We all know the importance of Assessment AS learning ….

This is when students (and adults, for that matter) reflect, and self-assess their learning that real long-term learning and growth can occur.

When the students in my Health and Career Education classes completed their end of the term self-assessment this past week, most were engaged and interested in the process. They took this assessment opportunity very seriously put effort into their responses.  A few students, however, found this self-assessment difficult.  One Grade 6 student wrote,

“I don’t like grading myself. I feel more comfortable being graded by someone else, like you, Mrs. Henriksen. You would be better at grading me because you have more experience with grading.”

Part of my response to this students was that no one really knew her learning this term better than she did.

Another student got upset about completing the self-assessment and refused to conference with me about his learning this term (even though I made it very non-threatening and open-ended). Initially, he wrote,

“I think I deserve an F!”

I let him know that that was not going to happen and that he did NOT, in fact, deserve an F. He’d done a lot of learning this term. That didn’t seem to make a difference in his thoughts though.  I will try to conference with him again this week sometime.

I find it disturbing that grades are done TO our students and not WITH our students.  It’s sad that some students feel so uncomfortable about reflecting upon their own learning and sharing this information with others.

This has, of course, left me with more questions than answers.

Why do some students have such difficulty reflecting on their learning? Why is it so foreign to them?

What do I do to make this a more comfortable process?  (Not doing the self-assessment is not an option.)

How long does it take for people to become more comfortable with self-assessment?

How much self-assessment are these students involved with in their other subjects?

Will the final term be any easier for them to self-assess their learning?

Photo by Kominyetska on flickr

Having iPads at my school and having to manage them and their apps has proven to be an interesting task.  If you know me at all, you would know that when I am involved in a project I usually jump in with both feet.  That’s what I’ve done with the iPads.

Knowing that we wanted the iPads to be used by everyone,without exception, I downloaded over 300 apps to each of the iPads – ensuring that there was something for everyone to use.  Yah, well, that didn’t work out too well.  Students started to create – movies, photos, slide shows, etc…  Great idea, right?  Not so much.  The iPads started running out of room! On the second day of use.  Yah. Way to go, Tia!

It’s all a learning curve.

So, I took the iPads home again for the weekend, I examined each app on the iPads and determined what should remain and what needed to get removed. I ended up deleting over 100 apps off each of the iPads.

Photo by flickr member: {Flixelpix} David

You may be wondering which apps remain on the iPads and why I chose to keep the ones I did.  There are still a lot of easy to use apps for early primary students – alphabet, number, basic skills-type apps. There are some Science/Social Studies topic apps for intermediate students that remain.  Most of the apps that are currently on each iPad, though, are “creation-type” apps – those apps which students can create projects with.

Some of my favourites creation-type apps include:

Writing

Book Creator – This is a great, easy way to make books and projects by students. Very easy to add photos, video, type, etc…

My Story – Students can draw or paint pictures to make a story. They can add their own voice to tell the story and their can type in words as well.  This can be used for many different subject areas – not just for writing stories.

StoryLines – a game of ‘telephone’ with pictures.  This looks like it could be a great app to use in a variety of ways. You can play this with a number of different users – online or by simply passing the device to other people.

Story Line – This is also similar to ‘telephone’.

Toontastic – Students can create their own cartoon or story with different scenes: setup, conflict, challenge, climax, and resolution. Students choose backgrounds, characters, and add their own voice to tell their story. They can also add “mood” music to set the tone of the story.

Sock Puppets – Students choose their puppets, scene, and props.  They can record their voice(s) to make their story.  Again, this can be used in many different curricular areas.

PuppetPals HD – Again, this is a good story telling app that can be used in many curricular areas.  For $2.99, you can purchase the “Director’s Pass” to unlock various themes.

Story Wheel – great for oral language, build up story, for primary students – group activity. This would be fun for students to make stories in small groups.

ScribblePress – very cool book creator with different topics. Sentences are scaffolded so that students would just add words in the sentences that are already written. For Instance, you could write a book called, My Book of Favourites. Once the student fills in the missing word, they can click on Create Book. Each of the sentences is placed at the bottom of the page. The students are then able to draw (with many colours), take photos, add pictures from a gallery, add type, change background colours, and erase. It looks very cool!

