Real Talk Intervention

Your at-risk student is looking for your support. Your GT student is looking for a challenge. We've talked a lot about intervention for your struggling students, but what do you do when you have gifted and talented students who are struggling? The struggle may look different when you're working with advanced courses and high achieving students, but the struggle is real all the same. Today on the podcast we have veteran AP teacher, multiple Teacher of the Year winner Valerie Minor on to talk about how she intervenes and differentiates for advanced students as well as what she's learned in her transition into a special education co-teach setting this year. You can listen to the podcast here or follow us and subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher. Give us a like on Facebook, rate or review us, and please share! We love to hear from our listeners!

All of us have been asked the question at one point or another. What made you decide to become a teacher? You've been asked it in job interviews, where the right answer seemed critical. You've been asked it by incredulous family members, where the right answer seemed impossible. You've been asked it by students, where the right answer seemed loaded. We've all got our response memorized. Whether that response reflects your deeply felt, inspirational path into the classroom, the safe-for-work, sanitized version of your winding road towards respectability, or is simply a rehearsed tale that carefully avoids saying "I don't know why I do half the things I do." I don't know about you, but I'm bored by my story. It's not particularly inspirational, and, frankly, it's not particularly interesting. You want to see into a teacher's soul? Don't ask us why we started. Ask us why we  stay .  Why do we stay in a career that...

What Happens After... 2/14/2018 5:50 PM Another 10 hour day….I never knew I would have to wear so many hats at one job. Exhausted, I walk in the door of my home and fall onto the couch. Time to switch off, turn on Facebook, pictures of cats and babies.  Only instead of a smiling baby, there’s a woman embracing a child. She has an ash cross on her forehead and her mouth, silenced by the photograph, screams only in my mind…not my child….not mine!  My husband interrupts my moment of national connected horror. It’s Valentine’s Day, we’ve all had the flu for the last month, and we finally have a babysitter and a night to go out to see The Greatest Showman.  9:45 PM   Humming “This is Me”, I wait for my husband to get out of the bathroom, and what else would I do in 2018? I grab my phone, mindless scrolling time.  The reactions are starting to feel familiar.  Thoughts and prayers.  Thoughts and prayers don’t work.  Stop trying to ca...

 In the midst of our wider, cultural conversation about women, and power, and leadership, and power, let us pause for a moment to consider the quite curious case of gender in education. Of course, education is an historically female driven profession - for much of the last century it was, in fact, one of the few jobs a woman could even realistically perform. That history continues to influence our profession today. 76% of classroom teachers remain women.  As women slowly take on larger and larger roles in industries all over this country, education sits as an - actually rather large - island. An experiment if you will, of sorts - an enormous, functioning machine -  a bureaucracy, a power structure - inhabited almost exclusively by women.  The lazy among us often joke how the world would be different, how much better it would be, if it could be run by women.  Well, education gives us a glimpse into what that world might actually be like. ...

Hey teachers. We've got a subversive message today. YOU are enough for your students. Drop the professional development. Drop the instructional strategies. Drop the trainings. It's not that. It's not pedagogy. It's not curriculum. It's not co-teaching. It's not graphic organizers. It is YOU. On today's episode we talk about the empowering, amazing, humbling power that is being a teacher. Take fifteen minutes today to listen to our podcast to remind you that no matter what you do in the classroom, because YOU are doing it, you are making a difference. Listen to us here, or download us on iTunes or Stitcher.

Let's be real - there can be a LOT of complaining in education. You're sitting in the teacher's lounge, just trying to eat your noodle cup and chat about last night's episode of The Bachelor, when in comes THAT teacher. That guy who's always mad; the lady who yells at her students every day at 2:45 like clock work. And you feel for them. You do. You used to be that teacher. Heck, some days you ARE that teacher. You listen to them sympathetically - because we've all been there- , but you really wish you could just say - "Okay but why are you doing that?" Why are you making life more difficult for yourself with that policy, with that assignment, with that rule? If you would just change your mindset, switch your perspective, bend just a little bit your life would be easier, your students would be happier, and you wouldn't be so stressed out all the time. Well this is Real Talk Intervention - and we. went. there. Are the things you're doin...

“Test prep” is a bit of a dirty word in public education. Time spent in a classroom doing explicit test preparation work is implied to be time wasted – time spent, not on educational goals, but on hazy “good test-taker” skills. Skills like eliminating the distractor answer choices, using the answers from the previous questions to inform your guesses, getting good sleep the night before – to be honest I’m not sure exactly what behaviors our “good” test takers engage in. I only know that we feel we need to spend time actively teaching our students how to be one. And, the truth is, we do. Your intervention students are not good test takers. You DO need to spend time actively teaching them how to become good test takers. But not by spending class periods doing intensive, specific “test prep” – whatever that might be. A good test-taker is a good test-taker because he or she is able to connect together a wide range of information and apply it to the context of a question. A bad test-ta...

