Salvaging Old Lessons for New Students

 School is busy! I have a fantastic schedule, filled with open collaborative partner time, and those periods have already been snapped up by teachers eager to have a second adult body in the room. It's been invigorating to work with friendly, familiar faces - thank you so much Kerri for popping in the library at the end of the day just to say how nice it was to work together again - and it's also such a treat to work with new staff members.

I'm collaborating with our new Grade 4-5 teacher (I haven't written her name because I didn't get permission yet to talk about her on my blog) to teach social studies. I pitched an idea that I've taught before for Grade 4 students that incorporates social studies, health, drama, and learning skills. She supported the concept and we tinkered a bit about how to include the Grade 5s. We launched it last week and the students are super-excited about it.

The lessons are "oldies but goodies" - in fact, it's so old that the accompanying files were made using ClairsWorks and HyperStudio! Thankfully, my husband and I did some digging and found ways to open the documents. It was fascinating to see which aspects were outdated and which aspects still held up. I plan on writing a similar reflection for the AML website.

The first lesson of the unit involves a mysterious email. Originally, when I first taught this lesson, we used HyperStudio to explore the concept, a la "Choose Your Own Adventure". I really liked (and miss) the non-linear way that HyperStudio operated, but the graphics were archaic.

The concept was still valid - it's about a type of phishing email exemplified by the "Nigerian Prince" scenario. Back in 2004, I was pretty proud of my limited animation skills as the cartoon figure actually spoke and moved her lips and eyes. Now, I cringe at how primitive it looks. 

I updated the look of the email, eliminated the photo and audio components, and shared it with the students.

I also examined the explanation slide from the original work. I've learned so much more about media education since then. One important thought is to not position certain media texts as "good" or "bad" but rather as "interesting". By avoiding a simplistic value judgement, learners can better examine the "strategies" (instead of "tricks") that different media creators use to match their purposes and allow them to form their own opinions. After all, we educators use some of the same methods to attract our students' attention, and I suspect we don't want to be labelled as "evil manipulators". Compare the 2004 rationale with the 2021 rewrite:

The ability to create attractive, realistic mock media texts has improved tremendously over the years as well. The final task in this unit is to participate in an auction to purchase chunks of land; I think I may revise the post-auction reflection to include a section on how land was seized from Indigenous people and sold without their proper input or consent. The money the Grade 4-5 students will use (Nadcaa Bucks) will be "earned" from demonstrating certain learning skills during the research process (e.g. staying on task, sharing resources, citing sources, etc.). I am aware of the dangers and problematic elements of creating a token economy in a classroom, but I justify my decision by noting that it's a short-term exercise and that the fake funds are tied to the end task. Take a look at the money templates from before and now.

I guess the lesson that I've learned from preparing for this collaborative teaching unit is that I don't always have to "reinvent the wheel", but I cannot use older lessons without examining them first to update the words and images to better reflect my current understanding of effective pedagogy. There's always room for improvement, even in "tried and true" tasks.

Reconnecting

 This is going to be a short blog post, composed on the same day it is published.

I had a good time reconnecting with relatives over the weekend. We chatted so much that I even forgot to take photos. (The picture here is from August 2021 of me and my Uncle Carlton, who is actually my first cousin. I call him my uncle because of our age difference and cultural traditions around elder respect. We saw each other by chance at a mall in the summer and that's when we made plans to see each other again.) 

Even though it takes time and effort to make these visits, the result can really nourish your soul, especially when you have a shared history. The stories and perspectives are eye-opening and interesting to share. Thanks folx for welcoming me and spending time with me!

Now to get to planning collaborative library units (hooray! I've missed that so much!), assessing my Queen's University TL AQ participants' assignments, going to Cross Fit, and voting. (ETA I voted! It wasn't an easy decision for me, but I encourage everyone that can to do so.)

More Questions Than Answers

We are back!