Wordventure!

Presentation Apps

DoodleCast – This is a cool app where students can draw something and record their voice talking about their drawing as they draw. Lots of useful applications for this app!

Explain Everything – Similar to DoodleCast, but you can do more – typing, addition photos, writing, etc… and you can make many slides

ScreenChomp is also similar, I think.

iMovie – Just what you think it is. Very easy to use as well.

I do still believe that we need to try to ensure all teachers feel comfortable using the iPads. As a result, we need to be sure there are a variety of different apps on the iPads.  We cannot, however, include everything we want or everything each teacher wants. There just isn’t room. As a result, there should be a criteria that is followed for deciding which apps are put on the iPads (criteria that should be created in collaboration with students and teachers). We will be working on this criteria soon.

The majority of the apps on the iPads, in my opinion, should be apps which students can use to create projects.  When students create, according to Bloom’s Taxonomy, they are using higher order thinking skills. Here is a great chart that includes different apps, according to the varying levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. If you haven’t already seen this, it would be worth a few minutes of your time. I still need to go through some of these apps to get a real understanding of each.

To review, when choosing apps for your school iPads, you may want to consider the following:

1. Create a criteria to follow so that everyone has a good understanding what kind of apps are appropriate to be added to the iPads.

2. Try to ensure that there are some apps that can be used by everyone – even those who are techno-challenged or scared of technology.  We want to include everyone and help everyone take risks with technology.  But, these apps should not take over the devices. They should only be a small portion of the apps on the iPads.

3. Try to have apps that can be used in a variety of curricular areas.

4.  Most apps should be able to be used by students and teachers for creating.

5. Try to ensure there is still plenty of room on the iPads for storage – for photos and movies that may be taken by students for their projects.

6. You may want to consider purchasing an external hard drive to which teachers can transfer their photos, videos, and projects.

In my ongoing reflection about the integration of iPads at my school, questions continue to bombard my thinking.

In the end, we need to think about what we want the iPads (or any technology, for that matter) to be used for. What do we want students to do with these devices? How do we want them to express their learning? Which apps will best help students and teachers achieve their goals?

What are your favourite Creation-Type apps?

What have been some of the lessons you have learned by integrating iPads into your school?

What questions are you asking yourself and your team?

After completing a good number of individual conferences, here are some of the conclusions I made today:

Letter grades ….

- squash learning

- inhibit motivation

- contribute to the disengagement of students in our schools

- put undo pressure on students

- take away from the actual learning

- contribute to the decline of relationships: between parents and child, child and teacher, and parents and teachers.

- shut our most vulnerable students down.

I would much rather give each child an A in the classes I teach. I know, giving every student an “A” would mean that the “A” didn’t really mean anything, but it actually *may* mean a lot.

• It may mean success for a child who may never have seen themselves as successful (especially at school).
• It may mean extra time spent with family members.
• It may mean that a child improves their attitude toward school.
• It may help a child want to come to school.
• It may put a smile on a child’s face, where there usually isn’t one present.
• It may help increase a child’s self-confidence (albeit very temporarily).
• It may improve relationships with those that matter to the child.

If you would like to take a look at some of the research about letter grades and what letter grades do to kids, here is some research for you to read:

From Degrading to De-Grading by Alfie Kohn

The Case Against Grades  by Alfie Kohn

If we want to engage, motivate, and encourage REAL learning by our students in our schools today and in the future, we need to look more closely at letter grades and how they are affecting our students. As a result, the answer is not to give each child an “A”, but the answer may be in doing away with letter grades altogether.

What do you think?

I am the vice principal of an inner-city school. It has been determined that our school is in the top ten percent of schools in our district of 124 schools with the highest rate of absenteeism.

So, you may wonder what is being done to help increase the attendance rate of the students in our school. First of all, our school is one of the schools being targeted for the Attendance Matters program in our district. This is a research-based program with many components (far too complicated to get into here). One component is having a breakfast program at our school every morning. While this breakfast program just started in January, it has quickly become the ‘cool’ place to be in the mornings. It is a very busy time, for sure. In addition to the breakfast program, there is also an outreach component for the families who may be having some difficulty with school attendance (lates or absences). While there were some bumps in the road at the beginning as we were learning which families would benefit the greatest by the outreach, it now seems to be going quite smoothly. Providing breakfast, however, only helps a small number of our at-risk students with high absenteeism actually come to school. For some families, our child care workers have been known to actually go to the homes of these children to bring them to school themselves.

