by Janessa Jordan

I love rituals in the classroom.

Scratch that–I love rituals with purpose in the classroom.

In my “Classroom Leadership” class, one of our classroom rituals is to share “good things” with the rest of the class. We listen to a 30 second clip of Rufus and Chaka Khan’s song “Tell Me Something Good” (listen here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkJFodl9I1U) and share seven-ten exciting tid-bits of news going on in my colleagues non-school lives. The “good things” have ranged from doing hot yoga with friends to learning the sex of my colleague’s prenatal baby to parents visiting town. This ritual has a few specific purposes: First, it helps create community among the group. Colleagues learn about one another by the “good things” shared in the group. We each share in the joy of a colleague becoming an aunt or another colleague’s girlfriend coming to town to visit. Thus, the classroom becomes a safe place where we can share our ideas and communicate our challenges about classroom material. Second, the group gains an appreciation of non-academic successes. Academic and personal lives are no longer compartmentalized. Sharing personal joys anchors our learning to something beyond mere success in the classroom, but rather ties it pursuing the goodness that life has to offer. Lastly, colleagues feel a sense of shared identity with the rest of their classmates.

Why am I rambling on about the “good things” ritual in my class? Because I believe that creating a community of learners who support one another’s joys is fundamental in closing the achievement gap.

I volunteered at Breakthrough Denver last year. Every day during the All School Meeting, students were encouraged to share good things that had happened in their weeks. In the beginning, students would share the Algebra homework that they received an “A” on or the English essay that they had improved over several drafts. Only a handful of students would offer their good things, and only them after cajoling from the leader. Gradually, students began to share more personal things that they were doing, such as improving their free throw shooting or rereading a high school level novel for fun. More and more students offered their joys to the group, and as a result, more students were inspired to share their triumphs. By the end of the year, almost every student shared their joys with the group–including a student who was accepted into an local IB program, a student who was raising money for Haiti Earthquake Awareness, and a student who shook President Obama’s hand during a speech. The students were so encouraged by their fellow classmates that they wanted to include their own joys in the mix.

Sharing in joy with one another encourage students to pursue those activities that will perpetuate the joy between peers, thus creating a supportive community. This community helps students stay focused on their personal goals and, more importantly, deters them from pursuing things that will be destructive to their goals.

So go on…tell me something good…

By Garrett Hedman

Oh the anticipation I had for my first day! Well, here’s how it panned out.

I rode the bus. Yes, I am one of 12 teachers out of 200 that takes the 20-minute bus ride to our school every morning. My father, a bus driver himself, would be proud. The benefits of daily bus riding: brilliant, Mississippi sunrises, breakfast, and more than an hour of free time to prepare for the day. Not to mention, I’m saving the environment. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that 8 of the 12 teachers that chose ride the bus teach high school science (primarily biology and chemistry).

Anyway, I entered the high school/elementary school (the buildings are adjacent to each other) with great anticipation to set up my classroom. Walking down the hall I was greeted by a friendly cockroach that I introduced to the bottom of my boat shoes (my first roach extermination ever). I entered my classroom, and began to put up posters around the walls. We have the “Our Big Goal” poster, the “HollaDolla Reward System” poster (yes, I decided to use the currency that I wrote about in the previous post), the “Classroom Rules” poster, the “Objective Mastery” poster (it tracks how well people are doing on understanding the objectives we teach each day), and a periodic table. The room was shaping up to be a conducive environment to learn.

In the science workroom, my teaching partner and I rehearsed what we were going to say one more time. I then started to dance a little to get pumped up for the day when a woman stepped into the room asking for all science teachers to gather for a meeting.

The woman calmly explained to us that no students had showed up for Chemistry and only half of the expected students showed up for high school English and Biology, a.k.a. I’m not teaching my first day! I couldn’t help but laugh and think of the readers of this blog, all the anticipation, the insight, then BOOM! I’m not teaching.

The woman goes on to explain to us how the school had offered a two-week extension of school that students could take to make up classes they originally failed. However, there were still quite a few students who opted not to attend the two-week extension, so there was a chance to “recruit” some students to teach. So we started to make phone calls. Yes, I was the telemarketer selling education. “Your child has the chance to enrich his mind. Also, he can make up credit.” How awkward, yet how powerful. It was the first thing I actually wanted to sell, but was afraid to. However, the deeper I got into the phone list, the more I thought to myself how much four weeks could impact these students.

This is what Teach for America is about. Although administration may throw us a curve ball, we call families to get students into the classroom to enrich their minds, to close the achievement gap.

Nonetheless, our work paid off. The next day, my second first day, I had eight students.

by Eric Benzel

I am taking a course called Radical Philosophies and Education at Teacher’s College: two weekends of all day discussions. The environment is a mix of the energetic and intellectual, innovative and critical. It is a wonderful course, and I am being encouraged to rethink my own constructions of schooling in very real ways.

