Reflecting on a week of recharging, regrouping

Our Superintendent came into our school this week and asked how things were going. I greeted her and responded, "this job is hard!". Elaine is so supportive and reminded me that yes, indeed it is, and that we are in the longest stretch of the school year without time off. It's a long time between the end of August and the last week of November and only have 1 day off. Stamina hasn't yet been developed in our students so signs of fatigue creep in. Like when at home, when I'm tired or my family is, it's hard to stay positive, the house gets a little messier and you often end up working hard to break even, to stay afloat. We're seeing signs of this at school too- students are struggling to stay positive with each other, at times being downright unkind, they talk about being stressed by assignments- even though we haven't increased work expectations since the 1st day of school. They seem to be treading water to survive rather than swimming forward.

2 weeks ago was especially hard. I came home last weekend frustrated having a hard time trying to grapple with the current mood of the school and wanting to fix it. I laid low, stayed quiet and began to get to work trying to address the climate first. As I grow as an educator nothing becomes more apparent to me over and over again than the saying I walked into teaching with from my grad school time at UVM- "They don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care." I have believed this from the second I went into teaching, and 15 (!) years later I believe it now more than ever. So this week I went back to making connections and teaching about it. We started our advisory on Monday talking about "Would you rather", an activity I created asking students to examine the world they would rather live in. The whole activity was deeply moving and the level of participation was more than I could have expected. I feel confident that students left and went into the halls that day as positive agents of change. They went out looking to make their world the one they want.

I sat more with students. I made an effort to connect and check in with phrases like "how are you doing today?", "what do you have exciting going on this week?". I asked these to every student that came to check in work, ask questions about classwork and every interaction I had with students. This work of connecting first, educating second was only reinforced when I went to the Rowland Foundation Annual Conference. The topic of addressing systemic racism, and inequity in our schools and society at large is a heavy one. Nothing about it was comfortable or easy to hear. But it is our responsibility to work towards the goal and make progress one day at a time, one person at a time. The first step, at the heart of it all, is connections. Connecting people, promoting humanness, interrupting the cycle of racism, bias and inequity are what it takes to move society forward. I could see that more work was needed in my curriculum and our school system as a whole.

So next steps, the post is running long... I'm having students dig deep into their culture and background for the next month. As I learned Wednesday in the mindfulness workshop, we need to know ourselves before we can really begin to know others. So students are looking at all aspects of their culture- from their belief structure to their passions to their ancestry. We're also beginning personal interest projects next week around our work on the 19th century in US History. Allowing students to dig deep into something that are excited to research more and teach others about. Advisory work will continue to focus on empathy, kindness and tolerance. Creating a culture where we call others in to our community and call others out for unkind behaviors. Continuing to work on my AMLE presentation about master schedules rebuilds that promote relationships before more curriculum time because why I want our school to rebuild our schedule is because my goal is to have a school-wide advisory. Where all people in our building are working together to promote the values that my students voted on. The words they used to describe their ideal world- LOVE, ACCEPTANCE, SAFE, WELCOMED, SMILES, RESPECTED, TRUSTED.

Reflecting on the first few weeks

I am having so much fun!

This is a great group of kids, the energy is so positive, I'm really enjoying these first weeks. In my homeroom, our advisory has been amazing. Kids willing to take risks, work hard to get to know new people and be leaders in our school. I have really enjoyed our new schedule, which allows us to have advisory first thing on Monday mornings. While, of course, I'd love advisory every day- having it to start the week has been a great change which really helps set the tone for a positive week.

In Social Studies I'm having an equally positive time. I'm trying a new routine where on Mondays when we "single block" our focus is on Current Events and Culture & Diversity. The students have seem to really respond! They have been engaged in the news of the world around them and this past Monday we focused on them getting to know their own culture better. We'll start doing a project on that next month. Hopefully we'll give this a whole new meaning!

In our Tuesday-Friday work we've been doing our school-wide Social Studies curriculum around Peace One Day. Students have been researching peacemakers and working on making a claim as to why that person is a great peacemaker. I have loved watching learners dig deep into their own opinions as to why so many great people in history have worked for peace. The message of peace from these peacemakers has really inspired many students to become change makers themselves. Many students have created their own statements of peace.

One of favorite things to the start of this year has been my literature group, or should I say groups! I have a large group (we all do in fairness because my team does not have any interns this year.) So when I saw that I was taking 17 students, I have the idea to split the group into 2 groups and use some student designed curriculum to help manage it. I'm blown away by how serious they have been in deciding on the two books (The Great Trouble and A Girl Named Disaster), and pacing their groups. They have set their own reading schedule as a group, hold their own book talks during class, checking in on each other if they've done the reading, and have shared so many great ideas when thinking about their research projects for this. What an awesome group of students.