This support from the district-based and school-based staff is helpful, but there needs to be more that is going to get these kids to come to school and want to be there. I strongly believe engagement is the key to increasing the attendance of our students. To do this, students need to like what they are doing at school, and have choice in what they do. Like David Warlick discussed at our District Focus Day, students need to have a personal investment in what they are learning. Learning should also be fun and social experiences for our students.

These thoughts were reinforced for me this evening at 4:30pm. Yes, 4:30pm and some of our most at-risk students with some of the highest rates of absenteeism, were still at school and engaged in their learning. You see, we have the wonderful opportunity of being a Community School. With that title, comes some excellent opportunities for our students. For some of these programs, students are registered on a first-come first-serve basis, while for other programs, students are invited into the program. We try to be strategic when considering which students are involved in these programs (especially when we know a certain program will be extremely popular and thus, difficult to determine who participates and who does not).

Every Tuesday after school, a small group of select students, participate in the Lego-Robotics program. That is where I was today at 4:30 pm. As soon as I walked into the classroom where the program operates, I noticed the engagement, the excitement, the collaboration, and the learning of each and every student. In fact, most of them were so engaged in programming the robot they had built, they didn’t even notice I was there. There were groups of two sitting at laptops, programming their robots to move across the special carpet in a certain manner. There were other sets of partners watching their robots to see if they were successful in their programming.

This was all quite something to watch.

One if these students has probably missed close to 50% of classes this year so far. But, here she was, at 4:30pm, learning. At school. Amazing. She was excited, engaged, enthusiastic, and learning. What more could we ask?

I doubt that this student will never miss a Tuesday of school while the Lego Robotics program is operating. This demonstrates the importance of engaging our students in their learning.

Here are a few questions for you to consider . . .

What can we do to ensure our students are engaged?
How can we engage even the most at-risk students?
What, if anything, do we need to do differently with these students?
How can we insure our teachers are engaging our students in meaningful, real ways?
Can we expect this of all teachers? If not, why not?

David Warlick started the day by reminding us that

“We know almost NOTHING about the future for our children.  This is the first time in history that we don’t know what the future will be like for our students.”

Things are changing so rapidly today – like never before.

Photo by flickr member henriksent

With this in mind, and knowing how different our children are today (their families, their life, their experience, their knowledge, their interests, their learning styles, and their brains), we really need to think about how we are teaching our students. We need to be more reflective and design our lessons to try to ensure our students are more engaged in their learning.

David Warlick shared a checklist which he thinks would be great for teachers to use when planning their lessons. While we know that not all lessons will have these characteristics, they are important to keep in mind and strive toward.

Checklist for Lessons (for teachers)

1. Guided by Safely Made Mistakes – It is when we make mistakes that we truly learn.  It is imperative that we create a safe environment for our students where mistakes are valued and even encouraged.  We need to model and acknowledge our own mistakes as well (yes, we all make them).
2. Inspires Personal Investment - How can I inspire?  How do we show our students that what they are doing is valuable. It is when they see the value in what they are doing that they will be inspired to continue.
3. Provokes Conversation - How can the learning experience require learners to exchange knowledge? Children are in constant conversations with people all day long – in person, via text messaging, via skype, via facebook, etc… The list goes on and on.  How can we take our knowledge of this and use it to our advantage? How can we get our students talking with each other (and others) in a meaningful way?
4. Responsiveness – How can we make the learning experience talk back to our learners?  Children today thrive on interaction with others. They thrive on the social experience.  How can we help nurture this responsive environment in our lessons and in our classrooms?

While I agree that this checklist would be very beneficial if used by teachers when planning their lessons, I also believe that our schools would also benefit greatly if the leaders of our schools also used this checklist in their leadership.

