Today I took my personal children, as in the children that I am in charge of outside school, to the park with my father. It was a bit windy and cool, but the sun shone bright and soon the jackets lay on the plastic bench thrust aside while the kids opted for ease of movement over the warmth afforded by the attire. My six-year-old and four-year-old took off and went exploring the playground. My two year old apprehensively stayed by my side overwhelmed by the chaos of running kids whirring by.

At one point my son (the six-year-old) was attempting to climb onto a piece of equipment that funneled acorns down the middle back onto the ground. My son lacks overall muscular strength as well as core strength. He asked me to assist him in getting onto the equipment. I had watched him struggle a couple of more times before his request and had made the decision that he could achieve this goal on his own. I kindly responded to him that he would have to succeed on his own if he was going to climb onto the piece. He tried a couple of more times and started to become slightly agitated. He pleaded for help again with a tinge of whining thrown in. My heart wanted to walk over and lift him up. It would have been so easy. I could have taken away his angst with little effort.

Instead, I replied to him that he was going to have to accomplish the task on his own again. I also informed him that if he wanted to he could choose another piece of equipment to play with. The reason for this seemingly callous decision was that my brain knew he could do it on his own. My job as a parent was not to swoop in and make everything easier for him simply because I could. During this time there was another child modeling how to get up. Their choice of entry was quite different from how I would have done it but the task was accomplished. My son instead chose to continue attempting entry his way and finally was able to succeed.

I told him I had faith that he would have figured it out and he smiled at me with a goofy grin and obvious delight that he had accomplished his goal. This story is probably the most common story a parent can tell you about. They let their child struggle because they knew he or she would be able to succeed as long as the child put in the effort. I am not looking for parental accolades here. What I am asking is how many times do we do this with our students? How often do we let them struggle on their own before we step in to save the day? It is so easy to take the reigns and solve the problem whether it be a cognitive issue, a social squabble between classmates, or a psychomotor difficulty.

Our empathy as teachers can hinder us at times. We have been inundated over and over again that conflict is bad. Two students shouldn’t be yelling at each other. A student shouldn’t have to struggle with finding an answer. Kids shouldn’t be falling down or running into each other. Yet if we don’t allow students to figure out how to solve conflicts on their own how will they ever learn? Brian Costello says you learn empathy by being around other people. When people are around each other conflicts arise. This is natural. Dealing with conflict in sometimes unproductive ways may actually be productive sometimes. How can we truly understand how it feels like to be yelled at and have our feelings trampled on if we have never been in that position? I am not advocating for allowing students to yell at and abuse each other; however, I am advocating that the best way for students to figure things out is by allowing them to figure them out. Too often we step in and discipline when we should redirect the offended student to address the situation with the child they had the issue to before taking it to the teacher level.

It is hard to watch a student struggle while thinking. If we don’t allow that student to struggle where will they get the self-confidence that they will figure it out? There are always caveats to everything. We wouldn’t do this without first having provided the resources or allow this to happen in front of the class for an inordinate amount of time. We are encouraged to allow at least a five second wait time before expecting an answer from a student. That may seem like an eternity for a teacher who is ready to get into the next part of their lesson. What we do by eliminating the struggle is that students never get to feel the accomplishment of thinking and achieving. The right answer is not always the easy answer that pops into our head. Sometimes there is no answer at all until… ding the lightbulb goes off.

As a physical education teacher watching a student struggle with a physical skill is difficult. I can help them complete their task with my feedback or carefully layered questions that elicit the correct response. Am I doing them a favor in the long run? Am I making their learning easier right now but taking away some of their self-dependence in the process? Optimally we would like for them to figure things out on their own. If not, a carefully crafted question can do wonders in helping them to arrive at an answer that helps them.

