Relationships First, Everything Else Second

“We may not get to decide which kids to serve, but we do get to decide the kind of climate in which we want to serve them” - Jimmy Casas

Each fall, educators spend the first 30 days of each school year getting to know their new students. Team building activities, interest surveys, and partner learning are fun and help us better understand the lives of our mini humans. Beyond those first 30 days, as we all know, life in a school gets busy and we tend to focus more on curriculum and content than on enhancing the relationships we have started with our students.

I have always been interested in promoting a strong culture and positive interactions with the kids in my classroom. I have wondered how we could bring the excitement and happiness of the first 30 days of school every day. How could that mindset affect the relationships I have with my students, they have with one another, and their interactions with others in the school?

One way that I have incorporated consistent relationship building into my classroom starts at 8:30 am each morning. Soft starts are nothing new. Harvey “Smokey” Daniels dedicates a chapter to them in his wonderful book, The Curious Classroom. A calming music playlist greets the children at our door and so do I - greeting everyone by name and with our “secret handshake” that we developed at our open house in August. They come in ready to stretch their brain or prepare it for a day of learning.

Once our morning jobs and procedures are complete, my kids have some voice and choice in how they spend the first 10-15 minutes of their school day. These choice activities give us time to connect with friends, share stories, get work help from a friend, settle in, expand our creativity, collaboration and critical thinking skills and get ready for the day! We work together to change many choices monthly (but not the procedures of our morning choices) to keep interest high.

The best part? After MY morning procedures are complete (So the office does not need to *gently* remind me to take attendance!), I get to join in! While kids are coloring together or completing a puzzle or writing a story, I can work on an activity while we have conversations about our busy and important lives.

Creating relationships involves “creating an environment where the students get to know one another. Only by intentionally taking time to invest in activities that allow students to regularly interact with one another can we ever achieve the classroom culture of excellence we all aspire to attain: An atmosphere where all students understand, appreciate, respect, and empathize with one another.”      - Jimmy Casas

When my students are able to spend the start of their morning collaborating with their friends and teacher, our other interactions throughout the day are more positive and focused. There is genuine care and concern when “our class is not complete” (in 3rd grade words...that means someone is away from school that day). Their attention is sincere when their friends share stories later at Morning Meeting. If someone needs help, they know they can confidently ask 21 people for guidance. If we need help being assertive with a situation (because we are all human and things happen…), we feel secure in knowing our friends will listen to our words and respect our needs better moving forward.

In his book, Culturize, Jimmy Casas repeatedly shares how important it is for people to model and focus on what you want more of. If I want our classroom to be a welcoming and caring and safe place to be, then I need to make time in our day to model and focus on welcoming and caring interaction opportunities with my students. Then it is the kids’ turn to model and engage in welcoming and caring interactions with the many other people they interact with during their day. And it all begins again the next day...

Q1: What is the morning routine like in your classroom or school?

Q2: How do you encourage and maintain positive relationships with students throughout the year?

Q3: How does your classroom or school promote a positive culture in the first 30 days? Throughout the school year?

Q4: What are fun and unique ways that you or your school encourage positive (adult to adult - adult to student - student to student) interactions?

#learnbps

Work With an Instructional Coach? Whoa...Talk About Vulnerability!

It was my seventh year teaching, but my first year as a second grade teacher.  To me,
this was just like being a brand new teacher. I was teaching in a very low socioeconomic
building in the District and the sense of urgency for me to give students a rich learning
experience was extremely high.  I had every bit of confidence that I could rise to the
occasion, but I was also realistic enough to know that if I wanted to meet the level of
expectation I set for myself, I would need to learn a whole lot more and have support in
doing so.  

I remember my first “coaching cycle” was with my literacy coach.  New to second grade,
it first real experience in teaching phonics.  I wanted support with connecting the little
understanding I had around phonics instruction and the scope and sequence within the
resource we had at the time.  I asked her questions and she asked me questions. Both
of us realizing we didn’t have all the answers, but together we would figure it out. We
looked at the resource, planned, co-taught, and through the gradual release model, she
eventually stepped back to let me do my thing.  The best part is, even though this little bird
was flying on her own, I knew that my coach was always there to be a thinking partner
with me along the way. I knew I was never truly alone in my work.

Fast forward eight years...on the other side of this story as an elementary instructional
coach. What I’ve learned is coaching and creating a culture of coaching in a school relies
heavily on relationships, trust, honesty, and a whole lot of vulnerability.  Vulnerability...very
tricky and truthfully, quite challenging.

