Hearts Bigger Than our Classrooms ~ David Bowie - Heroes (Live AID)

Prompt: What are you most proud of to date in your teaching career?

It has to be that my heart is bigger than my classroom.

As I was pushing myself at the gym this morning, and pushing myself not to develop bigger muscles but to develop a BIGGER SPIRIT...

I saw a shirt that said:

DREAMS WORK

WHEN

YOU WORK

I immediately thought of how that perfectly matches my classroom motto:

DREAM BIG

DO BIG

BE BIG

Which was inspired by Robin Williams who inspired me to leave the world of business to become a teacher because of his role in Dead Poets Society. 

When I asked him to send something that would inspire my students to achieve their own dreams, he sent this...

To Mr. Stuart's Class

Dream Big

And I thought, "Yes!" That's the answer!

He dreamed big and became big only because he DID big! 

And the birth of my classroom motto was born:

DREAM BIG

DO BIG

BE BIG

So as I left the locker room ready to live life to the fullest and bring out the best in my students I heard in my head:

You are a developer of heroes today!

Believe you can do it

Because every one of them are worth it!

No sooner had I left the locker room than I ran into the mother of a former student who I used to read to @ 7 years ago. She wasn't even my student, but she was a wonderful young spirit who had just moved to America and was nervous about her lack of English. 

So to help her after school each day she would come up from her Kindergarten class to my 5th grade class where she, I and my own three children would lie down on bean bags and read stories to her. 

Looking down at her smiling face filled me with joy and I thought: 

When we are young

and covered in love,

We completely believe

we are gifts from above.

This girl is now in middle school, and has been covered in so much love from her mother and teachers that she is earning straight A's, excelling at track and chosen to be the vice-president of her class. 

When our hearts are bigger than our classrooms, we help change the world in a big way. 

Thank you te@chthought for your 30 Day Reflection on Gratitude. I probably wouldn't have written this without your prompt. 

And thank you Robin Williams and that young girl, Sofia, without whom I wouldn't have been able to write this post. I'm very proud of the hero you've become :-)

Going to Bed with Smiles on our Faces

Today was a good day. We all got a lot of things done. Coupons were cut. Shopping was done. Help with homework was given. And after a month off after surgery, workouts were begun.

Pleasantly worn out from a very productive day, everyone was ready to call it a goodnight and head out of sight when low and behold little Lily arose with an Apples to Apples game to play for Family Game Night.

One-by-one we were slowly recruited, until all six of us around the table were seated. And as the game began and later a winner was sung, everyone ignored the end-of-game rules and play continued.

When we finally broke camp and hugs and kisses were exchanged, a warm glow overtook my heart and I saw that we were all going to bed with smiles on our faces.

Be Afraid of Being Afraid

Teach Thought 30 Day Blogging Challenge ~ Day 30 ~ What would I do as a teacher if I weren’t afraid?

 I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid of anything! Who, me? No way.

OK, seriously, What would I do?

Well, first, what am I afraid of?

It’s not receiving a bad evaluation. I care more about being an
effective teacher than I do about being seen as one.

So I’m not afraid of that.

 I’m not afraid of what others think. I am excited that they do think. Not about me, but about what they can do to be the ultra-effective teacher they dream of in their hearts.

 Hmmmm. Parents? No

I guess I’d keep doing what I keep trying to do, no matter the problems it causes; identify what each child needs to know, and provide exciting and as individualistic lesson plans as possible.

This is very different from what most parents know, and often we fear what we don’t understand.

 So, I guess I’ll continue being unafraid of parents being fearful of my teaching style at the beginning of every year.

Teaching ~ Fire Fighter Style

Teach Thought 30 Day Blogging Challenge ~ Day 29 ~ How have I changed as an educator since I first started teaching?

 

How have I changed?

Clear learning goals and targets to get those goals, and teaching in digestible chunks.

By deconstructing learning goals I now am able to create leveled learning targets to help more students achieve the learning goal.

By teaching these learning targets I force myself to teach in digestible chunks. Because of my love and excitement for learning and discovering new knowledge I tend to “teach everything all at once”.

Although my students have always loved the excitement and fun of my classroom, they sometimes came away feeling overwhelmed and incapable of achieving the learning goals.

Some parents even pulled their kids from my class saying they, “weren’t smart enough to learn the way I taught”, which told me something was missing from my teaching, something important.

Like a firefighter whose job it is to put out every fire, my job as a teacher is to reach and teach every student.

Firefighters don’t hope to put out a fire. They use all of their intelligence and courage to do their best to put out every one.

I’ve had to find the courage to increase my teaching intelligence in order to make improvements in my teaching.

Deconstructing learning goals into achievable steps, and monitoring myself to teach in those steps, has made big improvements towards my fire-fighting teaching style of putting out the fires of doubt in my students and helping them all achieve the learning goals, step-by-step.