So what is the point of all this? It goes back to the phrase “school of hard knocks”. Most people don’t think of that as being positive. They had to struggle and no one was around to assist them. I would like to start a “school of soft knocks”. The gray area found between floundering and breezing through. I want my class to be just challenging enough that a student has to work hard to achieve their goal but not so hard that they won’t be able to succeed without my help. Anything we value in life we have to work for. Let’s make sure our students value our class. 

If this sounds like rigor to you it may be but you would have to use the third definition to arrive at this conclusion.

Rigor
1. (a) Harsh inflexibility in opinion, temper, or judgment: severity. (b) The quality of being unyielding or inflexible. (c) An act or instance of strictness, severity, or cruelty.
2. A tremor caused by a chill.
3. A condition that makes life difficult, challenging, or uncomfortable.
4. Strict precision or exactness.

New Jersey is a funny state. We have as much or more state pride than any other state including the big one down south that believes they are their own country forcing their students to recite their country’s, sorry, their state’s pledge after the national pledge. We will tell you how close we are to New York and Philadelphia. How you can go skiing, hit up the shore, or hike across a mountain range all within a two-hour drive. We laugh at the joke about what exit we are from and celebrate the fact that Flying Fish Brewing Company has made an entire series of beer celebrating a different style of beer for each exit of the NJ Turnpike.

This brings me to the number one thing that can divide New Jerseyans, worse than why anyone voted for Chris Christie, is a meat that is called either pork roll or Taylor ham according to what part of Jersey you hale from.

Pork roll is a processed-meat product made from pork, spices and other flavors. The exact ingredients of pork roll are kept secret by the manufacturers of this popular meat. Pork roll is hickory-smoked, similar to ham, but is not considered to be ham. The flavor and texture of pork roll is similar to Canadian bacon, bologna and mild salami. Link

People from up in North Jersey call it Taylor Ham while the lower two-thirds of the state correctly call it pork roll. Taylor is the name of one company that makes pork roll. Ordering a Taylor ham and cheese sandwich would be like calling all your tissues Kleenexes or all your pencils Penntechs (the best for pencil break). What is funny is that when most North Jersey folks order Taylor Ham they aren’t even eating a product made by Taylor!! It is made by the brand Case which calls it by its proper name pork roll. Read this article to find out more about the great pork roll debate. Oh and that beer company, Flying Fish, made a beer for exit 7 and called it pork roll beer, not that other silly name!

If you are still reading this and you are wondering if this was the longest introduction to an educational idea ever here it comes. We need to have a common language in education. There is no need to have numerous names to identify the same thing. The best example of this is student growth objectives and student learning objectives. They are the exact same thing just called different names based on what state you are from.

An SGO/SLO, or a Student Growth Objective/Student Learning Objective, is a long-term academic goal for groups of students set by teachers in consultation with their supervisors.  An effective SGO/SLO must be:

• Specific and measurable
• Aligned to curriculum standards
• Based on available prior student learning data
• A measure of student growth and/or achievement
• Ambitious and achievable

In New Jersey that can be tiered, using specific groups of students, or you can use the whole class. They were implemented in 2013 and are controversial, to say the least. They increase a teacher’s workload, increase stress, and I have not found the research to support the use of them. This is another case of increasing what is asked of by teachers and administrators and not funding those mandates. I could not find any research to back up or support the use of SGOs/SLOs. Jersey Jazzman writes a great review of SGO’s here but that was published 3 years ago. The results of those SGO’s will account for 15% of the overall teacher evaluation score.

Personally, I do not mind SGO’s. They have forced me to focus more on data collection and making sure I can defend my teaching practices and content. In the year 2013, I was just becoming “woke” to the fact that my pedagogy and philosophy had serious flaws that needed to be worked on. Student growth objectives forced me to really examine my practices and refocus on assessment and data. I do feel that SGO’s are still more compliance than true learning for more teachers but that is an argument for people in much higher positions than myself.

