Mining For Hidden Gems

Photo by Alex Guillaume on Unsplash At first it was just a game to have a brain break and use up the last few minutes of class before going to lunch. But as I observed my fourth graders playing, I saw an opportunity to learn about what makes for a productive conversation, in class or outside; now as ten year olds or later as adults. The object of the game is to count from one to ten in order, as a group, without knowing who goes next. One person will say "one",  another will follow with "two", and on we go untill we reach "ten". If two people talk at the same time, we start over. It is almost impossible but it is fun and when we finally get to ten, there is loud cheering. The first few rounds we couldn't get past one because the same two or three kids wanted to be the first to start. These were the same students that always raised their hands to participate in class discussions, the same ones who initiated the group work. They are proactive and their ...

By: Susan Hansen and Andrea Greene In 2016 Andrea and I and Carolyn Pierce presented a session on the Power of Expectations at our school district's professional learning conference. As part of that presentation, Andrea tried to synthesize her own experiences as a teacher who sees greatness in every child, with the acronym RELATIONSHIPS. For years we have been wanting to expand on these thoughts as a way to demystify what it means to truly have high expectations and believe students into becoming their true selves. Here is a beginning. Joing us at our monthly Recharge Your Teacher Soul event to contribute to this conversation. ****************** What we fundamentally believe about human nature determines how we treat each other. All the world’s spiritual teachings tell us that humans are created in God’s image, that they are “mines, rich in gems of inestimable values”, that there is gold buried in all of us. When a teacher steps into a classroom with this belief firmly held, it is ...

This has been a hard year for teaching and learning. In the Fall, every week seemed like the first week of school and every teacher felt like a first year teacher. To the normal anxieties of teaching (Am I reaching all of my students? Is there enough time to plan for everything? Have I done all the proper paperwork to get the right kind of help for each kid?) were added some new ones: What if I get sick? What if I bring the virus home to my own family? What do I do with my own kids who are learning remotely when I am asked to teach in person? What about all the kids I cannot reach, physically or emotionally because they are muted behind a black Zoom square on my computer screen?  In the midst of all this, I had a new job. I had gone back to instructional coaching after three years in the classroom. I was excited to be part of offering the dual language program in two of our middle schools for the first time. I had an awesome team of four teachers to work with. But this was not the ...

This was a good year for reading. There was the pandemic of course and the heightened awareness that we don’t really know a whole lot about each other and about our country’s history, which prompted even more reading. Then about a month ago I tore my Achilles tendon which resulted in surgery and forced confinement on a couch. I’ve read 96 books so far (my goal is 100 before the year),  from a 622 page tome on the Great Migration to 32 page picture books. I’ve travelled back to Venezuela,  Iran and Texas -  places intimately connected to who I am. I read to understand and be understood. I also read to escape the news, even if for just a few hours. Here is a list of my top ten: Caste by Isabel Wilkerson - Over the past twenty years, I’ve read as many books as I could about the Black experience in America. As an immigrant, I realized a long time ago that I know very little about this part of America and even less about how it has impacted the rest of American history. If I ...

  Before there was art criticism, there was art. Before there was literary analysis, there was literature. Before there were rules, there was the game. Standards come into being long after there is a large body of accumulated knowledge and experience about a field. And they are always subjective! They are as limited as the vision, expertise and knowledge of those who write them. They are as universally applicable as the degree of participation of those who are subjected to them. So basically, standards, benchmarks, and milestones are all man-made. They change and evolve as our collective knowledge about a field grows and deepens. Standards are also written by people and as such reflect the values and biases of those people. Sometimes standards are guided by political ideologies rather than scientific research.  The more I teach, the more I question the unquestioned use of standards. To insist that every learner master the same concepts at the same time and to the same degree i...

Photo by  Marc-Olivier Jodoin  on  Unsplash When I was a child, my dentist would give me a tablet to chew on that would turn the plaque a bright purple color. These “disclosing tablets” were helpful in showing kids how to brush their teeth better. The pills tasted horrible, the sight of purple teeth was ugly and the truth about how badly or infrequently I was brushing my teeth was embarrassing. The pandemic has been a disclosing tablet, revealing all the areas that we have left neglected. This realization is not pleasant, the truths we are discovering are ugly and admitting our ignorance and neglect is embarrassing. But much in the same way, this experience can be used to make changes, changes that can go beyond the current moment and help restructure our communities for the better. When our one week Spring Break turned into two and then gradually led to online learning, many of the imperfections and inequities in teaching, learning and the role schools play were exposed....

Photo by Steven Wright on Unsplash To be a more reflective, responsive teacher is to cultivate curiosity by questioning everything we do, know, read, think or hear. By questioning I don’t mean second guess, interrogate, doubt or indict. Curiosity is simply asking questions to understand better. Here are are some of my curiosities for today: What do we mean when we say:  Meeting the needs of ALL of our students - How do we know what their needs are?  Preparing students for success - What do we mean by ‘success’? Empowering students or adults - What are we empowering them to do? What is our definition of ‘power’? Authentic learning - Authentic for whom?  Problem Based Learning - Whose problems are we solving? Who decided that was a problem? What do we mean when we say ‘problem’? What these questions have in common is the assumption that we all have the same definition of need, success, power, authenticity and problem. But a bigger assumption is the one about our true natu...