it sent a message that the unification process was in good hands.
2. The wiki bolstered the “brand image” of the school, creating a buzz throughout the community at large and generating at least one article in a nearby town that praised our work (see http://tinyurl.com/6evmb4s).
3. The wiki enabled working groups to capture multiple sources of relevant information in one place, without requiring any one person to compile and post everything on their own. It particularly helped when we were seeking research examples of “how x is done in other schools.”
4. Enabled group members to reflect and/or comment on issues between meetings. The following shows a posting that enabled everyone to consider issues before discussing them at a following meeting: https://healeyschool.wikispaces.com/message/view/WG----Teaching-and-Learning/32808780. This post, as you may have seen, was not successful in getting others to reply.
5. Enabled in-depth discussions that would not have occurred in any other way because they were a low-priority of the collective, though still centrally important to a small minority. See for example, this discussion: https://healeyschool.wikispaces.com/message/view/Homework/31616317. Face-to-face meetings didn’t allow such a conversation because meeting time was at a premium and other things were discussed.
6. Enabled issues that weren’t resolved in the timeframe allowed (in our case before the final report was due in March) to still maintain a presence, for possible future consideration.
7. Enabled the many meetings that were scheduled, to be posted in one place, without stressing a bottleneck of having one person keep track of everything.
Some Wiki shortcomings:
1. People did not take to the wiki quickly.
2. A large number of the school community did not engage the wiki at all.
3. An unrepresentative sample of school community members utilized the wiki.
4. Items were not always kept up to date.
5. The sheer size of the wiki may have kept some people away from the process. Just as many people don’t engage elections until there are only a few candidates still in the running, perhaps people felt it easier to stay disengaged until the work of the working groups boiled down to specific recommendations.
6. The wiki-master (your author) became stretched too thin and didn’t always engage the wiki as much as might have been needed.
7. The wiki became something of a forest of disorganized information, because people just posted reams of information without really understanding the capability of a wiki to post small chunks and link between them. (I ADDED THIS B/C THIS WAS HOW I HELPED SCREW UP THE WIKI!)
8. Good threaded discussions were very rare. The discussion tab was used extensively for posting and viewing, but was almost completely unsuccessful in having good back-and-forth discussions (except for the one linked to above). Whether this was a matter of training, comfort, or something else is not clear.
9. The working groups did not usually post their deliberations in a way that would make participation easy. Even within the school council—the most active group—things that were going be voted on in a coming meeting were not always posted in advance. Sometimes they were sent around in emails directly to council members, but this subverted the ideal of complete transparency and stakeholder involvement.
10. Some of the working groups did an inadequate job of keeping the school community informed, letting them know when the next meetings were, or inviting them to comment on their work-in-progress.
11. Teachers—who should be at the heart of the school redesign work—did not participate in the wiki, except for those who were actively involved in the working groups. The principal initiated lots of teacher input and discussion during professional-development time, but we didn’t do anything to involve teachers with the wiki early, and they didn’t jump in.
12. There were no students who used the wiki—at least as far as could be discerned.
13. The principal could have been utilized more to align his messaging with the wiki. He mentioned the wiki during teacher meetings and parent get-togethers, but to really draw people to specific wiki content, he could have mentioned more specifics.
14. The findings gathered on the wiki was compiled and/or interpreted mostly by people without a background in doing educational research. As might be expected, some of the research conclusions drawn from this work were lacking in rigor and perspective. I’M NOT SURE YOU WANT TO INCLUDE THIS ONE; IT SEEMS LIKE A RED HERRING/SOMEHOW UNRELATED TO WIKI’S, PERIOD
15. Despite the translation mechanism, virtually no non-English text was offered on the wiki (except as a demonstration).
Lessons learned (things we might do better for next time):
1. More outreach, more training, more hand-holding early to get more people using the wiki earlier, and to improve the way the wiki is understood to be used.
2. Find a team of wiki facilitators/coaches who would volunteer to monitor the wiki and coach the most-active wiki users to improve the way the wiki is being used. The central idea is that training and getting people started is not enough, but that someone needs to monitor wiki use early and gently make recommendations for improvements.
3. More direction at the school council level to create specific plans for wiki use and wiki outreach.
4. Because of the large number of navigation options, people got a bit lost. Eventually we put up an ISSUE DISCUSSIONS page to drive people’s attention to the key issues under discussion by the working groups. This was a good idea to focus people’s attention, but we needed more compliance from the working group leaders to utilize it. Not all the issues were placed on this page.
5. Use a narrated presentation to add some personal messaging to help people learn how to use the wiki. The instructions were clear, but by adding a human voice to the instructions, people might have been more willing to engage the wiki itself. Note: This was planned, but the wiki creator never got around to it.[You say on p.5 that you created a narrated PowerPoint presentation. Did this not end up happening?]
6. Create more alignment between the principal’s messaging and the wiki. For example, during a parent coffee, the principal could have pointed out wiki pages to pay close attention to.

