My Dream For Public Education!

Also my dream for public education! Children not being grouped in school by their age or grade level.  Instead, transitioning freely from room to room, based on their interests, passions, and natural talents!  I think we're on our way!  I've got my seat belt on and I can't begin to tell you how excited I am for the ride!!!

From Industrial to Agricultural

I haven't posted in a while, but today, I felt strongly to.  Our principal sent a link to a TED talk and asked the staff members to take 15 minutes to watch it.  Well, I did, and I'm fired up!  So now, I'm encouraging you to take 15 minutes to do the same.  Ken Robinson speaks about educational reform and how education thinks it is changing, but reforming is just a fancy way of trying to improve a model that is already broken.  Instead, he urges for a revolution- a transformation into something else.  I bet you can guess what that "something else" is....YUP!  Personalized learning!  Innovation is hard, it's a lot of work, but so, so, so worth it.  Check it out here.

Why Personalized Learning?....Why not?

It just makes sense!

Watch our journey so far!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcfeUcuaDq4

Wowza!

So it’s the beginning of trimester 2, and I don’t know where to start!  The kids in my class are so amazingly smart at this point, that it’s blowing my mind!  They are meeting end-of-the-year expectations left and right.  The most difficult part, recently, has been trying to keep up with where they are going to be.  For example, when your kiddos are flying through sight words, you have to be prepared for the next level.  So making/preparing things for them to be able to reach their new goals has been time-consuming, but amazing all the same!  Who would have ever thought that by December, I would be needing to work on fluency phrases with my kindergartners?!  I don’t care who you are...that’s exciting!  Here's a super cute video of one of my adorable kiddos teaching a little girl how to count by 5's. I caught the tail end of their "lesson," but it was so stinkin' cute...I just have to share!

What’s even more exciting, is that the kids aren't just making academic gains; they are becoming independent in every aspect.  In kindergarten.  At age 5.  Let that sink in.  All the teachers who may be reading this know of the recess struggle this time of year.  It takes the kiddos 15 minutes to put on their snow gear.  You’re ready to pull your hair out because 20 voices are yelling for you to help with mittens, zippers, and good Lord, those snow pants!!  By the time they go outside, they get about 5 minutes to run around before the recess bell rings to come back in and you’re ready for a tall drink!  Well, I don’t want to brag….but I’m the honest one, so I will :)  The very first day we went to put on all the winter gear, I was prepared for the typical whining….but I did nothing.  Nothing.  I literally stood there and watched as every one of my children put on all their own stuff, got ready, and lined up to go outside.  WHAT?!  Well that either had to be a miracle from the big man himself, or it was a fluke.  The next day….same thing!  And it’s not just my class!  Tiff and Alli were both standing in the hallway with their kiddos and we all looked at each other and though, “What is happening?!”  Our only conclusion we can come to, is that the kids are becoming independent in every aspect of their lives.  They are independent learners, and as a result, it is evident in everything they do.  

I recently had a conversation with one of my favorite moms in my class.  She is going to college, has two kiddos, both of which attend our school.  She said something to me about a month ago that really made me happy/thrilled/amazed.  At conferences, we had talked about personalized learning and how it has changed my instruction.  She was like most parents and listened quietly, nodded her head, then left.  She texted me a few days later and said that she’s been thinking about personalized learning.  She thought about how awesome it is for her boys...but more importantly, it’s made her think about the way she learns.  What?!!?  How amazing!  So, the way we teach kindergarten is causing her to think about the best way to learn for herself...in college...OMG!  That’s amazing!    

I can’t tell you enough times….personalized learning is the BEST way to teach.  I will never, ever, ever go back to the old “sit and get” way of teaching.  It’s a ton of work in the beginning (literally), but sooooooooooooo worth it.  So, my challenge to you is this:  What is one thing that you can change this month?  It doesn’t have to be huge, or life altering.  Just one thing that moves your kids in the direction of taking responsibility for their learning.  I guarantee you will see a change.  In the words of Nike, Just Do It!

