One Person

Just before Christmas break, the school secretary called me during my planning period, asking if I had time to see a couple of students.  After answering affirmatively, I puzzled over the call.  Students usually just come to the classroom to see a teacher; they don’t go through the office first!  Who could be on the way, and why did they ask the secretary to call me?  I only had a minute to ponder the situation before two young ladies walked through my door.  Both were students in my English class the year before, and both had left our school to attend the alternative school instead.  I was surprised and delighted to see them on this unexpected visit.

“Katie” had been with me an entire school year.  She had a tough exterior; her hair was dyed black, she wore heavy makeup, and her baggy pants usually had heavy chains hanging from them.  She was quiet for the first few days, but I could tell she was both intelligent and more interested in class than she wanted me to believe.  I didn’t pry, but I broached discussions with her each day.  Gradually, she warmed up to me and began initiating conversations.  While she was absent often, she always asked me about make up work and completed it.  

I learned bits and pieces of Katie’s life from our conversations.  She has a tough home life, and she’s been suicidal.  She has to miss school for counseling because her parent works second shift.  Several weeks into the school year, she broke down in tears as she explained to me she was going to miss class once a week for counseling because she felt I was the only teacher who wouldn’t penalize her for her absences.  While she didn’t earn an A+ and several assignments went unfinished during the yeaar, Katie passed my class and the state test with no issues.

“Laura” came to my class near the middle of last school year, and she was only with me a few short weeks.  She was returning to our school from a brief stay (due to discipline issues) in another district.  Many teachers and all the students knew her, but I did not since I had been new to the district the previous year.  She put on a display as she made a grand entrance to my classroom, but I ignored her bravado and treated her like any other student.  She was absent from class, sometimes from school but often just in the office.  While other teachers complained about her return, I never had any issues with her.  

Laura’s  presence was so infrequent that I might have forgotten about her, except for one major conversation.  Laura arrived late one day after being held after class by another teacher for a “tough love” lecture on choices, grades, and graduation.  I’m sure that teacher was trying to “scare” her into better behavior, but Laura was in tears.  The only thing she took away from that conversation was that she was a lost cause, that she had no hope of graduating.  My heart broke for her.  And I told her so.  I told her I cared and believed in her, and gave her five minutes to compose herself in the bathroom before joining the class.

They had just stopped by the office for paperwork and had timed it when I would be available.

They both hugged me and thanked me for believing in them and treating them with respect.  I was speechless.  We were all teary-eyed.  They shared the positives in their lives; they both started working part-time and had made progress at the alternative school.  While the visit lasted just moments, the emotions still make me tear up writing this.

I’m not proclaiming to have the magic formula to reach every student.  In fact, I know there are students every year I am not reaching and influencing the way I’d like.  But for these two young ladies, I left an impression.  Treating them differently than they expected by treating them with kindness and respect had a positive impact on their lives.   My hope is that every student, every Katie and Laura, finds that one caring adult who can make the difference.  You never know who you might be influencing without even knowing you’re doing it! Find that student in need, and be the one person who makes a difference!

Reflections on the ICE Conference 2014

Last Thursday and Friday, I had the pleasure of attending the Indiana Connected Educators Conference 2014.  While I have attended many conferences and workshops in my eight years of teaching, this was by far the most valuable professional development I have experienced.  Yes, for once I felt like I didn’t “attend” a PD; rather my two days were full of experiences!  Here’s what made ICE Indiana 2014 a different kind of PD for me!

The Keynote Speakers

Wow!  Dave Burgess and Kevin Honeycutt almost left me speechless!  While I follow both of these gentlemen on Twitter, I had never seen either of them in person!  I read Dave Burgess’s Teach Like a Pirate just before school began this year, and it greatly influenced my outlook on teaching this year-so much, in fact, that I wrote about it in my very first blog post in August!  His energy is unreal, and he is so right when he explains that our students deserve for us to be there and to be “on” all the time!  

