Drafting Lifelong Learners

Group work is one of those things that sounds simple until you actually have to do it. Put people together. Give them a task. Let them learn from each other. This should be easy, right? Not always. On a personal level, I have never loved group work. I tend to want to work on my own, organize my thoughts in my own way, and get things done without having to negotiate every step with other people. That does not mean I do not see the value in collaboration. I do. Students need to learn how to listen to others, explain their thinking, share responsibility, and work through problems together. Those are real-life skills. Most of us do not spend our lives working completely alone. We have teams, coworkers, families, committees, and meetings. So, yes, collaboration matters. But I also know group work can go wrong quickly. One person does all the work. One person takes over. One person disappears completely. Someone gets confused and just nods along. Someone else gets annoyed. Before long, the a...

For my Border Crossings activity, I had dinner with a friend who is a native Spanish speaker and her husband. Prior to the dinner, I asked them to spend most of the meal speaking only in Spanish. The goal was simple: I wanted to feel, even briefly, what it is like to sit in a space where the language around me is not fully accessible. My friend loved the idea. She is also an educator and works with English Learners, so she immediately understood the purpose behind it. She did not just talk around me, either. She pulled me into the conversation. She asked me questions in Spanish, used gestures, changed her facial expressions, and gave me all kinds of clues to help me figure things out. And I was still mostly clueless. Every now and then, I caught a familiar word. Sometimes I could tell from her tone or body language that she was asking a question or making a joke. I could usually sense the mood of the conversation, but that was not the same as understanding it. I was piecing together me...

Who am I? I am not one who usually sits around reflecting on my identity in a deep or formal way. I tend to think about who I am in more practical terms. I work at being a productive and caring teacher. I work at being a good and loyal friend. I work at being a family member who values the bonds we share. Those things matter to me more than trying to define myself perfectly. Still, when I step back and really think about it, I can see that my identity has been shaped by many roles: teacher, student, daughter, sister, friend, reader, and lifelong learner. One thing most people probably know about me is that I am an avid reader and a lover of stories. If friends, family, or colleagues were asked to describe me, many of them, if not most, would probably say, “She loves books and her cats.” Honestly, they would not be wrong. Stories have always mattered to me. Books have given me places to escape, ideas to think about, and people to understand. Reading has helped shape how I see the world...

This year, my Professional Learning Team (PLT) worked through a form of scientific inquiry by focusing on the paraphrasing standard for our 6th grade students. As a team, we knew paraphrasing was something students needed more support with, but we also had to figure out how to teach it in a way that actually worked. We talked through different teaching strategies and how much time we thought we should spend on the standard. After instruction, we used a team-developed assessment to see how students were doing. It was not a formal science experiment, of course, but it did follow that same basic process: identify a problem, try a method, collect evidence, and then look at what the evidence shows. The post-assessment information became the most useful part of the process. After coming back together, we looked at our scores, and talked about what we noticed. Some things worked. Some things did not. Some things were honestly harder to measure than we expected. Since this was a new process f...

Open any social media app and you are bound to encounter critiques of education and educators. I don't mind critiques, I happen to have a lot of my own, but I do mind when those critiques are based on stereotypes that can be easily disproved. Teachers only work ten months out of the year. Teachers only work about seven hours a day. Teachers are overpaid for the months they work. Anyone can be a teacher. I could go on, but these are some of the more glaring stereotypes I encounter often.  I do not think that these stereotypes necessarily come from malice. I simply think it comes from a complete misunderstanding of what teachers do day-to-day and year-to-year in the classroom.  I've worked in special education long enough to know that the gap between perception and reality is wide. People imagine a teacher standing at a board, giving instructions, going home at three. They don't picture the IEP meetings, the documentation, the parent calls, the hour I spent last Thursday tryi...