Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Year: 2009

  • The part that didn’t fail


    click image for source

    So, to most accounts, the dialogue I wrote about in my last post was a big fail. At times it could have been described as bedlam, mayhem (what strange little words).

    It was the debrief that didn’t fail, the debrief with the student who, as I told him, held the class hostage.

    I reflected back what happened. He didn’t remember it in the same way. I said, come on. When your peers are telling you, nay, yelling at you, to be quiet, to shut up already, it’s time to stop talking!

    He answered that no one told him to shut up. He hadn’t heard his friends yell at him. He was that taken with his argument.

    We talked about seeking to understand before being understood. And he told me why he couldn’t do that. (this is the part that I like). That he liked his idea. That he couldn’t listen to the other boy’s (or anyone else’s) because he knew that by listening it may change his mind and he did not want that to happen. He wanted his original idea to be recognized as the right one, he did not want to, he actively did not want to change his mind and did everything he could to make sure it did not happen.

    A while ago I wrote a comment on Why I Almost Quit Twitter (Jose Vilson) about an incident with 2 boys that makes virtual realities seem all the more un-real with the rawness of its to the core reality. This boy was one of those two.

    My plan for the future is to speak with him for a few minutes today while I have the rest of his class read the newspaper. I want to debrief the dialogue as a class. And I want to ask him to tell the class what he did and why. He’s already demonstrated a heaping pile of courage in relation to that previous incident. I bet he’ll do it again.

  • Dialogue


    Photograph by Brian Bailey. Click for source.

    I could have called this post ‘failed dialogue’ but that wouldn’t be entirely true.

    One of the courses I teach is called ERC, Ethics and Religious Culture. The course has 3 competencies – reflects on ethical issues, demonstrates an understanding of the phenomenon of religion, and engages in dialogue.

    So yesterday we did a little work on the 1st and third competencies with an adaptation of lesson 2 in the teaching kit on tolerance called The Power of Words from Tolerance.org.

    The activity starts with individual work. I handed out a piece of paper with a list of names on one side, a list of occupations on the other. I modified the list from the teaching kit to make it more specific for our area of the world. I inserted Mohawk and French Canadian names as well as some occupations from around here. I asked my students to draw lines between the names and occupations.

    Once they had made their decisions – and it was very difficult for them to remain quiet throughout the process, the activity was unsettling for them – I asked them to place their chairs in a circle and we were going to talk. The first thing I asked about had to do with some things I heard during the activity:
    “I feel uncomfortable doing this”
    “I feel like I am racial profiling”
    Giggles
    Saying of names (Eli Goldstein, Latisha Smith, George Two Axe…) and then snickering or laughing out loud

    Then I asked people to talk.

    (this is where we get to the failed dialogue part)

    It quickly became evident that 2 boys were getting into an argument about the activity, which is not necessarily a bad thing but isn’t optimal when we are sitting in a circle for the purpose of open dialogue. One boy said it was a set up, that I put ethnic names and specific jobs to make them be racist/sexist/prejudiced, and the other said that it was just a list of names and jobs and it was their minds that was doing the rest.

    They wouldn’t let anyone speak. For real. Each time someone else tried to talk they continued their argument. I reminded the group of our norm, seek to understand before being understood. I asked the group to go around the circle and take turns to say their piece. I introduced a talking stick (actually a talking pine cone). One of the boys tried to sabotage the process by telling the other students to keep passing the cone around so it would get back to him. Luckily the majority of my students stood their ground and spoke their piece when they had the pine cone. It wasn’t easy though, 2 or 3 boys were fidgeting (ok, jumping up and down in their seats) and saying pass the cone, pass the cone. I had to keep interfering so the dialogue was quite stilted to say the least. Some of the other students were getting frustrated with the boys, telling them to shut up, to stop.

    The pine cone finally made full circle and the first of the 2 boys had it again. The funny thing is, they couldn’t speak. They started to argue about the pine cone, about whose turn it was, about anything but the task.

    At the beginning of the class I reminded my students that each time we have dialogue I will be evaluating their participation and competency development. So at this point the two boys who had so much to say asked what mark they would receive for today’s dialogue. I told them a 1 to 2 (we mark on a range from 1-5, 1 being doesn’t meet the requirements, 5 being exceeds the requirements). They couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t fair. After all, they were the only ones who had anything good to say. It was lunch time, so I asked the rest of the class to leave except for the one prime arguer and the one prime jumper up and downer ‘pass the cone, pass the cone’.

