Grants Awarded for the 2019-20 School Year
1. Bluebird Nest Box Trail
Siobhan Rooney, First Grade Teacher at Lincoln Schools
This grant is for funding to install, observe, and maintain bluebird nest boxes on school grounds. First grade students will study the habitats and life cycle of nesting bluebirds, monitor and observe nesting birds, and collect and analyze data. This curriculum aligns with 1 st graders’ year-long study of backyard birds and with Next Generation Science Standards. Students will be able to extend their learning of birds to include the life cycle, see how their efforts are helping with bird conservation, and enjoy the outdoors and nature. The Lincoln school property is an ideal location for a bluebird box trail with its open fields alongside wooded areas.
2. Digital Book and Reading Clubs
Monica Albuixech, HMS Instructional Technical Specialist
This grant is to pay for a one year license for Seesaw for Schools for the 5th grade HMS class and teachers. The platform will be used to host book club and interactive read aloud discussions which can take the form of drawing, voice, video, or text. Through teacher moderated discussions, students will learn how to discuss and critique books, use writing to express their thoughts, and develop a joy for reading. The project is aimed to inspire reading and increase reading levels in an environment that makes it easier for shyer students to engage. As the discussions will be moderated by teachers, it will promote socially responsible interaction between peers while encouraging an open mind to new points of views and ideas.
3. Digital Photography in the Classroom
Mary Keane, Second Grade Teacher at Hanscom Schools
This grant is to pay for 20 digital Canon cameras with WiFi capability. 10 cameras are currently being used for a 5 week, grade-wide service learning project, but the current cameras are old so they don’t hold a charge for a whole class session, of different brands which makes tech support difficult, and don’t allow for wireless uploading which makes compiling the photos time-consuming. The current service learning project teaches students how to be observant when creating a photo composition and to think about the audience of the photos, who are homeless veterans. The photos are framed and hung in apartments provided for homeless or near-homeless veterans. With new cameras, their use can better be incorporated while studying science and math, and will make it easier for other teachers to use them in their classes. They can also be used in conjunction with the green screen in the MakerSpace to create posters and books and facilitate learning about digital editing which is a valuable 21 st century skill. The cameras will be shared with other teachers on an as needed basis as well, providing a resource for the school overall.
4. Upstander Academy PD - Studying Genocide to Encourage Decolonization and Upstanding
Claudia Fox Tree, Special Education Teacher at Brooks Middle School
This grant is to support a 6-day “Upstander Academy” professional development experience for special education teacher, Claudia Tree Fox. The course is designed to explore new content about post-genocide Rwanda and genocide against Native peoples in New England. Additionally, it will focus on bringing innovative teaching methods that support the inquiry arc, and critical and creative thinking, practicing and modeling the skills of upstanders in their classrooms and communities, and integrating genocide education and strategies for decolonization into the curriculum. Claudia plans to bring her learnings back to help with curricular transformations, most notably in seventh grade where she envisions integrating upstander teachings into seventh-grade advisory sessions on bullying and stereotyping, bringing literature and other material to augment African studies in seventh grade, as well as enhance the First Nations unit in eighth grade. She also envisions this training developing understanding of our students with Native American backgrounds. Claudia has a track record of bringing material back from her PD experiences and working to transfer it to other teachers.
5. Racial Equity Discussion, Waking Up White, Author Discussion Project with Debbie Irving
Project Lead: Jamie Moody, Lincoln METCO Coordinator; Project Collaborator: Claudia Fox Tree, Special Education Teacher at Lincoln Brooks Middle School
The grant proposes an all-day learning experience with Debbie Irving, author of Waking Up White, to enhance our community’s ability and skills to have deeper conversations about race/racism and raise awareness of race/racism and actions to take to dismantle oppression. Though programming is still in development with the assistant superintendent and principal, it proposes to be comprised of two 50 minute sessions for Lincoln Middle School students, a ~ 2.5 hour Lincoln Middle School professional development after school, and a two-hour community event in the evening. This work builds on the Brooks School’s professional development of the last two years around culturally responsive teaching as well as the book group/community conversations around works by diverse authors, which Jamie and Claudia have organized for the community and which have been received well.
6. Lincoln Opera Company
Blake Siskavich, Music Teacher at Lincoln Smith School; Carolyn Dwyer, Fourth Grade Teacher at Lincoln Smith School
This grant will allow the 4th grade LPS teaching team and the Boston Lyric Opera teaching artist program to help facilitate students in creating a student-led opera company building in themes from other areas of study from the year. Students will write, compose, design, promote, and perform an opera to a public audience. This year, this interdisciplinary work is already being run as an initial pilot. In the future, this program could take the place of the current Nikki & Guy residency which LPS students have had the opportunity to experience for the last 25 years. This meaningful and enriching artistic experience puts students at the center of creating and leading the process and shifts teachers into facilitating roles.
7. Teacher Leaders of Learning
Jess Rose, Assistant Superintendent; Becky McFall, Superintendent, Lincoln Public School District
The district has long been developing its capacity and working towards ensuring that all students have meaningful, engaging, authentic, differentiated, and deep learning experiences that honor their diverse identities in all of their classes. In the coming year, the district will focus heavily on shared work across all faculty and administrators around foundational ideas in the book Leaders of their Own Learning by Ron Berger. Becky and Jess have led a book study throughout this year with the principals using this text and the principals are committed to pooling our Wednesday afternoon PD time with faculty to collaboratively invest in this learning in the coming school year. Becky and Jess feel it will be critical to have a group of diverse faculty and staff from across our schools who share this vision for our district and can be a vital part of its realization. We would like to create up to 10 stipended positions for this group to:
● meet regularly after school for professional development, led by Jess Rose
● incubate and implement efforts in their own teaching and work with students to further this goal
● co-facilitate professional development for all faculty alongside administrators
● serve as a sounding board, reflective team, and co-develop ongoing strategies and resources to further this work in our district
8. Designing for Deep and Powerful Learning for All Mini-Grants
Jess Rose, Assistant Superintendent, Lincoln Public Schools District
Jal Mehta’s Deeper Learning Course offers an opportunity to explore the nature of deep and powerful learning and the implications for teaching practice. Readings will span these subjects: drawing on work on how people learn, learning in and outside of school, teaching for equity, the organization of powerful learning environments, and how trajectories of deep learning accumulate over time. We will also analyze videos of classrooms and experience a variety of different pedagogical modes (project-based learning, problem-based learning, design thinking, etc.) that mirror what we have been reading. The course will be interactive and highly participatory. Teachers who take the course will engage in a design process through which they will design or redesign one unit or some other significant aspect of their teaching practice. We are seeking to build a joyful, rigorous, trusting community through which we can help to advance and support one another’s work. The course would work well for individuals or for teams. District leaders are enthused by the amount of interest faculty have shown. As teachers design or redesign a unit, we want to enable immediate implementation, encourage innovation, and ensure the success of the units through a fund that would support mini-grants from individuals or teams. These mini-grants would be available for each educator to purchase supplies or other resources in order to put their work in the course into practice with their students.
9. Passion Projects
Jenny Nam, 6th grade English teacher at Lincoln Brooks School
This grant supported student-directed projects in sixth-grade English class at Brooks aligned with students’ “passions”. Students demonstrated an impressive range of passions from building, to baking, to birding!