Expected, Inspected, & Respected.
"We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience."
-John Dewey |
"We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience."
-John Dewey |
On the second last day of my winter practicum, I gave my students the opportunity to give me some feedback to improve my teaching. These are the results: Section 1: Evaluating Teacher Skills (Explicit Curriculum) Section 2: Evaluating Teacher Skills (Implicit Curriculum) Section 3: Other Thoughts So, there are some actionable items for improvement here. It's an easy fix to slow things down and write bigger. I only wish I'd known earlier so I could have made the adjustments right away. Maybe during my next practicum block, I should have students give me a simpler evaluation on a weekly basis, where they could write one thing they liked about my teaching, one thing they didn't like, and any suggestions they might have for improvement. As for the comments about a repetitive schedule, that was the point: consistent effort towards a goal - read and write every day to become better readers and writers. I also think that one of the reasons I rarely had any behaviour issues in my ELA classes as compared to my social studies classes (even though they were the same students) was that they knew what to expect, knew what to do, and knew how to do it because of the repetition. This evaluation was also written before we played Wits and Wagers and Minute to Win it games during our holiday party on the last day of school before break, so the fun was yet to come. I wanted to use Google forms for this teacher evaluation because it automatically gives you such a lovely visual representation of the data. However, as I didn't have ready access to the computer lab, the students filled out paper questionnaires and I input all of these student responses over the winter break.
As I was entering responses on our home computer, Andrea asked, "Don't you have a computer in the classroom?" And I said, "Yes, but only one - not enough for everyone to fill out a form at the same time." And she came up with the brilliant and obvious idea of just having students fill out the form one at a time while the rest of the class was reading or writing. I will remember that for my practicum in spring.
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Yesterday, one of my professors told a story today about how one of his teachers came to him as an administrator with a problem: he had a student who considered himself a neo-Nazi and the teacher wanted to know what he should do about that. Should he let the student share his views in class or should he shut him down and not allow the debate to happen at all? My professor said that as long as the student was being respectful, he should be allowed to say what he believed. The teacher should model democracy in the classroom through free speech, letting reasoned debate reveal the ignorance of the student's position. One problem with this stance is that it defeats itself. It is not possible for someone to espouse Nazi doctrine and remain respectful. Just because you can avoid using the N-word while saying people of African descent should be enslaved or slaughtered, does not mean it should be allowed in class. Another problem is that free speech only applies to relations between citizens and their government. It means you can't be prosecuted for things you say in public (within limits), it does not mean that you, or the rest of your students have an obligation to listen to hateful rhetoric. I wouldn't tolerate intolerance in my classroom and lend legitimacy to a student with alt-right arguments by giving them a platform, no matter how small that stage might be. Instead, I would talk with them one-on-one, maybe discuss with their parents (as long as I was fairly certain that's not where the student was getting it from), or get in touch with a former neo-Nazi like Maxime Fiset to correspond with the student directly. I didn't say any of this to my professor because it was 5:00pm, class was almost over, and I'd been at the University since 8:00am. I was half hoping that one of my classmates would do the dirty work of challenging the professor - it would prolong the class, perhaps, but we would have the opportunity to find out if there was more to the story and to hear from other perspectives in the class as to what the best approach may be. It might be worthwhile bringing it up again because there's a good chance this professor would be willing to have an open and honest discussion about it. Update:I raised the issue yesterday in class and we all had a good discussion about it. It became clear that my classmates agreed with me about not letting hate have a platform (at least the ones who spoke up). However, it became less clear as to what the situation in the teacher's classroom really was. He said that maybe the student in question was making a presentation about Nazi motivations during WWII without saying that was how things ought to be. In that case, I could see the value in allowing the student to present. If you simply demonize the people who believed (and continue to believe) in Nazi propaganda without looking at their motivations and underlying beliefs, it's difficult to understand why the war happened at all.
