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“Part of ETFO’s mission is the education, stimulation, and transformation of provincial and local organizations to be responsive to the diverse needs of the membership, and to be a positive influence for change at a societal level. “

 Source: ETFO Social Justice

I’ve been thinking more about my privilege in society and how to create space for others. I imagine my classroom, or even my school, as a microcosm of society and try to model kindness, joy, and hope to my students and colleagues. How do we make the world a better place? What does that look like in the teaching profession?

Reading the anti-oppressive framework created by ETFO helps me think critically about how I teach, the physical setup of my learning space, and the direction I’m helping my school take. It reminds me that part of being an ally is to advocate for those experiencing the negative impacts of colonialism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, and ableism.

Sometimes advocacy work means starting conversations that will be uncomfortable, but educators need to ensure that we unlearn oppressive practices and ideologies. We can create space for the oppressed to have a voice. We can advocate spending school budgets on specialized resources for clubs or educational opportunities for students from marginalized groups. We can advocate for professional development to implement the calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We also know that the arts and libraries need our voices heard to give all students access to music, drama, art, dance, books and technology. 

The teacher-librarian AQ course taught me to advocate for the library/learning commons. For years, I have had to justify my requests for the school budget to be spent on books, magazines, and technology. The effort was worth it. Recently, a student who graduated from grade eight thanked me for allowing her to exceed the book checkout limit every week. When other students were taking 1-2 books, she was taking eight. Consistently, every week, for grades two and three, she continued this pattern. By grade four, she began reading some longer books, so the number of books she checked out was fewer, but she was still reading voraciously, and she continues to do so to this day. Her family did not use the public library, and they couldn’t afford to keep up with her appetite for books, so the school library was the place she relied on to keep her reading. With this student and others like her in mind, I will continue to advocate for schools to have libraries and for libraries to have books.

Educators, your voice is valued, don’t be afraid to use it to make things better for someone else.

Isaac missed the first of four lessons in a media literacy unit. I invited him to my desk to review the first lesson. I didn’t know that Isaac was about to teach me instead.

In Media Literacy, my grade 2 class watched the video A Pep Talk from Kid President to You. We watched it a few times to observe how the words, the backgrounds, and the music impacted the meaning. In the next media literacy class, we reviewed a pep talk script I created based on the video. Students had to fill in the blanks to make their own pep talk, or they could choose to rewrite the script themselves. In the third class, we would pair off and film the pep talks using tablets. Finally, students could share the pep talks and accept feedback. 

When Isaac sat with me to watch the video, he reacted with shock as soon as Robby Novak came on the screen.  

“Hey,” said Issac, “He looks like me!”

In case you are not one of the 48 million viewers of “A Pep Talk from Kid President,” Robby Novak is an African American who was nine years old in the video. He went on to create more viral Kid President videos and wrote a book, all focusing on making the world more awesome.

When Isaac reacted so immediately and with such surprise to seeing someone he could identify with on the screen, I realized I needed to take diverse representation in the media more seriously. I must examine my privilege and bias when choosing media for any subject.

The American non-profit Common Sense media produced a report in 2021 called The Inclusion Imperative. The key findings include the following:

– High-quality children’s media can promote positive ethnic-racial attitudes and interactions.

-Among young people of colour, watching favourable depictions of their ethnic-racial group can have a positive impact on self-perceptions and views about their ethnic-racial group.

-Media created for even the youngest children should consider inclusiveness and representativeness.

I’m thankful for Kid President, and especially Isaac, for making me aware that I need to do more than I have been doing to ensure students experience more diverse representation in the media we use at school.

Resources:

Common Sense Media                     MediaSmarts

During these longer nights and shorter days, I often find time to reflect on my own journey as an educator. Coming up on 25 years very soon (gulp!), I can honestly say that I am not the same educator I was at the beginning of my career or even the same as I was five years ago.

Earlier this year I wrote a post about professional learning and realize as I reflect on my career that I also need to acknowledge the teachers down the hall. These educators have influenced and shaped my vision about students and teaching in so many ways through their mentorship, their permission to be human, and their examples as leaders. I want to dedicate this post to the teachers down the hall whose influence and teaching extended beyond students and to colleagues.