    We talked.
    (this is the part where the dialogue becomes unfailed)
    Oh geez. It’s 6am. I need to run. I will update this from school. But I think I’ll post the first part anyways, keep you on your toes ;)

  • Pearls need discomfort, right?

    pearl-oyster
    “Those that have survived such perils of the sea as typhoons, suffocating red tides, and attacks from predators are brought ashore and opened. if everything has gone well, the result is a lovely, lustrous and very valuable pearl.” Click image for source.

    Yesterday after work I was typing up a commitment contract with our head teacher, Lynn, for one of our students. We had had a day. I remarked that it’s like that in Alternative – each day is ‘a day’ – and that is what makes our jobs more interesting – every day is different and exciting.

    We joked about that for a while and then I said but seriously, even though they can be trying in the moment, it’s responding to the varied situations and the behaviours/needs of our kids that makes me a better teacher. It’s on the job professional development. I feel I learn so much each day about relationship, caring, learning. Lynn responded – better teacher? It makes me a better person.

    Thought that pearl was worth showing in the light.

  • What does your best teaching look like?

    I have a new blog. It’s called Teaching is a Verb and I want to collect stories about actual teaching practice there.

    The long term goal of the blog is to connect teachers to teachers by providing a framework for us to visit each other’s classrooms. We have so much to learn from each other.

    Anyone can register and share stories from their actual teaching practice there, or stories of teaching practice they have seen and admire.

    I’ve started with my own story, and a question. I’m cross-posting it here.

    What does your best teaching look like?

    You know, this blog is called Teaching is a Verb yet when I answer the question I realize that examples of my ‘best’ teaching happen when I am not in the room, during those moments when I am seemingly not doing anything directly related to learning.

    Example.
    I spent much of one day last week, or maybe the week before, meeting with students in crises. Every once in a while we have a day like that (here’s a detailed account of one of those days from last year).

    I walked into my Grade 11 CWI (Contemporary World Issues) class about 20 minutes into the period. They were quiet and had their laptops in front of them (we did a lot of fundraising last year and bought 18 mini laptops!). I figured they were taking advantage of the free time and were checking email, listening to music.

    Get ready for this: they were ALL working on this assignment. I had not yet assigned it.

    They went to our blog, read the new assignment, and began their research. The quiet dissipated as I walked in with, Tracy, I think I need to change my article, and Look at what I’ve found, I think there’s a connection here, can you look?, etc…

    This was a class that only a week earlier had to be stopped numerous times during each period in order to regroup and address issues of silliness, noise, etc. I had taken away their seating privileges because they weren’t making smart choices in that area (sitting with friends who distract…), I spent time each class with one or another student in the den having conversations about their behaviour.

    And then I realized it was about a month into the school year and that this was about the time that teaching and learning really starts.

    So what does my best teaching look like? It ‘looks’ like nothing when it is happening but it is actually made up of at least a month’s worth of and ongoing consistent classroom structure, making connections with individual students, and providing them with work that they can find meaning in for themselves and create meaning from together.

    The best thing about this is it eventually frees me up to work with individual students on either technical issues to do with assignments, personal issues that require some out of class intervention, comprehension issues, etc…

    Here is an example of that kind of work for a course in Contemporary World Issues. It’s what they are working on right now.
    Personal News Story Project

    What does your best teaching look like?

  • ‘Seeking to understand’ in action

    If only humans had it this easy when it comes to understanding each other
    If only humans had it this easy when it comes to understanding each other

    A norm that I aspire to, however difficult it can be at times is this one:

    Seek to understand before being understood.

    I just read a story about an administrator who practices this norm.

    From Karen S. about a Kindergarten student in trouble in Talking Him Off the Ledge at Talkworthy:

    “In a few minutes, he got the idea that I wasn’t there to make his day more miserable but that I was genuinely trying to understand him.”

    She described the encounter between herself and the child as magical. I felt the magic as I read her words. Karen is a true leader. Go read the whole story. It’s a story worth listening to, sharing, and believing.

    “We are responsible not only for the stories we tell and the stories we listen to, but for the stories we choose to believe.” ~Thomas King