Reasons I'm Thankful I'm a Teacher

This past week and a half has been a whirlwind.  I've been on the hunt for the ever-elusive sense of balance that I seem to struggle to find in my working life as a teacher.  I find that it's more difficult to enjoy what's happening during instruction in my classroom when I'm thinking about the ten other things that need to be done before the day ends.  However, amidst all the hustle and bustle of the school day, I did stop to reflect today on some moments for which I'm so very thankful.  A school is only as good as the people that work to create it's culture, and I'm very fortunate to work in a school full of fantastic people.

So here's what I'm thankful for this week...

• I'm thankful for the opportunity to work with an absolutely fantastic co-teacher this year. I look forward to teaching with her every single day.  
• I'm thankful for a seventh grade team of teachers that works together to make things happen.  I hit the biggest jackpot when it comes to the people I get to spend my workday with each day.
• I'm thankful for caring, sweet, sympathetic students.  I've been under the weather for the past few days, and I can't even describe to you how perfectly well-behaved and wonderful all my classes have been! 
• I'm also thankful for students who are full of grit and determination to complete tough tasks.  We're in the middle of a long writing assignment, and my students are knocking it out of the park! I'm beaming with pride right now, guys.

I made a goal this past Sunday to spend this week being more positive about my job.  I found myself feeling terribly negative last week.  It's just so easy to get bogged down in the busy work of teaching and forget for a moment that I'm incredibly fortunate to go to a job that I love every day. Hopefully, if you're taking a moment to read this, you'll find a moment to reflect on the things for which you can be thankful this week, too. I promise it'll give you a happier heart! :)

Tweets from the Secret Annex

Today was a super fun lesson! I've talked before about using Padlet as a discussion forum in my classroom, but today I used it a little bit differently than I've used it in the past.  We're currently reading The Diary of Anne Frank, and we're to the point in our independent reading when students tend to really get bogged down in the monotony of Anne's life in the Secret Annex.  It's totally understandable.  Anne's life is rough for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that she has to be quiet and still most of the day and has to maintain a very rigid schedule.  No matter how many times we discuss this and work to build empathy, students still struggle with this part of the book. 

So today I decided to wake my kids back up and try to rekindle their interest in the text.  We're a little more than halfway through the book, which is when Anne starts to develop a crush on Peter Van Pels. This is normally a winning point for female students, who perk up at the hint of a love story, but it's an even bigger turn off for boys, who are already sick of listening to Anne's feelings and could care less about this love story.

Today, we used Padlet like Twitter for a role play activity.  Instead of having students tweet their own thoughts, I asked them to tweet as either Anne or Peter.  First, we had to choose Twitter handles for each person.  Classes voted to make these decisions. You'll see in the pictures below that one class chose @DiaryLover13 for Anne and @BigPete for Peter while the other class chose @flirtygirl2735 for Anne and @PeteyTweety for Peter.  It was fun to see how the students viewed these two characters and how their perspectives were reflected in the Twitter handles they chose. Then students started tweeting.  The first round of tweets dealt with Anne and Peter's feelings toward each other. The second round of tweets dealt with Anne's feelings toward her family members at this point in the diary.  I haven't seen my students this engaged in Anne's story in several days.  It was so fun to see how they reacted to each other's tweets and really put themselves in the characters' shoes.  Not only did it help them build empathy for the people in the story, it rebuilt their interest in the story as we move forward.  I'll let their "tweets" speak for themselves. If you click on the pictures, they'll get bigger, so you can read their tweets.  Some show higher level thinking than others, but to be perfectly honest, I was just thrilled to have every student totally engaged in class discussion, and I really believe that students walked away from this lesson with a better understanding of the relationships in this book.  Sometimes, it only takes 140 characters to say what needs to be said.  It's a great exercise in brevity.   

This is definitely a lesson I hope to bring back with future texts.  We read several older texts throughout the year, and this activity was the perfect way to bring book characters into the 21st century and make them more relatable to students. Hope you enjoy our "tweets from the Secret Annex"!

Teaching: It's Just Like Driving a Car

We've officially made it to September! It's starting to feel a little less like summer, and everyone is getting into their school year routines.  We've already started our first class novel in English, The Diary of Anne Frank.  Things are really just moving right along!

One fun, new thing that I'm doing this semester is working with a group of graduate students who are in a Models of Teaching course.  I really love this course because it's so practical for pre-service teachers. It helps them build an instructional toolkit that they can take into their future classrooms, so they don't rely on the old "stand and deliver" lecture methods that are traditionally used to convey information in secondary classrooms.  One of my favorite models of instruction is the Synectic Model of comparison.  I love this model because it really stretches learners to think beyond their initial ideas about a particular concept, so they end up coming to completely new, and often deeper, understandings.

I used the Synectic Model with these grad students last Monday, beginning with the idea of "teaching." We started by making a list of words or phrases that the group might use to describe the act of teaching.  In true pre-service teacher style, they said words like reflective, rewarding, and wonderful. I, having driven to our meeting straight from the middle school, threw in words like stressful and overwhelming. It's interesting how one's perspective changes with time...

Anyway, after brainstorming a solid list, I asked them to think of a plant that could be described with the same words and phrases.  They settled on a squash, saying that a squash is stressed during the growing process as it gets bigger and becomes overwhelmed as more and more plants grow on the vine.  It is also rewarding to grow a squash plant from a tiny seed, and it provides wonderful food.  So hopefully you're seeing that these students were really stretching to make every word fit our new analogy.  We continued through our series of analogies until we came back to our original idea of "teaching." In our final analogy, I asked the group to explain to me how teaching was like a car.

At first, they all looked at me like I was crazy.  But after a few seconds of think time, they started to come up with some awesome metaphors:

• Teaching, like being in a car, requires a person in the driver's seat; someone to take control the minute class starts.  
• Just like many cars have a GPS system to provide a road map, teachers must have a lesson plan to provide a road map for the class period and a bigger plan for the whole course.
• Cars require regular maintenance, much like students require formative assessment, so everyone can stay on track.
• There are all different kinds of cars, just like there are all different kinds of students.  
• You have to make sure everyone is following the "traffic laws," or the rules, and going the right direction.

This activity made my heart so happy! It's so easy in the middle of a long day of teaching to forget all the wonderful, optimistic thoughts we had about teaching before we entered our classroom and got in the driver's seat.  This activity was such a heartwarming reminder about why I adore what I do each day.  It was also fantastically encouraging to hear these grad students talk about teaching this way.  To be fair, we've all got to be just a little idealistic to enter the classroom and want to stay there.  We teach because we want to make the world just a little bit better each day. So this week, I'm going to carry on with this analogy and work to drive my classroom in the right direction.  Here goes nothing...