Thank you, Dr. Marzano for your research into the areas of effective teaching practices, and to my principal, Mary Hool, for implementing those practices in our school.

The Data Tells me What to Teach Them ~ Their Passions Tell Me How

Teach Thought 30 Day Blogging Challenge ~ Day 28 ~ Should Technology drive curriculum or vice-versa?

I think neither should drive the other, but used together, with data driving both.

I know there are certain standards, big ideas and anchor standards that students must master in their various grades.

But for me it's their DATA that tells me WHAT specific curriculum they need on an individual basis, and not based solely their grade level. 

And it's their PASSIONS that tell me HOW to teach them. 

Some are script writers and PowerPoint creators while others are Lego Master iMovie makers. 

The challenge is to combine WHAT they need to know with HOW they are most likely to learn it. 

Working Hard ~ Playing Harder in our School Of Rock

Teach Thought 30 Day Blogging Challenge ~ Day 26 ~ What Role do Weekends and Holidays Play in my Teaching


The role they play for me is to play. Work hard ~ Play harder.

Either I take the entire weekend off to play; to rest, recuperate and recharge,

or I work hard the entire weekend to create lessons that allow us to play at school.

And not just academic games, but to play with science and math and reading and writing through an historical adventure.

The goal, or desired effect, is for my students to play with knowledge through experiential discovery in order to understand it well enough to perform it. 

As I'm planning, I envision them as musicians of all different kinds

 applying their new knowledge to play the instruments of their choice in new and exciting ways,*

resulting in a passionate performance!

*Taylor, Florencia and Katie doing well enough on their in-class reading assignment to take time off and play a little Spanish air guitar to the music of The Gipsy Kings (I got to play just because I'm the teacher - and, well, I need to have fun too). 

Favorite Teacher Resource Go-To Sites

Teach Thought ~ 30 Day Blogging Challenge ~ Day 26 ~ What are my 3 Favorite Resource Go-To Sites?

CPALMS.org

Teach Thought

Edutopia

Forget Everything You Learned in School ~ Unless You Learned to Collaborate

Teach Thought 30 Day Blogging Challenge ~ Day 25 ~ What would the ideal collaboration between students look like?



Depending on the teacher, student collaboration can look and sound calm and creative........or chaotic and scary.........or even calmingly chaotic and so creative it's scary.

lifeconfusions.wordpress.com

We tend to fear what we don't understand. One of my favorite questions I had to answer this summer during Marzano training was, "What does this look and sound like?"

In order to answer I had to first understand what my unit plan looked like in action. To achieve the learning goal/targets, what would I see and hear my students doing?

fotoimagepics.info

Since my unit adventure was filled with student collaboration, this thought-provoking exercise helped me understand better what student collaboration really was.

And I found out, thanks to both Marzano, and the movie, Dan in Real Life, that it's not so much a process or event as it is an ability.

Collaboration is an ability to use academic vocabulary while working together to explain, analyze, evaluate, infer, rethink, retool, create, design, illuminate, critique and question.*

And this ability to collaborate sounds pretty familiar, as it's a highly-valued skill in the real world. 

I did not learn to collaborate in school, and the first thing I was told when I graduated and got my first job was, "Forget everything you learned in school, it doesn't apply in the real world."

It is my job to make sure that this isn't true for any of my students, and that all of them are gifted collaborators..

www.pinterest.com

*http://www.teachthought.com/learning/project-based-learning/project-based-learning-cheat-sheet-authentic-learning/

x

Good morning, Vietnam! It's Project-Based Learning

Teach Thought 30 Day Blogging Challenge ~ Day 24 ~ Which learning trend captures my attention most and why?


Since I began teaching I have been really intrigued with both project-based learning (PBL) and game-based learning (GBL). 


But right now I want to improve PDQ in PBL while incorporating GBL ASAP so my students can be MVPs in Marzano's three DQ's, numbers 4, 2 and 3 


And instead of being MIA, or worse KIA in achieving their dreams, they become VIPs and LOL while ROFL while shouting, "I LOVE being ME!"


Shout out to the acronym master and man who made me want to be a teacher, Robin Williams. 

Project-Based Learning

Two of the wisest humans we have ever known, Aristotle and Confucius, were proponents of learning by doing...... 

 

              thetop10influentialpeople.wikispaces.com             www.chicagonow.com

......while Socrates showed us, "how to learn through questioning, inquiry, and critical thinking."  

myhero.com

The learners learn by active involvement in engaging projects, "inspired to obtain a deeper knowledge of the subjects they're studying".*

When I came back to the world of education from the world of business, I quickly realized I wouldn't hire the best of my students if all they could do was tell me what they knew, but couldn't do anything with what they knew. 

Life is all about doing, not simply knowing. 

In school we are trained to know a lot, but are we taught how to use what we know?