Our professor wanted to make the point that if we ever have to teach family studies, there will be sensitive subjects that come up and we will have students who have opinions on things like homosexuality and abortion that we won't agree with and we need to have a plan in place for how to handle those things when the time comes. Message received. As I shared earlier, my English classes during the month of December generally followed this outline:
The the quick write only had three rules:
I knew that it would be difficult for students to write without something to respond to or some kind of prompt; it's easy to be intimidated by a blank page. To make it as easy as possible for them to fill up the page, I told them they could write about what they had for breakfast, a favourite story, the plot of a movie, describe a tiny moment, write down the lyrics to a song, or even practice their autograph if they wanted to. I also put the poem of the day immediately before the quick write so that they could respond to that if they wanted to and posted a prompt about the poem on the projector at the front of the room. The secondary reason for these poems and prompts was to get the students thinking about possible topics for their personal narratives that they would be handing in. Here are some of the poems and prompts that I provided: "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll "The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred Lord Tennyson "The Man He Killed" by Thomas Hardy There were two poems on this day. We did an activity where I read The Charge of the Light Brigade and afterwards, told them to stand on the far left side of the room if you thought war was senseless, on the far right side of the room if you thought war was full of heroism, and somewhere in the middle of the room if you thought it was a mixture. Most people stood near the centre. I asked them to do the same thing again after reading them The Man He Killed to see if their answers might change. Most people still chose to stand in the centre of the room. The stories that came out of this writing prompt were my favourite. "As I Grew Older" by Langston Hughes "Beethoven" by Shane Koyczan "Knock Knock" by Daniel Beaty (Not really a poem) "Point B" by Sarah Kay (TED talk spoken word poetry) We didn't do a quick write on that day. "If" by Rudyard Kipling I also threw in one of my favourite clips about how to shape a narrative by Kurt Vonnegut: "Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou There are many children of immigrants in my classroom, so this quick write produced some interesting stories about how their families came to Canada. "Phenomenal Woman" by Maya Angelou There was no quick write on this day. "A Hero" by Robert William Service "This Is Just To Say" by William Carlos Williams I'll have a separate post about this one, because it was on a grander scale than most. Here is the prompt from the poem: For another change of pace, I read the illustrated children's book, When I was Young in the Mountains by Cynthia Rylant and prompted them with this: "Success is Counted Sweetest" by Emily Dickinson "Like Lilly Like Wilson" by Taylor Mali "Hero Worship" by Robert William Service I always looked forward to reading the poem of the day but I was never quite sure if the students enjoyed it. I threw myself into the readings, making them as dramatic as I possibly could, memorizing Carroll's "Jabberwocky" so that I could act out the slaying of the beast, or shouting, "Not good enough!" as loud as I could during Koyczan's "Beethoven". The only feedback I'd get were nervous snickers and silence. But at the end of December, I had the class fill out a teacher evaluation and received several positive comments about how they liked the way I read them poems.
I've been working in schools as an educational assistant (EA) since 2004 and I've lost count of how many times I've heard students call each other gay. My response to this has evolved over the years. Early on, to my shame, I would sometimes ignore it, telling myself that they weren't trying to be hateful. Other times, I would pull the student aside, get down to their level, and take an empathetic approach, saying something like, "You have sideburns. How would you feel if people called each other 'sideburns' when they wanted to call each other stupid?" Students often responded by saying, "I wouldn't care." The older I get, the angrier it makes me to hear this kind of ignorance repeated in classrooms and hallways. I'm not angry with the students as much as with the insidious culture of casual homophobia and bigotry that was here long before they were. It perpetuates itself through off colour jokes, insults, and endorsements in the media. For instance, Community is one of my favourite TV shows, but scenes like this: give students implicit permission to continue thinking that it's an acceptable and humorous term to use when insulting their friends. It's not. If kids continue to mindlessly parrot casual hate by their peers, older siblings, and Youtube celebrities without being challenged, the cycle of bigotry is allowed to continue; it's easy for a way of acting to become a way of thinking. I decided a few years ago not to let it slide anymore. I also thought that this particular infraction deserved a categorically different response from things like running in the halls or being loud in the library. Instead of getting down on their level, I would tower over them and quietly, between my teeth, seeming barely able to contain my fury, say something like, "I don't think you realize the number of people you're hurting when you say hateful stuff like that. I don't think you're trying to be hateful, I just don't think you know how many people here have cousins, or brothers, or sisters, or