One of my favourite educators would always remind me, “You are human.” Teaching can be overwhelming and is often described as the job that never ends. I know there are times when I felt I could literally work 24 hours and still not have “finished”. However, we also need to understand that we are human. We need to give ourselves some grace for the weight of the work we do and know that we need time to recharge. Setting boundaries for work doesn’t make us bad teachers, it means we are humans who deserve the time for necessary self-care.

An intermediate colleague I worked with once asked me, “If you’re not having fun, how do you think the students feel?” In the light of all the curriculum expectations and data collection, it’s hard to remember to ensure that the class community enjoys their time together. Whether it’s engaging in community building, sharing funny stories, or a cool science experiment, having fun makes the learning environment a comfortable and safe place to be. It helps to build relationships between students and educators. One teacher I worked with always greeted his primary class with a morning joke and that was always brought up by students years later at every grade eight graduation. Those small moments where we have fun are sometimes the small moments that have a big impact.

Another mentor teacher would always tell me, “We teach children, not just curriculum.” It is so important to know each child that we share space with during the day. To recognize that they hold different identities and experiences, acknowledging that those factors influence how they feel seen at school. As teachers we all want students to feel welcome and that school is a place they belong. Getting to know and accept students’ full identities, such as cultural heritage and neurodiversity and everything in-between is necessary to create that feeling of belonging.

Working with another colleague, I learned “Be passionate about your own learning!” Teaching is a practice and one that we strive to get better at doing each year. Learning more about teaching strategies, resources, and new pedagogical research are all ways we can fuel our own professional learning. Trying new strategies helps to deepen our understanding of subject matter and to stay excited about teaching.

I reflect on those conversations and am so grateful to those teachers who gave me a shoulder to lean on and a listening ear. When I think back on the last two decades, it seems like no time has passed since my very first class. I feel like that same new teacher on the inside, though I have been shaped by different experiences and growth – much of that due to conversations and mentorship from those teachers just down the hall.

As educators, I have always thought we have been rather blessed to have at least 2 New Year’s celebrations a year: the one that comes every September, and the one that comes every January 1st. For me, both of these days brings about a slew of self-care goals: to exercise more, eat better, cook more, be more social, or even look more “put together”. More often than not, I start strong, and regress just in time to reset for the next new year.

After years of cycling through all of my “new years” – and never really ever making any permanent lifestyle changes – it occurred to me that I wasn’t putting enough effort into my own self-care. In fact, I mistakenly believed that self care was something that would be instinctive, or simply happen without any expenditure of energy. What I have realized is that real self care comes with work.

This year has been exceptionally busy and Meg, the gym manager invited me to the dreaded new year fitness and nutrition challenge. The gym manager, a very young, fit and enthusiastic woman probably about half my age texted me with a flurry of fire and muscle arm emojis.

“Book the challenge! Commit! Are you in? Yassssss 🔥🔥🔥💪💪💪”

I honestly couldn’t picture myself cooking a whole other menu of food on top of what I was regularly preparing for my own family, all while regularly attending early morning workouts and of course, doing a full time job.

“You can do this. 🔥🔥💪💪Train insane or never change ayeeeee ☠️”

In that moment, I realized that there would never be an “ideal” time to embark on a lifestyle challenge. I had always wanted to clean up my diet and increase my fitness, but always made sure I was way too busy to ever do it in earnest. I had bought into a narrative in which I was the busy teacher-mom that was way too overburdened to do anything for myself. This narrative, I decided, needed to end.

I relented, said yes, and promptly scheduled my body scan so I could get the cold hard facts on what I specifically needed to improve.

Sure, I can book a vacation, a spa visit or an evening at a favourite restaurant and be practicing a version of self care where I feel I have carved out some “me time”. But these moments are fleeting, and end as soon as the bill is paid. These one-off events are fantastic, but do not bring any transformation. The kind of self care that brings lasting change means being consistent, and rethinking the way I approach my work as an educator.

As teachers, it is all too easy to throw ourselves into an endless workflow. In schools and school boards, there are always more things to do than people to do them. The key is knowing when to stop so you can have the energy to funnel to attempt manifesting your own personal goals.

