Month: November 2022

Thanks A Million

I’d have to run the numbers but it feels like this year has seen more mid-year teacher moves than I can remember, either to other buildings, other districts, out-of-classroom positions, or out of the profession altogether.

I don’t begrudge folks who make the move that is best for them personally by the way. But good teachers are missed when they are gone, for real.

Had a quick conversation with a student of mine who has had significant churn amongst her teachers this school year. We started talking psychology (her favorite class) and I let slip that I was a psych minor in college. In a feeble attempt at humor I told her having that kind of knowledge of what makes people do what they do just makes me really manipulative.

She’s exactly the kind of wise-beyond-her-years student who would get what I meant by that statement. Like, I can’t make students do anything, but I can create situations that will incentivize things that lead to positive outcomes for my students. Honestly it’s part of the job description as I understand it.

My district is big into PBIS. The idea is to “catch people doing good”, and acknowledge that by giving them a ticket that is entered into a drawing for a reward of some type. We’ve done ice cream treats, free basketball/football game tickets, little out-of-class celebrations, thay type of thing. Just a tangible “thank you” for doing things that make our school a place where we all want to be, 180 days a year. It tracks with the philosophy we had in the months leading up to consolidation – getting the culture right has to happen before anything else good can follow.

This year I’ve started issuing my stack of tickets in a slightly different way. If I cover another teacher’s class, or proctor the freshman PSAT, times when the “sub dynamic” in a room full of kids and a teacher who is unfamiliar to them can turn things sideways in hurry, I’ll reward an entire class with tickets, along with a heartfelt “thank you” for how they treated each other and me.

“Thank you”s matter.

Thanksgiving break is here, bringing with it a five-day weekend. Just like every year, we could use the time off. In these daylight-starved final weeks of fall I find myself craving a glimpse of sunshine in the morning before the first bell or while heating my lunch in the teacher lounge.

The transition to a project-based learning school is paying dividends but critical thinking is way more mentally taxing for students than filling out worksheets where all the answers are online or an airdrop away. No pain, no gain, I know, but when you are building strength, rest days matter too.

The PBIS characteristic for November is gratitude (obvi), and so on the final day before break our admin team sent an email to all staff and students offering an opportunity to drop compliments on folks in the building.

So I sat down and typed out a stack of thank yous – the Morton math teacher who welcomed all us Gavit refugees to the department, my instructional coach who models being a life-long learner, an original member of my Lunch Bunch, the language teacher who translates for my Spanish-only-speaking students, a couple of students who go above and beyond for their classmates. And honestly I could have sent several more.

Admin definitely stepped out on a limb putting this program together. What if no one responded? What if some teachers got stacks of accolades and others ended up like Charlie Brown on Halloween?

But I feel like they read the room. We already have the kind of building where teachers will stop each other in the hallway or drop a little note like, “hey, here’s a thing such-and-such student said about you!”

So this was kind of the next logical step.

And that form is going to stay open all year so this isn’t a Thanksgiving Week one-and-done kind of deal. Helped sweep the snow off my windows after school some dreary February day? Governor Compliment. Covered my first-hour class for ten minutes because I was stuck in traffic on the Borman? Governor Compliment. Dropped everything to help a classmate figure out trig ratios? Governor Compliment. Kinda like Buckeye stickers, except virtual.

And I thank myself for setting up my classroom for Monday, including a string of festive lights around my chalkboard. So I can walk in and be ready to go for a new unit, and a quick three-week sprint to Winter Break.

The pieces are in place to continue cultivating the culture we want – Natural Helpers, PBIS, Governor Compliments, a staff that’s got each other’s back every day. And at a time when schools sometimes feel like they are losing the teacher retention battle, I couldn’t be more thankful.

What You Need

I’ve got six sections of geometry this year. So I get plenty of reps with each lesson, plenty of opportunities to learn and reflect and adjust. I’ve joked for years that the class that gets the 1.0 version of the lesson should get a 2-3% score bump for being test subjects.

So this tweet caught my eye this week:

The second half of unit 3 has been filled with stops and starts. Testing, the Natural Helpers retreat, an e-learning day for family-teacher conferences, more testing. It’s taken like two weeks to cover two sections. So it felt like the right time to build in a review day/work day before a project-based activity to wrap up the unit. I didn’t want to just throw a worksheet at them so I went with one of my go-tos. Grudgeball.

A classic. Excellent for review days. And as an added bonus it shines a bright light on areas of need and allows for plenty of remediation. And because 20 brains are better than oneâ„¢, there’s a lot of ways for my kids to get math help.

