Engineer Turned Teacher Helps Students Build Apps for Special Needs Counterparts

Engineer Turned Teacher Helps Students Build Apps for Special Needs Counterparts

Nick Gattuso is a computer science teacher at Point Pleasant Borough High School in New Jersey, where his students have developed a suite of learning applications to assist students with disabilities, as well as an emergency-response app for school officials. Last year, his students’ work was honored by the state school boards association.

“This November will be my 15th year at the high school. Prior to coming [here], I worked for 20 years for Bell Labs. It was the pre-eminent research institution of its time…I was scheduled to be in the Pentagon, in its computer center, on 9-11. The reason I wasn’t there was because it was back-to-school night for my daughter, who was in elementary school. After that…I wanted to give back. I was too old to be a cop or a fireman, so I decided to give back by becoming a teacher.

“I took an early retirement package from Bell, and was literally put into a teaching job with no experience. I have a master’s degree in software engineering, and also a bachelor’s degree in English and poetry. I took an almost $100,000 pay cut—no lie.

“When I was at Bell, we had done this work for a guy who was paralyzed in one arm. It was a voice-activation program that helped him do his work. Years later, I was talking to my son Nicholas, explaining this story and how this program had helped this guy, and we had the idea of building real software, something that means something to people. I went down the hall to the teachers in the special-needs programs, and they were like, ‘We’ve been waiting for you!’

Nick Gattuso

“PALS stands for Panther Assisted Learning Software. In our case, my students have a set of customers downstairs, in special needs, and those customers are dependent on us to create programs that are actually meaningful, that help their lives. One of the applications we built teaches them how to go grocery shopping—with a shopping-cart simulator that has them rolling around a 3D store, picking up the bread. Another one helps them count money.

“When this thing started taking off, I went down to my administration and said, ‘We have Programming 1, and we then we have AP Computer Science, but there’s really no place for kids to go after that. So we created Advanced Software Engineering Topics. All we do is project-based, like it would be in college, or in the workplace. There are deadlines, but there are no tests.

“The question is: Did you solve the problem? Did you build something that will enrich the lives of the children downstairs? Did you make their lives better?

Some of my kids are working now for Google, for Apple, for Yelp. They make oodles of money, but they always know that the genesis of their work was building stuff for special needs kids, for doing good for somebody else.”

NATIONAL: A Growing Recruitment Strategy for a Diverse Teacher Workforce

NATIONAL: A Growing Recruitment Strategy for a Diverse Teacher Workforce

grow your own teachersIn the last three years, Alejandra Guerrero Morales has been making her way through the education profession with the Salem-Keizer School District in Oregon. Two years ago, she started as a bilingual instructional assistant. Today, she’s a special education instructional assistant. By September, 2017, she’ll be a special education teacher. Born in the U.S. to Mexican parents, Guerrero brings her skillset and commitment to the table. She also brings her culture—a resource that centers on the need for more teacher diversity.

Guerrero was one of the many panelists who were brought to Washington, D.C. on May 17 for a two-day conference called, “Grow Your Own: Teacher Diversity and Social Justice Summit,” hosted by the National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, and the AFL-CIO. The summit focused on a growing recruitment strategy called “Grow Your Own” This approach addresses the national need to recruit, develop, and retain diverse and culturally responsive, community-based educators of color to help advance the achievement of all students—particularly students of color.

Research supports that students of color who are taught by a teacher of the same race or ethnicity perform better in school. In March, the IZA Institute of Labor Economics released a study called, “The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers.” One of the findings underscored that “assigning a [B]lack male to a [B]lack teacher in the third, fourth, or fifth grades significantly reduces the probability that he drops out of high school, particularly among the most economically disadvantaged black males.”

John Hopkin University’s Nicholas Papageorge, one of the co-authors of the study, said, “Black students matched to [B]lack teachers have been shown to have higher test scores but we wanted to know if these student-teacher racial matches had longer-lasting benefits. We found the answer is a resounding yes.”

Despite evidence that shows the need for diversity within the education workforce, gains have been slow.

In her remarks to summit participants, NEA President Lily Eskelsen García shared that when she entered the profession, she had all the right support systems: support from other teachers, encouragement from her family, and federal grants to help her get through college.

“Today, that is happening against all odds, especially in communities of color and in communities of poverty,” she said. “How do we find ways to get people to college and not be crushed by student debt … How do we help those who should be [in classrooms] working with students who look like them, sound like them, and will connect with them?”

The answers may rest within grow-your-own programs.

What Is Grow Your Own?

