Planting Seeds

I sit here after reading an article about my grandfather and think I’ve put some of the pieces together. I am a lot like my grandfather. He was quiet and unassuming. Always looking to make something work better and trying to help make the world better. There are probably a lot more similarities that I'm not aware of too.

Lately I’ve been thinking about my current journey through life both personally and professionally. Honestly, I don’t think there will ever be a clear separation with the two based on my career path in education. I’ve been listening to the EduAllstars podcast and the stories of other educators while thinking of my own story almost daily on my commute into work. All in hopes of gaining clarity about my direction, purpose, and maybe help others here is my story.

It all started when I was a teenager thinking about what I wanted to do with my life. Most of my life had been spent wanting more and desiring more money than what I was used to. I figured I could go into business or sports journalism as I was a huge sports fan and loved money. Then in high school something changed. I went to volunteer at St. Francis Farm where my grandfather ran a catholic worker farm. It was basically a place that churches would send groups to do volunteer work, connect with the community, and connect with the world around them. I really enjoyed my work there, and was able to meet someone who I have lost touch with but influenced me more than he knows (recently found him on Facebook though). His name was Mike (he had a good name) and he ran a free soccer camp each summer for local kids. Mike asked me to volunteer there even though I had never played a minute of organized soccer in my life. That camp made me realize I wanted a profession where I could work with kids every day to influence and make their lives better. I felt I had a lot of life lessons to teach them and could connect with anyone. Seed planted.

Fast forward about 12 years later to when my son was born. That was almost two years ago now. The journey of the next two years I think has led me to finally begin sprouting some of the seeds my grandfather planted throughout my life even without his knowing. I do want to say that when this two year journey has been tough I just imagine how hard it has been for my cousin Meghan who has gone though a much tougher journey the last two years and we share my sons birth date as special for completely different reasons. Thanks to her for her unknown inspiration to me.

When my son was born I started to think about all the great things I wanted to show him and do with him, but I was too focused on myself and too far from my family to see what was coming next. When my son was 9 months old I lived in North Carolina and was a 12 hour car ride or a 2 connection plane ride from most of my family in New York. It was a few days before Christmas when my grandfather passed without the chance to meet my son. I already knew I wanted to be close to family, but I also wanted to continue on in his legacy serving others and helping make the world better. I am a lot like him in that we were both low key, I am becoming more easy going, and we would often times sit back and watch then get up and do it. I was learning the real value of being close to family, but struggling with trying to make an impact in education.

Then a few months later I got started on Twitter. It was a great way for me to connect with other educators. What I am realizing now is that I fit in because of lessons learned from my grandfather. While this was going on we were looking to leave North Carolina and move to Maryland so we could be closer to family. Then I decided that my impact on education would be greater if we went to Texas. I failed to account for the impact having family near by can have. While this journey in Texas has helped me change lives, influence others, make lifelong friends, and made me a better person I think I have learned the value of having family a car ride away. Which is what cost my son a chance to meet one of the greatest people I have ever known.

Here I am now, with a mission. I want to plant seeds in as many people as possible. I need to further my grandfather's cause and purpose to change the world and help others. Imagine if he could have leveraged social media to help him. That is my mission to help others. However, the people on top of that list to help right now are my family. I want to spend most of my time and energy making sure I am making their lives better. Then I will pour myself into education: helping students, teachers, and community members who need me. Hopefully in connecting these dots as I move forward will help me to properly thank my grandfather for all he has done.

Professional Learning

I have been thinking about what professional learning is for a few weeks now. If I were asked this a year ago I would have had a quick answer. It is learning related to my profession. However, now my ideas have changed some.

Professional learning in the field of education is learning about how to be a better teacher. To be a better teacher I need to learn about learning.  Then wouldn’t going through the process of learning improve my teaching? I keep thinking back to a time I had to change the starter in my car which was stuck in our garage. I remember searching online and researching for hours trying to find out how to do this. After spending most of a day I had accomplished the task and fixed the car. This whole process of doing a household chore taught me a lot about learning and failure. It took a lot of failure and retrying to figure out how to get the job done. So was this day a day of professional learning? I think so.

In addition, I know that learning and engagement are strongly related. Also we are most engaged when we have choice, autonomy, and purpose. Too often in our field the autonomy and even the choice is taken out of professional learning. In a field where the purpose is so obvious and important we should do a better job of providing educators with autonomy and choice in their professional learning.

My thoughts are that true professional learning is something done on your own choice with your own time. However, schools need to do a better job of providing educators with more time to pursue this learning. There are many days I find myself too tired and run down after what seems like endless scheduled meetings or things that must be done to complete my own learning. I wish as a teacher I could get some 20% time each week to work on whatever I wanted related to my profession. That would allow my teaching skills to really take off.

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#LoveTeaching

Alright so this week is celebrating the love of teaching by having teachers share why they love teaching. I’ll start out with a blog post and then try to tweet out some examples and maybe have a few more creations throughout the week. 

I love teaching because it allows me to build relationships with kids and create. I can make all sorts of cool things like quick instructional examples to help improve my teaching. Not only that, but I get to test out new ideas and constantly work on improving my instruction as I continually get to know my students. The science behind teaching is what makes me love it. Getting to know what makes your students tick and trying new things to help them learn. When you find something that actually works and motivates students is just amazing. Then I love teaching even more when the thing I found is something I created myself. Well maybe not created myself, but stole and adapted myself. 

Being able to build relationships and create such a wide variety of educational tools or resources for students is why I love teaching. I am excited for this week to keep reminding myself everyday why I love teaching and this has really come at a great time for me!

