Monthly Archives: December 2011

Reflections on 2011

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One of the best things I did in 2011 was begin blogging. But I still feel new to the blogosphere.

As I read the 20+ blogs that regularly arrive in my email inbox, it seems almost mandatory to write a post on “the best of…” or “reflections on…” the current year.

In this final post of 2011, I’m taking a risk by employing a more serious tone. This year, while full of lots of highlights, was a bit of a heartbreaker for me. Please don’t think the purpose of this post is for the reader to say, Oh…poor you. I’m writing because it’s most honest to share tough stuff as well as funny stuff.

My mom got sick this year. Cancer. Twice.

Family illness is something most expats face at some time or another. If I had the ambition to do actual research on the topic, I would hypothesize that a large percentage of expats return to their home country because they can no longer be away from specific family members. And, I suspect one of the tipping points that get expats on a plane is a family health concern.

Initial shock. Feelings of absolute helplessness. My mind spiraled through all the worst-case scenarios of treatment. What could I possibly do from 15,000 miles away?

Fly to her as soon as possible.

I accompanied Dad to many appointments, meeting the doctors and nurses. I read up on the treatments, and stayed in the hospital as long as work would allow. I was confident that, regardless of the harshness of treatment, Mom’s medical care was excellent.

Then I had to go back overseas. While with Mom, it was easy to hold myself together emotionally – I had to be strong for her. I returned physically to Hong Kong, but my heart was still in Portland.

Mom got worse. I got an incredibly sad update from Dad. My students were taking standardized tests and I needed to read portions aloud. I couldn’t lose composure.

I went up for a staff “Happy Birthday” celebration and the worst of all possible middle-of-the-day things happened: A colleague put her hand on my forearm, looked me in the eye and said, “I’m so sorry to hear about your mom. How is she doing?”

I lost it. I completely lost all composure. My poor colleague. All I could do was mumble, “Thanks for asking. It’s been a rough day” before I headed to a little alcove by the coffee pot, crunched down into a fetal position, and sobbed.

I don’t remember much about the rest of the day. I know I left for home as soon as the students left. When I got home, all I could do was lay on the bed and continue to let the floodgates open.

Poor Road Warrior (my hubby). He wanted to help but all he could do was hug me.

It seems like I should have advice for expats living through similar circumstances. I don’t. I know that a few things helped immensely:

  • Skype. Even in the worst of times, I could see Mom. I could see Dad. I could make my own assessment as to how bad or good things were at present.
  • Offers of help from those closer to Mom’s location. While I was helpless to do much myself, I could email friends and family, tell them what I saw with Mom and Dad and ask them to help in specific ways. I was always touched by the immediate response.
  • A spiritual foundation. Because I believe in an omnipresent God, I knew that He bridged the distance and kept an ever-watchful eye on things.
  • Expat friends who had experienced similar circumstances. One colleague would ask, “Do you want to talk about it or do you need me to help you hold it together?” What a perfect question.
  • Income that allowed me to see mom whenever I had a week break or long weekend.

I love so many things about living overseas – you read about those things in other posts. However, I can’t pretend that life overseas is always wonderful. Sometimes it really bites. In these cases, you breathe, sob, and get on with it.

So I’m offering a toast to 2012. I’m toasting all the expats who bravely endure family hardships from a distance. I’m toasting all who support us. And, I’m toasting our families. Happy New Year!

An Alternative to Student Gifts

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I was surprised to see that Alabama set policy against students giving gifts to teachers. But I understand many of the reasons behind the rule.

Christmas has always been a little awkward for me. When I taught in low-income public schools, I didn’t want students or their parents spending any of their limited money on me. My first couple years in an international school, my students gave me expensive gifts. I suspected most of the gifts were bought duty-free by parents on their various airline flights.

My school then implemented a policy that gifts could not exceed roughly US$25. Since then I’ve worried about getting an expensive gift and needing to insult the giver by handing it back.