Bottom Line
The wiki was essential to our work, but it was certainly no panacea.
Our redesign process was under incredible stress from a ridiculously constrained timeline and we just couldn’t do the wiki right. Of course, even if we had added all the supports suggested above, there is still no guarantee that we would have engaged more people in wiki use and school redesign work.
The wiki did create a positive buzz and ameliorated somewhat the incredible schisms that had been previously formed.
The negatives linger in mind. Those of us in the process might even say something like, “The wiki is the worst communication tool in the world today for participatory school redesign work, except for all other communication tools, which would be worse.” Others of us would add, “wikis can be amazing – if people get trained to use them.”

Overview and key findings: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network

2011-05-18T13:40:40Z

98.216.239.14: /* Communication infrastructure/communications made possible */

At the Healey School in Somerville, parents hail from xx countries. Some have no computers and no internet. A listserv has long enrolled only some, in a former magnet program now unifying with the rest of the school. Robocalls home go in four languages; handouts home often don't. Communication from school to home is a huge issue, particularly across boundaries of language and tech access/training. We've been working on a range of school-home and parent-parent communication strategies. In particular, the Parent Connector Network was an idea to link bilingual parents to parents who speak their languages, to support translation and personal relationships by phone. As part of the Parent Connector project, then made a [[hotline]] to answer FAQs from parents and [[Googleforms]] to collect info on how parents are doing.

We also supported a schoolwide [[wiki]] to be made to support information-sharing during the unification process, and near the end of spring 2011, a [[Googlecalendar.]]

===History===

We began in fall 2009 creating [[Reading Nights]] to link parents across a Kindergarten hallway in face to face efforts to share information on reading with young children. Our events were social, and academic; we met parents who formed the core of the working group that continued to work on schoolwide communication.

We also created a [[multilingual coffee hour]] model under the guidance of Consuelo Perez, to supplement the typically English-dominated meetings with the principal.

===Communication infrastructure/communications made possible===

CUT THIS DOWN ***!

In our final meetings in Spring 2011 after several months of testing aspects of the Connector Project, we came up with the following list of infrastructural needs.

Mica, Ana, Tonia, Gina

**next steps on the connector project: infrastructure and tools in the kit

-We need a clear definition of the connector’s job, because there is so much information coming from the school. The quantity of stuff needing to get out is so huge, otherwise. We can’t call families every week to say “there’s this coming up next week.” :

so, the job of the Connectors is to be a conduit for info to and from the school.

So, we need a clear process of getting info FROM school, to get out to parents. And, we will otherwise be available to parents who need to speak out to the school about something.

Too many requests are likely to come to Connectors for translating public information, etc. So, we have to set some ground rules: Connectors can realistically only make calls 1x/month, but also be available for questions.

INFRASTRUCTURE WE NEED TO GET IN PLACE

1. hotline. Plan: first day of each month, a new hotline recording goes up.

