Being a Fan of Student Growth

Photo by Ronny Sison on Unsplash

No one can celebrate like sports fans. All season long, they’ve been focused on the goal, tracking stats, arguing which player is the best. (The day after the basketball season is over, the pundits my husband watches are heatedly discussing the next season!) And when their team finally wins the World Series, the World Cup, or the NBA championship, the celebration is jubilant. 

Even though I don’t create quite as much noise and mess, I can feel just as much delight when I see students growing. Like when… 

• The teacher whose desk is next to mine shares that a student told her Jesus gives her peace and she wants to follow him.
• A colleague in a book discussion of Becoming a Globally Competent Teacher explains how students grew in their empathy for refugees as a result of a social studies project.
• A 6th grader giving a book talk to the class on A Wish in the Dark says, “I liked this book because Pong is courageous. Reading this book can help you wonder what is right to do, and do it.”

These stories of student growth—whether my own students or a colleague’s—encourage me, energize me, and send me back to focus even more on achieving my big dreams for students. What if these moments didn’t just happen serendipitously and individually? What if our international Christian schools fermented as much discussion around achieving our purpose statements as sports fans do around their team achieving victory? 

Teaching is hard, and to really flourish, teachers need all the encouragement we can get. Passionate purpose—like a sports fan—is one significant driver of flourishing. My deep hope is that staff at my international Christian school—and at every international Christian school—are experiencing the discussions (including celebrations) of the meaning, implications, and achievement of the school’s purpose statements that will help them flourish in terms of passionate purpose.

In my 30-plus years as a teacher, department chair, and curriculum coordinator at international Christian schools, I have experienced, used, and heard about practices that contribute to this kind of passionate purpose. Some are personal and individual; some are communal and institutional. Personal practices include prayer, conversation, expressions of gratitude, reflective blogging, and real or virtual learning communities. Communal and institutional practices include staff devotions, staff meetings, department meetings, and book discussions.

What exactly has this looked like?

1. Starting emails and meetings by thanking people for the time and attention they give to achieving the purpose statements (rather than by apologizing for taking their time).
2. Regular prayer in private, in staff devotions, and at the beginning of meetings for guidance as we seek to achieve the purpose statements.
3. Brief 5-minute devotional time at the beginning of meetings, focused on the meeting’s topic
4. Consistent times in staff and department meetings to celebrate student achievement of the purpose statements. It can be as simple as a turn-and-talk or think-pair-share about something your students learned this week.
5. Long-term staff sharing their story at meetings: what brought them to the school and what has kept them there.
6. Book discussions with other teachers where we deepen our best practices that help us achieve the purpose statements, celebrate the student growth we see as a result, and develop a collegial culture that continues such conversations beyond the meeting time itself.

What about you? What if we discussed and celebrated our international Christian school’s purpose as passionately as sports fans do their teams? How do you personally focus on and celebrate student growth? How does your school focus on and celebrate student growth? What would help you focus on and celebrate student growth even more?

 

Making an Impact Helps Students Learn

Photo by Homescreenify on Unsplash

• “That smells great!” my husband exclaims at dinner time.
• “I loved that book you recommended! Do you have another like it?” a student asks.
• “Thanks for helping our department diversify our literature choices,” says a colleague.

Comments like these give me joy. They give me joy because they let me know that what I do—for my family, my students, or my colleagues—makes a difference. It puts a light in my husband’s eye, sparks a student’s interest in reading, or expands the variety of neighbors our English department gets to help students know and love through novel studies. When I feel I am making a difference, a positive impact for Jesus, I experience passionate purpose, and I flourish. 

I want students to flourish, too. I want them to experience passionate purpose in their daily school lives. Like me, students flourish when they have the opportunity to make a difference—a positive impact for Jesus. What might that look like for students at an international Christian school?   

Right now my 8th grade EFL students are preparing to teach a lesson for the 4th and 5th grade EFL class. My students are asking so many questions about they article they’ll be reading—about refugees, about vocabulary, about pronunciation, and about grammar. They’re asking these questions because they really want to understand and get it right. Why? They know the elementary students will be seeing them as models, looking to them for answers.

