Category: Uncategorized

My kids go back to in-person learning tomorrow. Aside from all the health fears wrapped up in that, I have a larger looming existential fear we are going to miss a key learning of being forced online.

We saw into kids’ homes. We saw how they would choose to present themselves if they had even more tools. We saw how they would hide if they could. There’s learning there.

Some kids never turned their cameras on. Others made sure a digital background was always present when their cameras were on. Still others arranged their learning spaces in precise ways to share their worlds. There’s learning there.

Some kids showed up in pristine rooms and silence. Others showed up with muted microphones because they were saving their classes from the din constantly surrounding them. There’s learning there.

Some never said a word on camera but dropped mad knowledge in chats. Others begged their classmates to stop sending emojis in the chats because they were doing their best to focus on what they were supposed to be seeing, hearing, and thinking. There’s learning.

Online learning has meant daily home visits across all demographics. Kids we thought lived in stable spaces don’t. Kids we thought were without familial support aren’t. We were way off the mark on some of the kids we thought hung on our every word. And some kids we’d written off as writing us off, showed us they were counting on us to keep investing in them.

There’s learning in all of this. In some ways, we’ve been afforded an uncurated look at who are students are outside the context of classrooms and schools. In others, we’ve seen whom they’d like us to see them as when given powerful digital tools and the comfort of their own spaces. None of it is simple and all of it has powerful potential for our learning and theirs.

I don’t exactly know when, but I hope we get just a couple minutes in the coming weeks to stop and reflect on what our students showed us – intentionally or not – through these online portals into their worlds. There’s learning there.

Parenting is just an ongoing attempt to clean the kitchen. Just when you’re about to get a counter cleared off, a spoon, an empty orange juice container, an errant paintbrush appears. Just as you’re moving to get the spoon to the dishwasher, orange juice container to the trash, and paintbrush to the art closet; you turn to find the neighboring counters have been invaded by things you did not know were in your house in the first place

And, this is your day, a domestic Battle of Helms Deep. And, you thought you were going to get to the crossword…or a shower.

But you’re not. You will always be cleaning the kitchen. You will always be learning new things. Rubbing alcohol gets Sharpie® off the kitchen table. (It also gets “thinking” putty off a 10yo’s favorite blanket.) Cooking half a cup of red lentils before adding the marinara sauce will help you feel like you’re making a much healthier meal. An at-will snack basket and refrigerator drawer that closes an hour before meals will save more headaches than you can imagine.

Asking for everyone’s high and low from the day at dinnertime will help you to see moments and know feelings you missed during the day. A ritual of putting a penny in an old peanut butter jar after dinner as each person shares what they’re grateful for will sometimes turn around the most violently aggressive days.

Guess Who with cups of cocoa can feel like a hug. Painting rocks can last as many hours as you need because you’ve got unheard of rock access.

Learning which is the trash and which is the recycling is hard. Knowing which goes in which is harder.

You will never know how messy you are until the dogs are away for a night.

Parenting is cleaning the kitchen, and it’s so much better than cleaning the bathroom or vacuuming the living room or cleaning under the beds. It’s in the heart of the house. It nourishes the family. It is warm and hectic. It is never done.

Before I dig into this one, a little background on the word choice for this question. If you’ve read Nel Noddings or read what Chris and I had to say about the Ethic of Care in our book, then you might see where this is headed.

Taking tremendous liberties with Noddings’s work, let me sum it up this way. You care about the big pictures – poverty, homelessness, racism. You care for the specific humans – someone you know living in poverty, the family at your church struggling to keep their home, your friends who are people of color in a world of too little nuance and empathy.

So, when I think about who cares for me, I’m not considering those who are advocates of teachers or those who champion the rights of queer folks, or the band of people who have joined together to support guys named Zac. I’m talking about the people with whom I am in a caring relation. My parents, siblings, and other family members care for me. For many of us, though not all, this is true.

So, who cares for me in my work? This one gets a bit messier. As a classroom teacher, my students were literally in my care. My responsibility inside and outside of the school day was to care for my students. It’s the responsibility of any educator. It would have been unprofessional and unrealistic to expect my students to care for me. Take off the table the responsibility of the 140+ people with whom I was in most frequent and closest contact, it paints a bleak picture regarding sources of care.

This isn’t unusual. This is part of being a teacher. We are in constant contact with other humans and we would be wrong to expect them to care for us. Maybe you’ve witnessed or experienced a starvation of care this can create. I work with hundreds of educators across the country. Too frequently, I meet teachers who are angry, sarcastic, pessimistic, and closed off about their students. These are teachers who lack a structure of being cared for professionally. They have transferred the inappropriateness of expecting their students to care for them to a lack of expectation of being cared for by their colleagues and administrators. They’ve starved themselves or been starved by systems that fail to recognize caring for all is paramount to success.

Every educator is entitled to an expectation of professional care from the adults with whom they work.

I ask the question today because I constantly struggle with that sentence pf entitlement.

