Category: Be the change

Be the change, reflection, students

Stop Seeing Red Cars

Pernille Ripp
You know that kid I am about to write about.  That pencil swirling, head lay downing, always poking kid.  He always has en excuse for why he is doing whatever he is doing that is greatly annoying you at the time.  And I say “he” only because I have never had a “she” but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.  So you try your most patient tone of voice, you conference one on one on your feelings and how they are hurt whenever he does that thing he does so well.  He promises sometimes to get better but remember it really wasn’t his fault.  And you don’t believe him but you give him the benefit of the doubt, after all, you love all children.  5 minutes later he is doing those things again; not listening, fiddling, goofing off.  You panic and think you must be boring, non-enigmatic, sleep inducing and yet a little voice tells you that he is the problem, not you.

So you try a different approach; a stern warning; we will call your parents.  And yet those parents where the ones that told you their son was a little strange, good luck with him.  He doesn’t seem to care too much about that either, after all, they have had that same phone call many times before.  So you wish you had a punishment system, some sort of way you could take something away from him until he behaved.  Until he conformed.  Until he stopped doing those things.  And then you realize, hey wait, stop seeing red cars.

In my first teaching year, I had to take a mentor class, and although some times it was more a social gathering than educational, one video stands out.  In it the narrator speaks of the “red car syndrome” as in you buy a red car and all of a sudden when you drive it, all you ever see are all of the other red cars.  Well, inherently we as teachers see red cars in our classrooms too.  You hone in on that kid and instead of ever seeing all of the improvements, or the struggle to act the right way, you only see the problems, the slips, the slides, the just not acting the perfect way.  You see only the behavior you loathe, that upsets you.  So stop!  Be aware of it, speak to him about it, and then realize you are hyper-focused on him.  This kid did not wake up that morning and decide this is how he would act in school; you are after all the next teacher in a long line of teachers before you.  This may take years to help him with, or even better yet, find a way to make it work.  Don’t let it overwhelm you, don’t let it bring you down, but more importantly do not take your frustration out on the kid.  After all, he would probably rather be a perfect child too (which by the way, perfect children do not exist).  So stop seeing red cars, instead embrace, celebrate and realize that we are all human beings, quirks and all, even if that human being happens to be 9 years old.

aha moment, Be the change, students

Anyone Can Learn – Aviva’s Aha Moment

Pernille Ripp
This week’s Aha Moment is shared by Aviva Dunsiger, also known on Twitter as @grade1, and she is a a Grade 1 teacher in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada. She is an active member of my PLN who helps many teachers both new and old. She taught Kindergarten for eight years before making the move to Grade 1. Aviva loves using various Web 2.0 tools in her classroom to make learning more meaningful for students. As she says: Through my Grade 1 Website, Grade 1 Blog, Professional Blog, and Student Blogs, I share my own learning with others, and my students share their learning too. Many thanks to Pernille Ripp (@4thGrdTeach) for asking me to do the Guest Blog Post this week. I’m excited to share my Aha Moment with all of you!

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to teach. When I was in Kindergarten and Grade 1, I used to pretend to play school, and I even wrote my lessons on the wall. There’s a house somewhere in Thornhill, Ontario that still has my Process Writing Lesson on the wall underneath numerous coats of paint.:)
School never came easily for me though, and while I always worked hard, I never seemed to make the grade. In Grade 2, I had a Psych Assessment done, and I found out that I had a non-verbal learning disability. I will never forgot the feedback from that Psych Assessment: I was told that due to the severity of my learning disability, I would always struggle with school, and I would be lucky if I even made it to college. In other words, forget about university, and forget about my dreams of becoming a teacher. I was devastated!

 Looking back now, I guess that I could have given up at that point. I never did though. Despite having a really significant learning disability, I also had some really significant strengths. I learned how to capitalize on those strengths. My mom and step-dad helped teach me strategies to be successful in the classroom and to advocate for myself so that I got the accommodations that I needed to be successful too. I always spent double the amount of time on the homework as my peers, and in certain subjects, like geography, the lessons would often lead to tears and frustration, but I never gave up. I wanted to teach!

