Every Child Matters

Our school has a Mission Statement and a pile of Vision statements that the school has put a lot of thought and effort into over the years.

But to be honest, there's too much there for me to keep it all in my mind all the time.

So I've found myself gravitating to one of the statements in particular.

"Every Child Matters"

I do my best to live this out each day in my classroom as best as I am able.

What strikes me though, as we stand at a crossroads in Christian Education, is that I think that this statement is one of the fundamental ideas that should drive the way we teach.

I look at things like A School of One, Khanacademy, iTunes U, the Minerva Project, MOOCs, Coursera, Rocketship Schools, the Arrowsmith program, the Fast ForWord program, and so many more to see the possibilities that lie on the road ahead.

We can create schools where "Every Child Matters". As Christian Educators I think that it is our calling.

Even though I don't know what lies at the end of the road, I'm ready to start the journey.

Are you?

Crossroads

"Which way do we go?"

"Are we at a crossroads?"

"Do you feel we are at a crossroads?"

"Is Christian Education at a crossroads?"

These are some of the questions and conversations I've been having over the last couple of months with many different people.

I've felt for some years now that Christianity, Education, and the small subset of those two, Christian Education, is coming to a crossroads. (Feel free to replace crossroads with crisis or opportunity if you'd like.) I've often wondering if my perception has been accurate. I am a very passionate person and I often get carried away with things and go overboard. As I've had these conversations over the past month I've heard many others say similar things. I've become convinced that my perceptions match reality.

First, Christianity in North America is facing very different circumstances. Secular society, post-modernism, the incredible growth of the Church in Africa and elsewhere in the world, and so much more. There are others who have written and spoken about this far more eloquently than I.

Second, change in education continues to grow. The impact of technology, brain research, parental expectations and more sweep through the education field. Here in Ontario, Canada we've been relatively insulated from many of these changes due to the nature of education here. But when you look south of the border there are a multitude of approaches to education that are being explored.

Combine these two and we have some serious thinking to do about the place and role of Christian Education.

I don't think we can keep doing what we've always done. We stand at a crossroads.

"Which way do we go?"

So What Are You Going to Do About it? Part IV

   It seems to me that we see more and more of these students all the time. Students who are hurting, who need help, who have challenges of all sorts. Or maybe we are just more aware of it than we used to be.

   In my small school we have limited resources for our special needs department. It's always a challenge to allocate time and resources. We see all of those students who so desperately need help and try to figure out how best to spend the resources God has given us. Inevitably it's the gifted students who don't get the resources. We say, "The don't need it, the classroom teacher can enrich their program." And those of us in the classroom strive as best we can to deliver, sometimes we even do it well.

   This is where I had my brainstorm. If we could offer a service to families of gifted children they would probably jump at it. What's more our experience with the Arrowsmith program told us that if we offered a worthwhile program parents would be willing to pay extra.

   So I took everything I had been learning about online education and packaged it up in a program for students who needed an extra challenge. I centred it around authentic projects that were as diverse as I could dream up.

   Then I started sharing my idea.

   You know what surprised me? They didn't think I was crazy! What's more they signed on and helped make it real! You can visit this site to read all about the things we did.

   We ran the program for a year and it worked remarkably well! Not perfectly, and we learned an awful lot, but in the end it was a great experience for the students and for me. Feel free to check out these parent testimonials to hear their point of view.

   So why aren't you doing this now?

Well, that's a story for another day.

So What Are You Going to Do About it? Part I
So What Are You Going to Do About it? Part II
So What Are You Going to Do About it? Part III
So What Are You Going to Do About it? Part IV

Silos

My dad tells stories of how he built silos to pay his way through university.

Sometimes I build silos too, but I'm not supposed to.

My principal often phrases it as "being Kings and Queens in our own castle".

It's too easy for us as teachers to go into our own classrooms, close the door and teach all by ourselves. To build silos, to build our own castle and not let anyone else in.

And that's why I want to say thank you to Martha and Jennica, two amazing teachers that I got to spend a day with earlier this week.

