Shannon Renkly & Katherine Bertolini's "Shifting the Paradigm from Deficit Oriented Schools to Asset Based Models..."

 Quotes: 

    While reading Renkly & Bertolini's "Shifting the Paradigm...," I couldn't help but highlight entire sections that jumped out to me as important. Though it was a short reading, there was so much important content that I chose to highlight it through quotes from the reading. The quotes that I chose and why are as follows: 

1) "The asset model 'promotes the success of every student by sustaining a school culture and instructional program conducive to student learning through collaboration, trust, and a personalized learning environment with high expectations for students'...When the asset model is utilized through teacher evaluation, it also helps in 'developing and supervising the instructional and leadership capacity of school staff'... Additionally, when an entire community supports an asset model, there are numerous possibilities for community-parent-school partnerships...," (pg. 24). 

I chose this quote because it really highlights how an asset model transforms every level of the educational ecosystem -- from individual student instruction to school leadership and community engagements. This is important to the reading because Renkly & Bertolini were trying to prove that shifting schools away from a deficit model to an asset model is the right move. This quote shows that the asset model has research behind it, and it works. 

2) "...resilience can be fostered in our youth when families, communities, and schools work together to provide opportunities for kids to be involved in the community and build relationships with positive adults in their lives." (pg. 25)

I chose this quote because it reminds me of another reading that I did that talked about grit. That reading explained that grit (or resilience) can be fostered in students. Here, the authors are saying that by implementing an asset based system, we can grow resilience in children by involving them in their communities and building positive relationships with adults. These authors have shown that adults have an impact on children and it's this impact that drives them to succeed. Here is a link to an interesting article on grit. 

3) "...helpful strategies teachers can use in their classroom to highlight student strengths...include having high expectations for your students, convincing them that these expectations are attainable, helping them remove their fear of failure by encouraging them to fail forward, setting small and attainable goals, and celebrating successes when those goals are met before moving forward further." (pg. 26)

I chose this quote because it's a good example of how to have an effective classroom for students to be their best. It's important to keep these strategies in mind when teaching so that students feel motivated, uplifted, and unafraid to falter. These strategies help students move away from the fear and stress that is associated with school, and pushes them toward wanting to reach their goals, no matter how small, before moving forward. 

    One thing I want to reflect on in class is, in conjuncture with these strategies on how to highlight student strengths, how else do you think we could highlight student strengths in the classroom to make them feel encouraged to learn?