I find myself saying this quite a bit as a teacher.  It seems too often we assume students have all the skills they need, but that is not always true.  I know, this doesn’t seem like a positive way to start this post, but it can be a reality.  Sometimes we take for granted that students will write in complete sentences or be able to form a cohesive paragraph or think their way through a math response.

There’s another layer to this idea of “never assume” and it has to do with experiences.  Many students don’t have the same experiences and therefore the background knowledge to make connections with some of the things they are learning is simply not there.  Our job then becomes more than giving them the good drink of knowledge, but also leading them through the windy path to get to the troph.  We have inherited the job of giving students some basic experiences from Nursery Rhymes to what it means to respectfully sit and commune with friends.

I’d also like to balance this idea out by saying how we can get to a scary place as teachers where we assume that students can’t handle certain things in school.  It may be a direct affect of students not having the skills in one area, creating this idea that they can’t do something else.  For example, one may assume that the student who has poor writing skills can’t create a story at all, when in fact, they may have wonderful storytelling skills, but just has trouble organizing them and getting them down on paper.

I speak and write only from experience, and in mine, I have been in these shoes: both disappointed and awe struck at my students and at myself when I assumed too much.

In my years of teaching, I have learned that each student is an individual and I need to REALLY try hard to cater to all of them.  I guess the biggest and worst assumption of all is made when you assume that all your students will be at the relatively same level of learning, readiness and skill.  Of course we all know this is not true, but be honest, don’t you sometimes assume that?  Even on a small scale?   Ask yourself, as I do reflectively now: How often do you teach whole-class?  How often do you assign the same thing to all students?

Our whole educational system is based on the assumption that students progress to the next level of learning as they grow another year.  Our students aren’t grouped and moved on according to readiness, they are passed on by age (grade level).  (Whoa! Sorry. I didn’t mean to get on a national soap box there, but I guess that was worth mentioning.)

In all, this is where differentiation comes into play, but also teacher perspective.  I know I have to keep reminding myself to never assume students are all at the same place, that not all students learn the same way, that not all students learn the same way I did.  And with that reminder, comes a lot of hard work.  I have to take the time to learn about each individual student and understand what they need; never assuming I know it all.

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A couple of years ago, I attended an Arts Integration Day at Plymouth State University.  There, I presented a hands-on workshop on Building Community through Music.  But before the workshops began, all the attendees and presenters were treated to a wonderful keynote speaker and a performance by TIGER: (Theater Integrating Guidance, Education, and Responsibility), a professional theatre company that writes and performs wonderful performances that raise awareness and promote positive thinking and behaviors around topics that concern children.  I witnessed the “Green TIGERRRR” and was wowed by the enthusiasm, music, script and overall performance.

Well,  fast forward to last month, our fourth grade team found ourselves in quite a predicament – we had money to spend from our PTA and this money was intended for school programs.  I was happy to suggest that TIGER come to visit our school and after perusing their repertoire, found one on bullying:  “A Bully Isn’t Your Friend…Yet!”  My team agreed and we booked it.  Last week TIGER came and put on yet another great performance for our 2nd, 3rd and 4th graders.

The performance was so well done and age appropriate.  The music is uplifting and thoughtful and the scenery is very basic so as not to interfere with the message of the play.  One very powerful thing about TIGER is that they use the words of actual children.  From their website:

Based entirely upon the anonymous writings of New Hampshire school children, a TIGER performance incorporates live actors, puppets, theatre, movement, and music to engage school audiences from K-8. By using childrens’ own words, TIGER enables children to hear their own voices as they step back from the experiences of bullying and the intolerance of individual differences to move into more positive social interactions at school and in their community.

They take each letter of the word TIGER and create vignettes around a theme so that students come away with a positive and memorable message.  For this TIGER performance, T=Tell and adult, I=I can say no, G=don’t Gossip, E=Exit when necessary, R=Respect.

One very poignant moment, and a tribute to the company, was when in the performance, the actors were portraying a bus scene where Ernie was an outcast and was being bullyed by all the other students and seemingly even the impatient and enabling bus driver.  Ernie couldn’t find a seat and was not welcomed by anyone on the bus.  He was made fun of, laughed at and ridiculed.  There he stood, with his backback over his shoulder about to cry.  All 350 students were silent.  The teachers were too.  My own eyes started to fill up.  We all wondered, “What is going to happen?”  In that moment, TIGER created the raw and uncomfortable emotion that is really felt in that type of situation.