Last week, school resumed for students in my board for two days (on Thursday and Friday). Tuesday and Wednesday were spent frantically trying to prepare. I am back in the library, as a teacher-librarian. I am surprised and delighted to share that I have more open collaborative time (aka Partners Time, if you are an old TL like me and still occasionally use the title of the 1982 document) than ever before. Despite this return to what should be familiar territory for me, there are still a lot of hiccups and uncertainties. This is also true for teacher-librarians new or returning to the position. I've tried to help as best as I can, both on our board's Google Currents community site, as well as via private emails and on the Facebook group devoted to school library professionals (run by my dear friend, Ruth Gretsinger). People are desperate for clear explanations and solutions, but a lot relies on consultation with administration and site-specific decisions. That's not comforting, unfortunately.

Even though I've been trying to be a source for potential answers, I still have a lot of questions. Here are some of the main ones, with my attempts at resolving them.

How do I sanitize and disinfect objects quicker?

Our students need a chance to play together, but we still have rigorous standards to maintain about cleaning touched objects. Providing individual buckets of supplies works when we are talking about pencils and erasers, but not loose parts or toys. On Friday, students spent 30 minutes playing and I spent 50 minutes afterwards cleaning those toys! There's no sink in the library. Attempting to wash my Lego led to wet shoes, pants, and very damp Rubbermaid bins. Thankfully, our wonderful new caretaker Quentin saved the chicken wire I was going to get rid of and suggested I could hose things down on the wire in the big sinks. Hopefully the Lego isn't small enough to drop through. I will be consulting with the kindergarten team to see how they handle this time-intensive job.

How do I avoid visual overstimulation when all the students' cameras are on?

Last year, I taught Grade 6-7 and then Grade 5-6. When we were online, they didn't have their cameras on most of the time. I know this makes some teachers feel lonely, but I realize now that I got used to "less is more". Now that I am doing a lot of primary prep, and many of them are virtual, I find myself getting completely overwhelmed at the sight of 27 kindergarten children jumping on sofas, playing with robots, picking noses, eating snacks and doing all sorts of other things. When they need to perform their "what is media" actions, I found it difficult to observe so many of them simultaneously. I tried to have students turn off their cameras and turn them on when needed, but it seems like it's part of the primary online class routine to keep cameras on. The wonderful DECE Jen Cadavez is helping me consider different strategies to use to help me manage.

How do I get to class on time between online and in-person?

My schedule was engineered and designed in a special way so that we would avoid back-to-back classes of students. This is great for health reasons, but tricky when I need to take back an in-person class when an online class is waiting for me. I don't think this will be a huge issue; many of the teachers have been very understanding about me being a bit late.

How will I have time to shelve books?

I learned that volunteers are not yet permitted in the building. My students know that Pat McNaughton was the backbone of our school library when it came to organizing and shelving books. In consultation with my principal, I am adopting the most stringent of guidelines, and I am quarantining the books in huge Rubbermaid bins for a week after they are checked in. I am technically the only one permitted to handle the circulation computer and scanning wand. Maybe I will see about whether or not Pat can come in after school when there are no students, or if we should lower the amount of books that students can be permitted to take out. 

How do I share photos ethically and in a timely manner?

If I was a kindergarten parent sending my child to in-person learning, I'd want all the reassurances I could possibly get. I took photos of the kindergarten students playing with Fisher Price toys (which was the calmest part of the period, to be honest - many of our youngest learners will need a lot more time to get used to the "routine" of school, since there's been no opportunities to practice things like lining up, adhering to an institutional schedule, and other restrictions). I want to share these photos with the parents, but I don't know if I can send a mass email with a slideshow of all the images, because I don't know if they've signed media release forms. Sending photos individually may take a really long time. I don't have an answer to this one yet.

How can I use technology when the most useful items have all been distributed elsewhere?

We have no more Chromebooks to spare for in-school learning. As it was, I was scrambling to locate all the teacher laptops and ensure everyone had something that could possibly work. I still have some old iMacs (the white ones and grey ones we won back in 2008 [I think] in the Best Buy Best in Class contest) but they won't run Google Classroom or anything that takes too much power or has too many images. Word processing, maybe?

When can I bring in Cola the skinny pig?

