I’m Amy. A born and raised New Yorker, currently living in Miami. Here to reflect on my experiences as an educator and learner, working things out as I write.
I’ve been trying to write this post about the importance of thought partners for the past week and a half, but I keep coming up against a wall. “Blog!” kept staring at me on my to-do list, and I kept pushing it to the next day, and the next. It was the first week back from break and I’ll just say I barely made it to Friday.
Today, though, as I was speaking to two of my favorite coworkers and now good friends, A&A, I was filled with a sense of gratitude. I’m so lucky that I get to work alongside these smart, capable, caring, and reliable women, I thought. Reflecting on my practice with them these past eight months has made me a better teacher, whether those reflective chats happen at lunch or after school, at 7:30 in the morning as we make copies, through voice notes sent over WhatsApp, or in an official coaching cycle meeting.
I remember the first time I met Ana, it was during one of her first Writer’s Workshop PDs with the staff. It was a Tuesday in May, and I was visiting Miami for my husband’s birthday and to help him move some furniture in. After a day of Zoom with my students back in the Bronx, I caught an Uber to KLA and was greeted warmly by Angie and Male. I poked my head into the 4th grade classroom to see my soon-to-be students and was pulled to a seat to watch their end-of-year show rehearsal. Then, while the last students dismissed, I made my way into the gym and sat down in one of just a few seats, placed in a U-shape in front of the projector. As Ana shared, I took fast and furious notes in my journal, filling up 3 or 4 pages. Estelle and Lizzie asked questions, showing genuine interest and enthusiasm, even though we know that most teachers in May are exhausted and would rather go home than sit in a Tuesday PD.
I went up to Ana after the meeting and introduced myself. She seemed excited that someone else knew about workshop. I laughed and tried to explain that I didn’t follow it exactly, had never been trained in it. Later that night I texted my friend Danielle, who was finishing up her Master’s at Teacher’s College, how Writer’s Workshop finally made sense to me — and that was just after one hour of hearing Ana explain it.
I met Allison in that same gym, though it was arranged quite differently. It was the first teacher work day in August — the first first day of school for me — and tables were everywhere, with 6-8 seats at each. I, in true Crehore fashion, arrived early, sweating from the Miami humidity that I wasn’t quite used to yet. I took a seat at Estelle’s table, where Ana soon joined, along with a couple of preschool teachers who I made small talk with.
Then there was Allison, pulling up a chair and introducing herself. We discovered that we shared a similar background, having both taught as auxiliares in Madrid for a couple of years. Her smile and contagious laugh settled my nerves, which had been buzzing under the surface since the morning. I finally felt at ease.
For the next two weeks, I lived in Ana and Allison’s classroom as much as I could. We shared ideas and thoughts, signed onto Zoom meetings together, and dothed ourselves Triple-AAA.
So yes, pandemic teaching is hard, and we’re still in the thick of it, unfortunately. The end of the year is only going to make it harder, as everyone starts to get a little loopy in the build up to summer break and graduation.
But today I am grateful for having this support system to get through it alongside.
Anyone who knows me knows that I am very organized. (Yes, I do tend to get cluttered. I’m working on it.) I especially value organization when planning Project Based Learning units, which, without some structure, can just seem like a bunch of floating ideas. My three favorite tools for planning PBL units are curriculum calendars, Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy (CHRL) framework, and Thinking Maps.
Curriculum Maps
I’d used pacing calendars prior to Samara at my first school for math. Our math coach handed us a stapled pack of pages that outlined which math lessons we should be covering each day of the year in order to teach them all before the NY State tests. That’s not what I mean here when I refer to a curriculum map.
A curriculum map is an at-a-glance overview of your whole year — every month, every subject — so that you can see how all of the pieces of the puzzle fit together. At Samara, where each grade has a theme/essential question, we made sure to include essential questions for our 3 major PBL units, as well as field trips and culminating projects.
Our 5th Grade Curriculum Map for 2020-2021
Curriculum maps are extremely helpful. Not only can you see EVERYTHING, but you can also easily see how to integrate the various disciplines. For example, in the fall of 2020, our 5th grade PBL unit focused on government and the presidential elections. We saw a window here for teaching multi-digit operations as well as decimal fractions, since we’d be analyzing different infographics with population, demographics, voting percentages, budget, etc.
Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy
If you’re a teacher and you haven’t heard of Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s Cultivating Genius, do yourself a favor and buy the book RIGHT NOW. I won’t be able to do it justice in this short blog post. So I’m going to quote from Jennifer Gonzalez and the Cult of Pedagogy, as well as direct you there and to Dr. Muhammad’s website to learn more.
Muhammad believes we’re not reaching many of our students, especially Black students, because our curricula and standards are lacking. The emphasis in our current standards is mainly on skills—skills that can be measured easily on standardized tests—and not a whole lot else…
But there was a time in history when a more complete, more human form of ‘curriculum’ did exist, and it energized and inspired its students—all of them Black men and women—to read, write, speak, and publish with the kind of passion and dedication we would want all of our students to have about learning. This curriculum evolved within the Black literary societies of the 19th century…
These societies were the inspiration for Muhammad’s Historically Responsive Literacy framework, a four-layered pedagogical model that places skills on an equal plane with three other learning pursuits: identity, intellect, and criticality.
Though Cultivating Genius only outlines four learning pursuits, Dr. Muhammad has stated in various workshops and interviews that there is a fifth: joy.
I love using Dr. Muhammad’s framework to guide my PBL planning because it ensures that the unit will connect to students’ lives, teach them the skills and knowledge they need to know in 5th grade, help them to think critically and question “power, equity, anti-racism, and other anti-oppressions,” and provide them with opportunities for joy. It also increases the rigor of any unit. I’ll show you exactly how I use the framework after I talk about Thinking Maps.
Thinking Maps®
In the spring of 2019, I was trained in Thinking Maps, “a set of 8 visual patterns that correlate to specific cognitive processes” (thinkingmaps.com). Unlike regular graphic organizers, of which there are thousands that are usually chosen with no real rhyme or reason (like a sequencing map in the shape of an S for a snake?), there are only eight Thinking Maps. Each Thinking Map is aligned to one specific thinking process: defining, classifying, describing, comparing, sequencing, cause and effect, whole to part relationships, and analogies.
For Samara, a dual language school with ICT classes, Thinking Maps were a no-brainer. And me? I totally drank the Kool-Aid. I still use Thinking Maps all the time in my personal life: for to do lists, grocery lists, packing lists, even when Alberto and I were planning our move to Miami! They are unbelievably useful, and honestly, they just make sense.
The way I use Thinking Maps for planning PBL units is as follows:
Brainstorm with a circle map. Get down ALL of the ideas I have. Ideally do this with a thought partner.
A circle map we made for an end-of-year/end-of-unit project
Categorize all of the ideas according to Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s CHRL framework.
Backwards plan and sequence the unit: What needs to be taught first so that students arrive to the final project?
I can then input the sequence into my curriculum map and work on holding myself accountable as well as staying flexible for student choice and voice.
Putting it into Practice: Our Current Unit of Study
In December, I roped Josue, our tech teacher, into brainstorming for our ecosystems unit with me. We created a circle map that overflowed onto a second page.
Over winter break, holed up in NYC at my parents’ house during the omicron wave, I researched resources and field trips, adding to the map and bothering Josue with my constant texts. On the plane back to Miami, I organized the ideas into a tree map with the CHRL framework.
I revised and reworded the essential question until I finally got it right: How can we encourage our KLA community to take a more active role in caring for South Florida’s ecosystems?
Then I paced it out: How would I launch the unit with the students so that they could come to this question on their own? When would the field trips make the most sense? What would students need to learn about and build expertise in before starting to take action? How could I align math, reader’s workshop, and writer’s workshop units so that they supported the flow of the project?
Into the curriculum map the ideas went:
January – launch and start initial research on ecosystems; start informational writing unit
February – deeper investigation into ecosystems, including virtual and in-person field trips to the mangroves of Key Biscayne and the Everglades; final informational writing bend = quick-write brochure about the Everglades habitats and endangered species
March – begin conversations about taking action, interview eco-artists, urban designers, nonprofit employees, etc; start opinion writing unit
Since January, the unit has taken on a life of its own. The students really grabbed onto mangroves more than any other ecosystem. A request for an interview with eco-artist Xavier Cortada led to us participating in his Plan(T) project school-wide, bringing mangrove propagules to KLA. An interview with Anna, our atelierista, sparked criticality and gave seed to a community urban design culminating project that integrates math and art, which we’ll launch after spring break.