Some cultures are gift-giving cultures. A colleague of mine said that his school in Korea had a similar gift limit policy. Parents found ways around the rule. One example: the teacher was given a Monteblanc pen. He would have given it back – but his name was engraved on the side.

So I tried something different this year. Rather than giving me $25 gifts, I asked students donate the amount to Ember. A group of High Schoolers started Ember to fund girls’ education in rural China. High School education, including uniforms and books, costs US$350. Many high-achieving girls come from families who are unable to afford these costs. If 14 students donated to Ember rather than giving me gifts, a girl could attend High School.

I ran the idea by one of my classroom parents. I asked her if she would be willing to collect the money on my behalf, make the donation, and give me a card with the names of students who made a donation gift. Then I wrote an email to parents explaining my request.

Fourteen of my 24 students donated. I’ve been in contact with the High School students who run the charity. They have chosen a girl to receive the money and the girl will communicate with my class for the remainder of the year.

I don’t have students old enough to deal with issues such as modern slavery. But my student can understand the benefits of education. They can learn about the levels of poverty in rural China. And, they see the High School students that organize Ember as role-models, examples of learners who contribute to society.

Have you ever asked students to give to charity in lieu of giving gifts? What was the reaction?

Can All Classroom Lessons be Flipped?

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I’ve been following articles on the Flipped Classroom Model for some time now. Because my school has a 1:1 MacBook Pro environment, flipped classrooms are very feasible – students have continual access to technology both at home and at school. While I see the advantages of a Flipped Classroom, I note weaknesses that must be addressed.

In a Flipped Classroom, students view instructional videos at home. Classroom time is then used for cooperative learning or project-based learning where students move beyond the knowledge-level mastery to analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Rather than lecture during student contact time, teachers directly interact with individual students and student groups. As a proponent of cooperative- and project-based learning, I’m excited by the idea.

My concern is that proponents of Flipped Classrooms implement an “all or nothing” approach. A video from the Learning Place and one formal research piece, indicate that all lecture videos are viewed at home. A Flipped Classroom assumes that all students will view the videos at home. It also assumes that students have adequate listening skills.

I propose that educators start talking more about Flipped Lessons than Flipped Classrooms.

By discussing Flipped Lessons, the idea of video lecture and active classroom learning becomes one more powerful tool in an educator’s toolbox. Some lessons will be most effective if cooperative groups revolve around books. Other lessons may be most effective if students construct meaning without any teacher lecture.

Flipped Lessons enable teachers to better differentiate instruction within the classroom. An ISTE video was the first I found that mentions the Flipped Classroom approach as a way to differentiate learning. Groups of students may watch brainpop videos, watch teacher-made videos, or engage in specific research tasks while the teacher works with students who need extended instruction or who need a review of specific objectives. Not all videos need to be watched at home. Not all students need the same videos.

When videos are viewed in the classroom rather than at home, students can be paired to watch lectures. In Focus, Mike Schmoker recommends lecture “punctuated by frequent opportunities for students to pair, share, and process their learning.” A lecture watched in an isolated setting will be understood to the extent allowed by the viewer’s listening capacity.

In Rick Hess’s predictions for 2012, he asserts that educators and policymakers will question the flipped classroom approach because of “worry that the model doesn’t work for kids who don’t do the requisite work at home.” If we can discuss Flipped Lessons rather than fully Flipped Classrooms, this powerful teaching tool is much more likely to implemented on a large scale.

Resolutions of a Teacher

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I make resolutions every year, but rarely for classroom teaching. For me, the teaching year begins in August – I make my resolutions at that time. January seems like an almost-halfway point.

Yet, a commitment to Every Child, Every Lesson, Every Day means that resolutions are continually being made. I must reflect on my practice and my lessons, assessing whether or not each student has met an expected standard.

Students have been with me over three months. Many of them do not comprehend fiction as well as I’d like. So, this year (January to June 2012), I resolve to identify specific areas for student growth in fiction comprehension and pull small groups of students until they all demonstrate the necessary skills.