This week my 6th and 7th grade English language arts class gave and received peer feedback on their writing. I told them it was a chance to use their learning to help their neighbors right in their class. The added advantages are they can get more immediate feedback than when I collect and respond to the whole class, and they can see all the writing moves their classmates have tried. They took it quite seriously.

Eleven years ago, my daughter was deeply affected by a senior project at the international Christian school she attended. It was on a global issue that results in mistreatment of the creation or the neighbors that God calls us to care for and love. The project involved a research paper, personal involvement in addressing the issue, and a community presentation to raise awareness and answer questions. Her issue was girls’ education. Eleven years later, the project continues. Some of this year's topics were internet discernment, ocean pollution, and rights and support for those with Autism Spectrum Disorder. 

I’ve seen other opportunities for older students to make a difference in younger students’ lives by sharing learning about God’s creation. An annual zoo field trip involving a partnership between the high school biology class and the first graders. An annual amusement park trip pairing the high school physics and middle school physical science classes (some calculation of the action of forces required). Reading buddies where a secondary or upper elementary class regularly pairs with an elementary class. 

There are so many audiences on which students can make an impact—from family members and classmates, to younger students and the school community, to the larger community (local, national, global). There are also so many different formats that impact can take—from events like cooperative field trips and service learning, to class projects and authentic assessments, to classroom protocols for peer teaching and learning.  

What about you? When have you experienced passionate purpose by making a positive impact for Jesus? How do you give your students that same opportunity?  

Can You Teach It? Harnessing Authentic Assessment for Language Learning (Part 1)

“Soccer Speaks Many Languages” by Diana Geers on CommonLit 

• What is a refugee?
• How do you pronounce this person’s name?
• Why did Burundi have Hutus and Tutsis in it if they were fighting?

I have never seen this many questions or curiosity this persistent in my 8th grade EFL students. Why? Because they are working on an authentic assessment task—they are going to teach the 4th and 5th grade EFL class.  

When I introduced the project, the energy in the room immediately ratcheted up. “Eeeeh?!” Students sat up straighter. Their eyes opened wider. 

What exactly is the project? Eighth grade EFL students will teach a lesson to the 4/5 EFL class on the article “Soccer Speaks Many Languages” (see photo above). 8th graders will determine lesson objectives (big idea, content, and language), how students will show they have mastered the objectives, and what activities will prepare students to show that mastery. But first, of course, 8th graders will have to thoroughly understand the content and language of the text the lesson will be based on. I am at their service to answer any questions they have, teach them anything they decide they need to know in order to accomplish the task, point them to resources, and mentor them through the project.

“You’ll have to understand every word and be able to explain it if an elementary student asks you.” The 8th graders nodded solemnly. 

“This is a big responsibility!” one responded.

Briefly, the article is about Innocent Ndayizeye, whose family fled civil war in Burundi when he was 4. It demonstrates how in spite of difficulties in the refugee camp and as a new immigrant to the US, soccer always helped him build relationships wherever he went.

So at the students’ request, we’ve been doing things like... 

• Practicing how to say Ndayizeye, playing this clip and repeating it together over and over.  
• Checking the world map on the wall for locations of Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania.
• Learning words like and phrases like refugee, relocate, scrunch, form, competition, and at every chance.
• Discussing the impact of colonialization on the ethnic tensions in some African countries today.

I really can’t wait to see what the 8th graders will want to know on Monday, and how this project will shape up. I can’t believe it took me over 3 decades of teaching to tap into this powerful motivator for learning. 

How did it happen now? I’ve seen “reading buddy” relationships across grades help both older and younger students flourish. (My daughters, now grown with their own children, still remember their reading buddies from elementary school!) My EFL class knows that being able to teach others is one characteristic of an effective language learner. And I was recently in a book discussion of The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox where I had to choose an implementation experiment. One of the strategies we’d discussed was peer teaching. It was just the push I needed. 

When I asked if any of the other teachers had an elementary English class the same period I had my 8th grade EFL class and would be open to my students coming to read to theirs, I got a taker. It’s a 4th and 5th grade EFL class. I asked the teacher if she had any stories to recommend that my students could prepare. She said, “Anything about soccer.” Perfect for me, because my students love soccer, too. In fact, I’d just come across this article and thought it would be an excellent study for my students. I showed it to the 4/5 teacher, and she agreed. 

