Feedback and Confidence

When I was a student, I asked one of my English teachers how I got a C+ on an essay, while my friend had gotten an A, even though we had made the same argument and backed it up with quotes from the book, like she had asked us to do.  Both of us had followed the assignment exactly.  My English teacher shook her head.  "But Emily," she told me, "You can't write like Sonali.  She's a much better writer than you are.  Hence the difference in grades."

Yes, that is a direct quote.  No, I never will forget it.  Yes, that was the ONLY feedback she would give me on that essay.

That was tenth grade.  Many other English teachers, influenced by my tenth grade one (she was the department chair...and a toxic voice in the department), gave me similar feedback.  And thus, I have never had any confidence in my own writing. I wasn't too confident before that, but believe me, that quote tore down any last remaining shreds of it!

As such, my love of writing fiction went unused, and anything I did write was a secret between me and my hard drive.

Recently, though, I had an idea for a fiction project, which I bounced off a friend of mine.  This time, the feedback I received was: "What a great idea!"  We planned it together, and then I took off writing.

And I started thinking:  Why would a teacher tear down a student like my English teacher had done?  Isn't there a better way to give feedback?  And I realized that, the more *constructive* feedback I give my own students, the more confidence they have, even if I'm giving them feedback on something they got wrong.

That's where the idea of constructive feedback comes in.  Posing the right questions for the students to answer, guiding them, perhaps giving them an idea of where to look for an answer, rather than giving them the answer.

This seems obvious to me, I guess, and probably to you as well, but giving students the kind of minimal feedback, like my English teacher gave me, breeds lack of confidence, and lack of confidence breeds dependence.  I thought about this more as I read Justin's post yesterday.  The dependence leads to a complacency--one where students learn that they will *never* be able to do something, so why even try?

I am willing to bet that we have all had an experience with learned helplessness.  We've probably learned it at some point as well!  How do we break that cycle? What are we going to do with our students, and perhaps ourselves, who have learned this helplessness so well?

Making It Work

On Thursday, I decided to take a trip to the local Trader Joe's.  After shopping and loading my groceries into the car, I realized that I could not get out because there were two women fighting over the parking space behind me, blocking my ability to back up.  One was in her car, the other, standing in the parking space, telling the other driver that she would have to run over her to get the parking space.  After letting them scream (to the point that it was audible to me, in my car, with closed doors and windows), I got out.  I informed the ladies that I would be pulling out, if they would move and let me, and that one of them could have the space across from me, and one of them could have the space I was vacating.  They stared blankly at me, and then started arguing with each other about which one would be moving.  I was dumbfounded.  Hadn't I just come up with a solution?!  Eventually, I informed them that they were welcome to keep arguing, but could they PLEASE MOVE so I could go home?  They finally, grudgingly, obliged me.

Finding solutions isn't always easy.  It isn't always a "win-win" situation, and even if it is, it isn't always a "win" to the point that one might want it to be.  On Friday, I discussed this situation with one of my classes, who found it to be ridiculous.  "A parking space isn't worth your life!" said one of my students.

Fast forward to after class, when my Assistant principal dropped by my room.  "What else can you do?" she asked.  "I want to see if we can find a way to keep you and at least finish out the Latin program....Can you teach History?  What about French?"  

I can, indeed, do both of these things.  Man, was I glad to see that my school leadership is working on a solution.  It's Hard, but they are going to great lengths to save the Latin program.  I was amazed to see this happening, rather than them just saying "Oh well...." as many other Admins would have.

In class, I endeavor to teach my students that finding solutions isn't always simple.  It requires work, thinking, and moving pieces around to make the correct things happen.  

How do we teach both the students and ourselves to FIND the solutions?

Control

A few days ago, one of my friends posted the following quote: "True freedom starts with self-reliance."

And, Justin's post yesterday, especially Debbie's comment, addressed the issue of Control and Community.