Thanks to self-advocacy, amazing support from home, and strategies that really worked, I ended up graduating from high-school on the honour roll, and I even got a scholarship to university. It was when I got the phone call from the President of Nipissing University offering me a Presidential Scholarship and a place in the Bachelor of Arts and Introduction to Teaching Program, that I had my Aha Moment: anyone can learn! As teachers, we just need to find a way to ensure that all students do learn. I cannot thank my wonderful teachers enough: they didn’t give up on me, and as a result, I never gave up on myself.

This is my tenth year teaching, and every year, I get a new group of students and a new opportunity to make a difference. My own experience has taught me that we can never give up on our students, and that we need to find a way to ensure that all of them succeed. At the bottom of all of my e-mails, I have this signature: “If they don’t learn the way you teach, teach the way they learn.” I am thankful for the teachers that did just this for me, and I will always do this for my students too!
aha moment, Be the change, new teacher

You are Not Alone – Lisa’s Aha Moment

Pernille Ripp

This weeks aha moment is shared by Lisa Dabbs one of the most inspiring and essential members of my PLN.  She is an Educational Coach and Consultant and also a former Elementary School Principal and Fed Prog.administrator. Lisa has a B.A. in Child Development and a M.Ed in Educational Administration. but started  her career as a Kindergarten teacher. She has also worked as a Project Director of a Language and Literacy program. Lisa is also the creator of the new teacher chat on Twitter #ntchat, which is NOT just for new teachers and involved in many other projects.  More importantly, Lisa is a friend and mentor to many and I was honored to have her share her moment with us.  Her blog is a must add to your RSS and she is always a must follow to any new educators that stumbles upon Twitter.  




Teaching  and Mentoring are my Passions!
Sometimes though, good teaching is lost in the busyness of life or due to challenging times, struggling students, feisty kids or tragically; lack of support.


Today is the sharing of my Aha moment. I’m so honored to be asked by Pernille Ripp to guest post on this “moment”. The moment I truly knew that I needed to start a “blog to mentor”. This came in February of this year when I sent a response to a young, new, would be teacher who posted on an education website that she was “Losing hope”…


The teacher will remain anonymous, but the cry for help is so typical of many, creative, enthusiastic  teachers I’ve met over the years. Starting their careers passionate about teaching, only to be cut off at the knees by one simple fact: the lack of a mentor who is willing to support, guide and inspire.


The teacher started the post by saying that they had a dream. A dream to be the best teacher they could be. To be the kind of teacher that students would be inspired by. Unfortunately, there were no clear expectations set for this teacher, and worse, no support. This teacher’s perception was that they would be supported, as a first year teacher. Not an unfair expectation by any means. Instead they were placed in a “sink or swim” position. So this teacher sank. And so did my heart…This is absolutely not what you do to new teachers.


Here is a bit of the response that I posted to this young teacher who asked for “positive and encouraging words”:
When I read your words, “I believe I was under the illusion that I had support and help from all angles, when in reality, I hadn’t felt more alone and lost.” My heart went out to you. I was an elementary school principal for 14 years. During those years, I consistently spent time mentoring, supporting, guiding my teachers. If you read the research on why young people like yourself leave the teaching profession, it turns out that it is exactly for those reasons you describe. A school should work to foster a culture where its teachers collaborate and learn from one another. This is at the heart of how educators grow as professionals. However, some of my administrative colleagues still struggle with this piece. We need to do so much better.


