Abrupt About-Face

On May 19th, the province of Nova Scotia announced that all schools would continue to do remote learning for the remainder of the school year. Although this was sad, it was a decision. If you read my previous post, you'll know that the uncertainty is what is most stressful for me. I was glad that a decision had been made, and that I could move forward with planning the last 6 weeks of school to be as full of engaging learning opportunities for my students as possible. 

Yesterday (Friday, May 28), a mere 9 days after this announcement, that decision has been reversed. I am headed back to school on Wednesday June 2nd. I found out about this in a press conference (which, as an aside, was extremely confusing and did not provide clear information on a number of issues). I found out about this at 3:30pm on a Friday afternoon.

I am so frustrated by the decision to make an abrupt about-face, which was done without consultation with teachers.

I am so frustrated by the fact that the planning I spent the past week doing, in order to be the best I can be for my students, now needs to be modified yet again. Teaching online does not mean just taking activities that can be done in person and doing them online. Likewise, teaching in person does not mean I can just do the things I had planned when students were going to be learning from home.

I am so frustrated that my students, who had just started to get into a good routine, and who were coming to terms with how their school year would end, now have to go through a surprise transition back into the classroom.

I am so frustrated by the lack of answers to the following questions, which I believe are crucial to a safe and positive reopening of school buildings : 

• In what ways has the Back to School Plan from August 2020 been updated to reflect current understandings of the spread of Covid-19 and its variants?
• Based on the current restrictions in place in Nova Scotia, what are the Public Health directives for:
• seating in a classroom where distancing is not possible
• eating lunch indoors, where distancing is not possible
• having students work in groups
• masking in outdoor spaces (if this is still the recommendation for places like outdoor markets)
• masking during Physical Education / Music classes 
• What are the plans for families choosing not to have their children return to the classroom for the remainder of the year? Is there a plan in place to ascertain who these students are prior to Wednesday? From the perspective of the Region / Department, what are the responsibilities of the teacher if a family chooses to keep their child at home?
• What is the plan for students who miss time due to vaccination appointments / needing to self isolate for testing (possibly for 14 days)?
• Is it possible that Public Health be looking to provide vaccinations to students at schools before the end of June?

This back-to-school plan feels hasty, unnecessary, and not thoroughly considered, consulted upon or explained.  

Returning to Physical Classrooms - Some Thoughts

 I wrote a long thread on Twitter today, about my thoughts as we prepare to in-person classrooms three weeks from today. Here is the text of that thread : 

Context : I am a public school teacher in Nova Scotia, Canada. We have 4 active cases of Covid-19 in the province. We are requiring a 14-day self-isolation period for all travellers coming from outside the Atlantic provinces. Masks are required in all indoor public spaces for people 2 years of age and up (grocery stores, restaurants, hair salons, etc.) Masks will be required in the classroom for grades 4 and up where students are not able to be 2m apart (read: the majority of classrooms)

Compliance with the above measures are part of the reason we have so few cases in the province. We did the work to limit opportunities for the virus to spread. We will continue to do what we can to limit the spread when we return to our physical buildings with students in 3 weeks.

There are many valid concerns about class sizes not allowing for physical distancing in classrooms, about where students and staff will eat lunch, about how we will navigate frequent hand washing/sanitizing of surfaces, and about the state of our ventilation systems. 

Teachers, myself included, have indicated that we need more time to prepare to welcome students back into physical classrooms in September. The physical reasons listed above are part of that - we need time as school staff to discuss what those things will look like for our specific sites. In addition, we need time to debrief the past 6 months, in the context of a global pandemic, the science-denial happening in parts of the world, systemic racism, and the fact that we will have staff and students alike who view school as an unsafe place right now.

 

We need time to reconnect with our colleagues in an authentic, compassionate way. This isn't something that can be done in two days while we are doing all of the other things that need to happen before students walk through the doors of our classrooms. How are we? What do we need? Who is struggling? Who is in a space to provide support to others? What does it feel like to be in physical proximity to so many people outside of our own families again? These questions are so important to discuss/consider before we interact with students.