I have so many more thoughts, but I don't want to write a super long post today. In personal news, I'm honored to be have been elected the next president of VAMLE (Vermont Association for Middle Level Education). I will spend this year as the president-elect before starting a 3 year term next school year. I'm nervous but excited for this chapter of my professional growth. I'm in year 2 of my National Board candidacy, I'm presenting at the AMLE national conference in November and I'm one of the leaders for re-writing the VAMLE/Middles Grades Collaborative document, Middle School is Not a Building. I'm very excited to see version 2.0 get edited, and republished over the next few months!

2019-2020 Social Studies Overview

I'm so excited to start the new school year! The first few days of in-service has allowed me to really finalize a lot of thoughts about how the Social Studies curriculum will work this year. I'm pleased to roll it out and hope it engages all learners to think deeply about the world around them. I've created a mission statement for the class this year, "The Goal of Sterling Social Studies: Use transferable skills to think deeply about the modern world using the lessons of history to develop solutions for the future."

Our curriculum timeline will start with our school-wide Social Studies unit around Peace One Day. From there we will look at the theme of "Historical Connections" through the lens of the Civil War and Reconstruction. That will bring us to about the end of November. We will then start our integrated Humanities unit with Ms. Peterson to look at Westward Expansion. After the holiday break we will do a quick unit on economics or physical geography before spending February engaged in our team-wide integrated unit "Winter Survival". After February break we will do more geography work looking at human interaction. After the April break we will end our year with a Genius Hour Project around the Sustainable Goals.

Every Monday we will be covering our "Culture & Diversity" theme by looking at current events, a kindness curriculum and connecting with classrooms around the world using "Empatico". I'm very excited for Mondays!

I have created KUD's for most of units. KUD stands for "Know-Understand-Do" which sets out the learning objectives. As a class we will be building the sequence for these units and determining project outcomes together for the first time. Those KUD's can be found on the Social Studies site curriculum map page.

I'm attempting a Universal Design approach for our learning using the book "Innovate Inside the Box" by George Couros and Katie Novak and working at building literature books into our weekly class routine as well. I have lofty goals for my curriculum this year but I'm excited to take the risk and see what happens.

Spring Cleaning My Curriculum for next year

Sorry for the late post. I usually get this blog out on Sundays, but it was a busy weekend at our sugar house and yesterday I was feeling under the weather. I was super excited to get my blog out this week because I came back from the Standards Based Classroom course last week fired up about the rest of this year and next year.

This week we're wrapping up our Economics unit and I'll be using a strategy from the conference to assess the learning. It's called "Tiles" here's an example of a tile sheet I made about my conference takeaways:

The idea is to collect ideas and make connections in a way where there's no wrong answer when it comes to organizing. Tiles can be moved, folded, turned over, etc as you think about things first before writing about it. What Stan and Emily emphasized was that this provides students with think time rather than writing and trying to sort the ideas about the topic out at the same time.

I was able to really put some thought into next year. I wanted to start with a vision. So I wrote a goal statement for Sterling Social Studies: Use transferable skills to think deeply about the modern world using the lessons of history to develop solutions for the future.

From there I created a graphic that I thought would capture the work needed to pull this off:

I borrowed from a graphic I saw from the Tarrant Institute where the roots feed the trees. I know our work needs to be rooted in the transferable skills, from there our 4 topics will grow out of with specific learning to each and the UN Sustainable Development Goals are the backdrop that are present throughout the learning. I'm not a graphic designer but I was pleased with the outcome!

I was able to create 2 units for next year through this lens and develop a KUD for both. Those will be published on the new Sterling Social Studies website when I feel it's worthy! Next steps include developing inquiry based units to move students through the KUD objectives as well as creating benchmark documents so students know up front what the expected learning looks like. I'm excited to keep designing and thinking and can't wait to see how the "Tiles" work goes this week.

End of trimester. Exhale

It's always a busy time of year when the trimester ends because it's also deep in the throws of student-parent-teacher conferences. Since I've really invested in student lead conferences I've grown to love them. Celebrating the growth of the year, or 2 years for my 6th graders is always amazing. To pause and reflect is such a powerful thing. Students don't do it enough and me and this blog are my intentional attempt to do that professionally.

Students wrapped up the first part of our economics unit by completing their individual country research and partnering up and comparing and contrasting their countries and the economic markets. I had them fill out this graphic organizer to show their learning. We then watched a PBS show about American manufacturing to get them thinking about the next part of our unit.