I entered the teaching profession at 24 as a Kindergarten teacher. I was fortunate to have come from a long line of educators. However, even with this “DNA” I still encountered a great deal of frustration and anxiety in my first year. I too am a VERY creative person, and I had many ideas about how I wanted to teach my class. I quickly learned, by observing the culture of my school, and having to share a classroom, that I had to harness that creativity into focused, structured, well designed lesson plans. I did so by incorporating those creative ideas in such a way that measurable outcomes were clear and evident. This meant including, sadly, assessments of my Kinders, even “back in the day.” I used a few highly recommended teaching tools from my Child Development course work, as well as others that were recommended to me. I also asked to “observe” other teachers at my school to get a feel for, once again, the culture of the school and what was going to be expected of me. I lived and breathed “teaching” those first few years, and spent nights and weekends reading, creating, planning, all things “Kinder.”  The kicker is I too felt very alone, as I did not have a supportive principal, or mentor colleague. My kinder team member was a tenured teacher who believed in “kill and drill” for Kindergarten kids and I was mortified!
The bottom line is that my first few years were rough!

What made me stick it out? I held on to my dream, desire and passion. I held on to the knowledge that I knew the research about what was good for children. I didn’t give up, even when 6 of my 8 K teacher team talked about me behind my back. Did I have a mentor teacher? No. Was it hard? Extremely. But I kept pressing forward because I believed in myself and cared deeply for my students.


We know so much more now about how to retain and support new teachers. The research is very clear and you need a good mentor (or two). You don’t have to stick it out alone, nor should you.
So, in the meantime, I extend a hand to you, as a “creative” tenured educator, if you’d like an on-line mentor. This is my passion. I’m here to offer help and HOPE. Don’t let this one difficult experience defeat you. You are not alone in the “tunnel”. The light is just up ahead. It’s time to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get back in the game! I can hear them calling your name!


My Aha moment…my desire to “blog to mentor” and chronicle through photos, interviews and a few short words, what amazing teachers are doing to inspire is still evolving. The heartache this young woman felt, still resonates for me. It continues to motivate me to work to inspire, mentor, equip, teachers to “teach with soul.” I also hold fast to the belief that no educator should have to go through the challenges of the early years of teaching alone…ever. Through my blog and also on Twitter, I hope that I can come alongside and Mentor. The work ahead is challenging…but I’m excited to be on the journey!
When you reflect on your early years of teaching, how did you make it though the tough times? 
So grateful to you, Pernille for inviting me to share, my passion.
Be the change, grades, reflection

Rulebreaker

Pernille Ripp
I wasn’t born a rule breaker. In my hometown of Bjerringbro, Denmark, population 7,390, I did not strive to be a rebel without a cause.  In fact I was your average tomboy, a middle of the roader, a child deemed living below their potential.  I followed the rules set forth because that is what I was told to do.  Not specifically by people, but as a child, you just know what the rules are and what the expectations were.  Of course, there were small rebellions such as coming home just a few minutes late, or perhaps “forgetting” to do my spelling words (I knew them already so why did I have to write them out 5 times?).  So my childhood was not an adventurous one and my adult life seemed to be kind of middle of the road as well.  That is until I met my husband, Brandon.

Oh, the tales of love can inspire excitement or convulsions in people.  Mine usually gets giggles and aw shucks.  You see it was the classic tale of bartender meets bouncer and the rest they say is history.  And yet something fundamentally changed for me when I met Brandon. He asked me what I planned to do with my life, and although many had asked that same question before, including my dear mother, with him, I really wanted to impress.  I became a teacher, knowing I wanted to reach children, change them, inspire them, listen to them.  And yet, I followed the rules.  Good teachers graded.  Good teachers rewarded.  Good teachers told students that if their homework was not done then there would be consequences.  

In my gut, I knew something was wrong and yet these were the rules and by signing up to teach, I had signed up for the rules.  Never did I stop to question those rules, why should I?  They obviously worked, until they didn’t.  Last year, my class was a mixed bag of emotions.  Various big personalities that needed a lot of love and a lot of patience at times.  I learned more in that year of what type of a person I am, than I think I could have in any other profession.  I started the year the same way, detailing how to get an A.  How to earn a class party, how to get on the awesome board.  Basically, how to be the best student they could possibly be.  Or did I?  Really all I did was tell them the rules and then tell the punishment there would be for breaking those rules.  How is that for inspiring the youth of America?


