Monday, December 17, 2018

Seven Essential Characteristics of a Teacher at Cristo Rey De La Salle East Bay High School

(1) Loves working with young people, and empowers our student associates to become agents of their academic success;

(2) Exhibits the flexibility to pivot and is comfortable with change and transition;

(3) Listens to new educational research, displays a growth mindset, and commits to lifelong learning;

(4) Models mindfulness, culturally responsive and relevant teaching, wholeness and restorative justice practices;

(5) Collaborates openly and communicates authentically with colleagues to build an inclusive educational community;

(6) Takes creative initiative, and is self-directed and reflective in disposition;

(7) Appreciates our Lasallian Catholic heritage and tradition, and respects religious plurality.

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

A Future Not Our Own

A Future Not Our Own
in memory of Oscar Romero (1917 - 1980)

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view. 

The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent
enterprise that is God's work. Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of
saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.

No prayer fully expresses our faith.

No confession brings perfection.

No pastoral visit brings wholeness.

No program accomplishes the Church's mission.

No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about.

We plant the seeds that one day will grow.

We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.

We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.

This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an
opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master
builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own. 

This prayer was first presented by Cardinal Dearden in 1979 and quoted by Pope Francis in 2015. This reflection is an excerpt from a homily written for Cardinal Dearden by then-Fr Ken Untener on the occasion of the Mass for Deceased Priests, October 25, 1979. Pope Francis quoted Cardinal Dearden in his remarks to the Roman Curia on December 21, 2015. Fr Untener was named bishop of Saginaw, Michigan, in 1980.

Thursday, November 15, 2018

Three Draft Versions of Schoolwide Student Learning Outcomes

Version 1:

A Cristo Rey De La Salle East Bay High School graduate is a person who …

… witnesses with authenticity to the Holy Presence of God in the world.

perseveres in the face of adversity, and through a Quality Education is academically prepared to pursue a lifetime of learning.

… shows mercy, compassion, a Concern for Those in Poverty, and for Social Justice through contemplation and action.

Respects All Persons by caring and advocating for self, for our communities, and for our environment with sincerity.

understands the value of an Inclusive Community by showing an appreciation for the creative potential that sees unity within diversity.


Version 2:

(1) … is academically prepared, is self-directed in their learning, and is empowered with the cognitive skills, the content knowledge, the sense of purpose, and the habits of success to persevere through life’s challenges.


(2) … demonstrates a concern for the marginalized and disenfranchised, for social justice, and for the environment, and participates in the co-creation of a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.  


(3) … understands the value of healthy relationships as fundamental building blocks of human coexistence.


Version 3:


A Cristo Rey De La Salle East Bay High School graduate is a person who …


(1) … Develops Academic Excellence and Intellectual Agency

Masters the cognitive skills, content knowledge, and habits of success needed to pursue a college education and a lifetime of learning.

Works diligently with our corporate partners, faculty, and classmates to respond productively to constructive feedback.

Practices self-direction, resiliency, and agency.


(2) … Contributes to the Common Good Through Social Justice

Communicates with knowledge and awareness of socio-political and economic issues through a Lasallian Catholic worldview.  

Exhibits cultural competency, builds socio-political capital, and leverages both for the common good.

Examines the structural injustices of our world, particularly the needs of Oakland and the San Francisco Bay Area, and takes right action.


(3) … Leads with Integrity and Respect

Builds community through the development of authentic relationships.

Maintains a lifestyle dedicated to wholeness through healthy mindsets and choices.

Utilizes restorative justice tools to heal interpersonal harm.


(4) … Pursues a Life of Faith, Purpose, and Service

Appreciates our Lasallian Catholic heritage and tradition, and respects religious plurality.

Discerns personal gifts and talents and cultivates a sense of spiritual purpose.

Manifests compassion for self, our communities, and our environment.