Having time to collectively consider/discuss those questions is essential. Lori Desautels says we need to secure our own oxygen mask first. There will be a lot coming up for the adults in the building that needs to be addressed before we are ready to help students.

We also need time to plan how we will run our classes with the restrictions in place. My classroom involves small-group collaboration, sharing of art materials, circle discussions, one-on-one conferences, whole-class discussions, and lots of opportunities for movement. I use a wide variety of strategies to practice "brain intervals" or "brain breaks", many of which are self-directed and involve the use of physical objects such as puzzles, games, fidgets, and brain teasers. I need time to rethink these strategies in ways that are safe. My classroom environment is what I call “organized chaos” - students make choices about where to work, and have open access to technology and supplies. I begin the year with a collaborative design challenge inspired by John Spencer. I need time to plan how to do this in a new context. 

Sitting in rows all facing forward doesn't lend itself to the best practices I have developed over my 16 years as a middle school teacher. I need time to collaborate with other teachers in order to find ways of delivering the best possible educational experience for students. We need time, not just to understand new procedures and health guidelines, but to come together and plan a way forward in a very different environment. 

Alex Shevrin Venet says students and staff are likely to be hyper-vigilant when we return to in-person classrooms. Every sniffle and cough may be scrutinized, every improperly worn mask may be pointed out. Staff need time to develop strategies to help mitigate this hyper-vigilance.

I am excited to return to my classroom in person, and I need time to get ready. What could staff do better if we were given the first week to prepare in a meaningful way, before students enter our classrooms?

Covid-19 and Connections

I wrote an extended Twitter thread today, and wanted to put it up here as well :

(If you are wondering how to use Flipgrid, I made a post about it here)

Back to School - Year Fifteen!

School starts up in a couple of weeks here in Nova Scotia, and I can hardly wait! I appreciate having the summer to relax and reset, and to find time for independent professional development, and I also love heading back to school. I've had another commitment that is keeping me very busy these last couple of weeks before school starts, and I'm feeling the itch to get into my classroom and get set up.

Similarly to last year, I have sent out a letter to each of my incoming grade 8 students, and prepared our Google Classroom and Flipgrid introduction topic. I've also written a letter to parents/guardians this year, inspired by Monte Syrie and Allison Krasnow, which will go home the first day of school. My letter outlines things I want them to know, and also invites them to tell me about their child.

Here's a copy, feel free to modify & use if you wish!

 

It's important to me to maintain positive connections with my students' caregivers, and it's not something that I've always been particularly good at doing. Over the past few years, I've made it a priority to communicate regularly, sending both important information as well as personal notes about students (I use the add-on Email Parents to help organize this) I've received a lot of positive feedback from parents about this practice, and I feel very good about the open lines of communication that this creates.

Connections Matter

In August last year, before school began, I sent out a letter to all of my incoming grade 8 students. I wanted to set up the importance of connections before they even set foot in my classroom. We did Morning Circle every day, we talked about intentionally creating a community, we shared smiles and frowns.

I've always tried to make my classroom a strong community, and this is the first year that I made such an explicit effort to let my students know what my intentions were. I don't know why I hadn't been this explicit before, and I will absolutely continue to include students in my thought-processes, and in helping to build our community together.

To bookend the year, I wrote a letter to my students to include in their report card envelopes on the last day of school. I am not the first teacher to have this idea of course! I drew inspiration from many other teachers on Twitter, and ultimately I am very pleased with the list of life lessons I wrote up for my students.

Here is what I wrote. If it can be of use to anyone else, I'm happy to share :

Connections matter. In person, in writing, always.

A Funny Little Experiment

I've been working on an experiment for the past few months, and it came up in conversation with a colleague this morning so it must be time to write about it! The experiment is simple. I have mostly eliminated the words "but" & "however" from my vocabulary.

Now, this may sound bizarre to you. "But what about when you need to say something and then say the opposite?" you may be shouting at your screen. Well, I have replaced those words with "and", "also" & "additionally." How does this sound in practice in the classroom? Here's an example of how a conversation might go:

"Mme Gaudet, I'm thinking of making a flamethrower for my Passion Project, would I be allowed to do that?"