Students have already been asking to see our resident school library pet. I've read the Program Guidelines and Operational Guidelines published by the board, but I don't remember seeing anything about pets - it's probably a low priority. 

I'm sure that these problems will be resolved eventually in time. I just hope we figure things out before the rules and procedures change again!

What if we are the villains?

 This is an unusual reflection on the Labour Day weekend, just before we return to another year of unusual teaching. Some may say it's an insensitive post, considering how hard many educators have been working this week and next to prepare for their students in this uncertain time. However, one of the criteria for including something in my Monday Molly Musings is if it is a topic that keeps "tickling my brain". 

I belong to a Cross Fit gym that has a lot of educators in the membership. One day, as we were working out, the topic of residential schools came up and someone said that they wished they weren't called schools because it gives schools a bad name. I disagreed. I was too busy gasping for breath as I exercised to provide an eloquent explanation, but I thought I should articulate it somewhere, at some time.

Schools are established institutions, where parents are often required to send their children and "rules rule" in schools. For the longest time, corporal punishment was allowed because of the "in loco parentis" concept. Schools also used (and still use) the suggestion that teachers, due to their training and experience, sometimes "know better" than the parents. You can see this still reflected in comments directed to educators like "remember you may be the best part of a child's day", insinuating that home life is terrible and that school is a sanctuary (and the teachers, the saviors). Parents send their children to schools, trusting them to do their best to help the children learn and develop. In residential schools, there wasn't even the pretense of trust - families were forced to hand over their children. 

Schools have power. Our current schools aren't murdering children and burying them on the property, like the residential schools did to First Nations, Metis, and Inuit children, but sometimes educators do things to students that hurt them. This was my biggest fear when entering teachers' college - that I would discover that, either through ignorance or due to some other reason, I had harmed a student in my class. I wish I could find the tweet I saw that said something like "we see ourselves as the heroes in a story, but what if we are the villains?" However, I did find this tweet I saved.

This 🎯
Sometimes we [teachers] make bad choices, perpetuate harmful practices or miss the mark.
Being called out/in is a gift. https://t.co/U4ShsmgL6q

— Kristen Bynoe (she/her) (@KristenBynoe) August 11, 2021

This idea of bad choices or harmful practices could be large-scale or small-scale. A few days ago, Matthew Morris tweeted this interaction:

Not even an hour at school and was already asked if I was the caretaker. His excuse: “I saw you walking around and thought you were out of uniform.”

Really?!? Is this what we’re STILL doing?!?

— Matthew R. Morris (@callmemrmorris) September 2, 2021

People mostly responded with messages of dismay and support - but have we ever done something similar and just not realized the harm? What if we weren't called in or out and merrily continued on with our day, not understanding how our words or actions impacted others? One of the biggest regrets of my career was when I was facilitating a Tribes training, and we used an energizer, called "Tribal Dances" to have people learn what their "tribes" were. (Yes, I know already by this description that there are several levels of "wrong" already present in this recount.) The facilitators set up the groups, based on several factors we were told to use. My racial bias was revealed with the song choices I made for each group as well as the groups my co-facilitator and I formed. A couple of participants pointed this out to the facilitators privately at the end of that session. We, the facilitators, were ashamed and embarrassed. We wanted to mention the error we made to the whole group but the individuals that pointed it out asked us not to, because they didn't want to draw further attention to this injustice perpetrated against them even more. We respected their wishes, but I wish there was another option, because it might have been a learning moment for more than just the facilitators. This happened over twenty years ago, but I still feel ashamed by my actions and I want to know better and do better.

It's that whole intent vs impact thing, isn't it? It doesn't matter if an educator's intention is good, if the impact is negative, then things need to change. As we begin a new school year, may we see ourselves and our practices more clearly so we don't accidentally become a villain in a student's (or fellow teacher's) story. 

ETA - I forgot to include this link from the Globe and Mail about Black students showing greater gains in reading during the pandemic, and that a potential explanation being less exposure to racism. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-tdsb-data-show-rapid-reading-improvement-in-black-elementary-students/