Mining For Hidden Gems

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 ...

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...