TO DO: Seth needs to finish it so it is easy to use for fall, with people able to record on it via phone from home.

-TO DO: We need to advertise hotline in the front of the school first thing in the fall. AND get it on the radar of the PTA, others who need to advertise things.

2. Connectors will make a monthly call during the 3rd week of every month.

3. Develop a googledoc as one organized place where principal, school leaders, put info that most needs dissemination/translation each month. (people recording on the hotline and making Connector calls, will check the googledoc first.) This googledoc can also be a place where school leaders put questions that require immigrant parent input, that Connectors can ask when they call home.

The googledoc can hold two kinds of information (Note: this googledoc will be for events and basic information that everyone needs to know. We won’t translate high-level official documents that require professional translation.)

Info for connector calls: = info that requires personal translation/explanation, or questions that need to be asked of all parents.

Deadline for getting this info into Connector calls: by Friday of second week of every month.

Info for the hotline: = events and stuff that everyone needs to know about.

Deadline for getting that info on the hotline: by the Friday of the last week of every month.

-We propose that a translator of the month be appointed in each language. This would be a parent who might not have the time to be a connector but would do translation of the googledoc material. (see the Connector spreadsheet for a list of "Choice" parents who expressed willingness to do translation.) That person will translate the info on the googledoc, by the deadlines above.

4. TO DO: We need to appoint a person to fill a key year-long role as Information Coordinator: (paid staff?), who willl coordinate the EVENT AND INFO TRANSLATION effort above.

**The Information Coordinator will coordinate people to record the information on the hotline and will also help monitor the info going on the googledoc. The Information Coordinator can also put the translated info from the googledoc on an online calendar and the purple calendar. A weekly email from DeFalco can also go out w/ the translated info from the Googledoc, via ConnectEd.

**Note: TO DO: create a google calendar for the school? (needs to be run by someone central.) ((current calendar is not very effective – Tona can’t find events even when she tries.))

5. TO DO: appoint a person to fill another key year-long role as Lead Connector. This could perhaps be a volunteer parent – who is helping to coordinate the other Connector parents.

-Connector calls will happen the 3rd week of each month.

- So, in the first week of every month, the Lead Connector calls the connectors together with the principal to discuss what they have learned.

The Lead Connector also needs to:

-keep track of the actual Connectors: (e.g.: so far, Marcia and Ivanete have not called any parents, or selected “their” parents on the google spreadsheet. Ivanete is ready to be called and trained on the forms; she has been having dizziness problems. Marcia has been extremely busy at work but is also ready to make calls. Someone, a Lead Connector, has to reach out to them.

-go on the googledoc or make a call to principal, to decide before the 3rd week’s Connector calls what the theme/purpose of the month’s calls will be.

-keep tabs on the googleform we’ve created for keeping tabs on parent calls. Tona reworked it so it wasn’t set up as if there was a serious issue each time, but is more of a general recording space. (**question: this role of monitoring parent needs seems larger and suggests that the Lead Connector should perhaps be paid staff. . .TBD.)

-***convene the multilingual coffee hour – PTA is ready to offer coffee for it.

(TO DO: ASK THE CONNECTORS what they want to do w/ the coffee hour slot. Could be used for a quick update on Connector efforts but mostly, to hear immigrant parents with their issues and to introduce immigrant parents to non-immigrant parents. It could become a routine part of the Connector calls each month to invite parents to the coffee hour.)

Emails with questions at any time can go to the Information Coordinator and the Lead Connector. Mica will be an ongoing partner in such email exchange as well.

TO DO BEFORE THE END OF THE YEAR:

A. pick roles.

Appoint a Lead Connector: Tonia is interested. (TBD: On the one hand, it seems important to have it be a parent, since it'll be natural for them to contact other parents (like the Room Parent Coordinator from the Choice Program). Or, if it's too big a role, does it need to be paid staff?)