friends who are gay and feel just awful right now because of you. You don't know who might be gay and feel like they have to hide it because of people who say those kinds of things. I don't want to hear that kind of thing from you again." The emotional delivery of the message and the fact that it's not a question usually means I don't get any snarky back talk. I had a feeling that I would eventually hear someone call one of their classmates gay during my practicum and was prepared to take that simmering anger speech and turn up the volume to deliver an impactful message to the whole class at the same time, instead of having to deliver the speech multiple times to different individuals. On November 28th, I had the opportunity to try this tactic and it definitely had an impact. My cooperating teacher (CT) was away for the day and, as it was early in the practicum block, some of the students were pushing boundaries to see what they could get away with. When a student (the same one who gave me problems during the snow ball fight writing activity) exclaimed, "That's so gay!", I let him and the entire class know, in a booming and angry voice, that homophobia was absolutely unacceptable in my classroom. The room went silent as 26 pairs of eyes turned from their writing workshop activities to watch me shout at a boy who tried unsuccessfully to defend himself against my anti-homophobic tirade; I would not hear his attempted explanation of why it was ok for him to say that in class. By the end of it, the class (and probably the class next door) knew exactly where I stood on the issue of using the word "gay" in a derogatory manner. I'd like to think that this was an effective intervention but the truth is that I really don't know. According to Chip and Dan Heath, my simple, unexpected, and emotional message would have a high probability of sticking in the brain. However, I don't know if it actually changed any minds or if it just means students will be more careful about how they speak around me in the future. I also don't know if the damage I did to any relationships with my students outweighed the good it may have done. All I know is that I would like everyone, and Hollywood in particular, to follow jomny sun's lead and leave ironic bigotry behind. Let me know what you think is the best way to deal with this problem. Is it sometimes a good idea to yell or make an example of someone in front of the class? I think this incident was a big part of the reason why I continued to have problems with this particular student throughout the rest of my practicum. Was damaging our student-teacher relationship worth it? Did it change any minds or did it simply change his behaviour? Does that even matter? If it's easier to act your way into right thinking than to think your way into right action, is simply stopping the offensive action a win? What strategies have worked well for you in your classroom? Leave a comment below to share wisdom or your own experiences with casual bigotry.
Once in a while, Andrea used to complain that she had a problem with her technology: she would get sucked into information rabbit holes or scroll through her Facebook feed for far longer than she wanted to and it was resulting in headaches and tight muscles. I told her she should fight fire with fire by using a technology podcast to fix her technology problems. The podcast I recommended is called Note to Self and it bills itself as a a tech show about being human. They had done a series of exercises with their listeners in 2015 as a sort of technology boot camp called "The Bored and Brilliant Project". The purpose of doing these exercises was to re-examine your relationship with technology to ensure that you are in control of your devices rather than the other way around. Ultimately, its aim was to have people reclaim the space needed for creativity, productivity, and mental health. Andrea never listened to the podcast (she doesn't care for talk radio) but when the host of the show published a book about the project, I borrowed it from the library for her and she read it. Her relationship with her phone is much more productive and less painful now. One fact that really got to her was that if you spend around 25 minutes a day scrolling through Facebook, at the end of your life, you will have spent 2 years in mindless scrollery (p. 170). Yikes. I never participated in any of these exercises because I didn't find that I had any problem with how I used my technology. However... Before my five-week practicum began at the end of November, I was trying to do some unit planning but I was finding it very difficult to stay focused on the task at hand. I wasn't being distracted away from my work by any external stimuli, I just kept switching tasks before I could make any progress on the one I had set out to work on. As I was working on my social studies unit plan, an idea for a poem to read in English would cross my mind and I would switch tasks and then I'd switch to working on a social studies lesson plan, and I'd try to refocus and get back to my priority but the process would repeat itself over and over again. I was spending a lot of time working at my computer, yet no meaningful work was actually getting done. With my practicum fast approaching, it was starting to really stress me out. That's when Andrea suggested that I take some of my own medicine and read Bored and Brilliant, because I was describing exactly the symptoms discussed in the book as resulting from a lack of boredom. It's true that I rarely give my brain any downtime; I almost always have my earbuds in and a podcast going when I have a workout, a commute, or a mindless chore to get through. I thought my podcast habit was part of being a lifelong learner. Andrea is usually right, so