Debbie wrote:

"When I first started reading your post I envisioned a work environment with adults...they chat, they joke, they take breaks, they refocus, and in the end they get the job done. Isn't this how most of us work? There are some who want to jump in, do the task and then socialize. There are some who want to socialize and then get to task. We are all different and somehow we make it work. That "somehow" is just another skill that we can teach our students.

And then I read about the giving up and then community falls into place. Perhaps it is the "trying"to control it that prevents it from happening. Perhaps it is when we provide the "somehow" skills and then empower the community members to explore it and prefect it in their own way that things finally fall into place. It is another example of the Fire of Truth, except in this case it isn't about sharing different perspectives but about BEING different perspectives."

Getting "control" over a disparate group of people with different learning styles and different levels of self-reliance is impossible.  Even if you think you have it, you are deluding yourself.

I once had an administrator ask me how I dealt with such a "noisy" classroom.  I explained that my students were collaborating.  Like actually working together.  This, I explained, requires talking.  All the groups work in their own style, but each group has the work done by the time it is due!

Imposing what you believe is "control" over a group of students, or any other group, is destructive to community.  I am not talking about something that is a matter of public safety, like what happened in Boston last week.  I'm talking about a learning community.  If you try to "control" them, you lose and they lose.

At the beginning of this year, I spent a lot of time teaching my classes routines and self-reliance.  Need a pencil?  Well, they're in the bin labeled "pencils."  Help yourself.  What does that word mean, anyway?  Try a dictionary, or one of the awesome e-resources I posted for you on Edmodo.  Or, you could even look it up on that fantastic App I asked you to download.  Yes, you can use your phone for education!

And what happened?  Freedom.  Once the students learned that they had all the tools to learn the material, and that I wasn't the only person who held them, they worked with a vengeance.  Community bloomed, since the students learned that they could help each other.  They began finding new resources--things I had never seen before and sharing them.  It was amazing.

So, how do we teach that self-reliance?  How do we build a that Freedom?

Betrayal

As we were working on the Epic Mythology Project on Tuesday, one of my students opened her email to send a link to a friend.  There, she found an email from Guidance, informing her that Latin had been cancelled and asking her to sign up for a different language next year.

"Magistra!" she announced to the entire library, "Is it true that Latin has been cancelled?!"

Panicked, her fellow Latin 3s and 4s, as well as some of my Latin 2s, who were in the library with another class, rushed to take a look at her screen and to check their own email.  All of my non-seniors were greeted by similar emails.  Freaked out, they looked to me.

Now, I found out right before Spring Break, literally on the last day before, that Central Office had decided to kill the Latin program.  I was relieved, at least, to know that my Department Head, my Principal, my Assistant Principal, and I were all on the same page that this showed lack of foresight, and was a terrible idea.  All three of the leadership had fought with Central Office on Latin's and my behalf, but to no avail.  Because, Central Office said, our district can't support 4 languages.  BUT they still want to compete with all of those awesome and epic districts, like Newton, Wellesley, and Wayland, who DO support 4 languages at LEAST.  As my Assistant Principal said, "This shows incredible lack of foresight and willingness to invest in the students."

Anyway, my Principal and I had agreed before Spring Break that he would come up and talk with my classes so that I wouldn't have to.  After all, it fell on his shoulders.  He gave Guidance a Direct Order to not discuss this with the students until he said it was OK.  And they completely disobeyed it.

When I informed him of this, he was furious, and promised me he would reprimand Guidance.  But he was stuck in a meeting all of today, and thus, I faced my angry, confused students alone.

"I feel so betrayed!" one of my students told me.  "We were already asked to select courses!"

Believe me, I feel betrayed too.  After all, I worked so hard and the students worked so hard to make up for lost time in learning.

And why did this happen?  Because no one was held accountable.  No one has ever held Guidance accountable, nor has Central Office ever been held accountable.

And what happens now?  It affects students' ability to get into college, and takes away from everyone's credibility, honestly.  They promised the students, parents, and me that Latin would be offered next year.  And they lied.

So, even with this betrayal, I am trying to keep up the communities I've built, and the students are trying as well.

And we don't even have answers for WHY, which is the main question that students are asking at this point.