But having that organizational plan? It’s like a road map. You may end up taking an alternate route, but having the map in front of you helps you keep the final destination in mind.
When my husband and I decided to move to Miami, I was sure about one thing: whichever school I taught at would need to embrace inquiry, integrated studies, and project based learning. I was lucky to find KLA, which has allowed me the same creative freedom that Samara did in designing curriculum that is meaningful and relevant for my students.
The way I approach project based learning is heavily influenced by my time at Samara and the professional development I received while teaching there, as well as by what I’m seeing and learning at KLA with its Reggio-inspired model.
My first Samara 5th graders observe a photo of their Bronx neighborhood in the 1970s, when The Bronx was burning
A disclaimer: I am in no way an expert on project based learning. I do, however, think I have a knack for it. Planning projects is fun (if you’ve ever planned one with me, you know how excited I can get), and it’s probably the only part of planning that never truly feels like work, because I am learning so much in the process.
I know that I’ve learned the most about effective teaching through other teachers—talking to them, observing them, reading their blogs/social media. So my goal is to document and reflect on my planning process here in bite-sized blog posts, in case it helps anyone out there.
What is Project Based Learning?
Before I launch into this blog series, it’s important that we ground ourselves in a definition for project based learning. PBLWorks, the leading provider of professional development for project based learning, defines project based learning as “a teaching method in which students learn by actively engaging in real-world and personally meaningful projects” (pblworks.org). That said, project based learning (PBL) is NOT simply “doing projects.” I particularly like this explanation from their website:
“We find it helpful to distinguish a ‘dessert project’ – a short, intellectually-light project served up after the teacher covers the content of a unit in the usual way – from a ‘main course’ project, in which the project is the unit. In Project Based Learning, the project is the vehicle for teaching the important knowledge and skills student need to learn. The project contains and frames curriculum and instruction.”
PBLWorks
Seven Essential Project Design Elements – PBLWorks
I was lucky enough to receive a full day of professional development from PBLWorks before leaving Samara, and I still have a lot to learn from them, particularly in terms of assessment and student reflection, critique, and revision. I already know these are my next steps as I look toward planning future PBL units. Onward.
Depth Over Breadth
One of the first things I learned at Samara about PBL is the idea of valuing depth over breadth; when you decide to do thematic units or projects, you simply have to give up the idea of being able to teach everything.
This can be a tricky concept to swallow.
But I have to teach all the things!
Take a look at any social studies or science scope and sequence and you’ll see what I mean. There is so much that states and cities and districts want you to teach in a single year for a single subject that it can be overwhelming, if not downright impossible. The teachers who do try to cover it all usually end up sacrificing depth in favor of breadth—students get a little sprinkling of everything, but don’t get a chance to linger and build their expertise. Not very effective.
With PBL, we want students to think critically, problem solve, collaborate, and communicate their newfound understanding in meaningful ways. This means we need to go deep.
Where to Begin
I like to begin by looking at the standards and the scope and sequence. NYC has a beautifully designed, easy to understand social studies scope and sequence. Florida? Not so much. Either way, get familiar with what your state wants students in your grade to learn. Focus on science and social studies, as these are the subject areas that often get “sprinkled” throughout the school day/year, pushed aside in favor of literacy and math, which are absolutely necessary in the primary grades.
Once you’ve gotten an idea of the standards, look inward:
What do you see in the scope and sequence that you are passionate about?
If you’re passionate about something, it will be contagious — others will get excited about it because you are.
Next, look at your students:
What do you see in the scope and sequence that they are or might be passionate about?
Get to know your kids really, really, really well. What questions have they already asked that connect to these topics? What are their interests, their passions, their strengths?
Finally, look at your community:
What issues in your neighborhood/town/city relate to the topics you and your students are passionate about?
