The other evening I had a wonderful opportunity to spend about 70 minutes with a group of 40ish first and second year teachers in my area. I was asked to come in and help them with some ideas around engagement. At first, I was really struggling with this concept because there are so many deeper issues that lead to students not being engaged in the classroom. While I am not able to solve the problems for each educator, I did try to curate a hands on session that challenged their thinking about simple and free approaches to rethink how we allow students to express learning.
The intended outcome was to have beginning teachers will know and be able to select strategies to engage students and increase motivation.
I am not going to go through my whole presentation, but I want to set the context so you understand where I am coming from when I ask for your help to help these amazing beginning educators.
I focused on changing our perception – of kids, of learning, of ourselves, and of what is possible. Many are hitting that slump that comes this time of year and I wanted to help bounce them out of this mindset. In 70 minutes, we cannot change the world, but we can plant some seeds.
I then moved into several simple activities to have students express learning in ways they have not considered. The goal here was to equip them with some techniques they could use in their classrooms the next day to get them moving in the right direction. None of these are magic bullet fixes. None of these will solve every engagement issue. I realize this and you know this. However, a whole session on deep rooted research and theory is not going to work either when they have been teaching all day and then asked to come to a two hour class.
After we spent time going through several of these activities, experiencing them, and then thinking about classroom application we had to wrap up our session. Unfortunately, we had to cut many of the activities out because we ran out of time.
In the end I had them do a reflection that I read about from Mitch Resnick where participants will write down one word that stood out to them from the session around creative learning. From there, I had them exchange their circles with other people and they had to then take that word and write a question using that word about learning and their classroom.
AND THIS IS WHERE YOUR COME IN!
I typed up all their questions by word category into this document. You can read the questions and feel where they are coming from. You can feel their struggle. You can feel their confusion. You can sense that their college prep classes did not actually prepare them for the classsroom.
We need to help. These are real feelings. These are real ideas felt by many educators across the spectrum.
What I am asking is that you take the time to answer some of these questions. Link in ideas, blog posts, books, etc. that you think will help. Simply add a bullet underneath the question and help them feel hope! Help them understand there are answers.
I will be sharing this document back with them all soon. My work is hopefully not done with them and I hope this is the start to helping them stay in the game and not burnout and lose hope.
Please share your wisdom with them and maybe we can all learn a thing or two if we all collectively share.
And as a bonus here is the New Teacher Mixtape Playlist. I collected as many of the songs as I could using this cool idea from John Spencer. We started with this prompt and at the end of the session I collected their songs.
Feel free to send me your song and I will add to the mix.
New Teacher Mixtape Playlist https://open.spotify.com/user/coffeechug/playlist/2QomdFZaCrMN7Yb2q8tMLS?si=1DQ96r-WRNyPRtegNIBfpQ #NowPlaying
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