Kevin Honeycutt did not disappoint either!  His compelling personal stories tied to his amazing thoughts on education blew me away!  He stressed time and again that students need to be taught and challenged to do positive things with technology, thereby having no time to do potentially harmful things with their technology.  He also explained his philosophy of sharing the good things we educators are doing in schools and being our own best publicity.  If we remain “secret geniuses,” a potential is created that our good work will be lost with us!

Dave Burges promotes the idea of the “Five Word GPS” to guide teachers.  Teachers simply imagine the five words they would like to hear students use to describe their class most often, and then use those five words as a personal GPS to examine the route of each lesson, day, unit, communication, etc.  In a similar vein, Kevin Honeycutt shared the idea of the “30 second soul selfie,” a 30 second video that explains who we are and why we are here.  I LOVE both of these ideas; I will definitely be adding them to my website this week!  These would be some awesome whole staff activities as well at a collaboration!

The Camaraderie--Building and Expanding Professional Learning Networks

I knew going in to this PD that I would pretty much be going on my own.  Sure, my amazing tech director Kelly Clifford was going to be there too, but she was presenting three times each day.  While this didn’t scare me away (I have been to many PD events on my own before this), I have found many foreign language and English teachers at the conferences I usually attend to remain loners or to stay with “their groups” and in their comfort zones.  I am not a shy person, so meeting new people is usually not an issue for me...except at these conferences.  ICE was nothing like these prior experiences!  In each session (and, actually, at breakfast before the sessions began), I was able to meet and connect with people from all over the state who were not afraid to meet new people either.  After the first day, I had connected with teachers from Wawasee, Evansville, and even Santa Claus, Indiana!

The other difference maker was Twitter.  Now, I am fairly new to Twitter.  I had an account for over a year before I ever did anything with it!  Thanks to the Technology Leadership Certification with Kim Hendrick and Central Indiana Education Service Center, I am using Twitter more all the time.  I was actively tweeting during the conference, getting retweeted, and both following new people and gaining new followers.  Twitter does help us connect and share ideas, and ICE Indiana was a great time for even new Tweeters to grow.

 

The Practicality

I left ICE with countless new ideas, yet most of them I can implement myself with little to no prep work.  Sure, getting other in my building and in my district on board with some of these ideas will take some time, and it may be a few weeks before I can incorporate some of the ideas meaningfully effectively in my lessons.  But the great news is I attended sessions that were RELEVANT to what I am doing in the classroom and as an aspiring administrator, and the advice for implementation was PRACTICAL and achievable.  

Since the sessions were so practical, I felt inspired.  Maybe it’s a little of Kevin Honeycutt’s “secret genius” mentality meets Dave Burgess’s TLAP, but I’m sure I could lead a session next year!  Look for me at ICE 2015!

Reinventing the First Day of School to Increase Student Engagement

Maybe it’s the optimist in me, but I love the first day of school.  Everyone, including me, gets a fresh start, a chance to do things differently.  That first day should set a positive and exciting tone for the entire school year, and I have always tried to take advantage of it.  Unfortunately, many students form an entirely different impression of school on that first day, which I discovered last year when I asked students to collaborate on a writing assignment on their second day about their experiences on the first day.  Each essay discussed how dreary and boring the first day is for them.  They listen to teachers read them the syllabus, verbatim, and they receive their textbooks.  They sit in their assigned seats, in alphatical order, and they are not engaged in anything.  The only difference from one class to the next is that some might have students complete a pre-test on the first day.  

This revelation made me reflect on my own first day.  When I was teaching French, I was acutely aware that I was constantly in the business of selling my “brand” to ensure I had a job.  Since foreign langauge is not required for every student and Spanish is a more popular choice in my geographical area, I worked hard to hook my students on the language and send them home speaking French on the first day.  But as I moved from teaching French to teaching English, had I fallen into the first day monotony?

Yes, I did.  At least a little.  Sure, I still did icebreakers like the toliet paper game or candy introductions, but I wasn’t REALLY engaging the students.  I wasn’t getting them excitted about anything.  I did (mostly) read through the rules and distribute textbooks, too.  