These two brave souls were interested enough in the work I had done last year in the online pilot I led to respond when I went looking for other teachers to collaborate with.

They came to my workshop on GoogleApps this past summer to learn the tools we would use, and then the three of us met before school started to dream how we might work together as 3 teachers from 3 different classrooms from 3 different schools. We each headed back to our own classrooms to get the ball rolling and have been in frequent contact to solve all sorts of issues as we moved forward. This past Monday we met again to plan the second phase of our collaborative project between our 3 classes.

What an amazing experience that day was! I got to spend a whole day with two other passionate, inspired teachers bouncing ideas off of each other, learning, growing, and stretching. Ideas that if I had dreamed them up on my own would never have been half as good. I came home from that day exhausted, but exhilarated and inspired. I can hardly wait to find our which of our ideas work and which ones don't! What's more I learned so much from these two teachers that will flow into the rest of my classroom and I look forward to continuing to communicate with them throughout the rest of the year.

Dad, you may have told me stories of how you built silos, but I hope to tell my children stories about how I broke them.

Why I teach!

Today I was in the middle of a history class in which we were studying how the early Christians lived and what made them so different from the Roman culture they lived in. One of my students became intrigued and asked a slightly off-topic question. What followed was one of those teachable moments that you dream of as a teacher.

"What is heaven like?"
"How can there be a good God when bad things happen?"
"How are we saved?"
"How do we know Christianity is true?"
"How can we trust the Bible?"
"Why are people afraid of death?" 

This is why I teach in a Christian school.

I get to answer the most important questions of all, and it's my job! I enjoyed that hour and a half with my students more than anything else. God blessed me with the chance to influence these young people and perhaps help them grow in faith. I love my job!!!!!!!!

I left them with one of my favourite stories. You can read a version of it here.

Authentic Projects

One of the challenges of encouraging students to write is that often their work is only going to be read by their teacher and perhaps their parents. Occasionally it might get read by grandparents or others. Sometimes there's some kind of essay, poetry, or short story competition they can enter. But most of the time their work does not have a real, or authentic, audience.

I have been looking for ways to make the work my students do as authentic as possible.

Like many years before I've given them a writing assignment in which they have to write their autobiography. You can see the outline of that assignment here.

So what's different about this assignment? It's like many other autobiographies before it, isn't it?

This time they have a purpose. I've been blessed by two brave teachers who've joined me in trying to do something a little different. We're taking our three classrooms and having them join together to complete a series of projects collaboratively over the internet. We're going to have the students work in teams made up of students from multiple schools. Then they are going to work at a number of different tasks where they have to work with these partners at a distance using internet communication tools.

The first step is creating their partners and that's where the autobiographies come in. The students are writing their autobiographies with the intent that the classes from the other schools are going to read them. Then the students are going to submit their top choices for partners to the teachers who will then go and craft the teams. Thus the autobiographies have a purpose. The students are introducing who they are as people, as well as demonstrating their writing talents.

Take a look at the autobiographies they've written. You can find them on their blogs here.

Here's a sample of one of the student's work,

"Life is great!  I enjoy hanging and laughing with my best friends!  Ok, lets just say it this way: Life is like a jaw breaker it is good all the way through but still has a few layers bursting with flavor.  Some are sweet, and some sour, but they all have just the right amount of sugar and are full of bright rainbow of colors."

I have no idea how these projects are going to turn out, but it's certainly fun trying!

Grades

I don't like grades.

Don't get me wrong, it's not because of laziness or because I don't like looking at student work. In fact, I find the process of assessing student work, conferencing with a student about their work, providing feedback, and so much more to be incredibly valuable. It's in that process that so much learning can happen.

No, my problems with grading lie elsewhere.

1. It feeds into the factory model of schooling. During conferences with a parent they asked where their child was in relation to the rest of the class. This bothered me. It's the wrong question. The questions ought to be, "Is my child growing and learning more than yesterday? Are they living up to their potential?"
2. To quote one of my students this past week, "We don't come to school to be judged." There's a harshness to grading that I find offensive. Too many of our students have their self-worth wrapped up in grades, especially those who excel in school.
3. It's too final. Learning should be a constant process. The minute you put a grade on it, students stop.