Q1 What other terms in education are redundant? #slowchatpe

My wife’s grandmother died Wednesday night. She was 89 and in declining health. Although her passing wasn’t a surprise, it was still upsetting that she was no longer with us. She left a husband, four successful children (success being defined as happy/healthy), nine grandchildren, and numerous great-grandchildren. Her viewing was loud and full of people. Everyone was there to celebrate a life well lived. This is how life was supposed to happen. You are born, grow up, create some sort of family, and enjoy the trials and tribulations of a long and fruitful life.

The funeral the next day was much more sorrowful. It was difficult to watch her grandfather bury the woman he had spent over 50 years married to. There were tears and speeches. Flowers were put on top of her casket and we were told to move on to lunch.

The lunch was fun. Yes, the lunch after the funeral was a pleasurable occasion. Family and friends gathered together to eat and drink. This was where we were able to reconnect with out of town family and friends that we don’t see as often as we should. Lunch wrapped up quickly and then it was time for the children to nap before the family get together at night.

Once the kids arose from nap time we went over to my inlaws. All the aunts and uncles and cousins came together to just enjoy each other’s company. The ages ranged from 2-70 years of age. I was outside on kid duty. I watched the children swing on the swings, play with a football, play an interesting game called puppy, and run around in general merriment. They moved because it was fun. Their faces were flush, jackets were thrown to the ground, cell phones put away and they moved. It was a pleasure to watch and be a participant in.

We don’t always need organized leagues, videos to exercise with, or a gym to go visit. There are numerous ways to move with other people. Family parties are my favorite form of physical activity. All it takes is a volleyball net and two people, a football and someone who wants to throw it, a soccer ball that is laying in wait. Random games of tag pop up out of nowhere. Remember the joy of movement is multiplied when shared with others.

Q1: What is your favorite activity to do at family parties?

Imagine planning lessons that take a boat load of time to plan. You scour the internet and steal the greatest lessons from your personalized learning network in order to create the best learning experience you can provide. Then a student comes in your class and states they want to play __________. For the past two years, I have a student who walks into my class and wants to play their game. At first, this bothered me. I would tell the student no, I have a lesson planned and this is what we are going to do. At some point last year it occurred to me that I was crushing this young man’s creativity. I started to question myself (which I often do). If my class can’t be a place where a student can come in and play a game they created then where can they? Why was I saying no? Was it a power trip? How were his games going to align to my standards and curriculum? Was this going to be a waste of time?

I decided that I would give him the last five minutes of the class to explain and play his game as long as he followed the directions of the class. For the last five minutes of most classes, he would stand up, explain his games, and ask for helpers to demonstrate. The students would all clamor to be picked. Some of the games were interesting and worked well, while others needed a tweaking here or there to make them playable. The students loved the games and I even used one or two myself in other classes.

This year I have multiple students who are asking to play their games in my class. I tell them to create a google doc and share the game with me before the class so I can prepare any equipment that is needed. The younger students can draw a picture or write the game down the best they can.

Why am I so flexible in my teaching this year? It all goes back to creating that positive association with movement, my class, and school in general. Would you want to go to work every day where you had absolutely no input into your day? How fast can we crush a student’s creativity? It starts with the simple statement, “Not now.” It ends with the student not even attempting to contribute their original ideas after a while.

I am not saying that the students should run the class. Or that teachers don’t have valuable information that the students need to discover in some manner or another. What I am saying is that when we see someone enjoying learning, enjoying movement, and bringing something to the table don’t reflexively say no. Think about why you are saying no. There may be a legitimate reason not to allow the child to take over the class that hour or that day. I do know that if our default is no instead of I will make my best attempt to work with you, then we are slowly extinguishing our students passions for learning, creativity, and love of school.

Q1: When do you allow students to create in your class?

Q2: What do you do when students want to do an activity that you were not planning on that day?

Q3: What is your default, no or I will attempt my best? Why?

I sat down at a table rehydrating myself with beverages until the world calmed down. My head was pounding while my body was pulsated with electricity. The last three days had been a blur. It started with a plane ride to Las Vegas on Thursday night. It ended on Saturday night with a table of friends discussing education, thinking, power, privilege, actions, perceptions, and holding yourself with class. In between was nothing short of amazing.