Finally, Gladys got up and sat with someone else so that Ernie could sit.  You could hear a pin drop.  Then, in the goofy TIGER fashion of Ralph, the bus driver, the bus was driven off in a crazy, curvy, bumpy bus drive making the entire room roar in laughter.

At the end of the performance, our principal was gifted with a TIGER to keep in our school.  She then gave it first to my class so that we could start the tradition of passing it from room to room in a reminder of what we learned that day.

The performance for me was yet another reminder of how important and powerful the arts can be.  With this, the TIGER performance created a safe place for students to watch and reflect on the hard issue of bullying.  Certainly with the visualization, the music and the words, each person there was touched by an important message.  It’s my hope that some part of this performance sticks with our students and teachers, helping them to be more aware and proactive.

For more information about TIGER, visit: http://www.plymouth.edu/outreach/tiger/
~EMP
Please watch my animoto of pictures taken during our school’s performance.

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Frost crystallization on a shrub. From www.thefullwiki.com

How do you approach teaching?  When you are with students, how do you act?  What do  you say?  Are you engaging and encouraging?  Are you curt and sarcastic?  Are you somewhere in between?  (These are questions I ask of you and of myself…we’re in this together, after all. )

In the book I am currently reading, Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom (2009), the author, Thomas Armstrong talks about “Crystallizing and Paralyzing Experiences”  and I found this way of thinking about what I do as a teacher very catchy and insightful.

Crystallizing experiences are a concept of David Feldman (1980) out of Tufts university and were further developed by Howard Gardner.  These are “turning points in the development of a person’s talents and abilities” and can “occur anytime during the life span” although many happen in early childhood. (28) Imagine the time when you were introduced to an object or concept that struck your curiosity, imagination and heart all at once.  That event inspired you to discover more, play more, challenge yourself and grow into what your potential is.  Imagine a time when the undiscovered musician was brought to his first concert as a child, or a budding artist was given the opportunity to make a mess with paint and her feet.  Imagine when the right student was shown that a microscope could open up a whole new world or that you could speak in a language of numbers.  These experiences are, as Armstrong states, “the sparks that light an intelligence and start is development toward maturity.” (29)

Armstrong has made his own converse term “paralyzing experiences to refer to experiences that ‘shut down’ intelligences.”  These, of course are the ones we want to avoid and yet, we find them everyday in classrooms across the country.   I have come across so many adults in the workshops I give who have told me the horror story about when their music teacher asked them not to sing because they were ruining the sound of the chorus.  Woah! Or maybe you know that kid who was yelled at when he brought the frog into class.  I bet an afternoon sitting outside the principal’s office made him never want to share his love of nature in school again.  Ouch! How about the fidget-er?  You probably had this one in class.  He can’t seem to sit still, needs to stand while working, taps his pencil, keeps getting up… if only he were allowed to move throughout the day, he might not hate sitting and working on his studies.  Sigh…

I think of my buddy, Dr. Richard Selznick, author of The Shut down Learner, who has devoted his career to helping so many students and families of children who have started to shut down simply because they do not work well in the traditional educational system.  Imagine if students were not paralyzed in their curiosity and natural tendancies, but were encouraged and taught how to use those skills to their advantage and advancement?

I was just reading a post from Daniel Petter-Lipstein, who wrote a guest post on the Un-Schooled blog about his experiences with Montessori schools.  He made some very good points about how these schools not only encourage students’ own curiosity, but they develop it.  This is a wonderful example of “Crystallizing.”

We may not have control over every part of our students’ lives.  We are not in their homes, we can ‘t help them get ready for each day and we can’t wait up for them late at night, but we do have them for six hours, 180 days a year.  We can give in to the “Six Hour Retarded Child” and provide a day of paralyzing experiences that help a child shut down in class, or we can take true advantage of the time we have and inspire our students, and ourselves in the process.

As the saying goes…  “The choice is…” well, ours.

~EMP

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This week some students of mine have begun the blogging process.  They are very excited and so am I. Since the beginning of the school year, they have been writing in their “Reflection Journals” at the end of every day, reflecting on what they have learned in the various subjects and about themselves as learners.  This blogging is a natural extension of this as they will be blogging about their experiences in school.

Instead of asking the entire class to blog, I have invited students to become part of a pilot program.  I started by asking them to fill out an application stating why they were interested in blogging.

I am interested in blogging because it will be nice for people to answer questions I ask.  Or if I say something like, “I had a hard day,” they could agree or disagree. ~H.M.

I am interested in blogging because I want to try something new. ~J.W.