"Did last year's students do this?" a student asked at the end of class Thursday. Nope--it's a grand experiment all the way around! We'll all take some risks together, and we'll all learn something. Hooray for experiments! 

How about you? What’s your experience with project-based learning? Authentic assessment? Peer teaching?

Professional Reading for Summer 2022

 

As students begin to anticipate a vacation from learning, I begin to anticipate a vacation for learning. A hiatus from the daily work of teaching offers me the time and brain space to explore strategies for meeting student needs, closing learning gaps, building community, spurring motivation, building skills, and sparking curiosity and joy, so students can further develop all the potential God has given them as they engage in even deeper learning. 

There are so many wise and experienced teachers out there who have done the research and fieldwork on whatever pedagogical topic I want to explore and taken the time to write a book about it. With gratitude for the insight God has given them into how students learn and for the time I have to learn from them, my usual practice is to choose a number of books I've been hearing about during the school year that will engage and inspire me to be an even better teacher for my students in the fall. 

Six of the last nine years, since I started this blog in July 2012, I’ve posted a list of summer professional reading goals:

1. Professional Reading for Summer 2021
2. What I Plan to Learn This Summer 
3. My Summer 2019 Professional Reading List 
4. Summer Reading List: Professional Development
5. Summer Professional Reading Goals 
6. Summer Reading: Like Groundhog Day, but Better! 

I've been at it again this year, collecting a list of books I hear recommended about ways I want to grow my teaching. Three of the five are by authors of books from previous lists. Here’s my list for this year:

(1) The Joy of Reading by Donalyn Miller. This book is on the top of my list because for the last 2 years, my biggest teaching experiment (aside from branching into EFL and

 elementary, and returning to middle school after more than 25 years in high school…) has been incorporating independent reading into classes to build a culture of reading. Long ago I read Donalyn Miller’s earlier books, The Book Whisperer and Reading in the Wild, as well as Penny Kittle’s Book Love (first blogged on in 2014 here and here). I required independent reading, but I didn’t give class time, model it, and teach and conference to support and celebrate it. I’m actually currently re-reading Book Love and tweaking what I’ve been doing to give students a little more traction on goal-setting and reflection. So when I saw this conversation (see below) involving all my reading workshop heroes—Kittle, Gallagher, and Miller—about this book, which just came out in May, I knew it hit the sweet spot of where I’m really working right now. Just listening to them talking about the book made me feel I was with my people. I can't wait to read it!

(2) Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading by Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst. This book is 10 years old, but I hear it frequently referenced in online conversations in teacher groups. Last summer I read the authors’ more recent companion book, Reading Nonfiction, on strategies for reading nonfiction and found it really helpful. I’ve done close reading with middle and high school students for a long time, picking up tips here and there. I figure I should read the source that I hear most frequently referenced.

(3) A Teacher’s Guide to Mentor Texts, 6-12 by Allison Marchetti.
I use mentor texts for a lot of things—reading, writing, grammar. Another practice cobbled together from things learned and read here and there—Voice Lessons by Nancy Dean and Jeff Anderson’s books, including Patterns of Power. A teacher on Twitter asked for a resource, a compilation, of mentor texts, and this was the most popular by a large margin. I’m looking forward to checking it out! 

(4) The Quickwrite Handbook: 100 Mentor Texts to Jumpstart Your Students’ Thinking and Writing by Linda Rief. With all my recent focus on reading, I don’t want to forget about writing. The last 6 months I’ve been using quick writes especially

 with EFL students. I’m feeling the need to refresh that practice and maybe expand it into my ELA class. 

(5) 4 Essential Studies: Beliefs and Practices to Reclaim Student Agency by Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher. I’ve read everything else by Gallagher and Kittle and found it inspiring (see 180 Days), so I really want to read this latest one that came out last October, too. I’m just not sure it’s going to happen this summer. 

My vacation doesn’t start until mid-July, but once it does, I’ll be blogging on what I learn from these books. I just love recharging my idea batteries with what other teachers are doing.

How about you? How are you planning to grow your teaching this summer? How will you capture your learning?