As a coach, I have worked with teachers who don’t seem to be nervous about showing
vulnerability. They have been eager to learn as much as they possibly can for their
students. I have also been able to witness other colleagues who appear to be protecting
themselves from vulnerability. Perhaps our need to seem confident, skillful, and in control
prevents us from taking risks. In fact, Dr. Brene Brown, a research professor who has
spent two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy says, “You can’t
get to courage without walking through vulnerability.”  

The question then becomes, how can we ask our students to be vulnerable if we aren’t
modeling it ourselves? I have always been an honest person (perhaps too honest at
times). I modeled honesty and vulnerability with my students. Without a doubt, there are
limits; as educators, in the classroom we can not overshare, and we need to be sensitive
to the personal experiences of our students and colleagues. But, it is not beyond our
capability to be courageous and take risks.  The same is true in the context of being a
lifelong learner. It takes courage and vulnerability to reach out and say, “I need to learn
more about this and I think I need support in doing so.” In her Ted Talk,
Listening to Shame, Brown shares, “Vulnerability is not weakness.  It is our most accurate
measure of courage.”

Education is a very difficult profession.  The demands to deliver high quality instruction
using research based best practices, understand the continuum of learning, be diagnostic
for our students across all content areas, and so much more are simply daunting.  The
bottom line...we need each other. We need a culture of coaching. We need to know and
understand that we do not have to go it alone. The urgency is too great and the
responsibility is too high.

Twitter Tuesday Questions:

Q1:  How can you embrace vulnerability within yourself?

Q2:  How are you authentic and vulnerable with your students? Colleagues?

Q3:  What are some ways you’ve modeled vulnerability with your students?

Q4:  What are some ways you’ve been vulnerable with your colleagues or instructional
coach?

Q5:  Think about a time when you noticed someone showing vulnerability. How did you
feel during that situation? To what extent do you view them as brave or courageous?

Do I have to???.....................Yes, you get to! Student Engagement

Teachers wonder why students are not engaged, not participating, and not interested.  Why do I have to know this? How is this important to me? Two questions heard so often from students.

We try to get them to see that it is important. We spend time trying to find connections, things they can relate to, and ways to peak their curiosity.

Personally, I have spent the last three months specifically looking at hooking my students. When it comes to writing, we teach students that our introduction needs to grab the reader’s attention. We want to hook the reader into reading the story. The first couple sentences, works to grab the reader’s attention. So I have made it a personal goal to take those first few minutes of class, my introduction, to hook my students into learning. I want them to be as excited and as interested in the content as me. And I know that science is not for everyone, but we encounter science and live in science all the time.  I deeply believe that students should understand that science affects them daily. I strive to bring real world connections to my students all the time. Even with a connection, I still feel like I have my work cut out for me. Just making a connection doesn’t do it for everyone. I try to get their brain thinking, once their curiosity peaks, then I have them hooked!

A few units ago we were learning about Mitosis. We watched a video in class called “The Unknown World” which helped build awareness and allowed students to start making connections. The next class while still learning about mitosis, I posted this statement on the board:

I had a visual representation of what this statement looked like (bags of sugar).

That student that is usually completely disengaged, had his eyes glued and was in aww of the amount of skin cells being lost. His response was, “gross, where does that go?” Another student said, “Which part of our body do you think we lose most of our skin cells?” Another said, “dead skin cells make up dust, EWWW!?!” And another said, “I get it! If we lose all these cells you want us to connect Mitosis because it is the process to reproduce, replace and repair.”  YES, YES, YES! We are making connections, we are asking relevant questions, and we are thinking. Mission accomplished, hooked!

Dave Burgess is popular for his book, Teach Like a PIRATE. It offers inspiration, practical techniques, and innovative ideas that will help teachers to increase student engagement and boost creativity. Dave believes engagement hooks are powerful and success is based on your willingness to relentlessly search for what engages students in the classroom and then having the guts to do it. The following link has a poster of the Pirate Hooks used by Dave.

I have read many articles and there seems to be many things that disengage students; factors we can control and factors that we can’t control. We are not miracle workers but we do what we can. We give those kiddos every opportunity they can to be successful.  We try to help them overcome those barriers and provide rich inquisitive learning opportunities.

Twitter Chat Questions Tuesday, March 12th:

Q1: What factors prevent your students from engaging during class?

Q2: How do you involve all your students?
Q3: Name a strategy that you have found useful in helping increase student
      engagement.

Q4: What kinds of ideas have you used to hook your students?

Keeping things Curious…..