Tuesday, September 25, 2018

Our Personalized Learning Approach

As a Lasallian Catholic learning community, we at Cristo Rey De La Salle East Bay High School believe in the power of a progressive, transformative, and relevant education.  We have partnered with Summit Learning and New Classrooms Teach To One: Math to enhance our student centered personalized learning experience. The basic tenets of our model are aligned with the Core Principles of a Lasallian Education.   
Respect For All Persons: One-on-one mentoring for every student associate.
Every student associate has a mentor at school.  Students work closely with their mentors to set goals and to realize a sense of purpose through their work.  Teachers develop strong relationships with students to understand their passions, interests, and aspirations and how they can work to achieve those learning goals.  
Concern For Poor and Social Justice: A focus on real-world projects that build cognitive skills and core knowledge.

The Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity identified 36 cognitive skills as most critical for college and career readiness.  Our student associates develop those cognitive skills and core knowledge through real-world projects whose focus is on making our local and global communities a better place while contributing to the common good.   

Inclusive Community: Multiple learning modalities that allow students to learn in different ways.
We embrace three learning modalities that give students and teachers the flexible learning environment they require in order to meet their learning goals.  The Leveled Learning modality is an independent learning zone where students work on skill proficiency or lesson reinforcement through practice.  The Guided Learning modality is where teachers help to guide students through new skills or knowledge acquisition.  The Collaborative Learning modality is where students engage in peer-to-peer or small group learning.
Quality Education: Qualified teachers along with relevant and rigorous content that meet our student associates’s needs.
All of our teachers are highly qualified and trained in personalized learning and bring a diversity of experiences to bear in the classroom.  In addition, our course content is relevant, rigorous, and designed with the best pedagogical practices in mind.
Faith In The Presence of God: Each student associate is made in the image and likeness of God and is a unique individual with their own gifts and talents that need nurturing.  
The personalized learning experience is a way for us to nurture a student’s individuality within a community of learners who strive for competence and mastery.  We acknowledge that each student learns at different speeds and in different ways and what works for one may not work for another. We know that what students learn has to be important to them.

Monday, September 10, 2018

Stillpoint | 09.07.18

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the stillpoint, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

from The Four Quartets, TS Eliot

How good it is to center down!
To sit quietly and see one's self pass by!

The streets of our minds seethe with endless trafic;
Our spirits resound with clashings, with noisy silences,

While something deep within hungers and thirsts 
for the still moment and the resting lull.

With full intensity we seek, ere the quiet passes,

A fresh sense of order in our living;
A direction, a strong sure purpose that will
structure our confusion and bring meaning to our chaos.

We look at ourselves in this waiting moment - the kinds of people we are.

The questions persist:
what are we doing with our lives?
what are the motives that order our days?
What is the end of our doings?
Where are we trying to go?
Where do we put the emphasis and where are our values focused?
For what end do we make sacrifices?
Where is my treasure and what do I love most in life?
What do I hate most in life and to what am I true?

Over and over the questions beat in upon the waiting moment.

As we listen,
floating up through all the jangling echoes of our turbulence,
there is a sound of another kind -
a deeper note which only the stillness of the heart makes clear.
It moves directly to the core of our being.

Our questions are answered.
Our spirits refreshed, and we move back into the traffic of our daily round
With the peace of the Eternal in our step.

How good it is to center down!

from Meditations On The Heart, Howard Thurman

Friday, August 17, 2018

Evening Sky

... poetry by Carmel Cronin '41 from the Elizabethan of 1940.





A (Short) History of Saint Elizabeth's High School

... an excerpt from the Thuringian / Elizabethan Saint Elizabeth's High School 1929 yearbook.  



Redlining the Fruitvale Neighbourhood of Oakland





















Cristo Rey De La Salle High School is located within the Fruitvale neighbourhood. This article gives an excellent overview of how the redlining affected this community.

An excerpt from the article: "In the 1930s, as the country was recovering from the Great Depression, the federal government wanted to encourage homeownership in cities that had suffered from waves of foreclosures. So it established the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), to refinance mortgages at risk of default. As part of that effort, HOLC created maps of cities, to identify which neighborhoods were good investments and which were bad investments.