Likely, I will talk about this in later posts, but today, I need to write about a conversation I had with another student during our lunch break.

This teacher, Sargeant, teaches geometry to high school students in a fairly progressive school in the South Bronx. She just finished her first year of teaching while a part of the peace corps fellowship at TC. This means she was teaching and earning certification all at the same time. First of all, I think Sargeant has done some pretty incredible things in her classroom: focus on learning mathematics through writing, an innovative trial curriculum that focusses on developing geometry through symmetries, and she started an after-school math club. On top of this, she had a relentlessly supportive principal and a team of dedicated teachers. She had it made right?

It was her last week of teaching, and I asked, “So what are you feeling after the year?” Her answer was first of all, exhausted: it was obvious that she spent everything on those kids.

What has stayed with me though, almost hauntingly, was this thing she said…

I feel like I should be hopeful. But most of my students are failing. I wasn’t good enough for them… I could see how after five years of this, a teacher would be able to say that the students aren’t able to learn, because I’m not sure how long I can feel like I’m not able to teach. Hope? Right. It’s hard enough to have imagination.

Wow. Hope was not enough. Innovative curriculum was not enough. Dedicated, beyond-sleep, work past every contract, blood and tears teaching was not enough. I don’t know how much we recognize teachers like Sargeant. Most measures will probably not reflect the imagination that she is investing into her students… the raw energy devoted to the learning, teaching, planning, and loving.

It seems given that a teacher should have hope and belief that every student in the class can and should succeed, but what happens when someone gets done with their first year teaching having a hard time even imagining this possibility?

It is hard to think about the coming year, knowing that I will not reach all of the students (maybe not even the majority) who are in my classroom. Maybe, Sargeant made a much greater difference than she can recognize. Still, I want to take the time now to start imagining what can be possible, the improbable, even the absurd so that when I finally have my own classroom (and reality has set in), I can remain hopeful. So I guess this is my strategy for now. First, imagine. Then, hope.

By Nate Reaven

Now THIS is what university education schools should look like.

I currently believe (I am open to changing my mind with a solid argument and good evidence), that education schools at the undergraduate level focus on good things, but not the best things. For instance, at CU Boulder, in the majority of my education classes, we were instructed to create 20-minute lesson plans in groups on books like The Kite Runner or To Kill a Mockingbird. We were given weeks to plan this one activity. We taught our peers, all of whom are in college, are intelligent, and want to be teachers. In other words, we taught the ideal middle-school student. Standards are addressed, but they usually seemed to be secondary to the activity. I once received an A++. Really? An A++ is a lovely grade, certainly one that improves the GPA, but a grade that did not encourage me to improve, because I did not know what to improve upon. I was apparently, perfect.

For these reasons, I am excited to begin teaching summer school. I knew that I would be teaching real-live students, with real-live learning difficulties, and subsequently, real-live skills to improve on. However, I did not hypothesize that the training would be quite this good. We focused on skills that we will need in the classroom right away. We focused on how to write a lesson-plan far more explicitly than I ever did in college. We focused on the Say/See/Do (SSD) method of teaching a concept, and the Visual Instructional Plan (VIP) method of teaching a skill. We focused on breaking down skills into easy-to-digest steps. We focused on Active Participation (AP) in a way that allows students to remain constantly entertained and focused. We focused on creating an objective – how to backwards plan, with more purpose then I generally found in an educational classroom in college. There are no grades for the teachers – not just because we aren’t doing this for school, but because we are learning how to be teachers for ourselves. We want to learn how to do better.

I cannot describe how helpful this training has been.

At this point, I am contrasting training-styles and content focuses. It is unfair of me to choose one style over the other and call it superior. It could all just be my personal preference.

I will say this – beginning Monday I will be teaching Romeo and Juliet to middles school, inner city, underprivileged, and under-taught youth for six weeks. I will have a mentor teacher checking all of my lesson plans every week, coming into my classroom multiple times a week, and other experienced teachers at my disposal to discuss lesson-plan ideas. I will have teacher-peers who will be going through the same experiences, and teaching the same kids every single day, as I will. I will be able to improve regularly, and rapidly.

I have no doubt that all of these resources will prove to be invaluable as I move on to student teaching in the fall, and a career in education later. I just wish that every future teacher had this same opportunity.

Instead of a guest blogger this week, we would like to take the time to thank our partner Ednewscolorado.org. I interned for this wonderful organization during my sophomore year of college at the University of Colorado at Boulder. No other resource offers the detail, depth, and commentary, which Ednews provides for all Colorado education related news. After getting their newsletter for years, it truly was a thrill for me to see my name included in the articles provided this week. We here at NorthtoSouthEducation are looking forward to a wonderful relationship with this influential organization.