You may be wondering, did I succeed? Did I indeed manifest?

To be honest, it is too early to tell. What I do know was that it was indeed liberating to simply stop answering emails, planning lessons, and reading yet another book on assessment to get to bed early enough to make a 5:45 am workout and make a protein smoothie. And if learning how to interrupt my endless workflow is the only thing that comes out of this whole experience, I will have achieved something truly transformational.

One of my favourite ways to gather assessment is through thinking prompts. I love it because it gives me a quick snapshot of a child’s thinking at that moment. At the beginning of my teaching career, I used to use exit cards to determine whether or not students could understand a concept. Asking them to answer a question or to complete a parallel task were the common types of exit cards I used. As I started to reflect on my teaching practice and student learning, I felt this type of assessment had a certain finality to it. I was trying to find out what the students retained from lessons, but this didn’t leave a lot of room for student voice and reflection. These types of questions seemed content focused. As I became more interested in having students think reflectively about their own learning, I began to change the questions I used and while it took some time and a lot of modelling, these prompts became an important part of assessment that informed my own practice.

Reflecting on Learning Styles

Some thinking prompts help to elicit responses about students’ learning styles. They can be a great tool to arm students with the vocabulary and knowledge to advocate for their identities as learners. I always found this strategy most helpful in meeting student needs, honouring their voices, and being able to help make learning accessible for them. At the beginning of each year, I would begin by sharing about my own learning style with students. For example, I am a slow thinker so I need process time. I am a visual learner and like to learn by seeing things in math. If music with lyrics is playing, I get distracted easily. Sharing these examples empowers students with the knowledge that not everyone learns the same way and it’s okay to need different spaces or accommodations when we are learning something new. Prompts that help students to consider their own learning styles may include, “I could focus or learn better when….” or “I find it was easier to (use ……. strategy) because…..”

A few years ago in a grade four class, we were working on exploring sound. After designing and building musical instruments, I asked the students to finish the sentence, “I could focus on building my instrument better when…” The answers ranged from students who liked frequent check-ins with me through their progress, to those who worked better when they could talk with their friends, to others who liked being able to draw out their design before building. It was interesting for me, as the educator, to be able to see the variety of conditions the students wanted to do their best work. I used the information gathered from those exit cards to prepare for our next experiment and organized spaces in the classroom where students could choose to work based on their reflections.

A Change In Thinking

Sometimes I choose certain sentence starters when I want to encourage reflective thought. It allows me to see where the students’ thinking started and also asks them to reflect on their learning. In my classes, it usually takes some practice and modelling to use these prompts effectively. I would model my own thinking out loud for students during large group discussion. While reading aloud, I would often pause and explain how something changed my mind about a character or prediction and emphasize that when we have new information, our ideas may change. My favourite thinking prompts that encourage this type of response include, “At first I (thought)…. Now I (think)….because…” or “My thinking shifted when….”

I have found this opportunity for reflection gives students a chance to really engage reflectively in their learning and also provides valuable information for me. One year, we had worked with different representations of fractions and I had asked students to think about the prompt, “At first I thought…. Now I think… because….” One of the students shared the idea, “At first I thought fractions looked like pizza, now I think fractions look like linking cubes because the cubes are the same size and pizza slices are not always the same size.” This was far more interesting to me. In the past, I might have asked students to draw a representation of a few different fractions and looked at which representation they might use. With this response, I could see which manipulative was most influential to shift their thinking. I could also see they understood that fractions should be equal parts of a whole. As feedback for me, I could see the representation that helped to build their understanding and I could use that to inform future lessons.

When I think back to being a student, I wonder how I would have responded if I had been asked those reflective questions as a student myself. Would it have still taken me until university before I knew more about my learning style? Would it have changed my relationship with teachers to know that they really cared about what I thought and how I learned? What I love about these thinking prompts are that there is no definitive right or wrong answer; all the answers encourage students to know that I care about their learning, their thinking, and their ideas and that getting the right answer isn’t the most important thing to me. And maybe that’s the real lesson I want them to learn.