     If you happened to pop into my 3^rd grade classroom at Grimsrud, at first glance it may look like the classroom teacher is simply walking around observing while the students are busily working on a some type of project.  My hope is that you will see curiosity, collaboration, communication, creativity and critical thinking as they have been working diligently for the last 2 to 3 weeks on their own passion projects.  Some of you may be more familiar with the term, Genius Hour projects, but “passion projects” seemed to just fit in my classroom.  If you would take even a closer look and ask these students what they are so actively engaged in, I am hopeful they would jump at the chance to share what exactly they are curious about! 

            Two years ago I participated in a book study that dove deeper into Harvey “Smokey” Daniels book titled, The Curious Classroom.   From this book study I have incorporated many ideas into my classroom to help not only inspire students as well as hang on to the curiosity that our students already bring to the classroom.  The one idea that I feel has made the most impact thus far is incorporating a Genius Hour into a portion of our day/week.   This first started with simply having a “Wonder Wall” in the classroom where my students could share their own wonders about anything that they were interested in as well as ideas that they may want to dig deeper into.  Many ideas stemming from the “Wonder Wall” soon morphed into individual projects as well as small collaborative group projects.  Interestingly enough, many students found that they wanted to learn more about some of the same topics.  This then of course led to research and then creating different projects to eventually present and share with our entire class.

While one small group has been working on, Why volcanoes erupt?, which of course includes a demonstration of a volcano that the small group crafted together, another individual has been researching about Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Our entire class was pleasantly surprised when “Laura” visited us in full costume, which included her favorite candy from the 1927 general store.  She shared about her own life events on a time line where she included many pictures from her life.   That same week we were a lucky class as another one of my students was eager to share all about the USA Women’s Hockey Team experience in the 2018 Olympics. She was more than excited to share her news report that she created with WeVideo.   Last year one my groups even discovered how to create the perfect bath bomb – hence the pungent smell of lemons lingering throughout the entire wing of our small school.  These are just a few of the many passion projects that have stemmed from this Wonder Wall/ Genius Time. 

            I must admit that when I first implemented this new idea, I wasn’t quite sure where this might lead to.  What I am most excited about is that it truly has given many of the students a voice and a chance to learn about something that they are truly interested in.  Having these structures in place for student-directed inquiry has been amazing.   I have seen some of my quietest students explode with excitement when it is time for Genius Hour.  Upon entering the classroom I have also seen many students check our agenda in hopes that there will be time for Genius Hour and then just beam when they see that indeed there will be time to work on what they are passionate about.  The biggest struggle that I feel I have encountered is how to move some of my students passed only wanting to learn about DIY projects rather than digging deeper into learning about a new topic. For some I simply feel this is developmentally a stage that some are just more ready for than others.  I also believe that this has been an outlet to share more of the student’s creative side.  My students and I have visited extensively about sharing our learning in new and different ways and to not just use the same presentation style each time.  Many of my students are comfy with creating goggle slides, which is great however, we have really tried to work on finding new, creative and versatile ways to showcase our learning.

            In closing, I wanted to share this last thought. My biggest “Aha moment” from introducing the Wonder Wall and Genius Hour/ Passion Project time into my classroom was one I never thought would actually happen.  Being Curious isn’t just for 9 year olds.  In order to encourage many of my students to tap into their own curiosity, I had to be vulnerable and share some of the ideas that I am most curious about.  Clearly, as teachers we model every day, but sometimes even if it is difficult, modeling our own deepest wonders may just be enough to spark even our youngest learners, to take a chance and learn about something they are curious about.  Are you willing to take that chance?

Twitter Tuesday Questions

Q1: How can we encourage curiosity in the classroom?

Q2: How do you as an educator help your students to find new ways to share their new learning?

Q3: When students embark on a Genius Hour Project, how can we encourage them to dig deeper       into their learning versus simply sticking to a DIY project?

Q4: In what ways have you modeled being curious to your students?

The Power of Building Empathy and Gratitude in the Classroom

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

 – HARPER LEE

It was the time of year when I sat in front of my instructional coach and the TalentEd Perform tab trying to decide what my school and personal goals were going to be for the year. I reflected on the year prior and kind of knew the direction I wanted to go, but I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to go about it. I needed more time to process what I truly felt would be beneficial for me as far as growth, as well as what would work the best for my incoming students.

Last year was a unique year. My students had wonderful and funny personalities individually, however, when it came to working together as a cohesive unit, many times my class struggled to function. We had obstacles of getting along, name calling, and bullying, etc. My class felt like one big sibling argument all year long. In our small neighborhood school, most of these kids have been together since kindergarten and were pretty much ready to branch out to middle school where they would find more kids that shared their interests and personalities. So when it came time to figure out what I would like to take on as a goal for this year, an idea hit me.