I May Be Certified, But Do I Feel Qualified? If you’re like us, you took your ESL certification test for one inspiring reason  -  your district mandated it. And despite the rigorous preparation provided by taking that test, we still felt unprepared for the actual reality of beginner and intermediate English learners in our classrooms. This year close to a million Texas students are classified as English Language Learners or ELLs, according to PEIMS data released by TEA. Teaching English Language Learners is certainly one of the biggest obstacles we encounter as high school teachers. Districts throughout Texas have been, with varying levels of speed and enthusiasm, accepting this new reality. More and more of our students are actively engaged in the process of learning the English language - even though that may be not be what we are actively engaged in teaching them. The bald fact is that nowhere in the high school standards does it call for us to teach phonics, ve...

We are honored this week to share with you the fascinating conversation we had with an exceptional young man - Ali. He is an entrepreneur and soon-to-be high school graduate who came to this country as a Iranian refugee only two years ago. Ali shared with us his experiences traveling all over the world as he escaped Iran and sought asylum in America, and, once here, his amazing journey from limited English proficiency to high school graduate in only two years. Ali is a young man with an incredible perspective and a message for all of us committed to helping students like him. Listen to his story and ignite your practice here . For more stories and inspiration for your student-centered classroom subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher or follow our blog here. Music courtesy of The Creative Commons http://www.bensound.com

Almost 1 in every 10 students in American public schools right now is learning to speak English.  At the secondary level, where we typically aren't expecting to teach basic English-language skills in our classrooms, our students are confronting the problems we tackle on our podcast - how do students learn at the high levels required of them by the standards with their educational gaps - compounded by the additional issue of needing to learn a brand new language simultaneously. In our three part English Language Learner intervention series we talk with three different stakeholders in ELL education to get their perspective on what we're doing, how we're doing it, and how we can improve. In today's podcast we speak with Juliana Orcasitas, a late-in-life immigrant to the United States who raised two young children as English language learners in the public school system, while being an English language learner herself. Now she works in public schools as a math interve...

Recently we attended one of Marzano Research Group's online webinars - Designing and Implementing a Personalized K-12 Competency Based System . This revolutionary way of designing curriculum removes the structural barriers that stand in the way of your student's success, with a full school redesign that does away with whole group classrooms filled with students at different ability and competency levels. You can view the recording of the webinar here , and then listen to our podcast where Stefanie and I discuss how, even though you may not be able to redesign your entire school, you can still dramatically improve student success through implementing a personalized, standards-based system in your OWN classroom right now. You can listen to our podcast here Real Talk Intervention is on iTunes and Stitcher for Android. Search for us on your Podcasts app or download the Stitcher app to listen on your mobile device.

In this week's episode we discuss how creating learning ladders in your content standards helps you direct your interventions. In the English contents a learning ladder can show you where the "holes" are in your students' skill sets. While in science learning ladders can reveal where large conceptual misunderstandings are causing you to build upon an unsound foundation. Listen to our podcast here ! Did you know you can subscribe to us in your Podcast app? Add podcast by web address and enter this address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/realtalkintervention Music courtesy of Creative Commons http://www.bensound.com  

The Teaching Over Testing Act introduced by Representative Jacob Isaac (R) of Dripping Springs takes aim yet again at Texas' standardized accountability measure - the STAAR exam. The act calls for reduced number of exams a reduction of the accountability impact of the exams district choice as to whether or not to use the STAAR or any other TEK-aligned assessment You can read more about the act here We discuss, with great passion, why this continued assault on accountability measures is so dangerous for our most vulnerable students. Listen to us here ! Music courtesy of The Creative Commons http://www.bensound.com

In this episode we discuss how you CAN run a standards based classroom, where you teach every standard to every student, even when you have a broad range of ability in your classroom. Listen to our podcast here! Music courtesy of Creative Commons http://www.bensound.com Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @Intervene4Real. Leave a comment here if you want to join in the conversation!

By: Stefanie Garcia In the world of Texas English assessment at large, and here at the smaller world of Real Talk Intervention, there has been a debate on whether or not a test can actually assess an author’s intent. As an English teacher would like to weigh in on this – no, it cannot. Yes, it is impossible to know exactly what an author was thinking. As an author myself of many terrible high school emo poems, I understand that sometimes, an author uses a word, or a structure, or a simile, instinctively and without guile or intent. Sometimes, the author’s intent is just to get the feelings out. However, we are educators and we are not here to have esoteric conversations about individual authors and what they wanted me to think about their poem. They already got to write it, and now it is my turn to have a go at this text, whose rights were knowingly sold to the STAAR test creators. I am first and foremost a teacher and the educational reality is that discussing and, ye...