So this summer, after having accepted the fantastic challenge of a combination classroom and joining Twitter searching for others, searching like me, I came upon a tweet from Jeremy (@MrMacnology) to Joe (@Joe_Bower).  I stopped because I was surprised.  They tweeted about perhaps not grading, perhaps not rewarding, perhaps breaking the rules.  I lurked on their conversations, wondering if they would not mind another person asking questions.  Finally I held my breath and wrote to Jeremy asking if I could ask him questions.  We have collaborated since on a regular basis and I am proud of knowing him.

Grading degrades.  It tells a student that no matter how hard they worked, if it does not fit into our rubric, our vision, our plan for them, then they may not get the success they so hoped for.  Grades tell students that even though their parents are violently fighting and they can’t do their homework because they are scared, they lose 10% off their grade and get a zero if I don’t get it in a week.  Grades tell students that even though they devour books, when they leave the title and author off on a book report, they must not be A+ readers.  Grading tells students that have way too much responsibility at the young age of 10, that I don’t care that they had to watch their 4 younger brothers and sisters instead of doing their homework.


We know this as educators.  We see the defeat in students’ eyes when they get that grade they did not hope for.  We see it in parent/teacher conferences when parents’ zero in on the bad grades rather than all the plusses we so meticulously planted on the report card.  You cannot blame the parents; after all, they were part of this system too.  We all are.  Well, I am not anymore.  Or at least I strive to break the rules on this one.  I strive to follow my instinct and speak to students about their successes. Listen when they tell me answers that they didn’t know how to spell right.  Think when they give me an unexpected explanation.  I may not have been born a rule breaker but I have certainly become one.  It is in the best interest of my students and myself that I break these rules.  There is a better way to teach, we just must not be afraid to try it.  Will you break the rules with me?
aha moment, Be the change, students

Embrace All Your Opportunities – Joan’s Aha Moment

Pernille Ripp
This week’s Aha Moment is shared by Joan Young, one of the first people to reach out to me on Twitter; I am thrilled and honored that she said yes to do this knowing how busy she is.  Joan writes that she is a teacher who feels like a “new teacher” again this year after changing grade levels and schools. She is passionate about viewing students from a “strengths perspective” and hopes to give her students a positive classroom experience where they will not only learn the “required curriculum” but also learn about themselves as learners. Joan teaches 4th grade in a wonderful small school in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can follow her  @flourishingkids on Twitter and also check out her book and CD, 25 Super Sight Word Songs here:  http://www.amazon.com/Super-Sight-Word-Songs-Mini-Books/dp/054510582X 



Aha moments: I’ve had my share. When Pernille asked me to write and share about one of them, I initially thought, “Wait, I’m way too busy to take on something else!” And then I realized:  I need to be writing, even during this busy beginning of school time. Writing helps me clarify, categorize and sort my endless rambling of ideas and creative ramblings. I wrote back a few hours later, still a bit shaky about my “Sure, why not?”  Now, nearly a week later, deadline looming on the horizon, I am in a panic, indecisively scanning the archives of this busy mind, trying to figure out which aha moment will be most entertaining, most inspiring or helpful for other educators out there.


This ramble leads me to the biggest “aha” of all. We never stop learning and growing when we embrace opportunities that cross our paths.  Each challenge that falls before us on this incredible journey of life presents us with the opportunity to stretch, grow and be molded into another higher version of ourselves.  We must remain open to the daily “aha” moment and somehow take the time to reflect on it, process it and act on it, so that we can grow. And on that theme I will share my top 5 aha moments that have led me to courageously move ahead on my own path of discovery.