In short, these programs recruit local community members and help them become teachers, creating a workforce that’s reflective of the full diversity of the student population.

No one program is alike. Some programs have an intense focus on undergraduate students while others reach out to students in middle school and high school. Colorado-based Pathways2Teaching, for example, works with high school juniors and seniors. Throughout the school year, students explore related careers through a social justice and equity lens.

“It’s a sad reality to think that a child can go from K-12, get a bachelor’s degree, get a masters, and complete a Ph.D., and never have one teacher of color throughout his or her trajectory,” says Margarita Bianca, an associate professor in the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Colorado Denver—and founder and executive director of Pathways2Teaching.

Alejandra Guerrero Morales

“What message does that send to students of color,” she asks, adding that “you can’t be who you don’t see.” A point that is critically important considering the growing shift in demographics.

Approximately 42 percent of PK-12 public school students today are students of color, and this number is expected to rise through 2024.

For Oregon’s Guerrero, she wants to be seen as someone who can represent the growing Latino population in the Salem-Keizer school district. This was one of the reasons that propelled her to apply for a grow-your-program through Pacific University’s Master of Arts in Teaching Flex Program. The program is a 17-month experience composed of university coursework and school field experience. The program is flexible and accommodates part-time students with courses that meet late afternoon, early evening, and on weekend. Upon completion of the program, Guerrero will qualify for a Master of Arts in Teaching degree and an Oregon Initial Teaching License.

“Many of our teachers in the Salem-Keizer district are not bilingual, and with a population of students who are Latino, they need a voice, “says Guerrero, who grew up in the Salem-Keizer area and is the first generation in her family to graduate from a four-year university. “We need more people who speak Spanish and who know what it’s like to live and grow up in the area.”

The Summit

During the summit, participants discussed some of the framework for growing your own teachers. One key takeaway emphasized that this work needs to be done with different organizations.

Brian A. Turner, a special education teacher, high school baseball coach, and athletic director from the Salem-Keizer district, urged participants to work with local unions to help change school policy. “Our local union established a pathway for paraeducators to get into the teacher workforce,” he explained. “The change allowed them to work in the schools that they’re currently in—that’s a policy change.”

Other programs have been developed with the help of higher education institutions, which have offered free or reduced college tuition for students entering education programs.

State legislators have passed laws that promote respect for different cultures, too.

“You often don’t feel included if your mascot is racist,” says Matt de Ferranti, legislative director for the National Indian Education Association. He explained that states like Washington and Montana have passed legislation that incorporates native American history, culture, language, and government into the curriculum.

This curriculum change opens the doors for elders in native communities to become teachers. “Elders can be phenomenal teachers, and we have to get them to the classrooms,” said de Ferranti. “They know the history, culture, and language—and those are the pieces that are often missing.”

Cultural sensitivity and cultural diversity are essential components of a qualified teacher workforce that positively impacts student learning. These components need to be inclusive and mindful of students and their communities, too.

“There are a number of programs to diversify the workforce, but it’s done the wrong way,” says Colorado’s Margarita Bianco. “Bringing teachers from Puerto Rico to teach Mexican kids, just because they have brown skin, doesn’t mean they understand the kids and the community. Insider knowledge is what we have to promote.”

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Not Getting Enough Sleep? Tired Teachers Aren’t Usually the Best Teachers

Not Getting Enough Sleep? Tired Teachers Aren’t Usually the Best Teachers

teachers and sleep
Sleep is extremely important to the well-being of teenagers – but they’re not getting enough. According to a 2016 study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 69 percent of high school students are getting less than eight hours of sleep on an average school night. Sub-optimal sleep for teenagers has been linked to academic inhibitors (e.g., attention and retention issues), mental health problems (e.g., increased risk of depression), and physical challenges (e.g., teens with less sleep are more likely to be overweight.)

Unfortunately, individual educators can’t do much to make sure their students sleep enough at night, although districts across the country have been devising new policies – including later start times, even nap clubs – to bring schools more in sync with teen sleep patterns.

What we can do is pay attention to our own sleep lives. This, it turns out, is something teachers tend to be bad at  – especially early career educators. Too often, in an effort to “get it all done,” teachers stay up late and wake up early, operating on increasingly worsening sleep deficits and calling it a strong work ethic.

I was in this camp myself, until recently when I began doing a bit of research into the importance of sleep to a long, successful, and fulfilling teaching career.

Here are a few important things I discovered about sleep – and a couple of suggestions on getting more of it.