As leaders, we need to try to ensure that our staff work in an environment where they feel safe to try new things and know  that they will be supported in their successes AND their mistakes.

by flickr member royblumenthal

It is when our teachers and staff have a personal investment in their teaching and their student’s learning that the real difference is made.  They need to be encouraged and their value needs to be acknowledged and celebrated.

Ongoing conversation is very important for our schools to improve and move forward. We are moving into unknown territory in education and learning.  These are areas we need to have ongoing discussions about with our staff (and students, and parents).  Without ongoing conversation about these important topics, changes will not occur.

How are we making our schools responsive?  How are we encouraging discussions, questions, thoughts, and feelings? How are we engaging our staff members, our parents, and our students?

If we want our teachers to use a checklist like this in the planning of their lessons, then we should try to ensure we are using this same checklist to guide our leadership in and around our school.

What are your thoughts?

If you are a teacher, would you find this checklist helpful?

If you are a leader in education, how many of the items on this checklist do you use in your leadership?  Is this checklist helpful in your leadership?

With 5 hours of information and 16 pages of notes, I can’t possibly do only one blog post on our Focus Day today.  It will have to be multiple blog posts (not sure how many)…

Part 1 – Gathering Information

David Warlick talked a great deal about the abundance of information we have today. He demonstrated this abundance by showing us one page on the website, Personalize Media, entitled, The Count. On this page, there is an ongoing count of all information shared, tweeted, watched, joined, downloaded and posted in all areas of social media. Take a look at the link, it is quite something!

So, how do we deal with all this information, you might wonder?  Yes, it is overwhelming, but David discussed with us a few ways we could manage this information. 

We have all been to google and done a search for some sort of information we are looking to find out more about.  The google search usually gives millions of results to your chosen search topic.  There are other, more effective ways to search for information, according to David Warlick.  You might want to try some of the following search engines which have already been curated and recommended by others (unlike google):

Technorati - Real-time search for user-generated media (including weblogs) by tag or keyword.

Blekko – Web Search Engine

Topsy.com - Real Time Search for the social web.

Delicious – Social Bookmark sharing site – where you can house your bookmarks and also search others.

Diigo - Social Bookmark sharing site where you can highlight and sticky note blogs or articles you bookmark.

Flickr – Photo sharing site. If you want to use photos of others, please remember copyright rules and regulations. You can find some great images that you are free to share by going to the Creative Commons section of Flickr.  The owners of all of these photos have agreed with the use of them by others.

iGoogle – You can add RSS feeds that will show up on your iGoogle page (which you could make as your home page).

Flipboard on iPad – Personal Newsmagazine of all the latest posts from your PLN or all the blogs you may be following.

Google Reader – You could also set up the blogs you follow into Google Reader.

As you can see, there are many different ways to gather the abundance of information we are presented with on a daily basis on the world-wide-web.  Some of these search engines were search engines I had never heard about before today. I look forward to giving them a try.

I hope you find this information interesting and useful.

What are some ways you gather information online?

What works for you?

Flickr image by robpatrick on flickr.

There will be a few more blog posts about our time with David Warlick. Stay tuned….

Off I went to search my blog for “David Warlick”.  Drat!  I’ve only mentioned him once, in a post BEFORE he came to our Engaging the Digital Learner session.  It’s been so busy this year, I guess the blog post about that night didn’t happen.  So, here I am reviewing my notes about the evening.

Better late than never, I say.  :-)

I hope David starts his session tomorrow as he did in October: with something he learned yesterday (today, I, guess). What a great way to begin a session talking with educators (especially in today’s world of ever-changing and expanding technologies).  We are, after all, as David points out, learners.  We need to be modelling this to students as well. As David pointed out in October,  we must be willing to say that we don’t know the answer to the question. We must be able to model our desire to figure out things we do not know and how we would find the answers to our questions.

This is something I seem to do each day I teach French to the two Grade 5 classes to whom I am responsible for teaching French. While I do know the basics (it’s been many years since I took French myself), students often ask me questions about French translations for English words and how to pronounce these words.  Thank goodness for my iPad and the wonderful apps that translate English words into French and even pronounce the words for you!