I am interested in blogging because I would like to see how people relate to what I am saying about my last year at Cashman.  It will also help me focus on becoming a better writer. ~F.O.

From there, I asked those genuinely interested to come up with a welcoming greeting for the description of their blog and their first post.  While it is hard to get things rolling, we are on our way to some great interaction!

We are using School World, the program my district has adopted for all the teacher sites as the platform.  It has its limitations, but I am able to create individual blogs for each students.  Unfortunately, I am the only one who can post articles to the blogs (unless I want to give my students access to the entire site), so I am asking my students to email me their posts or to type them up in school.  From there, I post them and then the posts will be open for comments.

I can’t wait to see comments by other kids and what they think of my ideas.  ~E.C.

I have set up my one student computer in the room as a mini “Blogger’s Cafe” where students can sit, read their peers’ posts and write comments.  This is quickly becoming  a hot spot for students!

This is already proving to be a success!  The serious bloggers are very excited to have this opportunity to voice their ideas and reflections and the best part is that all the students can and will be involved through reading and commenting.

December 31, 1969 7:00 pm viaReplyRetweetFavorite

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We’ll have to see where things go from here.  I hope that in time, other teachers, parents and students from across the country and the world will read our blogs as we will also be able to read those of other students.

For now, we will need to work on what makes a quality post: topic, length, correct grammar, editing work, etc; and what makes a good comment: thoughtful response, correct grammar, spell check, staying on topic, etc.

Here’s a great video I’m going to share with my students tomorrow about “How to Write a Quality Comment.”  It comes from the Comments4Kids website. (Thanks @gret for the link to this great resource!)

How to Compose a Quality Comment! from mrsyollis on Vimeo.

It’s exciting to bring this aspect of social media and authentic writing into my fourth grade classroom.  Most of all, I am excited to watch my students grow as they are able to share their learning journey with others.

Do you have students blogging?  Do you want to try it?  Do you have questions or advice?  Please share!!!  ~EMP

Related posts:

1. Reflection Time

Today, I am sharing a guest post I wrote for the Whole Child Blog on the ASCD website.  Here is the first paragraph.  To read the whole article, please click the title’s link. ~EMP

Educators need to do more than teach; they need to create experiences for their students. Experiences are what make learning come alive. Let’s face it, experiences are what life is made of and what we need to emphasize in our classrooms if we are to teach the whole child. The arts provide a wonderful way to bring experiences into your teaching.

To read the whole post, please click this link: Creating Experiences Through the Arts

Related posts:

1. Collaboration in Action – Music Listening Experiences
2. Creating Time for Play
3. Musical Experiences – Composing in the Classroom

What’s an “Elevator Speech”?  It’s a short monologue that expresses something about which you are passionate.  Imagine yourself in an elevator with someone who is talking with someone else or to you and then they strike that chord.

“But the arts aren’t REALLY that important in education, right?”

“How can you really learn anything from the arts?”

“Can you as a teacher really consider yourself an artist?”

“What can the arts really do for our children?”

It’s that moment when you can say what you need to say and your audience is captive.

A couple of years back I was asked to prepare an elevator speech for a class.  I would like to share it with you along with the assignment:

Come to class on Tuesday with a story that was an aha moment for you that involved the use of the arts in the classroom, or other arena. This story should be brief–what might constitute an elevator ride (about 30 seconds but there will not be a stopwatch present)–with the goal to appeal emotionally to a decision maker.

My elevator speech describes my aha moment when I was taking a visual arts class (and let me tell you, I am not a visual artist )  But it was during that class that I started to understand the creative process and my ability to make art.

Elevator Speech:

“Don’t hold back,” I was told, and I didn’t and it happened, I became an artist.  Maybe not one you would pay to see, but one I’d like to be – forever.  A passionate, impulsive, expressive artist.  I can paint, sculpt, draw, write, create music and dance.

I am so damn alive.

You see, an art teacher told me that I have a creative spirit even though I am a self-proclaimed “non-artist.”  I remember hesitantly putting paint to paper, but through the process of experimentation and making what I considered to be mistakes, I learned that a marvelous painting did not have to look like anything in particular, and it didn’t have to look good to anyone else, as long as I enjoyed the work.  Most of all, I learned to appreciate the process of art making.

This is exclusively my own.  I have something to say, to express, to give to the world.

And now, a whole new world has opened up.

I am free to be open and creative and to inspire.

Are you?

Do you have an elevator speech?  Please share!

~EMP

Related posts:

1. Protected: Norman Rockwell – Activity 1 Parts of Speech