Author: Pernille Schmidt Ripp

Since 2010, I have lived my teaching life outloud, writing, speaking, and sharing the great, the okay, and the sometimes not so great. Starting as a 4th grade teacher in Middleton, Wisconsin, then heading to the middle school for many years, in 2022 I moved back home to Denmark to try teaching primary grades. Because why not? But I also started the Global Read Aloud in 2010, a global literacy project that has connected millions of children across the world. I also write books trying to help others co-create sustainable student-centered learning spaces, and I share my life on Instagram, in both English and Danish.
students

A Student Nominates their Person of the Year

Pernille Schmidt Ripp

We nominated our Person of the Year today and this is what one of my amazing students wrote:

     My person of the year is Martin Luther King Jr. because if he didn’t do what he did I wouldn’t be in here with my fantastic teacher and awesome friends.  I, instead, would not have friends, teachers, or rights.  He was willing to make people’s lives int he future better even if he was not the best. 

     Martin Luther King was a great man and I am glad him and other people like Rosa Parks were born.  He did not care if people bombed his house or threatened him.  If he was not born, my dream of becoming a football player or baseball player would never be close to coming true.  The reason I chose Martin Luther King is he made my life the best it could ever be.  That’s my person of the year; Martin Luther King Jr.

To see the post and leave Lewis a comment, please go to his post.

being a teacher, hopes, Student-centered

Must We Grin and Bear It?

Pernille Schmidt Ripp

Yesterday I shared a blog post regarding my journey from a complicated discipline system to throwing it all out and insetad running a classroom based on respect and communication.  A comment poster by an educator whom I admire, Jeremy MacDonald (@MrMacnology) immediately sparked my interest ( take a moment to read the whole comment). 

He writes,”My daughter has “cards” in her Kinder class. She is absolutely terrified of “pulling a card.” I’ve been to her class to visit her and she is a robot. She’s not my little girl….I know her teacher. How do you approach another teacher, who is in direct contact with your child each day, and tell her that her management is depriving my daughter of enjoying kindergarten; enjoying school?”

What an incredible discussion to start!  Do we, as educators and parents, that perhaps are on a different teaching journey than some teachers, have a way of discussing this with our child’s teacher?  Is there a gentle way that one can help “enlighten” others or must we grin and bear whatever happens in their classroom?

I know that my teaching methods have changed greatly because of interactions with other teachers, however, these have not been parents of mine, but rather colleagues.  How would I feel if a parent came to me and told me how to teach or how I should change something?  I know there has to be a way to initiate this type of conversation, but how?

So let us open up the discussion!  Do you approach the teacher, do you anonymously send them education books, or do you just let it be hoping for a different approach the following year?  Can you start the dialogue or is it not worth it?

assumptions, being a teacher, ideas, promises

It’s Not You, It’s Me – Or Why My Great Idea and Your Great Idea Shouldn’t Date

Pernille Schmidt Ripp

We’ve all been there, bouncing around at your school or home because you just discovered something absolutely, truly, fantastically wonderful that you just cannot wait to try in your teaching.  It is a marvelous feeling this one, one that makes you want to sing from the rooftops and share the idea with everyone you meet.  And then you do and the person who you indulge it with looks at you blankly.  Silence.  Deflated, you walk away, thinking to yourself that maybe that idea was not so great after all.

But wait it’s not them, it’s you.  Or me in this case.  I am one of those can’t wait to try it and then tell everyone about (mostly on this blog) idea kind of people.  I get so overly excited about something that I am practically bursting at the seams with my newfound wisdom and my poor husband is forced to listen to hours upon hours of blissful teacher talk.  I rave, I rant, I share and then I don’t understand why others don’t see the magic or get as excited to try it as I did.  Take Twitter for example, I don’t think I have convinced a single person to get on it, and yet it is one of the most life-altering educational experiences I have ever had.  But it’s not the “them” that are to fault, it is me.

We all love great ideas.  We all have them and we all share them.  Some great ideas work especially well for us and others just really don’t.  As I grow as an educator, I am beginning to understand more which type of ideas I am really drawn to; student-centered, technology integration, and no grade/homeworks/rewards etc. are things that just rock my world.  Others not so much.  So when other people come up to me and share their great idea, I might be the one with that blank stare that does not show any kind of enthusiasm.  Because to me it just doesn’t sound that exciting, or it goes against something I think I believe in, or I just don’t have the time.

And that’s when I realize, hey it is okay for others NOT to get excited over my great idea.

