On a Friday last month, I reached out to a family who needed help with their webcam. With @UnitedLanguage we overcame the language difference. Microsoft #QuickAssist allowed me to see their screen. After 15 minutes they were ready for first day of school. There was many cheers on all sides.
I read that we should not refer to students as “at-risk.” That term does not focus us toward solutions. Educators should use the phrase “under-resourced.”
If you call a student at-risk, it creates a problem in our thinking. Correspondence bias kicks in and we start thinking of the problems our students face as something core to their nature.
With “under-resourced” you start a conversation getting resources to our students. Instead of thinking of our students as deficient, we think that the do not have the resources they need to flourish.
For many of our students, we need resources layered on top of each other. The family I mentioned at the start of this post, any one resource would not have been enough. A knowledgeable professional (me) was not enough. The family needed an additional resource for translation. And not just translation, they needed translation services available on their schedule.
But that was not enough. In my story at the start of this post, I mentioned that I helped the family on a Friday. That is not the whole story. My first call to them was the day before on Thursday. I called with a translator. We spent almost an hour trying to help the family.
And I failed. I told them they would need to come to school for me to fix it. I told an under-resources family that they needed to spend more of their resources to fix the technology problem. For some families this would not be problem, for this family it would. A 45 minute walk to school. 10 minutes to fix it and 45 minutes back to their house. I was asking a family to commit two hours to solving this problem. I knew it, but I did not know what to do.
And Thursday night I remembered Quick Assist. I called them back Friday afternoon and asked if we could try one more thing. They agreed. We spent five minutes getting Quick Assist working. I spent 10 minutes checking and testing settings. The family giggled as I moved their mouse around from afar. And, we fixed it. And there were many cheers. The family cheered. I cheered. Even the translator cheered.
I did not fix it, we fixed it together. Quick Assist. The United Language Group translator. Me, the technology professional. The family. All these resources working together.
I am so proud of school system for proving these resources to our families.
My apologies to whomever came up with the at-risk v.s. under-resourced idea. I googled around and could not find it, but I am not the originator.
Notes For Kevin 