As part of the PDAS system, teachers create professional development goals to help shape individual growth through a school year. In past years, my professional goals have varied from "prepare, sit for, and passs the fill in content area certification test" to "successfully complete 12 hours of graduate school for a degree in whatever I was working on at the time."
This year, I wrote a goal to create two blog posts per month. One of the posts must be a reflective piece of what's happening in Stout Nation (aka the classroom) or my teaching; the other post must be a blog that connects what I'm doing in Stout Nation to make our campus vision become tangible.
This post speaks to our campus vision. Here's what our vision statement says:
"Our vision is to create inquisitive and passionate problem solvers by teaching the whole child to become positive contributors to our community."
For September's vision post, I'd like to write about how a behavior reteaching moment made me stop and think about our school's vision.
The situation: two first grade boys were lining up leave right after I had given a classroom reminder about my expectations when we line up. One boy, we'll call him Cal, started pushing another boy, we'll call him Sam. There wasn't enough space in line for both boys. Usually, we would problem solve this and send one boy to the end of the line where there's more space. That's a no-brainer, right? Not so fast, friend.
The grade level teacher has the students line up in number order. Sam is number 5 and Cal is number 6. They have to go together in line because that's the expectation that the grade level teacher has set for her students. No biggie; I'm more than happy to make this happen for her at the end of specials. Afterall, I've never met a logical procedure that I didn't like. :) I gave Sam and Cal a moment to work things out on their own, but Cal kept pushing Sam's back with his hands, and Sam kept pushing back with his own back.
It wasn't pretty.
I asked both boys to stay after class so I could talk with them. The first grade classes left and the second grade classes were hot on their heels coming in for their music lesson. Before I started the lesson, I told the second graders something had happened in first grade and that I had some friends who need their help and some good ideas. I had Sam and Cal come in the room and I re-enacted what happened in line in front of the second graders. I then asked, "What could they have done differently to help each other line up?"
About 12 hands shot up into the air. We talked through solutions. We expanded ideas. We tried out a few things. Sam and Cal got a chance to practice a re-teaching moment where I wasn't the main teacher--the second graders were. Older peers were working to help my Sam and Cal come up with better choices. Every interaction surrounding this reteaching experience was positive and calm, and Sam and Cal had smiles on their faces the entire time because they were getting some help from the big kids.
Oh, and the second graders were elated to be the smarty pants kiddos in the room! Because they are--just ask them!
After this interaction, I immediately thought of the "create inquisitive and passionate problem solvers" line from our vision statement. I feel a bit sheepish that I had the second graders be problem solvers with Sam and Cal for a problem that was really more a problem for me than it was a problem for anyone else. And then I paused and thought, "No, that's okay that you had them problem solve something that's a procedure. Because they could've fallen over with their pushing and shoving and knocked over other kids who weren't even involved. Human dominoes, Stout. It was a good process."
The interest that the second graders took in talking to Sam and Cal was encouraging. They didn't say their ideas to me; they spoke directly to Sam and Cal. HOW POWERFUL!
In the moment of having the second graders help Sam and Cal come up with alternate ideas, they made the vision statement come alive for me and become tangible.
How cool!