Option 1 : Yes, but you will have to get permission and be safe.
Option 2 : Yes, and we will discuss ways that you can be safe while you do that.

The "Yes, but" option sounds a lot like "No", while the "Yes, and" response doesn't close off any avenues.

I'm also consciously using "and" instead of "but" when giving instructions and feedback to students. "This project will be challenging, and I know that we can do it." Rather than setting up a dichotomy between what is challenging, and what we can do, I link the two ideas together and it becomes as if one follows naturally from the other.

I don't know if this shift in language is evident to my students, or if it is having an effect on their perceptions. I hope so. I hope that they hear in my words a sense of possibility, a sense of openness, a sense of "and".

Students and Passions and Blogs, Oh My!

This week marks the beginning of Passion Projects 2019! I introduced the concept yesterday to huge enthusiasm from my grade 8s, several of whom have older siblings and who have been waiting for this project to begin with great anticipation.


This year, I am trying something different. A common refrain, as readers of this blog - and my students - know by now! I have asked all students to set up a blog and to share the link right away. In the past, I have had students create blogs (or paper journals) but only share them at the end of the eight weeks. This time, I want students to be able to view each others' blogs throughout the project, in the hopes that having an authentic audience will encourage them to take more initiative in documenting their progress.

All students have created their basic blog, and some have written fairly extensive first entries! I am super excited to see where this goes. There were a few students absent today, so I will update this list once they have had a chance to create their blog. Happy reading!

Tanisha - Makeup
Alex - Flamethrower
Ryland - Potato Launcher
Cole - Lego
Makayla - Getting in Shape
Emily - Learning songs on the Guitar
Emma - Nature Photography
Aidan - Free Throws
Maddy - Learning to play Violin
Monica - Cooking
Kalan - Building a little house
Skye - Learning Italian
Carmen - Composing music
Milo - Learning Norwegian
Adrianna - Protecting Sea Turtles
Julian - Cardboard Projectiles
Nash - Creating a Painting
Luc - Smoke Bomb
Adam - Creating a Rap/Hip-Hop Song
Amelia - Learning German 
Stuart - Food Delivery Robot
Ryan - Homemade Go-Kart 


At the end of working on this today, students did not want to leave for lunch. One approached me and said, "I just want you to know that this project is revolutionary. Not just for me, but everyone in the class is so excited about this." Music to my ears!

For more information on how I do my Passion Projects, you can see the website I created for students or my blog post from 2017

It's the Little Things

Sometimes, it's the smallest things that stand out. I had to be out of my classroom today to fill in for the principal. This was a sudden occurence, for a sad reason, and it is the day after March Break. My plan was to spend the day reconnecting with my students, checking in, getting excited for the final stretch of this school year.  

When I am going to be out of my classroom, especially if it is unexpected, I always email my students with a plan of what the day will entail. I teach my homeroom for upwards of 3 hours per day, in a variety of different subject areas, so prepping for a substitute can be a daunting process. Emailing the students puts some of the onus on them to get things accomplished even when I'm not in the room. It cuts way down on, "But the substitute didn't tell us what we were supposed to do!" 

Although my students are growing up as "digital natives", they are not very diligent at checking their emails. I often will include a little challenge at the end, so that those who do read all the way through have a fun response to send to me (and a reward in Classcraft for such a response never goes amiss!) Last night, as I will not likely have time to check in with each of them today, my challenge was for them to send me a picture expressing how they feel about coming back to school after March Break. The two that I chose to include reflect the excitement I feel about our upcoming Passion Projects, our end of year Interdisciplinary Unit, and my normal excitement at reconnecting with my students after a break.

Here are the pictures I received from five students in response:

 

It's the little things that make a difference. Emailing to let my students know I will be out of the classroom is a tiny, easy thing - I copy and paste notes from the plans I make for my substitute. Letting them know I am excited to see them again costs me nothing, and the responses I get tell me so much (I'll be checking in with the student who sent "ok" and no picture to make sure things are really OK with them). Even though I'm not in my classroom today, I feel like I reconnected in a small way.