I had some work to do.  How could I show, on the first day of school, the things I value in the classroom?  What did I even value enough to include in this change?  How could I answer yes to “If I were a student in my class, would I be excited about the first day?”  After some reflection, I decided I value humor, collaboration, English class, technology, and most of all, I value my students as individuals.  That’s when I got the crazy idea to incorporte all these things on the first day by planning stations.

I got some fabulous ideas from my colleagues, so maybe the first day isn’t quite as tedious for the lucky students who visit their classrooms on the first day!  Deb Blaz shared her “classroom expectations quiz” activity, where students work together to read through the syllabus and develop quiz questions based on the class expectations, and Kelly Clifford gave me the “Padlet Selfie” idea to incorporate technology and individuality on the first day.  For humor and English class skills, I planned a station using John Green’s Vlogbrothers video “An Open Letter to Students Returning to School” and asked students to summarize the message and either agree or disagree with it.  Finally, one station used a youtube video on the elements of plot and plot diagram to review these terms before asking students to summarize the five elemens of plot in their summer reading novel.

When the first day arrived, my students were shocked.  They were up, out of their seats, and actually accomplishing things.  My first period was so shocked and slow moving that we didn’t quite finish the stations on the first day!  I’ll admit, since it was the first time I’d tried some of these activities, we hit a few glitches with both time and technology.  Fortunately, I had a back up plan, so I ended up delivering a 3 minute review lesson on the elements of plot to one class, and another class posted things about themselves on sticky notes to my blackboard rather than selfies on the padlet.  Overall, the stations were a huge success.  After three days, my students still have energy when they enter the room.  It doesn’t seem quite as boring and irrelevant as most of them find school because I hooked them on the first day.

Greatness (My Plan to Reclaim my Teaching Mojo)

On Wednesday, one hundred sixty-one new faces will come through my classroom door.  As always, I am nervous, excited, and eager to meet each of them.  This year, I feel more energized than ever before to begin a new school year, and it’s not because I spent time relaxing this summer.  I have been busy with technology conferences, new textbooks and new state standards for my classes, my own classes as I seek my building level administration license, and my husband and two growing boys.  No, this summer was anything but relaxing.

What is my secret, you ask?  It’s simple, really.  I have committed to this being the best school year I have ever had.  I’m going to work my hardest to make this vision a reality, and I plan to seek out all the help I can get along the way.  Fortunately, I work with some dynamic teachers and administrators already.  I’m also fairly new to Twitter, but I have found excellent ideas and resources from top educators around the world, all willing to share free of charge, day or night.

I just finished reading Teach Like a Pirate by Dave Burgess, a book teachers both in person and on Twitter can’t stop talking, and for good reason.  Reading his book inspired me to seek out the best school year and make it happen.  Burgess asks us, “Do you want to be great?”  He points out that many educators feel uncomfortable responding yes to this question.  They falsely believe that their being great is somehow selfish or that their greatness diminishes the greatness of others.  Well, Mr. Burgess, I’m not uncomfortable.  I will freely admit I want to be great, the best teacher I can be.  This year, I am committed to achieving as much greatness as possible.  I will actively seek out greatness.

I’ve always been committed to greatness, but I have been side-tracked by other demands the last couple of years. Two years ago, I left my job of six years teaching French and occasionally English to take a new position teaching English full-time in my home district.  While this change of schools had always been the ultimate goal, conditions of this particular transition were less than ideal.  I was hired on a Friday, and school started the next Monday.  And I was six months pregnant!  I made the best of the year, but it was the most difficult year I have had.  Last year was better, but I still didn’t quite feel like my old self, my foreign language teacher self in the classroom.  This year, I will reclaim my greatness, the creative and inspired teacher I was before all that craziness.  I will do it because my greatness is not just best for me, but it’s best for my students.  They deserve to have me at my greatest and for me to give them my all.

Are you inspired to strive for greatness?  What do you do to be the best teacher you can be?