So now what? How, in the face of betrayal, do we keep the joy alive in the community?

Crunch Time

With the School Year closing out, it is Crunch Time at school.
With Balticon approaching, where my ACapella group is featured, it is Crunch Time with prep for that.

There is just so much to do.  And everyone seems to think it must be done NOW! Emails pile upon emails.

It's Crunch Time for my students too.  And they are PANICKED.  "I have all of these tests to study for and so many projects to do!" complained one of my students.  So we started talking about Priorities.

What is easy and quick to do now?  What needs more time and attention?  How much is it worth?  When is it due?  These questions flew around my classroom.  So we started writing them down.

Somehow, my students were never taught the concept of a checklist, even less a prioritized one.

Organization is important.  But students don't understand WHY.  They just know that their teacher will "perform a random binder check" and if their papers aren't in "the correct section," they will get a 0.  But WHY do we organize our papers? So many reasons come to mind: So we can find them again; For easy studying; For easy reference; etc.... And not every system works for everyone.  I often give my students options, and let them pick one that works for them.

"Magistra, you're the most organized teacher we have!" one of my students told me once.  I was surprised.  I am an organized person, most of the time, but the MOST organized?!  Surely that couldn't be true.  As I've been on the Technology committee this year, I've been realizing how much I actually make a POINT of organization and MODEL it for my students.  And they begin to get it.

Once again, I come back to two questions: How? and Why?   How do we keep our students and ourselves from going insane at Crunch Time?  How do we model organization for them?  And How do we teach them not only WHAT to do, but WHY we do it?

Success!

"Ms. L?" a student asked me on Monday, "Can you believe we have 8 weeks left?"

I couldn't believe it if I tried.  This has been an incredible year, and one of the fastest on record for me.  For one, I have amazing little communities--not classes. These are the students that, although disparate at the beginning of the year, have come together to make sure that everyone in the class, not just their friends, gets cake for their birthday or that one student, injured and out for weeks, got all the work he needed, complete with excellent explanations of the work we were doing, including complex grammar points.

So how were we going to close out the year?

I had promised my students that we would work on Mythology, after all of that hardcore work on grammar for the first 3 quarters.  However, I wanted to make it meaningful to them.  I have often seen Mythology taught by having students read stories and answer questions. 

So I made them the teachers. 

Once the students grasped the incredible scope of the project, they split into their groups and immediately got to work.  This project will take them through to the end of May, and perhaps beyond. 

I really wasn't sure what kind of feedback I would get, but I heard lots of "This is awesome!" and "This is the most epic project ever!"

This is not an easy project.  It requires them to really work, think, make handouts, tell stories, and engage their peers.  And they are loving it.  The students even commented that they couldn't wait to see what other groups were doing!

And I look back and realize that these disparate students, who were scared, underconfident, and unsure of how to think or why it needed to be done at the beginning of the year, and I am amazed that we got where we are! 

When my principal asked how my students got so far, I explained that they had become a community, not just disparate students who sometimes had other classes together, maybe. Community building is key to student success, or, honestly, anyone's success in school and beyond.

How do we build that community?  And how, in the face of the Factory, to we maintain it?

A Wild and Crazy Week

Hi!  I'm back!  If you're wondering why you haven't heard from me, well, first it was Spring Break week, and I was away for my friend's wedding Saturday and Sunday...which means I had nothing for Monday. 

And the rest of this week?  Well, for those of you who don't know, I live right outside of Boston.  If you have followed the news at all this week, you know why I didn't update. 

With so many horrible, terrifying events happening within 20 miles of me, I nevertheless found myself looking for the good things--the helpers, the friends, the community.  People came together all over the place--from opening their homes to stranded runners, to celebrating the capture of the loose suspect and thanking all of our law enforcement and leadership. 

We all came together to help each other and comfort each other and work together, even if that just meant staying of the road, to catch these guys.

And yet, in the moments of fear, we still managed to launch Corgito Ergo Sum, a new webcomic by myself and my friends Justin and Lucy.