HOLC assigned each neighborhood a grade, according to the "favorable" and "detrimental" influences in the neighborhood. The presence of minority communities was among the so-called detrimental influences. Take Oakland's Fruitvale neighborhood, for instance. A 1937 HOLC map of the area indicated these so-called detrimental influences: "Odors from industries. Predominance of foreign inhabitants. Infiltration of Negroes and Orientals.

Fruitvale and other neighborhoods given low grades were colored red on the maps, which spawned the term "redlining."
https://www.kqed.org/news/11648307/has-oaklands-fruitvale-neighborhood-recovered-from-redlining

Thursday, August 16, 2018

Bishop Barber's Blessing

One of the people who dreamed our school into reality is the shepherd of the Diocese of Oakland Bishop Michael Barber, SJ.  He took the time to celebrate the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (which also coincided with our first official academic day) in neighbouring Saint Elizabeth's Parish and walked over with the students for a ribbon cutting ceremony and blessing of the school.  Here's the text of his blessing:


God of all creation,
In your kindness hear our prayers.
We dedicate this building to the
human and Christian education of the young people
You have kindly entrusted to our care.
May it become a center where young women and men
become leaders of faith, purpose, and service
to build your Holy Kingdom here on Earth.
May the relationships developed here
Be a sign of Your Love and may it
Be a catalyst to transform lives.
We ask this prayer through Christ, our Lord. Amen.

May the all-knowing God, who is Lord,
Show us God’s ways;
May Christ, eternal Wisdom,
Teach us the words of truth;
May the Holy Spirit, the blessed light,
Always enlighten our minds,
So that we may learn what is right and good
And in our actions carry out what we have learned.
Amen.

And may the blessing of almighty God,
The Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit,
Come upon you and remain with you forever.
Amen.


Monday, July 23, 2018

The Merton Prayer

O Lord, my God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that my desire to please you
does in fact please you.
And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this,
You will lead me by the right path
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore, I will trust you always
for you are ever with me and will never leave me.

-- Thomas Merton, OSCO


Tuesday, July 17, 2018

To Really See Someone

To 'really see' someone, especially someone who looks up to you, is to give that person an important blessing.  In a gaze of recognition, of understanding, in an appreciative look, there is deep blessing.  Often it is not so important that we say much to those for whom we are significant, but it is very important that we see them.  

Good parent see their kids; good teachers see their students; good coaches see their players; good administrators see their faculty and staff.  We are all blessed by being seen.

Today, the young are not being seen enough in this way.  Our youth are acting out in all kinds of ways as a means of getting our attention.  They want to and need to be seen by us -- parents, adults, teachers, coaches, administrators.  They need our blessing.  They need to see right in our eyes, the radical unconditional acceptance of their reality.  Young people need our appreciative gaze; most simply they need our gaze - period.

One of the deepest hungers inside young people is the hunger for adult connection, the desire to be recognized, seen, by a significant adult.  They desperately need, and badly want, the blessing that comes from our gaze and presence.  They need for us to see them.  In the end, more than they want our words, they want our gaze ...

-- Ron Rohlheiser, OMI

Monday, July 16, 2018

On Authenticity

In the first half of adolescence, the task is to fashion a personality — a way of belonging to the human community — one that is both authentic and socially acceptable. This is much easier said than done, especially in our current egocentric, aggressively competitive, materialistic societies. But this accomplishment lays the foundation for all later maturation. 

Becoming authentic means to know who you really are — to know where you stand, what you value, what you desire, what you tolerate and what you don’t — and to be able and willing to act accordingly, most of the time, despite the social risks. Under the best circumstances, this takes several years to accomplish. In the contemporary world, many never succeed. 

But what makes early adolescence even more challenging is the second half of the task in this stage, namely, attaining social acceptability. To be a healthy adolescent, you need to belong to a real community. So the way in which you express your authenticity means everything. You must learn how to be true to yourself in a way that at least some of your peers embrace. 

-- Bill Plotkin

Thursday, June 28, 2018

Summit Learning Platform and Personalized Learning

At Cristo Rey De La Salle, we are using the Summit Learning Platform as our personalized learning instructional system and model.  The decision to use this system and model was made after extensive conversations between our President and Principal which involved ending the 20th century factory model of high school education.  When I was appointed Assistant Principal, I had a fairly steep learning curve as I had to get acquainted with the platform as soon as I could in order to support our teachers.