This week was a study in contrasts. Hoo, did my second hour ever crush it. Petty and cutthroat and ultra-competitive. That had the effect of keeping the kids super-dialed in on working the problems and amped up the collaboration. Kids were helping each other get started or get unstuck, there was fabulous table-talk math going on. I’d have paid money to have my admin stop by for a walkthrough at that moment.

But the bookends of my fifth hour Tuesday and my third hour Wednesday, well those classes we needed a different approach. I had intro’d the activity, built it up, revealed the first exercise slide, and… crickets.

I couldn’t just turn them loose and wait to see which table group worked out their problem correctly, first. They needed help just getting started. I can dig that. After 18 months of pandemic-era remote teaching, many of my students come to me with holes where algebra skills belong. Constant spiral review is pretty much a fact of life. So regarding Grudgeball, it was time for an audible, obviously. The game turned into basically an 80-minute small group tutoring session, plenty of re-teaching interspersed with whole-class review of a handful of selected problems.

Not at all what I planned, or what I hyped the day up to be. But was what my students needed. Especially because I’m going to ask them to use many of these same skills to complete their PrBL next block.

It’s probably the greatest benefit of being “seasoned”. I recognize when my classes have different needs from whatever I have planned, and I have enough confidence to pivot seamlessly to Plan B while keeping a long-term goal in mind.

Pushing me to differentiate between the needs of my six sections of geometry? I love Grudgeball even more now.

Ready. Falling. Fall. – TLB4 x Natural Helpers

Two of my teacher besties have been trying to recruit me to Natural Helpers for legit 12 years. Even got requested as a retreat staffer by a handful of students over the years. It seemed like a really good fit (I’m that guy with a To Write Love On Her Arms magnet on his car) and I was definitely interested but there was always a conflict with my broadcasting schedule and it never happened.

I knew the program was having a positive effect on our building just from the way I saw the students who attended a retreat came back…. different. Different in the way they interacted with peers.

Now post-pandemic, post-consolidation, it’s time to ramp up Natural Helpers at Morton. And they reeled me in for the retreat held in the first week of November at a camp/environmental learning center in the Indiana Dunes. It all came together kind of quick. I had basically a 24 hour turnaround from the time I committed to the program until the time the bus pulled away from school.

Had a pretty extensive checklist in that 24-hour period, not the least of which was the third session of the IDOE’s Teacher Leader Bootcamp, where I’m serving as a mentor this school year. The topic was trust: what is it, why does it matter, how do we increase it, and what’s it got to do with school improvement? (Plenty, but you probably already guessed that).

A quote that stands out from the session, from a Simon Sinek interview: “Leaders determine how large the circle of safety is”. Sinek compares the value of performance vs. trust on a coordinate plane:

“We have a million and one metrics to measure someone’s performance, and negligible to no metrics to measure someone’s trustworthiness”.

You can guess that a discussion featuring 50 teachers from around the state, folks who are motivated to self-examine their own practice and seek out changes for the good of their students, their buildings, and their communities, features plenty of horror stories around the concept of trust and leadership.

We spent close to a half-hour of the session with Brené Brown’s “Anatomy of Trust” presentation. She proposes that trust is built in very small moments. It’s broken in small moments too.

We were encouraged to reflect on how trust might factor in to or affect our action reserach projects. Can you create an environment that fosters improved student outcomes without an atmosphere of trust? Do your admins trust you enough to examine your own practices and make changes that you identify?

All these questions were rolling around my head during the Natural Helper retreat, where (obvi) trust was a key theme.

Which is how I found myself being lifted 10 feet off the ground by a bunch of high school kids. If you’ve seen the trust lift, you know.

The Natural Helpers retreat operates under the “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” rule of confidentiality. So I can’t share details. But following a morning of trust-building activities the students from the two high schools in the city opened up to each other during the evening session.

Trust makes a difference in schools. Not just student-student and adult-adult trust, although those are important. The student-teacher trust is critical, and it cannot be demanded or expected. It has to be earned. But it is so worth it.

It also requires a bit of a mindset change on the part of the adults.

I saw it happen in real time on Friday when we were short subs and I was covering a science class. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, so I won’t share details. But as Mrs. Dull likes to say, when you give someone an opportunity to do the right thing, when you trust them before they’ve earned it, you’d be surprised with and pleased about the results.

She is a wise woman.

And it happened over and over again Friday. It helps that they know you are a “real teacher” – that you know the rules and procedures and what’s OK and what’s not. Street cred counts. And like Maya Angelou said, when somebody shows you who they are, believe them. Trust can be broken, and then act accordingly. But still. Treating kids like they are worthy of trust instead of always assuming bad intent goes a long way.

Like Brené Brown says, be a marble jar friend. And it doesn’t hurt to remember that sometimes school improvement has nothing to do with grades.