October Conferences

We just finished up October conferences at our school and, holy cow, was it awesome!  I finally had time to sit down with each of my students’ parents to discuss this crazy thing called “personalized learning.”  I was super nervous to even bring it up.  I mean, what were the parents going to say?  Would they see the benefit?  Would they understand why I would try something like this?  Would they run screaming to the principal to remove their child from my crazy class?  Of course not.  As a matter of fact, it went super.  Great.  Wonderfully terrific.  

I like to start conferences by having all the items I want to cover with the parents in a folder, easily accessible.  That way, I won’t forget what to say.  So, I wrote up a quick blurb about personalized learning, what it is, and a link to this very blog.  So if you’re checking out the blog, parents, this is all about YOU!  I then explained to them how their child is learning in the class, how it looks differently than when we were in kindergarten, and how their child is improving.  Normally, at this conference in October, I show the assessments from the beginning of the year, talk about some of the gains they may have made, and then explain how I expect them to make much bigger gains by the end of the trimester.  You know, the usual.  The amazing thing about this year, though, is that ALL my kids have made HUGE gains already!  There’s no need to hope for an improvement, because they have already grown significantly!  I mean, kids who came into kindergarten with NO sounds, NO letter recognition, NO number recognition, and couldn’t count past 10, are suddenly able to count to 100, know most letter sounds, and can name all capitals and lowers!!  Let me be honest (since that’s what I do best) not all of my students are there yet, but most of them are.  And even with most of them achieving this much, this soon, it’s enough to make me literally tear up from excitement and joy!  So, with that kind of data to back me up, no parent was going to say they wish I would go back to the old ways of teaching where I stand at the front and they have to sit perfectly to listen in order to learn.  I even had parents ask if their child could be in a class like this next year!  That made me happy to think that they saw the merit in the method this soon in the year and want to see it continue.  

The point of this post….I’m so excited that my students and their parents are starting to get just as excited as I am about personalized learning!  I hope you’re getting excited too!

Important

When I started thinking about Personalized Learning last year I had no idea how amazing it was going to be.  Everyday I find myself thinking wow, this is incredible. In fact, I found myself with tears in my eyes last Friday afternoon in my classroom.  The tears came after a week where I had multiple kids not only meet their goals, but double their letter goals, Double!  I had kids come up to me asking if they could work on their goals not only during choice time, but also during their snack.  After a week when one child who came into kindergarten knowing just three sounds meet her goal of 12 then reset her goal for 20, because she wanted to work hard to “be advanced.”  She then worked so hard this week she met that goal and reset her goal to learn 30 letter sounds because she didn't want to stop at 26.  After a week when one child saw another child try to meet their goal and miss it by just one letter and the observing child came over, gave him a pat on the back and said, “keep working hard I know you can do it, I’m proud of you.”  The tears came after a Friday afternoon when Carrie excitedly came into my room because she couldn't wait to tell me about a child in her room who made HUGE gains and blew her goals away.  The tears came as I watched a 5-year-old come skipping over to a chair by me because he was so excited, yes excited, to take a test and show me what he could do.  He sat in the chair bouncing and smiling as he said every single lowercase letter and then proceeded to say every single letter sound including sh, ch, and th.  I could not help myself as I watched him because he was so unbelievable confident in himself, he knew the expectations, knew his goals, knew he had been working hard, and knew he could do it.  Then the tears escaped when I asked him to get his iPad so I could see his goal because, I was sure he had just crushed it.  He opened his iPad and I could not find the icon for the Slides App.  He said, “Miss Arnold it is important so I put it down here,” pointing at the tray on the bottom of the iPad screen.  Yup, that statement on top of a week full of affirmations that this is truly what my classroom needs sent a tear down my cheek.  This child’s recognition that his goals are, “important.”

WE ARE DOING MORE THAN JUST SURVIVING!!!

So, we are a month in and OMG we are all still alive! ;)  Just kidding! Seriously though, all drama aside, I was a little nervous...okay, EXTREMELY nervous to go into this school year with no behavior system.  I thought, "There is NO way!".

