By Liz Fox, Collaborative Teacher We all know that feeling in August (July?) when school supplies sections pop up everywhere, reminding us that another academic year is impending. This year felt different. What will this school year be like? How do I navigate these feelings of being overwhelmed and unprepared after the challenges we faced during the pandemic? As I wrestled with these questions, we received a letter from Mr. Lane welcoming us back to the 21-22 school year. He included a story by Stephen Covey about a man trying to saw down a tree. When this man was asked if he should sharpen his saw, he replied that he was too busy sawing to do so. Mr. Lane not only hoped we had “sharpened our saw” over the summer but also encouraged us to do so as the new school year began.
Two months later, one of my favorite bloggers, Dave Stuart, wrote about the concept of satisficing. He explains and gives credit to this strange word in this way: “It's Nobel winner Herbert Simon's. It means, ‘Doing something at the good-enough level, not the optimal level.’ Few skills are as critical to the well-lived teacher's life.” This stopped me dead in my tracks. I take pride in the amount of time, effort, and attention to detail I spend as a teacher. I, like so many of you, stay after school for many hours beyond our contract day, and then I go home and work some more. But I have noticed that sometimes my input doesn’t lead to the results I expect from my students. Enter satisficing. It was time for me to realize that just because my evenings and weekends are relatively free, spending hours and hours on planning, assessing, and more planning wasn’t necessarily productive for me or for my students. The concept of satisficing–albeit more authentic in theory than practice–was beginning to help me lead a more balanced life. I often agonize over lesson plans, making small adjustments and wholesale changes in hopes to meet student needs (and, unfortunately, frustrating those with whom I work). Satisficing has allowed me to–as hard as it is–let go of ruminating over every decision I make. I’m not perfect by any means, but learning how to “sharpen my saw” has led to more clarity and efficiency. Another blogpost by the same author reinforced my ideas. Doing a better job analyzing my inputs and outputs has allowed me to take stock of the times I was using and/or creating lessons that weren’t as helpful as I first thought they might be. Teaching has been quite a challenging journey this year, making the successes in and out of the classroom feel more precious than ever. I’m guessing I’m not alone in realizing feelings of burnout were creeping into my psyche. Reading a post entitled “Mechanics of Teacher Burnout” helped me get back on track. I have tried to take this advice: “The first priority, in my view, is depressurizing the self. This one's the most within my control and is the easiest to modify, and it enables me to do the harder work of workload simplification. The second priority, then, is making my workload behave—workload simplification, so that I can focus on what matters most.” Sounds like a good way to sharpen my saw.
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What should we do with these sticky notes? Is it getting worse? What does worse mean, anyway?3/3/2022 By Taylor Amundson, DMS 6th ELA, and Carole Sand, DMS TAG & Collaborative Teacher What should we do with these sticky notes? Is it getting worse? What does worse mean, anyway? Sometimes the best ideas happen “in the moment.” These occur in our classrooms every day when students ask questions, share ideas, or toss out random comments. As teachers, it’s tricky to figure out when we should capitalize on these teachable moments and when we need to stay the course. In Mrs. Amundson’s 6th grade ELP reading class recently, the decision to take advantage of teachable moments paid off by spurring active learning and higher student engagement. After learning about personification, idioms, metaphors, and other figurative language, Amundson’s first hour students read a short story and applied their learning by working with a partner to use Post-it notes to record examples. After sharing their findings, a student asked a simple question – “What should we do with these sticky notes?” In the moment, the teachers suggested: “Stick them on the cabinets.” Second hour students immediately noticed and were curious about the sticky notes and became very motivated to find as many, or more, examples than the previous class. You can bet that they and students throughout the day were highly engaged when they read the story to see how many examples of figurative language they could find. The photo tells you the rest of the story. On a different day, after reading several stories and poems about natural disasters, a student asked, “Are natural disasters getting worse?” This prompted a discussion of different types of natural disasters. As the discussion progressed, another important question surfaced – “What does ‘worse’ mean with a natural disaster?” More frequent? More intense? More deadly?
We decided to search for our answers. Students broke into groups, chose a natural disaster, and looked for answers. They were very excited about their learning and wanted to share their work. This led to lessons on credible sources, paraphrasing, interpreting graphs, and understanding cause/effect. The final results were large posters, oral presentations, and excitement by all of the 6th grade classes. In the end, we learned that the meaning of ‘worse’ differs with each type of natural disaster but we did find they all had one main cause in common: global climate change. It’s hard to know when to take the plunge into teachable moments, but in these two cases we were glad that we did. |
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April 2024
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