1)      My “aha” moment that led me to be a teacher is one that always stands out in my memory.  I was sitting around that dreaded IEP meeting table, not as a teacher, but as a social worker, an advocate for a foster child on my caseload. As I listened to the condescending talk of the school psychologist, teacher, principal to the overwrought foster parent, who was hanging on by a shred of sanity, I realized something important. Teachers, though trained to “teach” often have not been trained to understand the psychological needs that impact learning. I realized that if I had 20-30 students each year who I could spend 6 hours a day with, and if I could work with teachers, and help them understand their 20-30 kids they spend their days with, then my desire to help could be achieved in a greater way than working with the kids on my caseload, visiting them once a week. Even though I had spent a great sum of money earning a Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychology, I decided that going back to school for a teaching credential was the best way for me to help kids, my ultimate goal.

2)     Kids are eager to take on challenges and are not “lazy” as I’ve heard teachers call them. When we lower the stress and risk that comes with fear of failing, kids thrive and reach higher than we can even imagine. My post here describes a day when in kindergarten when I was feeling a bit helpless about working with my lowest reading group.

3)   Don’t predict a kid’s future. I am not that “shy” kid I once was and I am happiest when I am creating, sharing and putting this passion for learning into practice.  I always find it amusing to think about the reaction I would have had if someone had told me, that painfully shy 16 year old girl, that my future would involve standing in front of a group of people each day, captivating their attention. If someone had told me that I would one day stand in front of 150 teachers, singing with them and sharing ideas of classroom strategies, I would have said they were crazy! We must not categorize kids as being weak or strong in a certain skill or even a personality trait. Some children have not yet been in the optimal setting to bring about the manifestation of his/her strengths. Each child has his own time frame; the best gift we can give is to provide opportunities for kids to discover, develop and express their passions.


4)    Work does not burn you out when you do what you love! Although I am well aware that I need balance in my life, I must not heed others’ advice to “not think about teaching” on the weekend. When I am engaged in other “non-related” activities, like exercising, driving, talking with my husband,or cleaning I am often brainstorming how I can develop an idea into a lesson.  Do I really need to tell myself that there are only certain hours and days of the week when I am allowed to be creative?

5)    Reach out to others! Teachers are amazingly giving and willing to help out when you have a need. Check out all of the amazing advice when I was setting up my classroom. 


When you reflect on your years in the classroom, what are your most significant moments of self-discovery? Thanks so much Pernille for inviting me to share in this wonderful exploration. 
Be the change, new year, reflection

No, I Didn’t Survive the First Week of School

Pernille Ripp
This week, I saw a few posts on blogs talking about how they survived the first week of school.  As some of you may know, this bothers me greatly.  I did not survive my first week, I thrived in it.  Some may call me relentlessly optimistic or just plain annoying but the truth is that I love my job.  I have been planning all summer for this first “real” week of school and it did not let me down.  So here is what I “survived” this week:
  • A student with autism who mostly speaks repetitive sentences telling me he loved me.
  • A student, who was in my 4th grade class last year, returning to be in my combination room this year after having been in 2 other school already this year.
  • A 5th grader in my room who last year asked for help every 5 minutes, not asking for help, but instead trying it himself and lighting up at his success.
  • 27 students who didn’t really know each other create their own Animoto for their parents to see their hopes and wishes for my room.
  • 25 hands in the air all wanting to model the incorrect way of how to read to self.
  • A shy boy with little math success last year, raising his hand 3 times during math class and getting it right.
  • A 4th grade girl, who moved to our school after a person got shot on her block, subtracting 35 from 71 in her head.
  • 3 students telling me that so far I was not a disappointment and that I was their favorite teacher ever.
  • 2 parents emailing me that they do not care that I have 27 students in my room, they are not part of the petition to get another teacher added to my school to alleviate our high classroom sizes, since they believe in what I am doing.
  • Another student with autism letting me in a little by cracking his first joke to me.
  • Students letting down their guard and reaching out to new people even if they are not the same age.
  • Students asking me to please not tell their parents that Double Bubble Gum’s flavor only lasts 4 minutes, thus making it the worst investment when buying bubble gum.
  • The students getting so excited about the Global Read Aloud project and studying the maps that we will mark when we connect with someone.
So no I did not survive the first week of school, I lived it to the fullest, eagerly anticipating many more days with these incredible kids.  Did you?