We know how to lose weight, but do we know how to use what we know to actually lose weight?

We know how to play a sport from endless hours watching it on the couch, but do we know how to use what we know to actually play the sport?

Would we teach art without having them do art, play an instrument, sing a song? 

Or do we just tell them how to do art, how to play an instrument, and how to sing a song?

rap.genius.com

This year, just like Bill & Ted on their Excellent Adventure, we are time-traveling scientists, adventuring around the cosmos and back-and-forth in time while integrating our reading, math, science, social studies and writing into our time-traveling projects.

Instead of just memorizing facts for an EOC, we're taking ideas and using them to question, explain, explore, analyze, create, critique, rethink, and inspire!** 

Even though I have so much more to learn about doing PBL better and better, I have an unlimited supply of teachers to help me along the way, and I'm excited!!!

                         krystalinevisions.blogspot.com                            orwell1627.wordpress.com

*http://www.edutopia.org/project-based-learning

**From Teach Thought's Project-Based Learning Planning Cheat Sheet http://www.teachthought.com/learning/project-based-learning/project-based-learning-cheat-sheet-authentic-learning/

Fear to Communicate with the Community

Teach Thought 30 Day Blogging Challenge ~ Day 23 ~ What is a way that I meaningfully involve the community in the learning in my classroom

Blogging

I used to have a blog dedicated solely to my students, called “Stuart’s Spectacular Students”.

Each year people from all over the world got to follow the learning and growth of my students from day-to-day, and they loved it!

I still have the blog but for the past 7 years haven’t added much to it because I was told I was no longer allowed to post pictures of students for fear of a lawsuit, even though their parents had all signed media releases.

The fear of the fear of the school and school system being sued was the culprit.

"The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but, it is fear."

~ Gandhi

personalexcellence.co

This was a shame because I had two former students visit me two days ago while I was recuperating from surgery. Luis was in the last grade I was allowed to post pictures (2007-2008). We looked at all the old posts and had a great time looking back at all the adventures we had that year. 

His sister, Patti, who followed him the next year, didn’t have any pictures and I had only written a few blogs, maybe one a month. She and I didn’t have the opportunity to look back at the growth and projects we did her year. 

This was a shame not only for her and I, but for the world community as well.

Good things DO happen in school and real learning DOES take place, and the world NEEDS TO KNOW about this. 

We need to be inspired. We need to hope. We need to believe that students aren’t just shuffled through the school system year after year as if they were being babysat with books, taught to the tests, and mass produced like little factory widgets, wholly unprepared for success in the real world.

And if I work hard to figure out how to make them successful and unstoppable in the real world, then I think it’s time I figure out how to blog about them again no matter the obstacles we face in a fearful society. 

"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment." 

~ Marcus Aurelius

Current Colleagues ~ Futuristic Technology ~ Ancient Wisdom

Teach Thought 30 Day Blogging Challenge ~ Day 22 ~ What Does Your PLN Look Like and What Does it do for Your Teaching?

My personal personal learning network is a powerful triangle composed of my peers and colleagues         

www.youtube.com

 technology 
                                                 teachthought.com
and the greatest teachers of all history.
                                                                        www.patheos.com

Each offers immediate expertise I can use right away, the technology to take my teaching into the future, and age-old insights that I still hold true today.

Together these three help make my teaching better every day.

Enjoy Life ~ Have FUN in the Classroom!

Teach Thought 30 Day Blogging Challenge ~ Day 21 ~ What hobbies do you bring in the classroom?

FUN!

My hobby outside the classroom is to enjoy life and have fun.

Since half of my life is spent in the classroom, why not spend my ENTIRE life having fun?

And I make sure the kids have a great time too, which often translates into greater learning because we are liking what we are doing. 

Teaching Students How to Curate Their Own Work ~ From Beginning to End

Teach Thought 30 Day Blogging Challenge ~ Day 20 ~ How do I curate student work or help them do it themselves?

As I go through student artifacts and decide which ones best represent their true mastery and growth, I explain how I'm making my decisions so they understand how to eventually curate their own work. 

www.oise.utoronto.ca

What I like about doing this is that it's helping them sift through the important from interesting, jsut like they are learning to do at the beginning of the lesson

In the beginning they have to identify what's important to understanding and achieving the learning targets and learning goal. 

At the end they have to identify which of their efforts shows that they have achieved the learning targets and goal. 

www.theatlantic.com

It's not a Toomah! ~ Powerful Ways for Students to Reflect

Teach Thought 30 day blogging challenge ~ Day 19 ~ Name 3 powerful ways students can reflect on their learning

Borrowing straight from Marzano's Element 13: What do I typically do to help students reflect on their learning?

1. Reflective Journals - a little too complex for too many of my 2nd graders in the beginning of the year (asks them to think too deeply too soon).