Yes, I am a learner and my students know it.  Is this okay?  David Warlick would say that this isn’t only okay, this is necessary.  He would go even a step further though and say that we should be not only be demonstrating our learning in front of our students, but we should be willing to learn FROM our students. This is especially true in the area of technology.

David Warlick went that evening on to assert that, “21^st century learning must be defined by the lack of its limits.” – unlike the 20^thCentury learning when there were many limits.  We are teaching in information abundance.  Never before has there been so much information available to us or our students.  During his presentation, David posed interesting, thought-provoking, important questions, such as “What are the methods at work when we have unlimited access to information?”  and “What does the school look like to kids when we try to wall the information out?”

Outside of school, our students have no barriers holding them back from knowledge because the information environment ignore barriers.  Social media, which most students, regardless of age, are involved with regularly, are powerful network tools. Difficult to contain? Definitely! Worthwhile, most certainly, when guided and used appropriately.

A few other powerful questions David posed during his presentation with us included:

• Can formal learning be more playful?
• Can we allow more distraction?
• Is distraction really something to fear or is it essential for learning?
• Can we be playful enough to give ourselves permission to get it wrong?

David talked about the importance of the need to look at gaming and how gaming is influencing our students and how we can harness that energy and engagement.  He showed us a highly educational and motivating program called Scratch which students can use to make their own video games (or play the video games of others – which makes this highly interactive and engaging).  Some of the students in the two Health and Career Education classes I teach had a great deal of fun learning about Scratch during our 100 Minutes of Genius projects where they got to explore their choosing a topic to learn about and share with their class at the end of the 100 minutes. They thoroughly enjoyed learning a bit about the program.

David Warlick also talked about blogging and how engaging and interactive, responsive, and thus, motivational, blogging can be for our students.  Yes, there definitely are some challenges with respect to blogging, but once students get the hang of it, and start to receive feedback from others, not only did their write more, but, David asserts, they started writing better!  Powerful, indeed!

Doodlebuzz.com was mentioned by David as a cool site to check out.  If you have not been to this site, please visit. It is pretty interesting. You will never read the news in quite the same way ever again.

David Warlick went on that evening to describe a checklist that  today’s teachers should have for their lessons:

The experience is:

• Responsive
• Provokes conversation
• Inspires personal investment
• Guided by safely-made mistakes
• … (there were more, but I guess I wasn’t fast enough when I was typing them that evening and I can’t seem to find them on his site). SorryImagine a classroom, a school, an education system where this was the case!  Just imagine the engagement of the students. Imagine the learning that would occur.

We completed the evening, as we have with all our Engaging the Digital Learner sessions by reflecting on our own practise and answering some very interesting, important questions. Some of these questions included:

1. What tools do you have now that might make learning more responsive?
2. What tools do you have now that might enable learning through conversation exchange of knowledge?
3. What tools do you have now that might bring value to student work inspiring personal investment?
4. What tools or policies do you have that might make the learning (and teaching) environment more playful and more mistake-friendly?

How would you, your colleagues, your administration, your district senior management answer these questions?  These are important questions to ask, ponder, and collaborate to answer.

If you are following along and are interested in David’s presentation with us tomorrow, follow us in the backchannel: #sd36learn and check out the Event Notes for our session with David Warlick.

I am even more excited about David’s session tomorrow!  I can’t wait!

I enjoyed listening to Dr. Neufeld’s throughout the evening.  During the first part of his keynote address, Dr. Neufeld talked about the various methods many parents, teachers, and caregivers use currently use to try to discipline children.  He went on to describe why each of these methods work and why (even though they work in the short-term) they do not work longterm. He talked about how each of these methods: spanking, isolation, “cry it out” at bedtime, time-outs, etc… affect children.  These methods, bit by bit, harden a child’s heart and end up distancing them from us.  As a result of this distance, the children then search out their peers to fill the needs that we, as parents, should be there to provide.

It was great having this background knowledge and understanding about what our current practise is actually doing to our developing children. We were all very excited when he started talking about “Now what?” strategies.

Dr. Neufeld outlined 12 Guidelines for Discipline which I would like to share here. These guidelines can be helpful for parents, care-givers and all who work or volunteer in the education system.