Friday morning started with a power breakfast with Sarah Thomas (@saradateechur). We sat next to each other and caught up on the current state of affairs in our lives. The food was great and the company was even better. We drank about 17 cups of coffee before Heidi Carr (@carr5) rolled up in a car inhabited by Shelly Stout (@theoddcentricT) and Amanda Rogers (@theedsaneT). One round of mani-pedis, lunch, and conference prep work down, the CUE Nevada conference was ready to begin.

Sarah kicked it off with the opening keynote. Her keynote was about her personal journey through education and life. She masterfully wove her tale enlightening the crowd with how she uses her alter ego SaraDaTeechur to become a better version of herself.

Sarah also explained how edumatch was created. The best part of Sarah isn’t that she spends time highlighting herself. She spent the bulk of her time amplifying the projects of those who have connected through edumatch. Her speech was both relatable and heartfelt.

I sat in on a session ran by Jason Borgen explaining how to become a future ready leader before I presented my session on Seesaw. After my session, it was time to see Vegas!!

Heidi Carr played hostess with the mostest along with the strawberry milkshake drinking Derek Larson (@lars3eb). We toured Vegas seeing the largest chocolate fondue fountain in the world, watched the Bellagio water light show, and took a ride on the High Roller on the strip. That evening created memories that I will never forget. The bond that Sarah, Shelly, Amanda, Heidi, Derek already strong due to our Edumatch Voxer connection, was strengthened to the level of life-long friendship. The beauty of the evening was that education was a common interest but took a back seat to 6 individuals connecting on a personal level. There was no talk of assessments, tech tools, or workshops. The topic of conversation was music, food, and fun.

Friday turned into Saturday morning and Shelly Stout was ready to begin her session. We sluggishly rolled in with one eye open and watched an Oddcentric individual (her twitter handle) transform into a classroom maestro. Her session on Socratic circles was the highlight of the conference to me. I learned the difference between level 1, 2, and 3 questions. She taught us how her students analyze and evaluate poems, stories, and songs in an authentic and engaging way. The best part is that her students were the ones saying how much the enjoyed those Socratic circles!

Amanda Rogers ran a session on how to unleash the magical powers of Google. I rolled into the session about halfway to the participants working in groups on their own completely engaged. Amanda was the guide on the side giving the participants time to explore Amanda’s projects that she set up for them. It’s not always about the sage on the stage at a conference session as well as in the classroom.

My next session was with the coca cola drinking, Derek Larson. This was a straight sage on the stage; dropping morsels of knowledge to the tech-hungry participants eagerly awaiting their next morsel. It was masterful in its simplicity. He categorized the different ways to organize yourself, social media platforms, as well as platforms to gather new ideas. He allowed participants to chime in whenever they had ideas or prior knowledge of that particular tool. It was sweet to see a virtuoso presenter in action.

My sessions finished with Digital Badges and Micro-credentials with Rich Dixon (@richedtech). I was skeptical of this session because badges are just a way for egotistical educators shouting “LOOK AT HOW GREAT I AM”! I couldn’t have been more wrong. He spoke about something called open badges and micro-data. This idea is that when you get the badge there will be links to the projects and data of what you did to earn that badge. This takes badging to a much, much deeper level. I am so happy I went to his session.

Up next was my keynote. I used Nearpod to include my PLN who were not able to attend. The crowd was super receptive. It was a blast.

The conference ended with me at a table with Sarah, Amanda, Heidi, Derek, and Shelly. It felt like the perfect way to wrap up the conference. I didn’t think it was gonna get any better until I heard Derek’s reflection of the weekend on Voxer as he drove two hours home. The rest of us listened together giggling and reflecting at his storytelling ability. It truly was the perfect ending to a perfect weekend.

