A face and a spark

at Two Writing Teachers!

Usually when a teacher runs breathlessly into my classroom at the beginning of a class period, one of my students needs to do something or go somewhere. Or a bilingual aide is needed.  Or the teacher has run out of strategies for meeting the needs of a student. Or...

"What's up? Do you need somebody?" I tried to appear concerned/interested as I simultaneously tried to get my students started on reading.

"Oh, we were just playing 'Guess the Student' from this morning's staff meeting... Is it H.?"

My shoulders relaxed and my biggest grin started to shine. Guess the Student? WE? It's 7th period! People have been thinking (and talking!) about this all day? AWESOME!  "Yeah, it's H. Good job! Isn't she just incredible?"

I got them thinking. I made a difference. Just one 5-minute vignette, but what a SPARK!

We had asked to be on the staff meeting agenda to talk about meeting the needs of ELLs. As I planned, I thought of my students: the ones who struggle through sorrow. The ones whose hearts are broken. The ones who can't believe they're lucky enough to be here. The ones who flounder through a strange world. The ones who are proud to share their world with us. The ones who work nonstop. The ones who feel so lost they've given up trying. The ones who find success and find themselves.

 If everyone knew my students as well as I do, wouldn't they want to move the world for them too? If they knew what these kids are going through, wouldn't they remember to speak with kindness and teach with patience and consideration? So I took a deep breath, stared out over all the heads of all those teachers who barely even know me, and told one student's story:

Hopes and dreams. Responsibilities and duties. Fears. Medical struggles. Religious devotion and open-mindedness. A willingness to try new things and a hunger to learn, despite her anxieties and obstacles.

After school, another teacher stuck his head in my doorway on his way out of the building. "Just wanted to say 'Great job!' on the staff meeting. I really liked the personal story. I think it made people think about students in a different way!"

A history teacher. A French teacher. The principal. The assistant principals. A math teacher. A science teacher. The school psychologist. The librarian. "Great presentation!" "Was the student H.?" "I liked hearing about your student!" "Aren't our students amazing?"

When I told my mom, she called it "putting a face on the data". To me, it's just loving my students. It only takes a SPARK to change the world.

Making a writing plan!

at Two Writing Teachers!

Yesterday, Kate Messner's first post for the Teachers Write! 2012 camp was about making time for writing.  Now, I've gotten a lot better this year about making time for writing... I even did it every day in March! 

However, the end of the school year brought its usual (and even some unusual!) craziness, and all of a sudden I didn't have as much time to write as I wanted to.  So I'm glad for Kate's camp and her suggestions to get me back into full ready-to-write mode. 

Ironically, I'm a day late posting about this... But I seriously spent ALL DAY yesterday -- and I mean nearly every waking minute that I wasn't eating -- preparing for ELL summer school, which started today!  However, that was an abnormality caused by a variety of factors, including no teacher workday at the end of the year, my cousins coming into town, and the Memorial Tournament.  (Anyway, summer school is off to a great start, although it's K-5 this year and elementary kids seem to be rather wigglier than I remembered!)

But really, I love the idea of making a writing plan.  In March, it was just sort of "I HAVE TO BLOG TODAY!!!" and I squeezed it in somewhere, although I often ended up posting at a similar time.  Like Kate, I learned not to wait for the mythical "perfect writing time" but to just WRITE! Squeezing it in somewhere worked for a month, but it was much too easy for other things to squeeeeeze the writing back out when the month (whew!) was over.  

with Kate Messner!

So here we go, my writing plan!  (Or at least, what I think is my writing plan, subject to change if I find that something else works better!)

1. Cut out / cut back on: TV, reading blogs, playing games on my iPod Touch.  Write during this time instead -- maybe not read all my blogs every day, and don't play my games so often.

2. When & how long: The big new commitment time will be evening after-dinner time: around 7:30pm, for 30 min to an hour.  If I have the chance some days, I'd like to add additional blogging-only time after school, before dinner, which is when I usually blog now (and thus why blogging gets pushed aside on busy schoolwork days!).  As for how long, my problem is that I'm kind of a long-drawn-out-writing-process person: I brainstorm, I play with ideas, I change them in my head before I put them on paper, and then I dive in deep when I start writing.  (For example, I've been thinking about this writing plan since yesterday and I've still already been in the process of this post for over an hour!)  To really try writing every day, I think I need to change how I think about writing -- I don't have to "WRITE" a polished, finished THING every day, I just have "DO writing"!  This could be brainstorming, outlining, editing, or even just "rough" writing that never gets polished.  I need to get a real Writer's Notebook (and maybe also form a digital one in Word for blog drafting?) to make this possible.

3. Where: On the couch with my laptop (and/or notebook) for the evening times, so I can still spend time with Husband.  In the afternoon, I'll opt for writing on the cozy bed with the drapes open to the greenness of our big tree (that's where I am now!), or outside on the back patio if it's nice weather!

4. Who I'll tell:  Husband, who is very sweet and encouraging and supportive about all this writing stuff, even though he's neither a writer nor a teacher... and obviously all of you, my wonderful blogging friends, who keep me going when I don't feel like it!  Also probably my parents because I may even have to write when we're over at their house sometimes, if I really jump into this completely!