That's all I've got for now, if I think of more I'll come back here and edit some more.

In the meantime, I've got some current events assignments that need to be graded.........

More about Failure

This week I asked students to choose from the following two topics and write a blog.

1. Write about a success or achievement that happened here at school.  Why do you remember it?  How did it change your thinking or feelings?
2. Write about a time that something you did at school was a flop or you failed.  How did that make you feel?  How did it change your way of thinking and doing things?

Here's the interesting question: How many of them will dare to choose the 2nd option? How many of them are brave enough to embrace their failure, or even talk about it?

To often we've structured schools to be places where failure is anathema. I've had many conversations with parents who cannot abide the possibility of their children failing.

And yet, I think that failure is healthy and that we should provide more opportunities for students in our schools to take risks and learn how to deal with, live with, and grow from failure.

Here's a list of my student's blogs. Feel free to check them out. Let's see which ones dare talk about failure. Then let's find out how to encourage the rest of them to be brave enough to look at their failures.

It's not due if I don't Blog.

I'm aiming to have my students blogging once a week. As part of that process I've promised my students that their blogs aren't due unless I have complete my blog.

So, I'm going to complete the same assignment today that I'm giving them for this week.

Our school is a 7 Habits school. That would be the "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen Covey. We are inspired by A. B. Combs, a school that applied the 7 Habits to how their school runs. Although, as a Christian school, we take a slightly different angle on some of these ideas.

One of the 7 Habits is "Begin with the End in Mind". In my classroom I have students write their Personal Mission Statements. So I've assigned them the task of blogging their mission statement and explaining it.

So here's mine:

My Personal Mission Statement

Primary:

Serve God.

Love my Wife and children.

Be there for my friends and family.

Secondary:

Be honest.

Be worthy of trust.

Be prepared.

Be flexible.

Work hard.

Admit mistakes.

Fix mistakes.

Listen.

Learn.

Be Patient.

Explanation:

The primary elements of my mission statement: I want to be the best Father, Husband, Son, Brother, and Friend I can be. None of that happens unless God is at the centre. With God at the centre all those other roles that I desire to be fall into place.

The secondary elements of my mission statement: I have not been called to mediocrity. I have been called to excellence. But excellence demands excellent character. Even though these are lofty goals that I fall far short of, it's what I'm aiming for. I want to be the kind of person that someone else can count on, and so each day I strive to live up to these character qualities.

Ok, now let's hear yours.

Failure

One of the things that bothers me as a teacher is when students are afraid to try. Often they are afraid of failure.

How do we teach our children not to be afraid of failing? How do we show them it is often through failure that we grow? That taking risks and missing the mark is a great idea?

We have to demonstrate it.

And this week I did.

Two of my project ideas this past week failed, one almost totally and the other only a little bit.

First, I had wanted to have my students learn to use Google search better. One of the best ways to learn anything is to teach it to others. So I planned on having my students teach themselves how to do better Google searches and then go and teach other classes. I still think the the core of this idea is worth considering, but the way I went about it didn't work. The material I gave them was too tough, and the instructions not clear enough. What's more I was startled to find that at least a third of them didn't care about getting better at Google searches. To their mind Google was good enough without really understanding it.

So I've had to shelve the project for a time. I still want to try it, since I think it would be really valuable on many levels, but I need to re-think my original approach.

The second project that failed was an attempt to allow for differentiated instruction in spelling lessons. I had each student creating their own spelling lists, then they were going to create assignments for each other to complete based on those spelling lists. Once again, the core idea is really good, but the implementation went a little awry. The idea of having the students designing the assignments failed. You see, we had some students sick, some technical difficulty with some of the software we tried to use, and we had some students who just couldn't get their work in on time, which meant other students didn't have assignments to do. In the end I made up some spelling assignments for everyone instead, and I think I will continue to do so for the next while. We may come back to creating assignments for each other later.

All in all, an awesome series of lessons learned by me and my students!

I hope that my failures will make my classroom a safer place for my students to take risks and try bold things.