I would be remiss if I did not thank and honor Heidi Carr for the conference she spearheaded as well as the opportunity for me to keynote a major conference. She went above and beyond chauffeuring me to around Vegas as well as to the airport making sure I caught my flight! She is an amazing individual who will never quite understand how indebted to her I will always be. I would also like to thank Derek for turning around and driving back after he realized I was a dummy and left my bag in his car!! You are the man!

Have you ever reflected on something and realized if you changed one simple idea your lesson would have worked out sooooo much better? The past two weeks (read more here) I have focused the bulk of my attention on creating and fostering relationships between my students as well as between myself and my students. I have been using different teamwork/cooperative activities to help the students work on communication, cooperation, and problem-solving. The lessons were fun, engaging, and overall successful. We were able to authentically speak about introverts verse extroverts and how boys may have the tendency to be louder or more assertive than girls. This brought us to the point that everyone has ideas on how to solve problems or meet the objectives.

There was something absent though. We were talking the talk but not necessarily walking the walk. They discussed how to work as a team but they weren’t executing teamwork skills at a high level. What was the missing piece? Then the lightbulb went off. I hadn’t given them the steps or scaffolded how to engage in teamwork. There was no gradual release method being implemented. I figuratively threw them in the water and said go swim. Most students were drowning.

It was then that I realized the one simple change that I could do that would make a world of difference. I gave them steps on how to work as a team. This ensured that everyone had a chance to see teamwork in action and truly understand what it looked like.

I started out by giving them 5 steps.

Step1: One person must state what the problem/objective of the group was. Once they finished step one they were to stand up or give me some signal they were ready for step two. I required a check in before they could proceed to the next step to ensure 100% they were following along.

Step 2: Every person had to have a chance to either give their idea, agree with someone else’s idea or state that they had no ideas of their own on how to solve the problem/objective. I did this so that every student quiet or loud had a chance to give their idea and make a contribution to the group. 

Step 3: The group had to choose one hypothesis they believed would work the best. I allowed them to vote or use any other fair way to choose the attempt at the solution. I was worried this would be a problem. It wasn’t 

Step 4: Attempt to solve the problem using the voted on solution.

Step 5: If the solution worked reflect on why it worked. If it did not succeed discuss why it didn’t. Sometimes execution of the solution was the problem. If that was the case they could choose to use the same hypothesis and fix the problem. If the group wanted to go in another direction due to the loss of faith in the original solution they could choose to move on to the next most popular solution.

Some of you may be shaking your head and wondering why I didn’t have a system set up like this from the beginning. I honestly had not realized that students may not have been trained on how to work in groups before. Now that I reflect, that one change could have made my whole unit much better.

Q1: How do you introduce teamwork to your students?

I am keynoting at CUE Nevada on October 1. (Please come to the conference!!!) I started to mull over some different ideas that would work for me during the keynote and I came across metacognition. Thinking about thinking.  One of my favorite quotes about metacognition is by Gandhi.

The only problem was the more I thought about this the more I disagree with him that beliefs become your thoughts. How can I believe something that I have never thought of before? How did it become a belief? Did I just start believing something without really understanding it?

I believe that thoughts may become beliefs. I have tons of thoughts that I don’t believe. Most of my thoughts, to be honest, are complete trash and unworthy of being typed onto this page. My beliefs, on the other hand, have been debated or discussed with other people.

I stumbled across a quote from the great Deepak Chopra. How do we get to the point that we believe the thought is a truth? In other words, how do we turn our thoughts into beliefs?

The answer to that is our Personal Learning Network. This could be friends, family, adults in education, students in education, people we hate on social media, people we like on social media, books we read, or any other litany of ways we have our thinking pushed.

Q1: Do you believe that thoughts shape beliefs or beliefs shape thoughts.

Q2: Where do you get new thoughts from?

Q3: How do you make sure that your thoughts or beliefs are truths outside your reality?

Q4: Tell us about a time when your truth or belief was shattered. What happened?

Q5: Who do you follow on social media that pushes your thinking?