Creative, Autonomous, Accountable

We have been using Flipgrid quite a lot this year - it's one of my favourite new finds. I dabbled a bit last year, but this year I've made a concerted effort to use it more consistently. I've made some progress in that area, and I'm looking forward to using it more effectively as time goes by.

This is the tool fo you if you have ever wanted a way for students to provide a verbal/video response to a prompt without needing to host the video somewhere (eg film on an iPad, then upload to Google Drive, then share... so many steps!) Students can log in with their school email credentials and record a video right away. The teacher has control over whether the videos are private or viewable by other students in the class (or, in fact, by other students with the link to the "grid")

There are lots of great resources created by teachers for integrating the use of Flipgrid in the classroom and beyond. For example :

Flipgrid eBook - The Educators' Guide to Flipgrid. This has everything you need to get started. How to sign up, how to give your students access, how to go beyond simple videos.

Flipgrid Integration - So many ideas for integrating Flipgrid in specific subject areas, for specific ages!


Following Global School Play Day (see last week's post), I asked my students to reflect on their experiences. I recorded a video prompt in Flipgrid, and provided them with some reflection questions to consider.

I was out sick, so this was an activity that I was able to leave for my students to complete with a substitute (another perk to using Flipgrid!). Many responses were thoughtful and detailed some (as is often the case in middle school when there is a substitute) lacked depth. When I do this again next year, I will take more time to prepare my students to respond thoroughly.

Most of the feedback I received was very positive. Students were happy to have had a "break from the normal school day." For the most part, students felt that the expectations had been followed by their peers, and that it was a fun experience. Many of them commented on the fact that it was enjoyable to be able to do what they wanted, when they wanted, speaking to the fact that a "normal" school day is generally structured by the teacher. I am interested in exploring how more of that freedom can be incorporated into my classroom.

One of the comments that was surprising to me came from a grade 8 student. She stated first that she enjoyed Global School Play Day, but that, "I wished there were more activities I could do, because I was kind of bored. Like, if I was allowed to, like, build a fort, I would be pretty happy."

I was surprised by this response because I tried very hard to be clear that I was not putting any limits on what students were "allowed" to do. In fact, I explicitly stated that, as long as they were following the expectations we established together, anything was possible. All of the students in my classroom chose to spend most of the day playing either cards or board games, so I wonder if she felt that building a fort would break some sort of unspoken rule. I will absolutely follow-up with this particular student, to determine how I could have made it clear that any activity was possible.

Students' Flipgrid responses

Another comment that came from multiple students, and one that didn't surprise me at all, was that they wished there had been more organization to the day. They are so used to having their time scheduled for them, they struggled when they were given freedom to choose their own paths. I see this in project work as well, and I hope that having experienced this day of unstructured play will allow them to draw some comparisons when it comes time to choose their passion projects, or other free-choice ways of showing their learning.

Thinking creatively, making decisions autonomously, and holding themselves accountable are skills I strongly encourage in my students. These are the skills they will need moving forward. These are skills we could all stand to improve upon.

It Takes Time, and it is Incredibly Worth It

Today was Global School Play Day (globalschoolplayday.com) and my students and I participated wholeheartedly. There was a wonderful hum in the room all day, with all of my students engaging in unstructured play time. They organized themselves, chose their activities, rose to the expectations we had set out, and generally had an awesome day. The activities they chose were varied and completely self-directed.

Some students preferred to spend their time reading...

... or drawing ...

... or learning to play chess!

Some of the highlights from the day include:

- My newest student (arrived just three weeks ago) noticing someone not being included and inviting them to take part in a game without making a big deal out of it.

- The sincere and sudden vocal excitement from all players when another player took a risky move in Black Jack and it paid off. The rest of the activity in the classroom stopped and we all revelled in the glory of a well-timed risk.


- This exchange, fully embracing the expectation to be good communicators :
     "Do you feel like playing Spot It with me?"
     "Not right now, but when I'm done this game of Solitaire I will."
     "OK, sounds good."




- This statement when I approached a group playing Cranium, showing their willingness to improvise. "We don't really know what the actual rules are, so we made up our own. Is that OK?" YES.