Even amidst tragedy, life doesn't stop.  Early in the week I was talking with a friend of mine, who was TERRIFIED.  "How do you stay so calm?!" she asked.  I thought about it.  Then, I said something to the effect of: "Well, the world doesn't stop.  You have to put on your "f**k you" hat, band together, and keep going.  It's the biggest way to tell these people that you aren't scared of them and tell them to pi** off."  And it's true!  

Alright, so, we're back.  So good to see you all again!  The healing process has started.  How do we ensure that the community sticks?  That the hole in the factory system, that allowed this community to come out doesn't get patched up?

Prophecies and Lies

One of the great quotes to come out of Portal is "The Cake Is A Lie."  When you start the game, you are promised cake for participating in the scientific experiment.  Well, let's just say you never get it.

As I thought about today, and realized just how much I like the Portal metaphor, I was confronted with lies within my own school district.  And it hit me:  The Cake Is A Lie. 

We tell the students that their experience will be "engaging," that they "will have to think," that they will "discover," and that they will "learn."  We tell them that they will be "prepared for college."  There's the cake.  But they never do get that cake, do they? 

The Cake teachers are promised is being able to "engage" students, discussing real material with them, teaching life lessons, making their generation great.  But it's become a web of tests, blame, and shame.   And teachers pass on the lies to their students.

What we need is to redefine cake in this context.  It shouldn't be "being prepared for college."  Instead, it should be "learning for learning's sake."     Teachers' cakes shouldn't be "high test scores" but "what their students become."  It's hard to measure, sure, in this world of analytics and data, but it is true prep for life.  It means true problem solving, true community, and true learning for the sake of learning.  It means innovation, as well as developing self control and intrinsic motivation.  It means actually learning something can be "cool" again. 

Mark's comment here talks about how we might go about measuring something like this.  It sounds amazing, doesn't it?

"Happiness as the standardized testing method would mean the subject being tested for is personal to each person taking the test. It would likely be a subject each person was passionate about. These tests would always be graded by observation.

One observation would be how many showed up not just on time for the test, but early for the test.

Another observation would be if a student was clamoring for more tests. In wood shop  as soon as I finished the first step stool I made, I stayed after school working on the paper plans for my next project. I worked until the teacher ran me out as he was heading home. I was all too ready for the next test.

Also measurable on the happiness scale is how many other students circle around the person being tested to hear what they have to say about their test. In other words they are all too happy to share what they have learned with others.

At trade shows you always see the largest crowd circle a booth when the person speaking has full knowledge for what they are speaking about and at the same time they love the topic like their own kid. It works the same way in a classroom when a kid starts sharing and teaching others.

Don’t forget about the parent given and graded portion of the happiness scale. My 13 year old son goes wild telling me about what he learned the day before in French. Anytime a box is being opened and there is French text on the box I have to either hide the box or be prepared for a French lesson from my son. Great problem to have."

Ok, so all of this sounds so idealistic.  But what if the Cake were real?  How would we go about baking it?  Can we make the Cake at least a bit real for our students? 

Caves and Portals

Yesterday, one of my students asked about the Allegory of the Cave.  They had been discussing this in English class, and he still didn't understand it.  However, since "it was Plato" and I "knew ancient things," he figured I might have an idea.  So, off we went on a discussion of Plato.  My other students were curious.  This was new to them!  Suddenly, J made a connection.  I was amazed by what he said.  "Think of it as coming from Chem to Latin.  Chem's the cave, Latin's the light."  I stared at him.  "Well," he said, "Here we get rewards for thinking.  In Chem we get rewards for regurgitating canned information."

Man, was I surprised.  I mean, I feel like I hear this a lot at conferences with people who think like I do.  But it isn't common to hear that from a student!  

If we want our students to succeed in today's world, the cave needs to cave in.  It needs to be more like...Portal.  If you've never played Portal, it's a puzzle game.  It's about getting where you need to go by placing a portal that you can jump into in the correct place.  To do this, you need tools--A portal gun and companion cubes.  These are often provided for you.  But sometimes you need to find them.  You start off with things being provided, then they're kind of hidden, then you need to actually FIND them and solve the puzzles to find the pieces you need.  

