True Teaching

A few weeks ago, before the craziness of "remote learning" even entered our minds, I had an experience that brought me back to what I love about teaching. I started to blog about it then, but, as always, got distracted by things that seemed more important at the moment. Well, one blessing of the current #coronaclosure is that all of those "important" things -- running errands, meetings, lesson planning -- are suddenly much less urgent. So, I'm trying to use my new-found free time to re-focus. I woke up leisurely (no alarms!), did a yoga workout in my basement, and now I'm drinking hot coffee on the couch, and spending some time writing. It would be much more relaxing if the world didn't feel like it was falling apart, but I'm trying to enjoy what I can.

So here is the story I started to share weeks ago.  Somehow it feels equally, and maybe even more, relevant now as I think about what teaching may look like in the weeks and months to come...

It was Closing Circle. My students were gathered around the perimeter of our carpet. One of my students had a picture in a frame, ready to share. She began by telling us about her grandmother, the special relationship they had and how much they had in common. Then she shared that she was worried about her grandmother, and her grandfather, because her grandfather was getting a kidney transplant.  Her grandmother was donating the kidney and so they were both having to stay in the hospital for a little while (I should pause here to note that I did not verify these facts with her family, so I'm not actually sure this was a real story, but it was what she shared with our class).

As soon as this student mentioned the hospital and surgery, and her grandfather's failing kidneys, another one of my students began to comment under his breath "Ew! Agh, I don't want to hear this!"  Then he started to make fake-vomit noises. Immediately, I sent to our "Safe Place" to take a break. He groaned and pouted, and stomped away to the Safe Place, while his classmate finished her story and shared the framed picture of herself, as a baby, with her mom, grandmother, and aunts.  When she was ready for questions and comments, some of my other students jumped in to share their concern and well-wishes. Then it was time for everyone to go to Art class. I hustled the other students out the classroom door, while instructing the kiddo in the Safe Place to stay put so we could talk after everyone left.

Once the classroom was quiet, I walked over to the kiddo in the Safe Place. He was still a little pouty, but mostly calm. I started, as I always try to when I send students to "take a break," by asking him if he knew why I'd sent him away from the class. He said, "no." Of course he doesn't, I thought, and I could have just jumped to reprimanding him for being rude while another classmate was speaking. For some reason, though, I took another tactic. "Do you know what kidneys are?" I asked. "Yes," he answered confidently, and pointed to his heel. I stifled a smile, "Nope, that's your achilles."

At this point, I shifted gears and invited him, and another one who had stayed behind from Art class to finish a math assignment, over to my computer.  I pulled up brainpop.com.  Side note: This is one of my favorite websites because I can always count on them to have kid-appropriate videos for nearly any topic that comes up in my classroom. Case in point, within days of COVID-19 outbreaks worldwide, BrainPop had a free video available about coronaviruses, which included tips for avoiding spread, getting information from reliable sources, managing anxiety, and supporting others without judgement.

On this particular day, I searched "kidneys" and, sure enough, found a short video on the urinary tract system. We began to watch and I paused a few times to answer questions or explain further. "Yes, your pee is in your body all the time." "Well, your bladder sends a message to your brain when you need to pee so that you don't have an accident." "Right, your kidneys help filter out the bad stuff from the air we breathe and food we eat."  It was evident, very quickly, that neither of these kiddos had ever learned much about how their bodies work.  They were genuine, curious, and fascinated as the video went on.

At the end, I turned to the little guy who had made fake-vomit noises 20-minutes earlier at the mention of surgery. "Do you understand now why your classmate was feeling scared that her grandfather's kidney weren't working?" He answered quietly, "He could die without kidneys because the bad stuff would be in his body." I nodded, then asked, "Do you understand why it might have been hurtful that you were pretending to get sick while she was sharing about her grandfather's kidney transplant?" He was silent for a long moment. Then he just said, "Oops."

I knew he got it. He didn't need a lecture or punishment. He understood why his behavior had been inappropriate, and that he should try to be more sensitive in the future. It was a beautiful moment.  After that, I walked him to Art class. That was it.

Kids, and adults, often appear rude, unkind, disrespectful, or hurtful, when really they are confused and un-informed. We can tell them to be more thoughtful or empathetic, but that's only part of the solution. We actually need to provide more information, to teach them.

Missing all of this.

This has been a challenging year for me, and I've found myself feeling disconnected and unmotivated more than I'd like, but this experience reminded me what I love about teaching... being able to provide information, ideas, and answers at the time they are needed most.  My favorite moments in teaching have always been when I've been able to follow the interests, questions, or curiosities of my students. I know I haven't been doing this well lately. I've let the pressure of looming state tests, evaluations, and demanding parents push me to plough through content and focus on assessing standards, rather than knowledge. I can do better. We all can.

As we move into a new phase of education, I am hoping that I can make the time, and find more creative ways, to truly teach my students, even if we won't be gathering around the perimeter of the carpet for awhile.

{Nearly} 10 Years of Blogging

I started this blog nearly 10 years ago.  I can't believe I'm even putting that number into writing!  It truly feels like an eternity ago.  When I started blogging, I wanted to be able to share some of the things I was doing in my classroom with other teachers, and I wanted to capture my own in-the-moment feelings about teaching, the projects I was doing with my students, and the turns I was taking in my career.  As it turns out,  those last few things have been far more important than sharing anything (especially since my mom is still my primary reader 😉.)