1. Whenever possible, use structures and ritual to impose order on behaviour. Children require order, ritual and greeting rituals in order to form strong attachments with us. Structure is good for kids, and necessary. Chaos, or perceived chaos is not at all helpful for these kids.

2. Accept responsibility for doing what is in the best interests of the child and for keeping them out of trouble. What are YOU going to do differently to keep them out of trouble? Dr. Neufeld says it is our responsibility to learn our lesson and to stop trying to teach children a lesson in terms of their behaviour. This should not be the agenda, but learning about how we are impacting the behaviour of the child is what we need to be examining and reflecting upon.

3. Always treat the child as if they want to be good for you.  According to Dr. Neufeld, we only want to be good for those whom we are attached. The desire to be good is a function of attachment.  If our students are not attached to us, then they are not going to want to be good for us.  If we work on attachment and treat our children like they want to be good and are trying to be good, then they will be. If we teach our children that we think they are “bad” then that is what you will get in return.

4. Bridge all problem behaviour and resulting discipline.  Dr. Neufeld talked about the importance of focusing on the connection (and on the return). It is important for the children to know that you care for them and that you will always be there for them. “No matter what, I will always be your mom.” Only when a relationship is there, can a problem be discussed.  When facing separation, preserve the connection by drawing attention to what stays the same or the next point of contact.

If you are a teacher, and you see that a child is having difficulty with behaviour and you feel they need to have a break (with another adult, an administrator, a child care worker, etc…), focus on your connection with the child and focus on their return. You might say something like, “I can see you are having a difficult time. It is important for you to go with ___ to calm down/refocus, etc…  When you come back we are going to ….  I will miss you and hope you will be back soon.”  Can you see how different saying this would be, rather than, “You have done ___ and ___ and I am not going to put up with it anymore. I am calling the principal.  You can just go sit at the office.”

5. Always attempt to Collect before you Direct. Dr. Neufeld said that this is where the greeting ritual is so important, essential really.  There are three parts to this ritual: 1) Eyes (connection) – ensure you get the child’s eye contact. 2) Smile – get the child to smile somehow. It could be that you tell him/her something that you’ve noticed or perhaps you can tell them that they are having their favourite food for dinner. 3) Nod – get the child to nod in some sort of agreement.  When you have had your child (or student) do these three things, THEN you can ask them to do something for you (direct them).  Dr. Neufeld says you will have a much greater chance of success and less of a chance of defiance or problem behaviour if you follow these steps.

6. Defuse counterwill by hiding your agendas and drawing attention to a meaningless choice. It is important to keep our agenda to ourselves.  Our children (and students) do not need to know our agenda, necessarily. I loved the example Dr. Neufeld used about getting a child ready for bedtime: “Would you like your pink jammies or your blue jammies? Would you like to brush your teeth like I would an elephant or a crocodile? Would you like to take alligator steps or bunny hops to bed?”  All of these are meaningless to you, but these questions provide choice for your child and end up getting your child into be with little difficulty (and it’s FUN, which will be discussed later).

7. Script the behaviour of the immature. Scripting is an attachment intervention.  It’s much like playing Simon Says.  You say something and your child would mimic what you are saying.  It’s a way of scripting the behaviour you want from your child.

8. Don’t overwork the incident.  Don’t attempt to do the work in the incident. Instead try to preserve the relationship during the incident.

Dr. Neufeld gave the following guidelines for handling incidents (Instead of trying to make headway, aim to do no harm):

• Address the violation simply.
• Bridge.
• Attempt to change the control the situation.
• Set a date to debrief or address the problem.
• Exit sooner rather than later.

9. Infuse fun into the activity you wish to happen. Everyone is more likely do comply or do as you wish, if they perceive it as being fun.  You would too!

10. Walk confrontations with futility all the way to sadness. Don’t back off from saying no, but go all the way to tears. We don’t want stuck tears. Dr. Neufeld explained that the tears actually soften the heart, which aids in forming strong attachments. Always do what is in the best interest of your child. Be agents of futility. Make it easy for children to find tears and confront the reality that they are faced with difficulties and things they are not going to like, and they will, in fact, be able to adapt to these difficulties and be okay.