I read the book and have changed some habits. For instance, phones at our house are now mostly out of sight and always away at the table because, "the mere presence of a mobile device, even just lying there, seemingly benign on the kitchen counter, can lower the empathy exchanged between two friends." Also, "...conversations in the absence of mobile communication technologies were rated as significantly superior compared with those in the presence of a mobile device, above and beyond the effects of age, gender, ethnicity, and mood" (p. 56). Additionally, in the interest of good communication and staying connected to my family, I no longer wear earbuds at home if Andrea and Kaia are around. That behaviour not only fills silences, it extends them because I don't start any new conversations and if someone wants to start one with me, they always have to repeat themselves when I say, The other major worry I have about my technology usage is that I've found it harder to read for a sustained period of time without interrupting myself as well. Zomorodi explains that, "there are various aspects of the reading brain circuit that are changing along with the amount of time that we are spending on the Internet and digital reading... The human brain is adapting almost too well to the particular attributes or characteristics of Internet reading. Basically, we are losing our ability to slow-read by giving up the practice of it." I definitely read more online than on paper now and apparently it's hurting my ability to retain information. In an experiment Zomorodi explains in her book, "fifty adults read a mystery short story, with half reading the paperback version, and the other half on a Kindle e-reader. Afterward, readers filled out a questionnaire. All reacted in emotionally similar ways to the story, but there was a big difference in how they answered questions about plot chronology. The Kindle readers performed significantly worse when asked to place fourteen events that happened in the story in the correct order. Most of the subjects also showed an 'overwhelming preference for print'" (p. 47). As the majority of my university readings come from online journal databases, I thought I was doing the smart and environmentally friendly thing by reading them on my Chromebook instead of printing them out. For my final university term, that will change. I'm also going to do an audit of what I'm listening to on podcasts and cull the programs that are unnecessary. Otherwise, the episodes will just keep piling up. The other thing I have done is to download an app called Moment - Screen Time Tracker to see where my time is spent and if I need to change some unexamined habits. I'll let you know how it goes. Lastly, I want to remain vigilant about my daughter's screen time. If Steve Jobs didn't let his kids use iPads, it makes me think that maybe he knew about the addictive nature of his own product. Zomorodi says it's no coincidence that , "The only people who refer to their customers as 'users' are drug dealers, and technologists" (p. 36).
For the past 5 weeks, I've been trying to get my Grade 8 class to ask good questions, find the answers, and share their findings in a meaningful way through the inquiry process. The topic to be interrogated was ancient Greece and Rome. This post will cover the general process I used to guide them through the inquiry, as well as my thoughts on how it went. Asking Questions I thought it would be fitting to begin this inquiry based unit by asking the class a question: What do you notice about this painting? This question was a good place to start because it was open-ended and there were no wrong answers. It was also a great way to introduce them to the idea of using popsicle sticks to solicit answers. After asking the question and giving them time to examine the picture, I drew names from the cup and asked them to share their observation(s). Although the students didn't like it at first, I think this randomizer is a wonderful pedagogical tool and that all teachers should be using them. It prevents a handful of eager students from dominating classroom conversations while the rest of the class checks out. The tough part about it for me was remembering to give sufficient wait time after asking a question. I try to only use hands-up when students want to ask me questions. (To see Dylan Wiliam explain this and a few other simple and effective classroom strategies, watch this BBC documentary. It's really great.) Next, we practiced generating questions about the painting using the question formulation technique. I gave them 4 minutes to complete page 1. Most of the students understood what was expected of them from the instructions on the worksheets, but several students were confused. Next time, I will provide a more thorough demonstration of how to complete the sheets so that there are absolutely no misunderstandings about how to proceed. We discussed the advantages and disadvantages of closed and open-ended questions together as a class when they were finished. During the next class, I assessed their prior knowledge about ancient Greece by producing a Pencil/Pen/Stone chart together with the class. On a big piece of chart paper, I labelled three columns with Pencil, Pen, and Stone. Then, my students shared factoids about ancient Greece and told me to record them in the Pencil column if they weren't too sure if it was true, in the Pen column if they were pretty sure it was true, and in the Stone column if they were absolutely sure it was true. Unfortunately, my students' confidence surpassed their knowledge and some corrections were necessary. Mistakes were expected though, and correcting their misconceptions was a good learning opportunity. In order to assess whether or not my students understood