But this doesn't mean we don't do this ever. It means we build up to it by developing our higher-level and more sophisticated thinking skills, and then introduce students into when they are individually ready.

Because I'm a natural motivator and whole-child developer, I keep getting asked to teach younger and younger students. 

Being a bigger guy and former football player,  I truly feel like Arnold in Kindergarten Cop sometimes :-p

a. What predictions did you make about today's lesson that were correct? Which were incorrect?

b. What information in today's lesson was easy for you to understand? What was difficult?

c. How well do you understand the major ideas we are studying?

d. What did you do well today?

e. What could you have done better today?

2. Exit Slips

*I use this for homework. Students are told to go home and share their class notes from the day with their parents, answering the following questions: 

a. What do you consider the main ideas of today's lesson? 

- Desired Effect: Student lists the critical information re the learning goal/learning targets

b. What do you feel most and least certain about?

c. Do you have specific questions about today's lessons?

d. With which aspects of today's classwork were you successful?

3. Knowledge comparison

*We do this in class. I call it our JAM Journal (Journal in afternoon and morning.....JMA doesn't sound as cool as JAM!)

a. What is your level of knowledge at the end of the day compared to what it was at the beginning?

My Metaphor 4 Teaching.....Life! with Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity

Teach Thought 30 day blogging challenge ~ Day 18 ~ Create a Metaphor for my teaching 


 LIFE! 



My metaphor for my teaching is............Life!!! 

photoletters.blogspot.com

100 years ago John Dewey looked at the average American classroom and saw rows of children, "sitting quietly and obediently in their seats, passively receiving information from their teachers and committing random facts to memory. Every classroom and every teacher would be doing the same thing at the same time."* 

 This is exactly how Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein were taught 30 and 60 years earlier, and both hated it! 



Fortunately, Edison's mom pulled Tom out of school and little Al learned to teach himself. 

 Dewey realized children were learning more at home applying skills to the real-life tasks of chores and activities. 



He also realized, as does Sir Ken Robinson today, that if the teacher learned what most interested his students, and created a learning environment based on his students' unique interests, learning could flourish and students could be more likely to be successful in real-life. 

This didn't mean a real lower-level thinking life of a factory worker or fast-food server by the way.

brainyquote

  *http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/pioneers-our-field-john-dewey-father-pragmatism

New Hubble Telescope Image is Deepest Look into Universe Yet | ESA Space...

Students as Highly Evolved Experimenters and Powerful Problem Solvers

Teach Thought 30 day blogging challenge ~ Day 17 ~ What do you think is the most challenging issue in education today?

I'm tempted to say that it is the same thing that was the most challenging yesterday, the most challenging yesteryear, and until we solve it, will continue to be the most challenging in the future.

How do we reach each student on a deep level that develops them into unstoppable problem solvers throughout their lives?

kosmixmedia.com

And how do we (their collection of teachers -  parents, instructors K-12+, coaches, role models, etc.) know we were successful?

Did that child in his or her adult life go on to figure out how to perform the biggest experiment and solve the biggest problem of their life?

Making their biggest and brightest dreams happen, resulting in becoming their biggest, brightest and most beautiful selves? 

www.pinterest.com

If the answer is yes, then we have done out jobs.

We know that right now the answer 9 out of 10 times is no. 

I don't care if it was only 1 out of 10 who didn't get their real dreams. That's one too many.

But 9 out of 10? That's a crime. I know we're a relatively new species, and don't care exactly how many years we have or have not been here. I care that we become more evolved right now to the point where our students do achieve their dreams, and not just dream about, dismiss or deny they ever really had them. 

And education is where we can truly teach our students how to do this.

hotmeme.net

*Dedicated to the great dreamer, Robin Williams, who inspired me to become a teacher. 

  

Robin Williams ~ A Superpower Star that Lives on in Each One of Us

Teach Thought 30 day blogging challenge ~ Day 16 ~ If you could have any superpower, what would it be and how would it help?

It would be the superpower to make a powerfully positive influence in every one of my student's lives forever.

I'm not kidding. To spend your life and energy giving life and energy to others is no different than what allows our entire universe to exist. 

A star gives its light and energy out into the universe, and if it's a big enough star, explodes out into the universe during its supernova death, the nuclei of its atoms fusing together to spread the building blocks of life:

www.pimco.com

- the oxygen in our lungs
- the carbon in our muscles
- the calcium in our bones
- the iron in our blood

The elements of life are born in the fiery heart of a dying star.

And add to that the precious elements gold, silver and platinum. 

www.nasa.gov

During their lives giant stars are ablaze in magnificence.

At their death they give themselves to enable us to find our own magnificence. 

Robin Williams was a giant star, and has done exactly what a giant star in the universe does with both his life and his death.

Thank you Robin. 

You are the superpower I want to be for my students.