It's a scaffolded game.  Players learn how to solve the puzzles as they play.  It is a bit of the idea behind Operation LAPIS--a sandbox on rails.  Students learn the ideas with help at the beginning, but as they learn how to play, the help begins to go away, and students have, hopefully, become self-sufficient.  

How do we teach students to take responsibility for their own learning?  How do we teach them to pick up and use the tools they have available to them?  This is not something they have to do often at school, but it is in life.  How do we help them learn it?

Show and Tell

In the front of my classroom, there hangs a poster reading, "Acta Non Verba."  As I explain on the first day of class, it means "Actions, not words."  

I always explain to my students that this saying applies both to me and to them.  There is no "Do as I say, not as I do" in this class.  If I were to expect them to sit up straight, I would have to do it too.  When I say, "I will have your quizzes back in two days," I will do it.

Amazingly, my students are always surprised to have to think about others.  One of our first assignments is to brainstorm why the procedures of the classroom are as they are.  I never tell them why...they tell us.

I was thinking about messages we send to our students and they send to us.  What if we all followed Acta Non Verba?! Our students see our actions every day.  They model what they do after what we do.  If we don't care about them, they won't care about us, or our subject.

I am one of those people who takes care of her personal appearance.  I want to look good every day.  One of my students once asked me why I dressed up every day.  I was surprised.  "Because I respect myself, you, and my job." I replied.  My students blinked curiously at me.  "Well..." one of them finally replied, "that makes sense!" I went on to explain that the message you send with your clothes and your actions, and your outside appearance.

How do you make your actions speak and back up your words? How do we show and not just tell?

Weaver

I've been thinking about the DCA conference, and the incredible closing keynote by Geoff Rockwell.  Classics is a "fundamentally interdisciplinary" subject.  Justin touched on this yesterday in his post.  

Part of the inspiration behind Operation Lapis and the work that I'm involved in was the idea that Classics is not the separate subjects of Language, History, Culture, and Texts and Artifacts, but a truly combined mix of the four.  To study the Classics, you can't just focus on one piece of the Classics puzzle!  And Classics continues into Science, Art, History, Music, etc....

Classics is connected.  Why is it always taught as a disconnected jumble of random pieces?  To understand Cicero, you need to understand what was happening at the time!  

Good teachers are weavers. Those who work in Digital Humanities are weavers.  Weavers pull disconnected threads together to make something connected and beautiful (or deliberately not!).  We work to bring life to the disconnected should-be connections and we build incredible projects to make this happen. 

And we must go from being weavers, to teaching weaving.  If we model how to make connections between subjects and people and places, students will begin to follow it.  Ask questions, find opinions, find "answers."  

How can we become weavers?  And how can we go from weaving for students to teaching them to weave?

Incredible Weekend

I admit, when I took off to the Digital Classics Association conference on Thursday night, I was unsure.  Why was I going to this?  I mean, I was interested in Digital Humanities, but was it really worth me driving to Buffalo?

Short answer: YES.

Long answer:  It was amazing.  Another one of those, "No, you are not crazy!" experiences.  There were awesome people, young and old, coming together to discuss Digital Classics, and the amazing projects that we've been developing.  From amazing maps like Pleiades, the Ancient World Mapping Center, and ORBIS to ways to develop and use digital literacy with your students to projects like Mapping Mythology. 

The two days were filled with amazing conversations, and I got a lot of interest in what I do with the Pericles Group and ideas of ways to collaborate with the incredible projects I saw, as well as people who wanted me to collaborate with them and work with them on their own projects.  Mind you, these were people young and old--from those just starting out as teachers to those who had been in the field for a while.

As my co-presenters and I discussed, the Classics world, and the Humanities world in general, is changing.  No longer is the "brilliant professor" or "brilliant person" an academic holed up in an ivory tower, but a playful, altruistic person, interested in making the connections that need to be made. 

