AVReading

  On occasion, I have had one of those classes where there is just one personality in the room who seems to bring the group together.  It is a rare and beautiful phenomenon to behold.  For those students who are especially good at it, they can somehow create a mood or atmosphere within the room just by being a willing and interested participant in the activities and then by some wonderful sense of energy can bring along most of the class with them.               Those students are exceptional and they truly do make the learning experience seem much more effortless.  Aside from the personality of that individual, the truly significant factor is the willingness of the group to buy-in to the class or to participate and engage.  A particularly skilled teacher can also have this effect.               The truth is that...

  It is important to recognize that there is a difference between being a reflective practitioner and someone who becomes overwhelmed by their thoughts, fears, and anxieties.  While there is a time when we need to let ourselves “be in our feelings” and to experience those emotions of pain and fear, productive reflection requires that we also bring a little more structure and intentionality to our thinking and meditations.   The psychological term for excessive contemplation of oneself is called rumination.  It is the mental process whereby someone ponders a past or future event until their emotional response has grown disproportionately to the impact of the original thought. Some people refer to it as a mental “rabbit hole.”  Rumination is not abnormal, especially for teachers.  Consider the many times you have driven home as you mentally replayed an event from the day.  You likely spent a good amount of time revisiting the mom...

  I am often caught off guard by what I do not know.  For as much as I try to humbly enter each day with the understanding that I am still learning, there is that part of me that just assumes I already know what there is to know about the world around me.  And yet, I regularly learn that I simply do not have a clue -- in some cases it probably is a willful cluelessness.             About a year ago, I was in a meeting with a group of educators when I used the phrase, “Well, let’s just  call a spade a spade and tell them what we truly think.”  It was a phrase I had grown up with and had read and used through the years.  And as soon as I said it, my colleague who is a person of color called me out on it.  “Actually, Scott.  You need to check that phrase.  It has a pretty oppressive history.”  It was a humbling moment.  It took me by absolute surprise, but after...

  As part of our   yearlong study on being reflective practitioners, our emphasis this month is on honesty.   A regular downside to self reflection is that we tend to be less than honest with our assessments.  It is just really hard to acknowledge some truths or realities that might exist in our worlds because they can totally shake the foundations of what we might believe or think.               This is especially true when we begin to consider constructs like race and how schools have maintained systems of power that disproportionately target students of color.  Being honest, in this sense, means that white teachers (like myself) have to perpetually acknowledge the way our whiteness has not only benefited us, but the way it has influenced the way we see race.  And the same can be said for our understanding of class, gender, and ableness as well.  It is not as though ...

 Here is the presentation where you can find our four "take away" activities:  Paired Readings, Effect / Cause Graphic Organizer, Claim / Evidence Inference, and Word Play.

  I make so many mistakes throughout the course of any given day that I often wonder if I am doing more harm than good.               Each morning as I walk to school, I ask to be an instrument of love, mercy, and compassion, not an instrument of pain and hurt.    I am continually working to forgive and in some cases “ask for forgiveness.”  A while back, I took the rather rare step of removing one young man from my 5th hour class for the day.  My finesse skills are usually much better, and I like to employ other tools than removal.  But on this particular day, I told the young man, “You need to leave.”  He clearly was not pleased, but I insisted that he must go and that we would talk about this later.  The incident sat in my head for the rest of the day and even as I fell asleep that night.  The next morning, I was walking the halls on another task, and I bum...

  Beyond just the value of writing ourselves into understanding, written reflection can also serve as important information for our future selves.    Remember, we tend to recall the things we like and bury the things we don’t.  So a written record of our lives in the classroom keeps us more honest about our shortcomings and mistakes. I recall a reflection I had written at the end of one year that stated, “Your failure rates were much higher this year.  I think that you could have been more proactive and consistent with your calls home.  Those have historically been an effective tool in addressing students who are not handing in work.”  In this case, I am much less likely to make that mistake again.  Additionally, had I not returned to that reminder six months later, I’m not sure I would have caught it.    Sometimes it is painful to re-read those past reflections.  Honestly, re-living some of those memories c...

We have this remarkable tendency to remember the things we like, and forget the things we don’t.  It’s a form of confirmation bias that, if it goes unchecked, ensures that we will likely make the same mistakes over-and-over again.               Though this cognitive bias did not have a name in his day, Charles Darwin was quite aware of this tendency.  In fact, to avoid the pitfalls of this mistake, he developed his own “golden rule” of reflection:  if there is contradictory or inconsistent data, immediately write it down.  In his own words, “I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones” (Darwin,1887).             I think this problem is magnified in the classroom, where we make so many decisions each day.  Sometimes to just survive, we have to forg...

  I had one of those days a few years back that really tested my resolve as a teacher.  We were about three weeks into the year, and my 5th hour, had been a pretty difficult group.  In working with my co-teacher, we were hoping to create an environment of engagement and collaboration versus one of submission and control.  But our attempts were proving to be ineffective.  On one particular day, I walked into the room to find a young woman wrapping the cord of the window blinds around her neck, a fellow classmate who then went into some type of anxiety triggered seizure, and a third student who felt the need to pull down his pants and reveal his underwear to the class.  When both my co-teacher and I returned to our room after dealing with seizures and pantslessness, we discovered that. . . the young woman who had been wrapping the cord around her neck had now locked us out of the room!  It was a moment of absolute absurdity. And my...

  For me, the idea of a reflective teacher used to conjure up images of a wizened-- yet pretentious-- English teacher, sipping tea, alone in a classroom with some classical musical playing in the background.  In part, I think this is due to the fact that we consider reflection and contemplation as something elitist.  The truth is, we don’t really have a lot of good role models for reflection.  For most of us, we likely never saw behind the curtains of our favorite teachers.  In fact, chances are we made most of our judgments about what makes a good teacher through the process of “apprenticeship through observation” or the process of constructing mental models of good and bad teaching simply by what we observed as we sat through years of schooling (Lortie, 1975).  The logic is that since we have not seen teachers reflect and think, we do not think it is important.  And since we do not think it is important. . . we don’t do it.  An...

  A few years back, we had a thoughtful administrator who opened up our faculty meeting with an image of a street sign.  On the pole with the street sign, the city had posted six or seven other notices and ordinances which seemed almost absurd.  In some cases, the message on one sign seemed to contradict other messages on the same pole.  The administrator used this as a metaphor for districts, schools, and teachers that are not thoughtful about their choices.               Making thoughtful choices, however, is not as easy as one might think, especially under the circumstances that we are often expected to perform.  There are so many different duties and expectations placed upon teachers, and our schedules are so compressed, that the spaces in which we teach can sometimes feel more like emergency rooms than classrooms.  Just as we catch our breath from one prep, we must mov...