Alli and Carrie, fellow kindergarten teachers (#BEST-TEAM-EVER), tried to sell me on the idea and sent me blogs and other articles that were in support of eliminating behavior systems similar to the one we have used in the past.  I've been teaching kindergarten for eight years and for all of those eight years we've used a "Beehive" as our behavior system and tweaked it along the way.  For the past two years, our behavior system looked like this, all bees start in the beehive or on green at the beginning of each day and move up the rainbow to blue and purple if the student makes positive choices and down to yellow, orange, and red if making negative choices.  Before that, for the other six years, the rainbow stopped at green and the students making positive choices just stayed on green...day after day after day.  It was extremely difficult for me to redirect the students making negative choices, by only focusing on their negative behavior all day long.  I was giving them the attention they wanted and needed, but for all the wrong reasons.  On the flip side, it was even more difficult keeping the students who were making positive choices engaged and motivated to continue to make those good choices.  But why would they, they saw all of the attention the other students were getting.   That behavior system and philosophy sounds so completely absurd to me now looking back on it.  I can't imagine redirecting and acknowledging only negative behavior all day long... How draining.  So, the addition of the blue and purple seemed like a super fantastic idea.  Little did I know, that I wasn't focusing on the root of the problem.  It wasn't the kids making the positive choices or the kids making the negative choices.  It wasn't even the KIDS!!!!  IT WAS ME!!!!  ME?!  Yeah, I know!!  Shocker, huh?!

I would have never come to that conclusion if I wouldn't have read the blogs and articles that were shared with me.  After reading them, I was totally and completely SOLD on the idea...well, in theory.  It took 27 very long school days to re-program my brain and shift the way I think as a teacher.  Yes, a teacher and not just a teacher, but a good teacher.  Looking back, as it related to behavior, I don't think I was even being a teacher as much as I was just an OBSERVER.  Think about it.  I observed the behavior and then I moved a bee.  It didn't matter if it was positive or negative.  I provided them feedback with the bee being moved either in one direction or the other just by seeing or hearing about the behavior from other teachers and sometimes even from..."GASP"...their tattle tailing classmates!  No discussion really, just seeing and doing.  It was a crutch.  You get busy with the tasks at hand and the hustle and bustle of the day and it just becomes a reaction.  Move the bee and move on to the next thing.  The saddest part is, that at the end of the day when a child's bee was on orange or red or even blue or purple, not only could the student not remember why their bee was on that color, but neither could I.  How was I going to provide feedback to the parents?  How were the students going to learn from their mistakes or behavior to not continue to make those poor choices?  How and why would the good behavior continue and the poor behavior stop if I continued with this behavior system that provided extrinsic, meaningless recognition and feedback and most importantly, for those students who were consistently on orange and red, a public display of humiliation?

So with all of that being said, what am I doing now?  Well, I am explaining to them what the expectations are and what they look like, sound like, and feel like.  If I see positive behavior, I acknowledge it and provide immediate praise and feedback and discuss and describe it to the whole group.  I praise students individually with a hug, a high five, and/or use kind, caring, encouraging words to thank them for making such a good choice.  I use words like "Respectful", "Responsible", and "Safe".  I am trying to TEACH them that making good choices feels good and that feeling good about your choices is the best reward.  Better than any extrinsic reward that they could possibly get from me or anyone else.  I have also tried to shift away from redirecting behavior that is not impeding the learning of others.  I am more of a distraction to the other 21 students, who are engaged and listening, than that of the 1 students' behavior, if I continuously interrupt my own lesson to ask a student to sit on their pockets criss-cross-applesauce.  This is working for approximately 80% of the students in my classroom and supports the tiered Response to Intervention Model.

The other 15% of my class is responding to the 1-2-3 Magic Strategy in addition to the previously mentioned strategies.  In my classroom, this strategy sounds like, "(Student's name), the expectation is (what I would like them to do, but are currently not)." [Brief pause to see if they comply.] "That's 1."  [Brief pause to see if they comply.]  "That's 2."  [Brief pause to see if they comply.]  "(Student's name), if I say three (realistic immediate consequence)."  [Brief pause to see if they comply.]  "That's 3."  [Immediately enforce the consequence.]

For the other 5%, which is 1 student, I met with a team of teachers, students services staff, and the child's parent(s) to create a more individualized behavior plan for that student to be and feel successful in the classroom.

Now, after only 27 very short days of school and shifting my old way of thinking for the last eight years, I look ahead at the way I am currently addressing student behaviors and I can't imagine doing it any other way.  I refuse to be an "Observer".  I choose to be a TEACHER!!