Biography Driven Instruction A New Tool For USD 214 Instructors

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A new “Multiplier” group at USD 214 focused on biography-driven, culturally-responsive instruction is gaining traction across the district, and two members of the group - Amanda Coffey (Curriculum Specialist at Hickok Elementary School) and Audrey Marshall (sixth grade math teacher at Kepley Middle School) - discussed how the program has had a positive affect on their students. The two spoke at a recent board of trustees meeting and assistant superintendent Kevin Warner said as of the Oct. 14 meeting the multiplier group had met four times.

“Biography Driven Instruction, or as it is often referred to as BDI, basically means you are taking a student’s background information and then using that and applying it to their learning in the classroom in ways that are beneficial to help the students and not the system,” Coffey said. “Basically what that means is the teachers are working hard on building relationships with students.”

The Multiplier Group is a teacher from each campus nominated by their peers and administration.

“This first cohort of educators for USD 214 believes that every student has an inherent potential to achieve their fullest academic and personal success when given the right learning environment and tools to do so,” Marshall added. “The Multipliers believe that all students deserve excellent Tier 1 instruction to ensure high-quality learning experiences. The Multipliers believe that all students have a story and personal experiences that can enrich the entire learning environment when a student is empowered to do so.”

Coffey said BDI has been of great benefit to non-English speaking students.

“The teachers are working hard on building relationships with students and oftentimes, in the classroom, as much as we hate to admit it, we tend to build relationships more with our English-speaking students and not so much our non-English speaking students mostly because of that language barrier,” Coffey said. “This is helping us become better at building relationships with all of those kids.”

Biography Driven Instruction (BDI) is a communicative/cognitive method for providing culturally responsive pedagogy that guides teachers to maximize each learner’s potential for language acquisition and content learning by drawing upon students’ sociocultural, linguistic, cognitive, and academic resources.

“It’s important because we have to build those relationships, that’s what a teacher does,” Coffey said. “This benefits all of our kids because we have a lot of kids that are coming to school now that don’t have skills to be ready in a classroom, especially at an early age.”

Coffey said teachers need to change their instruction to fit the needs of the student, and BDI is one of the ways that will help with that.

Maria Ortiz-Smith, Education Consultant with Southwest Plains Regional Service Center in Sublette has been working with the Multiplier group to implement the plan.

“She has come and sat in meetings with us and talked to us about different ways to work with our students,” Coffey said. “She’s teaching us different instructional practices and scaffolds that can help meet the needs of all of our students and then we can use the students’ background knowledge and the things that we learn about the kids and apply it to their learning.”

Coffey said it’s important because the district needs to close the achievement gap not just in the English Language Learners kids, but all of the district’s students.

“By going to this BDI training and learning about these different instructional practices and how we can  use them in our classroom, how we can get students to work better together in smaller groups, work better together as a classroom, that will help us be able to close that achievement gap even just a little bit more,” Coffey said. “That’s why what we’re doing is so important.”

Warner said it’s been educational for both teacher and student.

“A lot of it was ‘I didn’t know that my teacher ended to know this about me,’ or ’This happened to me, I’d like for my teacher to know this,’” Warner said. “It allows you to do a deep dive into the kids’ interests or their life story that you can now connect to the content, and vice-versa.”

Marshall teaches sixth grade math at Kepley sand said she does a “Math Autobiography” trying to get to know her students’ background and what they think of themselves when it comes to math. After her first BDI class, she implemented an assignment called “I am From.” That focused on the students’ culture, then the next day she did the Math Autobiography.

“I feel like it made it easier for them to do the math autobiography because we focused on them individually and their culture and where they’re from and what they think of their environment,” Marshall said. “And then when asked them to say ‘Now tell me about your math journey’ I feel like it was easier for them to get that going without me having to prompt them and give them more ideas to do that.”

Marshall said it made it easier for her to better communicate with her students. She also said the Multiplier group helps her to have a place to go and communicate her ideas safely.

“That’s a true statement,” Warner added. “Maria (Ortiz-Smith) started the conversation and then the group off of each other’s conversations with what they shared, spurred more development into that, now it’s a system instructional strategy not a school or a teacher instructional strategy.”