This resolution is tricky because all nine of our fifth grade classrooms are in the midst of a nonfiction reading unit. So, I will have to simultaneously check for fiction and nonfiction comprehension. I have three weeks between Christmas and Chinese New Year. What can I accomplish in that amount of time?

So here is my plan:

  • Between now and January 2nd, I will reread my favorite books on reading comprehension. These include Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension for Understanding and Engagement by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis and What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction, Third Edition edited by Alan E. Farstrup and S. Jay Samuels.
  • On January 2nd, I will review students’ final fiction assessments. Students will be grouped by needed skills.
  • Students who need additional teaching will choose from a limited number of fiction books. The books will be used for re-teaching necessary reading skills. A skill will be taught in one chapter and students will be expected to demonstrate mastery in the subsequent chapter.
  • Students will re-take the final assessment, basing their answers on the recently-chosen book.

What do you want to accomplish in the first few weeks of 2012? Would you recommend other books on teaching comprehension skills?

Teaching Partners: Inspiration for Better Instruction

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Ninety percent of the time, I love having a teaching partner. Ten percent of the time, a teaching partner is like a parent making me take cough syrup.

For me, poetry is the cough syrup of teaching. When I was in school, poems were those short pieces in the basal reader stuck between the longer stories. During the daily “reading” time, the class was instructed to round-robin read the first half of the story, independently read the end, and answer the comprehension questions – in complete sentences, of course. I got all those questions right. Then we silently read the poems and answered comprehension questions. I got those all wrong. Some esoteric truth was written between those lines – a truth that felt as evasive as the seventh grade boys during a slow dance.

This past weekend, my teaching partner went to a poetry workshop. He came back excited to read a poem a week, helping students use imagery and inference to decipher deeper meanings. I resisted the urge to grimace. Somewhere deep inside, I knew poetry was good for me – and good for my students.

If we didn’t co-teach the same 44 students, I might happily slip through the rest of my career teaching everything in reading except poetry. But alas, I need to learn to teach poetry confidently. My students will know if I’m faking my way through it.

…Which brings me to the great side of team teaching. My partner is willing to teach lessons one day ahead of me. I videotape his lessons and copy them the subsequent day.

This week, students read “Night Story” by Beverly McLoughland.

When the blue page of day
Is turned to night,
An alphabet of stars
Is printed, small and bright,
On dark and ancient-storied skies

We read the universe
With wondering eyes.

Today, my students did a “first blush” read of the poem and drew their imagery in a 3″ by 3″ square. As I watch the videotape of my partner’s second lesson, I learned that tomorrow my students and I will analyze the poem line by line. Students will check off the lines that they were able to capture in their pictures and highlight the lines they could not adequately represent in a drawing.

In the videotaped lesson, my partner talks about getting to know poems like we get to know people. The first couple of readings, we are introducing ourselves and getting first impressions. Then we get to know the poem better, little by little, through multiple encounters. I get that. And, I will sincerely enjoy sharing that insight with students tomorrow. Students will then circle key words that should be represented in their second drawn image – the image that comes to mind now that they “know” the poem better.

My teaching partner also mentioned that, while novels create movies in our minds, poems create pictures or snapshots. Now I see myself in Madrid’s Museo Prado staring at the El Greco paintings. Can words really create the same feeling?

At the end of the lesson, students compared their first drawn image with their second. Here are a couple of examples:

Student 1, Day 1

Student 1, Day 2

Student 2, Day 1

Student 2, Day 2

While I’m not an expert at examining students’ poetic imagery, I see from the pictures that the poem is becoming clearer and more personal to the students. The work these students do inspires me to elicit the same quality work from my own students.

Teaching partners make me a better teacher. They push me out of my comfort zone and model lessons. As I analyze the students’ work, I see how good poetry is for building skills of imagery and analysis – skills that will make students better readers of prose.

I’m taking the cough medicine and finding it’s not that bitter after all.

What can colleagues teach you? Can you partner up with anyone and share videotapes of lessons?