Connections happened all over the place.  I met up with my professor from college, met several friends of friends, had wonderful conversations which ended in enthusiastic promises to keep in touch, and Gerol introduced me to 4 amazing people, 2 of whom know a very good friend of mine as well.  (We discovered this by accident!!)

So, this brings me back.  How do we make those connections, keep them up, and work with the altruism and collaboration that we are slowly beginning to embrace?

Gerol and I were discussing the Network.  Especially now with electronic network, what can start as a tenuous connection can grow stronger as you realize what you have in common with others.  I know this seems obvious, but now that we don't have to write and read zillions of letters, we can maintain more connections and they can grow more quickly. By working in the digital humanities, are we explicitly in the business of making connections? 

So, what is it that we can do to get this started?

Connections and Cows

Wednesday was a day of connections.  SO many connections!  

*I learned that some people I had recently been thinking about, who I missed, and hadn't seen in a while, would be at the conference I will be at this weekend.  (YAY!!)  

*I was able to introduce a friend of mine to another friend of mine.  Two women, same profession, one who had recently been on the artist retreat that the other was about to go on!  

*And, amazingly, a friend I hadn't talked to in 2 years tagged me on Google+, to ask about a game he had thought about.  Was there interest?  Would he be jumping in alone?  And I was able to connect him with other friends of mine who were working on similar things.  We can totally work together on this!

And it wasn't coincidental.  It was just what I needed--and what my friends needed.  All of us!  

At the same time, the first story that my favorite team of amazing five-year-olds went up, with full illustration and audio, on the Tres Columnae project.  The girls were super excited and vowed to continue writing about these wonderful talking cows, and the adventures of Fortunata the Cow, Io the calf, Maximus the Bull, and Diana the Puppy.  "Is this what happens in school?!" asked J.  A, her mom, explained that sadly, it wasn't.  At a traditional school, she wouldn't get to write amazing stories in Latin about cows.  "No wonder people don't survive at these schools," J replied.  

And suddenly, the true necessity of *Joyful Communities* was cemented for me. We need the connections, the lack of coincidences, the ownership.  Because now that J owns the work she does, she is SO much more enthusiastic about doing it.  

So what can we do to build connections for our students?  

"Closer to Fine"

Back in Mid-January, two of my seniors, R (male) and J (Female) were talking.  They are close friends.  J is a very sweet, but somewhat disconnected girl.  The conversation went along these lines:

R: Ok, J, what was the name of my last crush?
J: Uhhhhh...
R: Oh Jesus...
J: You had a crush on Jesus??!!??!?!

After everyone in the class, including, I confess, myself, recovered from laughing uncontrollably, N, another senior, asked, "What would it be like to have a crush on Jesus?" and a discussion started from there.

This is one of my favorite examples of great stories from imperfection.  This one was funny, tied my class together even more, and we made some connections.

As I think about it more, it is impossible to be perfect when everything is so disconnected.  (It is impossible to be "perfect" anyway, but we knew that.)  Pulling it all together and making connections builds community and makes improvements, conversations, discussions, and brings us "Closer to Fine," as the Indigo Girls once so memorably put it.  The mistakes we make, if we choose to learn from them, accept them, both as individuals and communities, make us better--not perfect, but better.

So I think, once again, about the Quest metaphor.  We're all on quests, right?  Has any hero or heroine ever been able to do this alone?  No.  Quests are about making connections and building a community out of disparate questers.  No quest has ever been perfect.  There are always setbacks, there are always mistakes, there are always rough parts.  But at the end, the questers come through, working together even if they don't always agree.  But it's all about the connections, the community...the Quest.

How do we help build the connections and the community? How do we make it more about the Quest?

Perfect

Justin's post yesterday struck a hard chord with me.  Go read it.  Have you been there?

Before SXSWEdu, I was super panicked.  My presentation had to be "perfect."  I had to look "perfect."  How many of us have been there?!