Appoint an Information Coordinator: (TBD: Is Gina interested in this role, while being a Creole Connector to practice the parent liaison role for her career?)

Support and documentation: Ana

Remote partner in the whole thing, included on emails: Mica

B. Plan a face to face meeting between all of the Connectors. E.g., Gina, or Tona, should reach out to Ivanete and Veronaise ASAP and show them the forms. (TBD: who will do?)

Gina should find out everyone’s best meeting times for that meeting. (Sunday with kids?)

C. let’s still pursue a call home by all Connectors before the year ends – to gather information on “how are the interactions w/ your teachers going? How is translation and interpretation going?”

D. Lead Connector and Information Coordinator will need to organize a summer training for Connectors, by principal, on how the school functions.

Things for other people to do:

-Email training? (PTA or Welcome Committee.)

-actual employed translators/interpreters (Welcome Project)

Overview and key findings: Schoolwide toolkit/parent connector network

2011-05-18T13:40:05Z

98.216.239.14: /* Communications made possible */

At the Healey School in Somerville, parents hail from xx countries. Some have no computers and no internet. A listserv has long enrolled only some, in a former magnet program now unifying with the rest of the school. Robocalls home go in four languages; handouts home often don't. Communication from school to home is a huge issue, particularly across boundaries of language and tech access/training. We've been working on a range of school-home and parent-parent communication strategies. In particular, the Parent Connector Network was an idea to link bilingual parents to parents who speak their languages, to support translation and personal relationships by phone. As part of the Parent Connector project, then made a [[hotline]] to answer FAQs from parents and [[Googleforms]] to collect info on how parents are doing.

We also supported a schoolwide [[wiki]] to be made to support information-sharing during the unification process, and near the end of spring 2011, a [[Googlecalendar.]]

===History===

We began in fall 2009 creating [[Reading Nights]] to link parents across a Kindergarten hallway in face to face efforts to share information on reading with young children. Our events were social, and academic; we met parents who formed the core of the working group that continued to work on schoolwide communication.

We also created a [[multilingual coffee hour]] model under the guidance of Consuelo Perez, to supplement the typically English-dominated meetings with the principal.

===Communication infrastructure/communications made possible===

CUT THIS DOWn

In our final meetings in Spring 2011 after several months of testing aspects of the Connector Project, we came up with the following list of infrastructural needs.

Mica, Ana, Tonia, Gina

**next steps on the connector project: infrastructure and tools in the kit

-We need a clear definition of the connector’s job, because there is so much information coming from the school. The quantity of stuff needing to get out is so huge, otherwise. We can’t call families every week to say “there’s this coming up next week.” :

so, the job of the Connectors is to be a conduit for info to and from the school.

So, we need a clear process of getting info FROM school, to get out to parents. And, we will otherwise be available to parents who need to speak out to the school about something.

Too many requests are likely to come to Connectors for translating public information, etc. So, we have to set some ground rules: Connectors can realistically only make calls 1x/month, but also be available for questions.

INFRASTRUCTURE WE NEED TO GET IN PLACE

1. hotline. Plan: first day of each month, a new hotline recording goes up.

TO DO: Seth needs to finish it so it is easy to use for fall, with people able to record on it via phone from home.

-TO DO: We need to advertise hotline in the front of the school first thing in the fall. AND get it on the radar of the PTA, others who need to advertise things.

2. Connectors will make a monthly call during the 3rd week of every month.

3. Develop a googledoc as one organized place where principal, school leaders, put info that most needs dissemination/translation each month. (people recording on the hotline and making Connector calls, will check the googledoc first.) This googledoc can also be a place where school leaders put questions that require immigrant parent input, that Connectors can ask when they call home.

The googledoc can hold two kinds of information (Note: this googledoc will be for events and basic information that everyone needs to know. We won’t translate high-level official documents that require professional translation.)

Info for connector calls: = info that requires personal translation/explanation, or questions that need to be asked of all parents.