If you have any tips about how YOU manage your writing time, please share!  :-)

The joy of collaboration

Today we had a waiver day (no kids, PD all day) due to Race to the Top funding.  My brain is pretty fried, so here's a short reflection:

• The opportunity to discuss and APPLY whole-district ideas with people from my subject area is invaluable.  It's so important to figure out together how WE are going to apply RttT and progress measures to OUR classrooms to benefit student learning.
• Nothing helps decrease stress like talking things out with colleagues and realizing that they are all feeling the same way I do: a mixture of confidence and being overwhelmed.  Yes, we track our kids' progress all the time through a wide variety of authentic measures, so we're already ahead of many people, I suppose. However, it's going to take a lot of work to start formally documenting all of that progress and making it more concrete. Moreover, I'm not the only one who needs to do a lot more formal pre-assessing to identify concretely where kids are STARTING so we really know HOW MUCH they're growing.
• I LOVE collaboration -- at least, with colleagues who are "on the bus" (as School #2's principal would say) with the same types of ideas that I am.  I wish I got to collaborate with challenging, hard-working peers more often.  My current position makes me feel like an island, and while I definitely have an independent streak (I am an only child, after all!), I crave dialogue and idea-sharing and someone to work with on all these big initiatives that are looming ahead.   Moreover, I love the feeling of excitement that comes from passionate colleagues working together to increase student learning.  
• Since I don't get to connect with those "real-life" colleagues nearly as often or as consistently as I'd like, thank you to all of the wonderful teacher bloggers who also inspire, share your ideas and feelings, and provide that same excitement about student learning.  You are like a mini-collaboration session in my RSS reader every day!

My First Professional Presentation

Today I gave my first-ever professional presentation at a conference full of people I didn't know!  I presented about SMARTboards at the Central Ohio Technology Summit. It was scary and exciting and rewarding.  COTS is supposed to be a great place to present for the first time, and it really was!  My husband will tell you that ever since I said I would be willing to present (back in the spring), I've gone from excited to nervous (WHY did I say that I would present) and back again.  I was afraid nobody would come to my session, I was afraid that people who came would think I didn't do a good job, etc. etc. Now that it's over, I'm so glad I didn't listen to that "excuse voice" in my head, and I can't wait to do it again next year!  I had an almost-full room in both sessions and people seemed to enjoy it and learn a lot!  :-)  As a young teacher, it was really rewarding to be able to share ideas with colleagues in a professional, positive setting!

My session was called "Putting the INTERACTIVE in your Interactive Whiteboard" and it was all about how to use simple techniques in SMART Notebook software like grouping, layering, animation, and the infinite cloner to create your own interactive activities.  Everything I shared focused on creating activities that will have your students (instead of you) up interacting with your SMARTboard.  (My schools mainly use SMARTboards but we also have Epson boards, Promethean boards, etc. I will use "SMARTboard" on my blog to mean kind of interactive whiteboard.)  I love SMARTboards but I've noticed that many people use them as a fancy presentation gadget instead of a learning tool for students.  To me, your SMARTboard should be a tool that your students use more than something for you to stand in front of.  My students' best chance to learn with the SMARTboard is if they are manipulating things on it and I'm sitting in the back of the room watching them.  If you want to see my presentation, you can download a PDF of it (and maybe also the real Notebook file if our district website ever decides it likes Notebook files!) on my teacher webpage -- go to the "For Teachers" section on the right-hand side of the page.

I also learned a lot from the sessions I attended at COTS and I have some new ideas to try out this year!  This was my second year attending COTS and I've been very impressed with the quality of most of the sessions.  It's a wonderful place where educators from a variety of districts come together to share ideas -- and it's free!  This is the type of PD that gets me excited for the school year to start -- such a spirit of excitement and collaboration. 

I'm so proud of myself for taking the plunge from observer to presenter!  :-)

Changing Education Paradigms

Yesterday at my district's voluntary PD "Leadership Academy", we watched and discussed an interesting video from RSA Animate.  I'd seen and enjoyed several other thought-provoking videos from RSA Animate in the spring, but this one is even better!



The basic "big ideas" out of our small group's discussion ended up being:

• How do we change education in radical ways to benefit our students when the current structure is so ingrained in our society and "education reform" is emphasizing standardized testing?
• If we each do as much as we can in our own classrooms to engage students in 21st Century Skills, can our excellent district be a leader for others in changing education from the inside out?
• Another article we read (by Diane Ravitch) that was supposed to be a counterpoint to the video reminded us that subject matter knowledge is still important too.  We concluded that the article isn't really a counterpoint to the video, but an addition: so-called 21st Century Skills are essential to learning, but so is content.  In the article, Ravitch points out that "one cannot think critically until one has quite a lots of knowledge to think about."  

Another quote from the same article that I really loved: "Until we teach our teachers and our students to love knowledge and to love learning, we cannot expect them to use their minds well." (Diane Ravitch)