We're there every day in schools.  We have to be perfect for our students, perfect for our colleagues, and perfect for our administrators when they come to observe us.  Students have to be perfect for their teachers, perfect for their friends, perfect for all of their extracurriculars.

Why do we feel like we have to be perfect?  Where does that come from?

Once I stopped beating myself up about perfection, I enjoyed SXSWEdu a lot more.  I've learned to enjoy my teaching a lot more too.  Making mistakes is how we learn.  I make them.  My students make them.  We move on.

I always make sure my students know this is a mistake zone.  We can make mistakes here.  All of us can!  There is no judgement from me, and they must suspend their judgement of those who make mistakes, and suspend their fear of judgement about making their own mistakes.

When we stop stressing ourselves out about perfection and being perfect, a huge stress is lifted.  We enjoy learning, sharing, teaching, hosting--well--life a lot more!

So talk with me about perfection.  How do we foster safe mistakes?  How do we eliminate this culture of stressing over the "perfect"?

Messages

So let's think back a bit:  We've talked a lot about the messages we're sending to students.  What messages are they sending us?  I think about this today, as I read Justin's post from yesterday and about the journeys we take and the meals we eat together.  

My student A is an athlete.  She presents herself as one.  I was quite surprised recently when she was talking with one of the students in her group and said, "Yeah, M, but you're smart.  I'm not smart!"  I let the comment go at the time, but caught her after class.  "Is that really what you believe?" I asked her.  We had a long discussion about this, and she pointed out that she has been carefully molded into being an Athlete type. For a while she tried to fight it, and show she had other talents, but she kept getting forced into the Athlete hole.  "It's really uncomfortable!" she told me.  

At a teacher meeting recently, my student D came up.  He is a "bad, lazy child" teachers said. "Oh, he has an A in my class.  He works really hard for me!" I told his teachers.  They stared at me.  After making sure we really were talking about the same student, I pointed out that he didn't work for me at the beginning of the year either.  Then, we had a chat.  I told him I believed in him, and I knew he could do better.  I let him talk about his learning and how he works best.  We made a pact that he would try his best. We haven't had an issue since.  

Students send US messages all the time--messages about how they feel, how they want to be treated, how they can be helped.  These messages are largely ignored.  Sometimes they are verbal.  Sometimes not.  What if we stopped ignoring them?  What if we actually took the time to have conversations with our students and let them have conversations with each other?  

We teachers have to remember that to do what we do effectively, we cannot see it as "buffet style" either.  How do we listen to those voices and foster those conversations?  

Dinner Party

This year, for the first time ever, I hosted Easter.  Mind you, I found out I was hosting it with 48 hours notice, but off we went, cooking ourselves silly!  

It came off amazingly well.  We had mostly family there, and a few close friends.  

But it occurred to me as we were all assembled to eat Brunch, that this is not normally a "community." Family or not, my extended family doesn't always get along--I am, after all, the child of two black sheep.  

Anyway, it was, by far, the most civil any of my extended family members have been to me or to my parents.  There were real discussions, about actual issues, and not just awkward small talk.  

So why did this happen?  Part of this, I truly believe, was Brian and I brainstorming topics that anyone  could discuss without getting too opinionated ahead of time.  But finally, things were starting to head that way.  I was a bit nervous, but I let the discussion go, rather than trying to change the subject.  

Suddenly, there were real discussions among my family.  This has never happened before.  At first, I wondered if they wanted to act "normal" in front of our friends, but I realized that has never stopped them before!  It also occurred to me that usually, our family eats buffet style at holidays.  This time, I made us all have a sit down meal at a table!

So, I got to thinking about how this works in schools.  Why is it that my students have great, real, open discussions?  Because, even with rows of chairs, I emphasize the "table."  We are not eating/learning "buffet style."  We are learning with everyone's opinions.  You can't pick and choose.  "Be polite--eat at least a piece of the the brussels sprouts" turns into "listen to and respect everyone."  Don't take only what you want.  You have to listen to the difficult conversations too!  

With all of that said, what are we going to do to make our classrooms not "buffet style?" How are we going to get that process started today?