I wanted to build a strong classroom community with my group this year. I wanted to find a way to have my students accept one another’s differences, appreciate the good things in their lives, empathize, and to just simply be a kind human being. Easy task, right?

 In order to take on such a task, I have to promote and model every single day what kindness and empathy look like. I have an entire bulletin board dedicated to “witnessed acts of kindness.” I have a specific job where it is a kid’s duty to spend their week “sprinkling” kind words to people. I have an “Appreciation Circle” at the closing of everyday where we recognize things we are appreciative of. I have a morning greeter that welcomes everyone into the classroom and a “goodbye wisher” that gives each student a special high five on the way out- myself included!

Another way for me to easily promote kindness and empathy are my morning meetings! I have been utilizing a morning meeting routine for a few years, but I wanted to bump it up and make it more meaningful for my students. I wanted something engaging that would bring my kids together and initiate deep conversation. I found an amazing morning meeting curriculum that complements our Second Step curriculum nicely. This morning meeting curriculum addresses topics of belonging, kindness, compassion, conflict, perseverance, integrity, and more! So much of what we are talking about in our Second Step curriculum is brought to life by this morning meeting curriculum. I use music videos, quotes, song lyrics, clips from Youtube, and read alouds that address these community-building themes. Kids have a journal where they are able to reflect on themselves, set goals, analyze quotes, and are given a chance to respond to the themes presented for the week. Each day, we gather together in a circle and discuss these various topics in depth. We have such rich conversations about the need to feel like they belong, the power of a compliment, how to stand up to a bully, and persevering when things get difficult. As we progress through the year, I get to know more about my students through our conversations with one another. During these morning meetings, I have been able to connect with my students and build relationships more than I ever have in years prior. One lesson in particular stands out as a lesson that solidifies my need to continue this type of social/emotional instruction.  

 As I mentioned earlier, at the end of each day, my students stand in a circle and provide either an appreciation, apology, or an “aha” moment. One day, I told them that I watched a TedTalk that explained that we (as Americans) have more than 75% of the world population. This could mean something as simple as having clothes on our backs, shoes on our feet, or a free public education.  Instead of our typical Appreciation Circle, I wanted them to reflect and think of things that they could be grateful for. I explained that it had to be something beyond, “I am grateful for Fortnite,” or “I am grateful that school is done.” There always seems to be that one kid…

My kids had beautiful responses.

“I am grateful to have friends that support me.”

“I am grateful that I have a mom and a dad.”

“I am grateful to have a fun school.”

“I am grateful that I have a roof over my head and food to eat.”

With such an amazing response, I wanted to extend this activity further. The next day, I showed a One Republic music video- I Lived. In this video, a young man is living with Cystic Fibrosis (CP). Although he has this debilitating disease, he insists on living his life to the fullest. He runs, plays hockey, enjoys summers on the lake, and participates in cycling events. There are many times the videos shows him hooked up to numerous monitors and breathing machines. He compares CP as trying to breathe through a straw. After the video, I took my kids upstairs to our gym to run around to get their heart rate up. They were so confused as to what my plan was. When I had them stop, I gave them each a straw and asked them to try and breathe through it like it was the only way they could breathe. Obviously this was a struggle and something they couldn’t do. When the lesson was over and it was time for them to go to Phy. Ed, I told them, “Remember, we have more than 75% of the global population. Today, I am grateful for my health and my opportunity to share this moment with you.”

Before I left the gym, I observed their reactions. For most, they were stunned and quiet. For others, they made comments like, “Wow. That is how he breathes? How does he do that?” “If I had to breathe like that, I wouldn’t be able to do sports like he did.” “That is what my asthma feels like.”

Empathy. For some of these kids (and maybe even adults), experiences like this are needed for them to realize how to be empathic human beings. It takes more than just reading and responding. In that moment, my kids needed to experience something that they probably take for granted every single day.  What does it mean to have more than 75% of the global population? Our school is right next to our local homeless shelter! Even students that consider the shelter a home needed a moment to realize that they still have more than others and they can still have appreciation and empathy. There are moments and experiences that we can offer our students to help them build empathy. I got to witness something great that day. I got to experience that “lightbulb moment” ten-fold. Isn’t that what brings us, as educators, the most joy? To see our students realize and get something for the first time? I know it does for me.

Q1: How do you promote empathy & kindness within your classroom?

Q2: How can we encourage more kindness and empathy within our current state in the nation?

Q3: What are your favorite community builders in your room?