One of the most important contributors to the success of GSPD was the lead-up over the two days preceding the actual event. As a class, we spend a significant amount of time focused on building strong community, so I already have some structures in place to set expectations collaboratively with my students. For this activity, I began by outlining my expectations of them for the day.

Students then took some time to come with expectations they had of me and of each other. Each class came up with their own, and the differences in their expectations is reflective of the culture of the individual classes. The grade 8s spend a lot of time with me (at least 3 hours daily), while the grade 7 class only comes to me for an hour each day. As a result, we haven't had as much time to focus on community building.

Grade 8 Expectations

Grade 7 Expectations

We also talked about what they were excited about for a day devoted to unstructured play, and what they were worried or concerned about. This part of the conversation was very helpful to me, as it let me put some of their worries to rest (some worried about what would happen if a toy was accidentally broken, some that they would not be able to handle a full day without an adult organizing them into activities and groups, others that there might be judgement about what games or activities people chose) I was so impressed with their openness in sharing their worries, and the care they took in responded to the concerns of others (some of the expectations above came out of the conversation about worries) Without those conversations ahead of time, I think our day could have played out very differently. Having a list of expectations that we co-created allowed me to quickly make reference to #4 for example, and students would use them to remind each other of what they should be doing.

This student taught multiple classmates how to play chess over the course of the day

Students creating a marble maze together

I had a moment of concern when I sent out my memo to parents last week, explaining the event. We have had some school closures lately because of weather, and this would be another day without "real school", but I did not receive any negative responses from parents at all. I've been really focused on building community with my parents this year as well, through very regular communication about what goes on in our classroom. I hope and believe this has contributed to a certain level of trust when it comes to some of the paths I take with my students.

Grade 7s at play!

Building a strong community is the reason I can engage in the types of activities I write about on this blog. It takes time, and it is incredibly worth it.

Not All of Them, Not All of the Time, but Enough

In 2011, Xara Choral Theatre was approached by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to create a piece of choral theatre for the Halifax event. I was fortunate to be part of Xara Choral Theatre's commissioned adaptation of the book Fatty Legs. The book tells the story of one Inuit girl's experiences at Residential School in Aklavik. For that first performance in front of 500 survivors, we were honoured to have Olemaun, the Inuit girl of the book, and her daughter-in-law Christy join us as our narrators.

I felt great shame and anger in 2011. It was the first I had ever heard of the Indian Residential Schools in Canada, and I felt that my education system had failed me epically. At the time, I had already been a middle school teacher for 7 years, and the feeling that I had been failing to educate my students about the realities of Indigenous experiences in Canada was upsetting. Every year since then, I have made it a priority to read Fatty Legs with my students, and to spend time discussing the legacy of residential schools beyond that one story.

We have remounted our choral theatre production of Fatty Legs three times since 2011, once for a tour of schools in the Maritimes, and twice for school shows in Ontario. My students have been overwhelmingly supportive of the time I need to take away from my classroom in order to bring this story to other children.

This year, following my two weeks away on tour, we were fortunate enough to be able to organize a Google Hangout with Olemaun and Christy. My grade 8 students took time in advance to prepare questions, and to organize the classroom in a way that would look and feel welcoming over a video chat (we went through several iterations of this, using the projector to gauge how we would look to a viewer - they wanted to avoid looking "intimidating, like we're ganging up on them.")

My students blew me away with their insightful questions, the intentness with which they listened, and their respect for Olemaun's lived experiences. They were kind, they prefaced their questions with some of the reasons why they were asking, they asked follow-up questions that showed they were really listening and reflecting during the conversation. Not all of them, not all of the time, but enough that the flow of the dialogue was natural and did not feel like an interrogation.




Forty-five minutes is barely enough time to scratch the surface of the legacy of residential schools, nor is it adequate for students who are speaking with an elder from a First Nations community (most of them for the first time). Afterwards, I asked students to reflect in writing on what had resonated the most with them in the conversation, and if they had any further questions that had come out of hearing the perspectives offered by Olemaun and Christy.

Below are some of the highlights. Some students chose not to respond to the writing prompt (this is always their right during our writing periods), but many did, and what they had to say revealed significant understanding and reflection.