the difference between closed-ended and open-ended questions, as well as to get them thinking about possible topics of inquiry, I asked them to go through the QFT again, this time posing all the questions they could think of about ancient Greece or Rome. Then, they had to identify two closed-ended questions and one open-ended question from the list they generated. Finding Answers Once they had their questions, I asked them to find the answers to those questions in the books I had taken out from the Winnipeg Public Library and the Manitoba Curriculum Support Centre. After this assessment had been completed, I introduced the idea of a major project based on finding answers to an essential question. Because I wanted to give them lots of choice in this project, I told them that they could work by themselves or in groups of their own choosing. If I were to do it again, I would randomize groupings as well because most groups ended up being clustered according to academic ability. This made the quality of the finished projects very unbalanced. It would have been beneficial for struggling students to learn from more successful ones how to organize themselves and stay on task. I asked the groups to get together to share some of their favourite questions from their QFT about ancient Greece and Rome and gave them some time to look through the books again and discuss what might become their essential question. While they discussed and did preliminary research, I circulated, meeting with groups about their main question, suggesting that groups narrow, broaden or change them completely as necessary. I provided groups with this template for taking notes: Every time I gave the class a period to work on their projects, I required them to fill out this Quick Peer Evaluation Form as a way to keep groups on task and as a way to assess individual contributions to the group effort. Sharing Findings In the interest of providing further student choice, I left it wide open as to how they wanted to demonstrate their learning at the end of the project. We brainstormed to think of different ways that they could share their learning. Every group but one chose to use power point and most of them made the mistake of presenting a series of text dense slides which they simply read off the screen - even after I warned them not to make this rookie mistake. I think it would have been more valuable to teach them the Pecha Kucha method of presenting: 20 slides with pictures at 20 seconds each and only an outline of what to say. Most people are like water and choose the path of least resistance and I don't blame them for choosing something safe, relatively easy, and familiar. Making every student use the same presentation method would have given the students a new tool that would be useful to them in the future and would have been easier for me to grade as well. Speaking of grading, I also gave my students a voice in how the inquiry project should be assessed. Together, we brainstormed applicable criteria: I put these criteria into three main categories, And produced this rubric: I was surprised that, even after showing the class easybib.com and bibme.org, only a few groups took advantage of them by putting their sources in proper MLA format to receive full marks for research. At the end of the presentations, I wanted them to do some metacognition, thinking deeply and reflecting on the inquiry process. I asked them to answer these questions: I compiled a list of their pros and cons and shared with the class. I also told them what I thought of the whole thing: As a culminating activity, the class participated in a spider web discussion. This type of discussion doesn't work well with groups over 15 people, so I randomly divided the class in two groups using the popsicle sticks, and had them take turns observing in the outer circle while the other group discussed the question at the table. The first group was asked the question, "What are the pros and cons of learning through inquiry?" The second group was asked, "What is something interesting that you learned about while researching or listening to the presentations?" I knew that this discussion would be dominated by a few of the stronger students but the purpose of the exercise was to get everyone to share at least once. So I told them that this activity would be a pass/fail activity. If everyone shared, everyone would get full marks, but if anyone failed to share, no one would receive any marks. Using grades as a carrot for motivation did not feel good because, as I've stated before, I don't believe it's good for students. However, since the instructions suggested using grades at first and removing them later, I went with it. I didn't take part in the discussion at all but let the students lead while I diagrammed the conversation. It was a stilted, unnatural, and awkward conversation. And even though many students tried gently asking questions of their more reserved peers, there were some in both groups who refused to take part. Grades were obviously not much of a motivator for these students. You can tell by the charted conversation that I should have reminded them not to sit beside their friends. I was disappointed that the inquiry process took much longer than anticipated and I had to jettison a really great debate activity from the Stanford History Education Group about whether or not Athens was a true democracy. Next time, I would do the Athens democracy activity first and give the class less time for inquiry. Perhaps there would be more focussed work done by students during class time with a tighter timeline.
A lot of good learning took place over the last five weeks but I feel like I might have learned more than my students. In the future, I'll have to flip that on its head.