Consistency is Sleep’s Friend

The key to higher-quality, REM-filled sleep is a consistent schedule. Regular exercise helps us sleep better, as does a regular meal time and a regular bed time. In fact, one study suggests that sleep variability (i.e., going to bed at inconsistent times) is one of the most important factors in how well people sleep. It’s better then to go to bed at the same time each night rather than going to bed early tonight to “catch up” from a last night’s paper-grading marathon. Regular sleep schedules even predict better moods.

To improve at this, we can look at what time we would have to go to bed if we were going to aim at getting seven hours of sleep per night. This becomes our hard and fast bedtime, and paper-grading (which is best done in sprints versus marathons) gets scheduled either before that time or seven hours after it.

teachers and sleep

Good Sleep is a Fragile Creature

Sleep can be thrown off by all kinds of close-to-bedtime substance consumption, including some you might expect – like caffeine and nicotine –  and some that may surprise you, like alcohol. I used to think a glass of wine right before bed wasn’t a bad idea but, as it turns out, it is. Apparently you fall asleep quicker with alcohol, but your sleep isn’t as deep as it could be otherwise.  According to Shawn Stevenson’s Sleep Smarter, deeper levels of sleep are “significantly disrupted” by alcohol being in your system,” and this makes it so that your body can’t “fully rejuvenate.”

 Getting Enough Sleep Increases Speed and Reduces Errors

If you’re like I was for the first five years of my career, you might be reading this and thinking something like, “Well, I don’t get enough sleep, and I’m still performing well.” Consider this: According to a physician study cited in Stevenson’s book, sleep-deprived individuals took 14 percent longer to complete an assigned task. They also committed 20 percent more errors than their well-rested counterparts.

So here’s a question: Even if you think you’re doing ok even on inadequate amounts of sleep, does that mean you couldn’t be performing with greater speed and accuracy if you were sleeping enough?

You Actually Figure Stuff Out While You Sleep

A 2015 New Yorker article, Maria Konnikova’s “The Work We Do While We Sleep” , cited a bizarre study that found that our brains “think” when we sleep. Researchers assigned a complex math task to a small group of people. Konnikova describes what happened next:

Though the subjects didn’t know it, there was a simpler way of solving the problem—an abstract rule that would enable a quick solution. Few of the subjects spontaneously figured out the solution the first time. Each participant was retested on the task eight hours later; some were allowed to sleep and others had to remain awake. Just under a quarter of the group that took a sleepless break came up with the faster solution. But the insight rate more than doubled among the subjects who had spent the eight hours sleeping: sixty per cent of them could now see the shortcut.

In other words, our brains are actually working while we sleep. So maybe that solution to the classroom management conundrum you’ve been wrestling with or the curriculum knot you’ve been trying to untie is waiting for you in your sleep.

You Can’t Handle the Light

Melatonin – the substance our body releases when our circadian rhythms say that it’s time for bed – make us feel sleepy, but it also does things like normalize our blood pressure, improving our immune systems functions, and improving insulin sensitivity and weight reduction.

Even if you think you’re doing ok even on inadequate amounts of sleep, does that mean you couldn’t be performing with greater speed and accuracy if you were sleeping enough?

Here’s the thing, though: exposure to light – especially the blue kind emitted during the daytime and from every electronics screen in the universe – interrupts the body’s release of melatonin. Your eyeballs have certain photoreceptors that detect changes in light (these receptors even work in blind people); even our skin has light-sensing abilities.

So, chill on the screens.  According to research, screen time needs to end at least an hour before bed.

A Saner Work Schedule: Not All Tasks Are Created Equal

While these were some specific insight I gained about sleep, the reason I began trying to change my sleeping habits was because of the overarching story in all of these facts: sleep makes us more likely to succeed at teaching and more likely to enjoy each day. When something does both of those things – improves our outcomes in the future and our quality of life today —we’re foolish to ignore it.

So, if you’re an educator who neglects sleep, try out a self-experiment for a few weeks to see how you might be more successful with consistent sleep.

For example, start thinking about a schedule you can use to force you into greater efficiency, effectiveness, and sanity as a teacher. Lay out a teacher work schedule – an actual plan of what specific time slots in a week you’ll budget for teaching-related work. Once you limit your working hours like this, you’re more likely to prioritize effectively, as not all tasks are created equal. An exercise like this will teach you which tasks can be sacrificed and which tasks cannot – a critical lesson that only experience can teach you. Being more strict with our working hours can free up more time for sleep, and that can make us better teachers (and our students better students) in the long run. (You can read more about setting a better work schedule on my blog.)

Dave Stuart, Jr. is a high school teacher in Cedar Springs, Michigan