Pre-K Math

I ran into a former colleague at a party a couple of weeks ago, and as we were catching up I shared that I now teach fourth grade. She was shocked! She remembered me as the quintessential Pre-K teacher and said she couldn't really picture me working with older students. It was a funny, and gratifying, feeling to know that I still held this place in her mind, but it made me realize how far I've moved on from that role in the past few years.

I remember a moment last year (which, unfortunately, I didn't sit down to blog about at the time) when I realized that I felt completely "at home" in the role of fourth-grade teacher.  I had stumbled into fourth grade, but it actually seemed the like the perfect fit for me in a lot of ways. I loved my own fourth grade teacher (although truthfully I don't remember very many specifics about her except that I loved her read-alouds and she gave me my own copy of The Giver, which was my favorite book for years to come). I had also loved working in a fourth grade classroom during a high school teaching internship.

4th Grade Math Activity

Teaching math was also an unlikely position for someone who never considered herself very good at math, but, again, it kind of made sense.  For most of my own eduction, math felt to me like a secret code that I couldn't crack. Yet, I think my personal struggles to memorize rules and recognize patterns made me a more empathetic teacher of math. Never feeling like a "math person" made me appreciate the value of teaching math in different ways for different kiddos. And I do remember solving endless long-division problems in fifth grade after I'd learned to follow the algorithm, because it felt like magic! As a math teacher, I live for those "aha!" moments with my students.

As I sat down to try to write something today, I decided to look back through some of my previous posts. Wow! As much as I've held on to the image of myself as an early childhood teacher, I barely remember being the person who wrote some of these words. I've been thinking for a little while about how much I miss working with little guys and these posts brought that home. I miss planning hands-on centers and field experiences to the market.  I miss designing writing units, breaking down mentor texts, and incorporating social-emotional learning into nearly every lesson -- none of which feels as possible in fourth grade with the expectations of our curricula, testing, scheduling, and departmentalization.

My favorite 1st grade math game:
Roll and Record!

Now most of the students and families at my school don't know me as anything but a fourth grade teacher.  As much as the "fourth grade math teacher" role fits me, part of me is still the teacher who puts on puppet shows and sings songs to bring kids to the carpet.  I know there are some teachers who are content to teach one or two grade levels for their entire career, but I just don't think I'm destined to be one of them. After four years of Pre-K, I remember knowing it was the right time to move on. I felt the same way after teaching first grade for four years. This is my fifth (technically fourth and a half) year in fourth grade and I'm wondering if it's time to try something new once again. What that will be, who knows?

Differentiating in Math

A few years ago, when I started teaching fourth grade, our school's "policy" was that students who scored __% (it varied) on the beginning-of-year math assessments (which also varied), and were deemed "strong in math" by previous teachers, were moved up to the next grade level for math.  The third, fourth, and fifth grade teams had to align our schedules so that math happened at the same time in all classes, so that students could go to which ever math class they were assigned to without missing other subject-areas.  In a lot of ways, this worked for our school -- the kiddos who were moved to the grade-level above felt good about themselves, their families felt good about the "challenging" math instruction their kiddos would receive, and at least some teachers felt good about having all of the students in their math class working on the same grade-level standards. This method of "differentiation" was also pretty easy; we made the decision at the beginning of the year about who was in which math class, and it basically stayed the same all year.

However, it wasn't a perfect system. Other trends started to emerge. Within math classes, the range of abilities was still quite wide, but it was now students working well below their own grade-level mixed with younger students working one or two grade-levels above. The kiddos who were "left back" in their own grade-level math classes started to say that they were "bad at math."  The younger students who were pushed forward consistently out performed the on-grade-level students, often dominating class discussions, but also sticking to themselves during partner or group work.  Families of children who were not pushed forward but felt that they should have been complained that their kids were bored and/or not challenged, which sometimes came to a head when a student would be moved mid-year; although this also led to more questions about what qualified a student to move up and how and when.

Last year, when our school fully departmentalized fourth and fifth grade (and got a new principal), we decided to move away from this system.  We justified the shift for a variety of reasons, including that we had a new curriculum, which was more rigorous than our previous curriculum, and that there was new a district-wide focus on mathematical discourse, which we felt required students to engage with peers at a variety of levels.  We also felt that this change would help us address the culture around math that had developed in our school -- with kids thinking they were "bad" at math if they were working on grade-level.

To ease the shift, we also put in place a few opportunities for students to continue working in more homogeneous math groups within and outside of the math classroom. I held "lunch bunches" with the students who were essentially repeating fourth-grade math to set individual goals and reflect about their math growth. Another teacher pushed into my room two or three times per week to pull a small group of these "high kids" to work on challenge problems. Once a month we held "math seminars" where we split the kids across fourth and fifth grade to work on more critical-thinking problems at different levels.

I learned a lot from these experiences! It turned out (not actually surprisingly) that some students who were good at mathematical computation, and even interpreting basic word problems, really, really struggled with open-ended questions. Other students who had weaker computation skills, were very strong in reasoning. And many students struggled with communicating precisely about their mathematical thinking.  As a result, I introduced more problems that required reasoning, practiced math vocabulary to improve discussions, and looked for more ways to have students demonstrate their understanding about concepts.

Even as I'm typing this, it's hard for me to believe this was all just last year!  Thinking back about all of the questions and challenges we faced last year, I'm realizing how quickly some of the issues resolved themselves, while others we've still barely addressed.  I've come a long way in my own way of thinking about and planning for math instruction and differentiation. This year, I have a completely different group of kiddos, with different strengths and areas of need which has led me in different directions.  As I remember all the things I tried and learned last year, I'm realizing that some practices have already become second nature and many more are still very much a work in progress.

More on this soon 😉