Reading Menus Part 2

So another week down trying to implement more choice and independent reading in my classroom. I have learned a lot this week about my students. They want to do their work on these menus that I have made for them. Unfortunately, they aren't sure how to select a book to do it with. This is probably due to them always being told what to read and not being asked to select their own text. I also realized most students have trouble picking a book. I asked them why they picked a book and most were not even sure. When I followed up with “What would you like to read?” most fell silent. These barriers have led to some mixed results and also information on where to go next. In addition as I continue my way through The Book Whisperer I gain more inspiration and confidence that I can find something that works for me and my students.

Here are my plans as I go forward.

I am going to get my library reorganized by genre the best I know how. This will help the kids and help me recommend. I started just picking up books reading the blurb and discussing what genre it was only to find half my students wanted to try that book. My students want to read, they just need practice picking their own books. I need to get things more organized for them and help them figure this out.

I am also going to simplify their response work. I will have a skill we focus on during the week and something related to that. Beyond that we will just write blog posts about their books. I'll work with them and encourage their blogging. Basically each week I'll have my students complete something to practice a skill we taught and then write a review, recommendation, or summary on their blog about their reading.

Finally, I am going to utilize some other reading programs that students have access to to help give students some other types of extra practice. In addition only giving me about a third of the class to work on reading with.

These changes might help make some improvements over the last few weeks. We will see how they respond next week.

Reading Menus

The past week or so I took to Twitter to regain some inspiration. I have regained a lot! First of all I want to blog a lot more often, but in shorter chunks. Second I decided to revamp my reading and writing block into something that resembles workshops combined with some Daily 5 structures.

To dive into this I figured I would use reading choice menus. I am not sure what I’ll call them, because they go by many names. I gave out one to students that I had found and made no changes to because it accomplished what I wanted this week anyway.

On the first day the students were told they were to select a nonfiction book of their choice, read it, and complete $50 off the menu. The one I had chosen was broken down by price of nonfiction reading response activities. Immediately the students began doing items from the menu without having read a book. Part of this was due to excitement and part due to the fact you can probably do a lot of nonfiction responses by skimming and scanning without reading an entire book. I facilitated, gritted my teeth and watched things not go entirely as planned. Many students weren’t sure what to do, they began acting out, complaining, or just doing other things. Eventually, most of them got it together and gained some direction in terms of text they were going to work with and which assignments they might try.

Day two went a lot better. Students had direction, and began working on assignments. I circulated asking questions and providing feedback on their work. When we both ended up lost and needing some direction I would suggest they go back and just read some of the book. One huge success I noticed on day two was the poems that students began writing. One option was for students to write poems about the topic. I had a student on day one write a poem about elephants around the whole “Roses are red, violets are blue” style. It rhymed, but the book wasn’t about elephants and it didn’t demonstrate any comprehension of the text. On day two students began writing acrostic poems or looking up poems on the similar topics online and trying to create their own. One set of students were looking for example poems on diamonds and found out how to write a diamante poem. So they began work on writing one of those about a diamond.

Now, things are going great yet, but there has been a lot of improvement in two short days. I can’t wait to see what a whole week brings as I make adjustments to the assignments and time frames. The kids are getting excited and taking advantage of the choice being provided. Hopefully this will continue to grow.

Balance

This year I have been struggling with the idea of how to be great at everything I do. I first thought it wasn't possible. In reality I knew that there had to be a way, I just needed to find it. Maybe reading The Fourteenth Goldfish helped see then possible.

To start, I focused in on being great for my family at home. It has been hard. My wife is working is a job that has proved very challenging and that has been something I am still trying to help with. Our son is 21 months old and spending time with him is a must. As much as I might want to be doing something else, when he plops down on my lap with a book or some Legos I know what needs to be done. Which can be hard when I'm coming home from a long day in the classroom. Or when dinner needs to get on the table and bed time is in 90 minutes.

However in putting my personal life first I have found a balance. I have found ways to be more effective in the use of my time at work by just setting limits. As I take time to reflect at the end of this year, setting limits has gone well in the last few months. I have been able to work on being great for my family and still improving as a teacher. I have also managed to find time to do some fun things just for myself. The keys are setting priorities, limits, and looking for growth towards greatness. I do believe that I can be great at home and at work. It will just be something I am constantly working toward and not necessarily something I will "accomplish". I need to keep on trying though. 

Keeping it Positive

There are too many great things in the world to not constantly be celebrating them. The same can be said for ANY classroom. There are always great things happening and it is my job to keep it positive.

I have known this since my first year teaching and have struggled with it every single day since. I first learned to focus on the positive when I used to give out tickets to students as rewards for positive behaviors. Then at the end of the week there would raffle drawings for a chance to pick from a prize box. This was for fifth grade students and it really worked well for the student population we had. What I noticed though was the following: at the end of the day when I felt like we had gotten a lot accomplished I ended up running out of or had to tear off extra tickets during the day (I would prep 100 each morning). When I felt like it had been a bad day and I was frustrated with not getting things done or student behavior I still had a pocket full of tickets I never gave out.

Too often we get distracted by the negative, and forget about all the great things going on. Although I have shifted from tickets to different forms of rewards and now to Class Dojo points, one thing remains the same. At the end of the day if a lot of points were given out it felt like a good day. When there were not a lot of points given out it felt like a rough day.

My point of reflection is this …

I have completely changed as a teacher over the last 7 years. I have taught students from literally across the country (Las Vegas, North Carolina, and now Texas). I have used 6 different sets of standards since college. I have taught in schools with high poverty and low poverty. Even after this wide range of experiences when I reward and focus more on the positive I feel better about the day, I am more motivated to keep trying, I am excited about my job, and I even dance into work every day!

Remember that there is always greatness, but sometimes we just forget to look for it.