For the past 5 weeks, I've been teaching English to a Grade 8 class at General Wolfe School in Winnipeg. I loosely based my class format on Penny Kittle's recommendations in her book Write Beside Them. Her format looks like this:
She had 83 minutes to work with while I only had around 55 minutes, so my modified format looked like this:
Here's a more detailed breakdown of each segment: 1. Silent reading (10 minutes) - The purpose of this segment of class was to build stamina and speed. I encouraged them to explore different genres, subjects, and authors to expand their literary horizons. Every day, the students kept track of how many pages they had read. At the end of the week, they took their highest number of pages read in 10 minutes, multiplied it by 6 to find their total pages read per hour, and recorded that number on the class sheet. In order to avoid competitive comparisons, I always reminded them that comparisons between classmates were meaningless because if one person was reading a graphic novel and another person was reading War and Peace, their speeds would be vastly different but wouldn't say anything about their abilities as a reader. The purpose of charting these numbers was to see an improvement in aggregate. I put their numbers into a spreadsheet so that they could see their progress, on average, over time. Ideally, this would be done over an entire school year.
While the rest of the class was reading, I had 3-4 one-on-one conferences with students, discussing what they were reading, their reading habits, and what they planned to read next.
2. Poem of the day (~5 minutes) - I read a poem to the class, usually related to our theme of heroes or personal narrative. We would then go over difficult vocabulary and briefly discuss the poem as a whole.
3. Quick write (10 minutes) - There are three rules of quick write:
4. Mini-lesson (~10 minutes) - I created these lessons based on the research showing that isolated grammar instruction and diagramming sentences does not work to improve student writing, but sentence imitation does. I used Don and Jenny Killgallon's book, Sentence Composing for Middle School to create my mini-lessons. Because I have a lot of basketball fans and players in my class, I used a basketball analogy. I told them that if you had to perform a jump shot without ever having seen it done before, it would be pretty hard. Lebron James has a great jump shot because he saw Michael Jordan do it and was able to create his own style by first imitating him. I explained that we would use a similar process with writing, spending time every day copying the sentence structures of authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, E.B. White, Michael Crichton, Louis Sachar, Lois Duncan, and J.K. Rowling through sentence unscrambling, combining, and imitation.
5. Writer's workshop (10 minutes) - This is where students developed ideas generated during the quick writes into coherent, polished pieces. Students worked on their prewrites, drafts, revisions, peer edits, and final drafts. During my English classes, I would often compare myself to a coach that was running drills in order to improve player performance, and the buy-in from students seemed genuine to me. I would tell them of all the spillover benefits brought by improved skills in reading and writing, from better grades in other subjects, to success later in life. I talked about how the only way to gain that improvement was through consistent effort towards a goal. I told them that people tend to overestimate the gains they are capable of making in a day through monumental effort and underestimate the progress that can be made in a year through small consistent habits. I would always emphasize the importance of finding books that interested them. Building strong reading muscles doesn't have to be a slog! ![]()
Two things I would do differently next time would be to include more sharing of student work during class and to take the advice of the title of Penny Kittle's book and actually write beside them during the quick writes. She recommends writing beside them to stay in touch with what we are asking of our students and to practice our craft as their writing teachers. It benefits students to see that writing does not spring fully formed onto the page, but is a messy process that takes time. I always had other minor tasks to attend to while they were scribbling away in their journals, but I could have done those things at another time. I think I was reluctant because writing is vunleralbe; what if I made mistakes and someone noticed? :-)
Over the course of my practicum, I've been really happy with how smoothly my Grade 8 English class has been going. I follow this set schedule:
On Tuesday, because they had just handed in a personal narrative piece that they had been working on for a while, I decided to deviate from this routine and do something different and fun. I planned to use The Mysteries of Harris Burdick as a story starter, and then have a "snowball fight" collaborative storytelling activity. (Click through the slideshow for further explanation).
Can you guess the mistake I made? The problem happened on step two but my mistake came earlier when I failed to sufficiently prepare them to throw "snowballs" responsibly. When step two asked them to crumple up their paper and throw it somewhere, several students took this as their cue to go into full battle mode, picking up snowball after snowball, throwing, dodging, dipping, ducking, diving, and dodging, ending up writhing around on the ground in mock agony.
This group of kids were usually so calm and hard working during this period that I grossly overestimated their level of maturity.