After all, being a teacher means you get to work with an incredible array of personalities that have one thing in common; they really love kids.  So whichever way, or whichever ideas we use, to get us to change the world one kid at a time, is alright by me.   However, I will promise myself that the next time someone presents their great idea to me, even if it seems a little strange, I will give it a good listen, perhaps even try it, and then decide.  After all, I can only change myself.

classroom expectations, classroom management, our classroom, punishment, rewards, Student-centered

Put Your Name on the Board – a Tale of Why I Gave Up Classroom Discipline Systems

Pernille Schmidt Ripp
Image from here

Put your name on the board! Those words spoken in a very stern voice accompanied by a teacher look was enough to whip the toughest student into shape. Except when it didn’t which for me was enough times to make me wonder. Could my discipline systems really be thrown out and replaced with nothing? Would chaos then reign supreme?

If you had come by my room last year you would have seen them. Those sticks in the cups or the names on the boards with checks, sometimes double checks and plenty of stern looks to go around. I was doing exactly what I had been taught in school, exerting my control as the main authority figure and if students misbehaved, well, then there was some form of punishment. Oh don’t worry; there were plenty of rewards as well. If students didn’t move their stick or get their name on the board for a week then their name got entered into drawing for pizza with me. At the end of the month if they didn’t have their name in my book for not doing their homework, they could also enter their name, and then I would finally draw names and five lucky students would have pizza with me. Confused? I was! I could hardly keep check Of all those names, checks, and punishments.

However, last year I realized something after reading Alfie Kohn; I knew I had to change. By perpetually focusing negative energy on the same students, who, lets face it, are most often the ones having their name singled out somehow already, I was indeed just adding more to their self doubt. While I believe in discipline for all students, I also believe in compassion and that philosophy simply was not fitting in with my chosen system. So I did as many teachers may do; I threw it all out. However, instead of hunting for a new system, I decided to detox myself, start this year with no system for reward and punishment and instead strive to create a classroom community where students just know what the expectation is.

I was petrified that first month. I run a tough classroom in my expectations for my students and I know that if you do not set the tone those first weeks, it can be detrimental to the rest of the year. And yet I held strong in my conviction that even the more unruly students would eventually figure this out through repeated conversations and respect. And boy, did we talk. We talked about expectations, rules, how to speak to one another, and what to do when something goes wrong. A lot of the time, I just listened to these amazing students come up with solutions to problems, listened to them explain how they envisioned our classroom, how they wanted fourth grade to be. And I was in awe; these kids knew how to behave without me telling them over and over. And they certainly would figure it out without me alternating punishment and rewards.

So after the first month I started to breathe again. I let our new system flex itself and watched the students help keep the classroom stabile. Sure, there are times when I think ooh if I just had a way to “punish” it would fix this and this and then I realize that perhaps I just need to find some time to speak to that particular student. Now instead of an exasperated tone and a system to keep them in check, we discuss, we try to fix, and we reevaluate. I don’t run the classroom with a complicated system of checks and balances, rewards and punishments, but rather with an atmosphere of community, of belonging. Is it perfect? No, but neither am I, nor my students. I am just glad I believed in my own skills enough to realize that perhaps, just perhaps, my students would know how to behave without me rewarding them for it. Once again, they blew away all of my expectations.

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Literacy, Martin Luther King, Reading, writing

A Study in MLK Jr. Day

Pernille Schmidt Ripp

We discuss Martin Luther King Jr. throughout the year, however, in order for the students to understand why they get Monday off, I decided to do a little mini lesson today during literacy to remind them.  I am a huge Patty Griffin fan and knew that her song “Up to the Mountain (the MLK Song) would be an incredible piece to study on our Music and Poetry Tuesday’s.

I started out by asking the students why we get Monday off, thankfully most of them knew why and they also knew a little bit about his life.  I minored in history so I took the kids back to pre-Civil War times and told them a little bit about Jim Crow Laws.  (I don’t want to go into too much detail because we explore it in social studies later this year).  Once the background had been set, we talked about the time of MLK and what they knew about him and the Civil Rights Movement.  This was at most 10 minutes of my class.

After that I knew I needed to recapture their attention because I had done a lot of talking.  So I played them a clip from MLK’s Last Speech also known as his “Up to the Mountaintop” speech.  The students were amazed that they were able to watch him speak. 

We discussed how he was a preacher so he used biblical text to express his desire for his followers.  The kids completely got the duality in his speech once we had mentioned this.  I then played them a video of  Patty Griffin’s song while they got a print out of the lyrics to follow along with.  Having the lyrics was helpful for them since she can be hard to fully understand.  Finally, I played the speech clip again without saying anything.  Quiet.

I asked them, “What did Patty Griffin use in her song from the speech?”  Multiple hands shot up with different answers.  They all saw the similarities.  And what is more, they understood more how powerful MLK was because they had seen him speak “live.”  I ended our viewing with this short video montage from the “I Have a Dream” speech, which never ceases to amaze kids.

We finished the lesson with the students journaling on the topic:  Has MLK’s dream come true that we only get judged by our character and not by how we look?