Personalized learning has been a buzz phrase for some time in educational circles.  By leveraging the use of technology, it is entirely possible to meet the individualized educational needs of the young people entrusted to our care.  But, it's not entirely about the technology.  The entire system is predicated on positive relationships between teachers and students, or, mentors and mentees.  Through the use of check-ins, teachers are able to support students by coaching and giving feedback in addition to offering scaffolds to ensure student success in meeting their goals.  The whole system, then, highly encourages students to become agents of their own learning and to become self-directed in the process. 




















The Summit Learning Platform has four pillars: (1) Cognitive Skills; (2) Content Knowledge; (3) Habits of Success; and, (4) Sense of Purpose.  All four of these areas needs to be developed, but at the top of the pyramid are the development of 36 cognitive skills that are at the apex of so-called 21st century learning.  Content Knowledge is personalized depending upon student interests and aptitudes.  Habits of Success push students to acquire the necessary strategies to become successful in college and in life.  Finally, students acquire a Sense of Purpose which give students an opportunity to become self-efficacious.  These four pillars are research-based, teacher-tested, and student-centered.

We are the first Cristo Rey Network School and Lasallian Institution in North America to adopt the Summit Learning Platform.  Properly deployed, this system and model has the capacity to even the playing field for young people from economically disadvantaged circumstances.  Somehow, I think Saint La Salle smiling upon us from somewhere with a wink and nod of approval.  


Friday, June 22, 2018

Stillpoint | 06.22.18

Stillpoint is the mini-retreat time that our president Mike Anderer has designated to take an intentional break from the business and the busyness of the day-to-day operations of the school.  During Stillpoint, we gather in council and sit in a circle.  The guidelines of the council are simply to speak from the heart, to be lean of expression (which is another way of speaking our own truth and story and not the truth or story of others), and to be present. 

After recalling that we're in God's holy presence, and dedicating our council, we begin with a reading. This was our reading for today:

Beginnings, Community, and Seeing Reality
"It is quite easy to found a community.  There are always plenty of courageous people who want to be heroes, are ready to sleep on the ground, to work hard hours each day, to live in dilapidated houses.  It's not hard to camp -- anyone can rough it for a time.  So the problem is not getting the community started -- there's always enough energy for take-off.  The problem comes when we are in orbit and going round and round the circuit.  The problem is in living with brothers and sisters whom we have not chosen but who have been given to us, and in working ever more truthfully towards the goals of the community. ... True community implies a way of living and seeing reality; it implies above all fidelity in the daily round.  And this is made up of simple things -- getting meals, using and washing dishes and using them again, going to meetings -- as well as gifts, joy, and celebration.

Community is only being created when its members accept that they are not going to achieve great things, that they are not going to be heroes, but simply live each day with hope like children, in wonderment as the sun rises and in thanksgiving as it sets.  Community is only being created when they have recognized that human greatness is to accept our insignificance, our human condition, and our earth, and to thank God for having put in a finite body the seeds of eternity which are visible in small daily gestures of love and forgiveness.  The beauty of humanity is in the fidelity to the wonder of each day." -- Jean Vanier from Community and Growth

We then sat in stillness for a few minutes and we began with a brief check-in consisting of three words describing our current state.  We then practiced gratitude by declaring what we are or have been grateful for.  Finally, we glanced again at the reading and picked several words or a phrase which had particular meaning for us at that moment in time.

For me, the words were "courageous people."  I shared with the circle that I see before me a group of courageous people.  And the word courage etymologically refers to the heart.  The references to heart like seeing with the eyes of heart, or listening with the heart, or hearing with the heart is a reminder to get us out of our heads and into a different space.  Our role as courageous people is to give heart, or to encourage, especially those students who will be entrusted to our care so that they can, in turn, become people of heart for the people in their own communities and for our world, which in such desperate needs of heart-filled people.