One of my classes was super fortunate to have a parent come in as a guest presenter. She lived in the Soviet Union as a business liaison at the tail of end of the Soviet Union's run as a Communist state. She shared stories of rationing, government planning, and the difference between Communism as a philosophy and Communism in practice. I learned a lot and I know the students really enjoyed it. She brought in great artifacts to show as well.

It was a great week and though it was a 4 day week (today is reserved for parent conferences) I was just as tired last night as if it were a 5 day week. I'll take the long weekend (I've done my conferences outside of today- trying to fit 11 hours of conferences into a 7 hour day never seems to work for me) to breathe, recharge and get ready to welcoming my awesome students on Monday. They'll start their research on an item "Made in the USA" and track the individual components around the globe to see where it all comes from!

Global economy lesson leads to conversation about Christchurch

The week was going great. Students were heavily invested in their research. They could pick any country in the world to study. Describe it using the 5 themes of geography and extend our economic vocabulary to analyze the resources of that country (land, labor, capital and management). Every student seemed excited to get know their country better, some picking truly remote places they had never heard of (they weren’t allowed to pick the USA- we did that as our public record).

Direct instruction happened around the Learning Target for the unit (Economics). Most students were at 2- understanding Supply & Demand. We had updated the deadline for the research as a group, allowing for some democracy in the classroom. I wanted it due Friday, they wanted more time, so next Tuesday it is!

Then the incident of Christchurch took place, Friday morning our time. I couldn’t ignore it. It was the neighbor country to many students’ research countries in Oceania. It was an act of terrorism, an act of out fear and lack of understanding. With all the work we’ve done around empathy it was a teachable moment now on many fronts.

So we began Friday’s lesson with some deep breathing. I reminded them about putting themselves in an empathetic place. We talked about the 3 ways to show empathy: 1- putting oneself in an empathetic mindset. Focus on how they feel rather than yourself. 2- active listening. 3- asking “you questions” rather than making “I statements”. Students were given the option to not participate as well. From there we began the discussion. Let’s find New Zealand on the map, let’s look a the political map and understand that the bigger the font, the bigger the city. So Christchurch is one of, if not the, largest city on the South Island. We talked about what a mosque is. I stated facts, being careful to only cite information that came from official press releases from the New Zealand police or. Government. I was transparent with the students about that too. We talked about the why behind it, the historical aspect that many religions have been attacked based on fear of them over history. We ended by talking through what our response could be. Reach out to a Muslim friend or family member, just to offer words of support and let them know you’re thinking about them. Pause before passing judgement, you never know who is impacted by events like this, be them Muslim or not. Look at the news to see how locals are responding. Be aware that there are mosques in our area, notice how people may go there just to say kind words and support our neighbors. My hope was that I continued to teach these students to be globally aware, but use empathy to impact the community in a positive way locally. It wasn’t the lesson I had planned for the day, but as I’m finding in my first year teaching Social Studies, the news around us is often more powerful a lesson framework than anything I would design in a vacuum.

Friends vs Friendly, Free Markets and Five Day Weeks

The first day back from a vacation can be a challenge. Waking up to an alarm, refocusing attention and being aware of others all come back into play. And the same is probably true for students! This year I've been using those first days back to work on light-lifting, low stress but teachable lessons on empathy, kindness and reestablishing relationships. We did our improv work after summer vacation to work on our listening skills, after the holiday break we worked on the kindness pledge and this time around we did some direct instruction on empathy. I used a lesson from Tolerance.org to help. I explained to my students that you can be friendly to anyone and that doesn't mean you have to be friends. Before we got to the role-playing part we focused on the 3 keys to developing empathy- 1) Put yourself in an empathetic mindset. 2) Be an active listener. 3) When following up, ask "you questions" rather than making "I statements". Students role-played different situations and worked on their empathy skills. We closed with a whole group circle exit task where we shared out big takeaways and things we could go out into the day practicing that show empathetic thinking.

From there we started our unit on economics. Economics is tricky because there are so many unit specific vocabulary words. I gave kids a handout that we used some literacy strategies to read aloud, take notes on and then answer some comprehension questions around. I explained that the goal wasn't vocab mastery but starting to familiarize with terms like producer,  consumer, market economy, supply & demand, etc. Friday we read a Newsela article on the different types of economies in the world. Newsela is great because it allows students to adjust the reading level of the article, highlight words, and take a check-in at the end to make sure they understand what they just read. From the teacher dashboard I can see what reading level each student selected and what words they highlighted. I asked them in particular this time to highlight words in red that they still didn't know so I can build a vocab wall in the room. The big piece of understanding students needed was to learn what resources are being talked about when describing the market of a certain country. Starting tomorrow, students will pick a country from anywhere in the world and research their markets with the goal being to make a claim as to whether they are capitalist, communist or socialist markets by the end of the week.