There were three students in particular who, despite the majority of their classmates returning to their seats when asked, continued to throw paper across the room. I tried and tried to tell them firmly and respectfully to take their seats and finally got two of them to quit their antics. The leader just ignored me until, out of frustration and anger, I yelled at him in front of the class until he was sitting with his arms folded, pouting. I believe he ignored me on purpose because I had told him that he couldn't sit with his friends during the social studies inquiry presentations that morning and he still had a chip on his shoulder about it. The activity was supposed to be fun and now I was hollering at this adolescent boy while everyone else sat in an uncomfortable silence. I didn't like yelling, he didn't like being yelled at, and the class didn't like having to witness it. It was a lose, lose, lose situation. I apologized, took a deep breath and continued with the lesson, demonstrating very clearly how I expected the next round of paper throwing to go. And the rest of the lesson was smooth. They wrote when they were supposed to write and threw when they were supposed to throw. I just hope they were cooperating out of a desire to have a good time with the activity and not because they were intimidated by their usually mild mannered teacher who they had just witnessed transform into a raging giant, frothing at the mouth. (I may be exaggerating slightly for effect).
I guess the big takeaway is to never underestimate a class's ability to demonstrate their immaturity. Or maybe the takeaway should be "forewarned is forearmed". Or perhaps "proper prior planning prevents poor performance". Take your pick. A slight tweak to my instructions should solve this problem in the future.
One of my favourite podcasts is Hidden Brain with Shankar Vedantam. In a 2016 episode on goal setting, he interviewed researcher Gabriele Oettingen, who shared that the power of positive thinking, vision boards, and wishing for things actually makes a person's goals less likely to be realized. That was interesting enough in itself, but then she outlined the WOOP (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan) method of goal setting, which has proven to be much more effective. I immediately filed it away in the back of my head as something to try with students someday. Well, that day has come and gone and I'll tell you all about it. I started by leading my class of Grade eights through the recommended goal setting exercises found at characterlab.org. We read through the three student thought bubbles together and they predicted which one was most likely to achieve their goal. Then, we watched this video while the students answered number 3. After the completion of the video, we discussed why most students would change their prediction of student A being most likely to achieve their goal to student B, based on what they saw in the video. Student B saw a potential obstacle and had a plan for it. Then, I demonstrated on the whiteboard how a person could use this worksheet to make their own WOOP plan: I told the class that I use a similar common tactic for getting myself to go to the gym when I really don't feel like working out. I tell myself that I just have to get there and work out for 5-10 minutes, and usually, after 5 minutes have passed, I feel like completing the workout and end up staying for an hour. After this demonstration, I had them fill out their own WOOP worksheet, instructing them to write down a SMART academic wish for themselves, SMART being an acronym for: The WOOP playbook states: "Rather than pursuing goals that feel imposed by others, WOOP taps into a student’s intrinsic interests." However, in order to make the activity relevant to the curriculum, I needed to ask my students to focus their goals on academics, knowing that, unfortunately, some of them don't really care about school at this point in their lives.
I hope I made it clear to my students that this system of goal setting can be used for any aspect of their lives and that they bring WOOP with them outside the classroom. According to the WOOP playbook, "Teaching students how to achieve important wishes is the difference between a lifetime of 'I wanted to' and a lifetime of 'I did.'" Maybe that's a little grandiose but, who knows? Maybe I'm planting trees under whose shade I will never sit. I began this blog as a way for me to reflect on my learning, to have a record of the things I've done, and to serve as my digital portfolio. George Couros gives plenty of compelling arguments on his blog about why it's important for teachers to be self reflective, but despite my intention to put this knowledge into practice and make blogging a habit, I have failed. One habit that I have kept up, however, has been reading George Couros's blog and he had a recent post that encouraged me to start reflecting once again. In the post, he says that blogging serves to:
He also provides tips for blogging:
I think that it's difficult for me to keep up with self reflection because forcing myself to examine my flaws, while helpful for personal growth, is inherently unpleasant. The process of writing isn't my favourite thing to do either. George R.R. Martin apocryphally said, "I don't like to write, but I like having written." I feel the same way. During my hiatus from blogging, I have often been haunted by the thought of the Anton Chekhov quote under the title of this blog: "Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice." In order to walk the talk and keep a promise to myself, I'm going to share publicly my intention to produce a blog post bi-weekly here. (Do I mean twice a week or once every two weeks? Bi-weekly is basically meaningless.) As always, comments are welcome - even if you just want to chime in about how silly the word bi-weekly is - whether here, on my Facebook feed, or on Twitter. |
David Wiebe
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