I deserve the care of my colleagues. To help internalize this, I have taken to reminding myself. My colleagues in my office care for me. Many of the principals and teachers in the district care for me. The coaches, interventionists, and administrative staff with whom I work care for me.

It is difficult for me to rely on others. While I would likely drop everything I’m doing to help out an acquaintance after a few minutes of conversation, I do not afford that same charity to myself. I need to. We all need to.

The people with whom I work and teach and learn every day care for me. Only when I accept that as true and presume it as I do my work will I be able to do better work.

Toward the end of last year, I started posting to Instagram pics I tagged as #TheBigQuestion. The thinking was to throw one question up there each day. Each question was designed to push our practice – yours and mine. It felt like folks responded to the questions, and I found myself carrying each one with me through the day. So, all of this is to say I’m committing to post these questions each day of #2019. I’ll be doing that in the morning. In the PM, I’ll be posting my thinking on the day’s question here on the blog. Since I love conversation, I’m hoping you will also make public your answers as they come. I’ll supply the questions, we’ll all share our answers, and – I’m hoping – have a more thoughtful year.

Let’s stop saying, “my low kids,” or “my low readers,” or “my low math kids,” or whatever other ways we homogenize and dehumanize students.

When I was teaching kids writing, my classroom had a dead word wall. It was a lasting tribute to our lexicographical kills throughout the year – the words we determined as overused or ineffective in communicating our ideas. They added imprecision and subtracted meaning.

“Low” is the first word on the dead word wall of teachers. It acts as a pseudo-insulting stand in for the words we can’t say. It’s a kinder, coded version of slow, stupid, and dumb and also has some sort of qualified protection. When we say low, we are abbreviating “low scoring” (often in reference to standardized assessment). Looking more closely, low and low scoring are abbreviating our students.

In a recent conversation with a principal, she said to me, “Our data…” At the finish of her sentence, I asked, “When you say our data, what are you referring to?” Unless we are examining a robust body of evidence chronicling not only a student’s learning trajectory, but also their multiple opportunities to show their learning, I’m not inclined to sit at a table and pretend we are developing a useful understanding of that child.

Low not only abbreviates our students’ performance on assessments, it abbreviates the extent to which we see them, it closes the aperture of our understanding of the full sets of knowledge and ability they bring to learning as well as to the tasks we assess. When I hear teachers talk about students who surprise them on assessment scores, the sentence is something along the lines of, “Even my low students did well.”

I’m tempted each time to ask how many times these low students will have to score high before they earn enough of our esteem to become our middle or our high students.

I suppose, then, we run the risk of everyone being thought of as capable and diminish the value of framing education as a competition. Wouldn’t that be a beautiful day.

Most any time I’m visiting a classroom, I’m having a conversation with the students I meet. The first few questions are pretty expected –  “What are you learning about?” and “What are you doing?”

The last two questions I routinely bring to the table working with students are less expected – “Why is that important?” and “What questions do you have?”

I know those last two are less expected because they are met with silence and stares from students – no matter the grade level. For me, it raises the questions of why are students are doing what they are doing and whether they have been asked to consider the deeper implications of a text. Whether it’s a third-grade student reading The Year of Miss Agnes or a ninth-grader wrestling with Regine’s Book, our expectation must be that students can consider key ideas, themes, styles, etc. outside of the pages of what they’re reading.

Much work has been done on the transfer of knowledge and skills, and there are certainly some thoughtful, complex projects students can embark upon to show those abilities. For the purposes of this post, though, I want to focus on two activities that can build students’ understandings of their learning and thinking while helping teachers understand areas of growth and need.

Essential Question journals can help students track their thinking about essential questions within lessons or units of study. For each of the curriculum modules within our elementary curriculum resources, for instance, students are asked to consider essential questions as they read, write, and speak their way through complex texts. Journaling around those essential questions can be easy.

• Make routine time (5-10 min) once or twice each week for students to journal their answers to the essential questions within a unit of study. As they journal, have them consider what they wrote in their previous entries and focus on what they know or understand now that they didn’t before. Ask students to share/compare their journals with their peers and then engage in whole-class conversations about reading and writing.

Standing exit tickets help your students focus on a stationary target for thinking about their learning while giving you some quick formative information on what they think they are learning and wondering.

• Have students fill out slips of paper with their names on them at the end of each class or lesson. Have them respond to the same prompts each time – “What can you do now that you couldn’t do at the beginning of class?” and “What is one question you have as a result of your learning?” If technology is available, have students respond via a google form. Imagine being able to conference with students with not only numbers and summative assessment results, but a portfolio of their own statements of learning and inquiry as well.

Not matter their age, all learners improve their abilities and skills if they have consistent, dedicated time to reflect on their learning. By including time to journal on essential questions and checking in at the end of a class, we make that time for our learners and provide ourselves with new windows into how we can alter our instructional practice to meet students’ needs.

Previously published on the professional blog.