I have been spending more time as of late reflecting on the past school year as I slowly and calmly begin to think about the year before me. These reflections aren’t the summer scaries surfacing up in me. I am noticing that these reflections are more rooted in the desire to let go of things that didn’t work from a year of pandemic teaching and lift up the things that did and in the process maybe even add some ideas that I am not even aware of yet.
This last year was the most challenging of my career. Upon reflecting on these difficulties I have noticed many highlights, many things that worked incredibly well, and some decisions that I made that I want to revisit in the coming year. I’d like to share some of them with you here and call on you to reflect on whether what worked with my students could impact yours.
One decision I made was to invite more colleagues into my classroom to support students as often as I could. I wanted my students to engage in as much small group discourse and learning conferencing as possible. I have observed time and time again over my career that these conversations in learning are incredibly helpful for students to understand themselves better as learners, to set clear and personalized goals for themselves, and to feel supported in taking on more agency over learning. If these are the benefits I have observed from students conferring with one another and with adults, I wondered what would happen if we had more teachers in the room to help in this process?
I know we all have different structures that restrict or liberate us in working with one another in the classroom setting. Although you may have less access to the opportunities below or perhaps more, please try to see yourself in this work. Please consider: how can I invite more educators into my classroom to help my students?
I focused these efforts in one particular class. I was able to bring in another teacher for a handful of lessons and combined with the educational assistant in the room this class now had three educators present to support them in their learning. I knew that simply adding in more adults to a space wouldn’t garner the impact I was aiming for. With this in mind the three of us co-created how we would support students within the structure of having more teachers in the room.
We spent time discussing our learners and their strengths and stretches. We wanted to use our collective experience, the added relationships in the room, and our perhaps differing and unique perspectives to help paint a more robust portrait of each learner. This work was exciting as it didn’t merely occur amongst us, the three teachers in the room. We did this work as though this was the content of our lesson plan. We engaged kids in understanding themselves better as learners and their strengths and stretches. We noticed that the more we brought these questions and conversations to students, the richer the information was that we were gathering about them and we could in turn use this information to design learning that better supported students. Further, as we engaged in this work with students, they were simultaneously getting to know themselves better as learners. It was a win/win that had a cascading effect on students feeling a sense of belonging, agency, and competency development.
We also created a series of guiding questions that would help us in our observing of learning and shape who would receive particular and intentional support moving forward in the class on a macro level (long term over the duration of the course) and a micro level (day to day and minute to minute within the lesson). For example, one question we asked ourselves was who is engaged in their learning and who is not? and used this question to inquire into our inquirers. We found ourselves becoming better observers as we began to really lean into an assessment practice that was timely, authentic, and highly impactful when it came to helping students in their learning. We found that we were beginning to recognize some stale routines and patterns that at times we were getting caught up in. In essence, as we became more observant of students in learning and we got to know them better, we were unpacking our own biases as teachers and this clarity allowed for more equity and responsiveness in the classroom. It was magical.
Another commitment we made was to the act of collaborative reflection. We agreed that we would take on a few actions in our practice. We would try and more mindfully observe learning, document learning evidence of what we noticed, and we would share this evidence with one another throughout lessons and before and after class. We found ourselves having many small and intimate conversations about our learners and about our practice. We would share something we noticed, we would unpack something a student shared with one of us, or we would lift up an experience or move that had a positive impact on a student. Essentially, this collaborative reflective process was a crash course in getting to know our students better, what we could do to help them in their learning, and how we could co-create as teachers in the space a more meaningful and successful learning experience for all. It also led to some powerful evidence being documented that we ended up using with students in their portfolios and on their report cards.
Undeniably there were a few undperinning strengths to this work that accelerated the impact we witnessed from this collaboration.
We were curious educators. We all were up for questioning how we could best meet the needs of our students and what would happen if we had more teachers in the room to help in the learning process?
We were collaborative educators. We wanted to work together because we knew the benefit of our collective experience and differing perspectives.
We were responsive educators. We were willing to be agile in our time with students and allow what we were noticing and observing - that timely and authentic assessment practice referenced above - to guide immediate pivots, moves, and decisions.
We were inquiry educators. We wanted to learn from our students. We wanted to shift our practice. We wanted to engage our students in the learning to a degree in which they felt a genuine sense of belonging and ownership. And we wanted this for ourselves as well: to engage in our learning to a degree in which we felt a genuine sense of belonging and ownership.
Simply adding more adults to a classroom setting was not the solution. The impact of having more adults in the classroom setting resides in how we spent our time together and with students. It resides in how we inquired and how we embodied inquiry. This is something I am very much looking forward to exploring more in the coming school year.