Deadline for getting this info into Connector calls: by Friday of second week of every month.

Info for the hotline: = events and stuff that everyone needs to know about.

Deadline for getting that info on the hotline: by the Friday of the last week of every month.

-We propose that a translator of the month be appointed in each language. This would be a parent who might not have the time to be a connector but would do translation of the googledoc material. (see the Connector spreadsheet for a list of "Choice" parents who expressed willingness to do translation.) That person will translate the info on the googledoc, by the deadlines above.

4. TO DO: We need to appoint a person to fill a key year-long role as Information Coordinator: (paid staff?), who willl coordinate the EVENT AND INFO TRANSLATION effort above.

**The Information Coordinator will coordinate people to record the information on the hotline and will also help monitor the info going on the googledoc. The Information Coordinator can also put the translated info from the googledoc on an online calendar and the purple calendar. A weekly email from DeFalco can also go out w/ the translated info from the Googledoc, via ConnectEd.

**Note: TO DO: create a google calendar for the school? (needs to be run by someone central.) ((current calendar is not very effective – Tona can’t find events even when she tries.))

5. TO DO: appoint a person to fill another key year-long role as Lead Connector. This could perhaps be a volunteer parent – who is helping to coordinate the other Connector parents.

-Connector calls will happen the 3rd week of each month.

- So, in the first week of every month, the Lead Connector calls the connectors together with the principal to discuss what they have learned.

The Lead Connector also needs to:

-keep track of the actual Connectors: (e.g.: so far, Marcia and Ivanete have not called any parents, or selected “their” parents on the google spreadsheet. Ivanete is ready to be called and trained on the forms; she has been having dizziness problems. Marcia has been extremely busy at work but is also ready to make calls. Someone, a Lead Connector, has to reach out to them.

-go on the googledoc or make a call to principal, to decide before the 3rd week’s Connector calls what the theme/purpose of the month’s calls will be.

-keep tabs on the googleform we’ve created for keeping tabs on parent calls. Tona reworked it so it wasn’t set up as if there was a serious issue each time, but is more of a general recording space. (**question: this role of monitoring parent needs seems larger and suggests that the Lead Connector should perhaps be paid staff. . .TBD.)

-***convene the multilingual coffee hour – PTA is ready to offer coffee for it.

(TO DO: ASK THE CONNECTORS what they want to do w/ the coffee hour slot. Could be used for a quick update on Connector efforts but mostly, to hear immigrant parents with their issues and to introduce immigrant parents to non-immigrant parents. It could become a routine part of the Connector calls each month to invite parents to the coffee hour.)

Emails with questions at any time can go to the Information Coordinator and the Lead Connector. Mica will be an ongoing partner in such email exchange as well.

TO DO BEFORE THE END OF THE YEAR:

A. pick roles.

Appoint a Lead Connector: Tonia is interested. (TBD: On the one hand, it seems important to have it be a parent, since it'll be natural for them to contact other parents (like the Room Parent Coordinator from the Choice Program). Or, if it's too big a role, does it need to be paid staff?)

Appoint an Information Coordinator: (TBD: Is Gina interested in this role, while being a Creole Connector to practice the parent liaison role for her career?)

Support and documentation: Ana

Remote partner in the whole thing, included on emails: Mica

B. Plan a face to face meeting between all of the Connectors. E.g., Gina, or Tona, should reach out to Ivanete and Veronaise ASAP and show them the forms. (TBD: who will do?)

Gina should find out everyone’s best meeting times for that meeting. (Sunday with kids?)

C. let’s still pursue a call home by all Connectors before the year ends – to gather information on “how are the interactions w/ your teachers going? How is translation and interpretation going?”

D. Lead Connector and Information Coordinator will need to organize a summer training for Connectors, by principal, on how the school functions.

Things for other people to do:

-Email training? (PTA or Welcome Committee.)

-actual employed translators/interpreters (Welcome Project)