11.  Solicit good intentions to inculcate values, prime a sense of responsibility, and sow the seeds of self-control. Dr. Neufeld says we should say things like, “Can I count on you to …” If you can’t get order on their mind, you are not going to get order on their behaviour.

12. When capable of mixed feelings, draw out the tempering element in the context of the troubling impulses. 

As Dr. Neufeld pointed out, we need to keep our child’s heart soft.  We need to get them to fall into attachment with us. Once this happens, nature will do its part. Most of us make the mistake of trying to impose order on behaviour without causing problems with attachment, however, often, because of the techniques we use the opposite occurs.  Our children hearts are hardened, they fall out of attachment with us, and the behaviour worsens.  Then, our children begin to seek out attachments with others. Unfortunately, those attachments usually are not the best for our children.

If you are a teacher or other person involved in education, how many of the above 12 recommendations do you use?

If you are a parent or care-giver, how many of Dr. Neufeld’s recommendations do you implement at home?

Will you try anything differently after reading this?  If so, what?

I am looking forward to reading Dr. Neufeld’s book!

We talked again today about these attributes and interests and how important it is that they decide on a career which they are going to enjoy.  I could tell that some of my students looked rather sceptical when I told them that they could do anything they set their mind to. If they make goals and have a dream, they can accomplish that dream. Again, some eyes of disbelief stared at me.

Then I told them a story about a “friend”.  I described her as coming from an abusive home – both physical abuse and emotional abuse.  Both of her parents didn’t go past a Grade 8 education. In fact, none of her entire family graduated high school.  I told them that both of her parents were alcoholics (we later talked about Alcoholics Anonymous when a student brought up a treatment that his father was currently going through).  I went on to tell them that this girl went to many schools – 8 school in her 12 years of public education.  We talked about how her parents finally divorced after many years of fighting and abuse. 

The students were all incredibly engaged throughout the story.  When I finished, I asked them if it was possible for this girl to accomplish dreams she may have about her future career.  The students were eager to provide me with their answers and did so in a respectful manner.  Most of them said that it was not possible for her to achieve her goals. When asked why not, I head things like, “she hasn’t had a good role model”, “those who are abused, abuse others”, and “her parents don’t know how to support her”.  They were adamant that it was impossible for her to achieve her goals.

Then, there was Nathan (not his real name).  He bravely raised his hand, with a bit hesitation. He said, “Yes, she can achieve her goals. She is not her parents and does not have to have them define who she is or what she will do in her life.”  Clearly, he had “heard” me when we had talked outside on supervision the week before when he told me about his dad being in rehab. Those are some of the words I said to him.  He is a survivor. And, so was the girl in my story.

To the surprise of the class (and to myself), I told them that the girl that I was talking about was me.  All of those things described me growing up. Each of my students looked at me with their eyes open wide. A couple of students actually started to clap. It was really quite sweet.  Then, one of my most challenging students said, “Mrs. Henriksen, can you tell us that story again, please.”

We went on to talk about how they can achieve their goals. They can choose a career in an area that they love (like I did) and they can be successful in whatever career they choose.  They can. They don’t have to let the experience of others define who they are or what their future will be.  They now looked at me with eyes of belief.  Eyes of trust. Eyes of hope.

I would never have thought I would have shared this part of  my story with my students, but I am glad I did.  It is important for them to know that I believe in them.  It is possible.  Anything is possible.  They can do it!

A short time after starting my blog in July, 2011, I ran the URL of my blog through Wordle to see came up.  In case you do not know how Wordle works, it represents words in a visual representation.  The more times a word appears, the bigger the word is in the visual representation.

This can be used as a reflective tool because after running your blog URL through Wordle, you will see which words are used the most in your blog.  If a word is used a lot, then the word will be large. If it is not used often, it will be smaller.

I was pleasantly surprised when I ran my blog’s URL through Wordle. This is the visual representation of my learning over the past 7 months.

You will see that both Students and Twitter are quite large. That is great because it really clearly demonstrates two things that are important to my growth and development as a teacher and leader in education. The students in my school teach me something new each and every day, as does Twitter.

There really are no better tools for learning.

Have you tried running your blog URL through Wordle lately? If not, you may want to try it to see the visual representation of your blog.

If you do, I’d love to see what comes up! Please share.