I’ve found that project based learning is most effective and meaningful when it’s place-based too. What resources exist in your community to bring this learning to life?
Starting with a Seed
Here’s how I followed this for our current unit of study.
What do I see in the scope and sequence that I’m passionate about?
I am passionate about the environment and combatting the effects of climate change. I see this in the Florida State Standards SC.5.L.17 about Interdependence.
What do I see in the scope and sequence that my students are passionate about?
Many of my students love animals and wildlife. Some of them who moved here from another state have asked why our school doesn’t recycle. Most of them love being outside and are very active.
What issues in my neighborhood/town/city relate to the topics we are passionate about?
Miami is a city built on top of what was once part of the Everglades. Climate change is impacting Miami immensely because of sea level rise. Lots of flooding issues. There are many organizations working to combat pollution of Miami’s beaches. However, there’s a lack of easy/cheap recycling, and hardly any composting.
I had the seed of an idea for the unit. Now I just needed to start planning for it. To be continued.
An installation of mangrove propagules in our classroom window. We are currently participating in Xavier Cortada’s Plan(T) project as part of the community engagement portion of our project.
This October, I decided to get back into rollerblading. Perhaps “get back into” is a generous statement, seeing as aside from the occasional outing as a child and one semester of rollerblading P.E. my junior year in high school, I was never really “into” rollerblading to begin with.
But when I moved to Miami this summer, I had rollerblading on my mind. My friend Arta had lived here in one of our first years out of college, and one of the things she loved about Miami was the ability to do so many outdoor activities like boating and biking and, yes, ‘blading.
So in October when I mentioned this to another friend, Meryl, and was met with equal enthusiasm, we both made a promise to skate together and promptly purchased some stylish 90’s-esque inline skates in bright pastels.
My new Impala inline skates
And when the skates arrived, we upheld that promise and went on our first skate date! Meryl picked me up and drove us out to Virginia Key, where we strapped on our new skates and our pads and realized very quickly that we were quite wobbly, the ground was not smooth as we’d imagined, and we both had no clue how to brake, especially when going downhill. So after that outing (which was quite enjoyable truly, filled with long talks and good views and a post-workout smoothie), I put my blades in their new bag, and shoved them in a corner of my closet.
Where they sat for the next three months. Untouched.
I will be honest: all of the joy and enthusiasm for blading that I had felt when I purchased them and put them on, wheeling around my apartment for the first time, dissipated at the early signs of challenge and the very real fears of falling on my butt. I didn’t want to feel that sort of failure again. I was embarrassed, and I was scared. It was easier to make excuses — not enough time, too tired, “oh, I’m trying to get back into running and circuit training actually now” — easier to give up, than to face the fact that if I wanted to improve I’d have to work at it.
In the education world, there’s something called the Learning Pit.
The Learning Pit, by James Nottingham
I’ve taught about the Learning Pit a couple times over the past few years. It comes up at the start of the year usually, when we’re talking about having a growth mindset in the face of challenging academic tasks. I teach my students that it’s important to participate in productive struggle, and how mistakes help you learn because they cause synapses to fire in your brain (Jo Boaler, you are a goddess). We make lists of things someone with a fixed mindset might say (“I can’t do it” or “I’m not a math person”) and things someone with a growth mindset might say (“I’ve got this” or “If I just keep trying, it will get easier”).
But here I was, preacher of all things growth mindset to my students, shoving my rollerblades into the darkest corner of my bedroom closet, letting the dust bunnies slowly devour it until I could no longer tell it was there (except that I could, because the bag was so big).
Then two things happened:
It was the new year, and you know, we set intentions. After spending winter break in freezing New York, I was determined to take advantage of my new city and go outside more often during the week.
I got COVID in January and it completely knocked me out, forcing me to take a two-week break from working out.
So I made a choice. I took a long hard look at myself and thought, “You know what, Amy, you’re the one who wanted to start this new hobby. You’re not going to become a rollerblading sensation overnight. And I know that it sucks, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Just put them on and commit to taking them out once a week and practicing. You can only get better from here.”
That first Saturday morning of February, after fully recovering from my run-in with omicron, I strapped up, padded up, and took my blades out for a spin on the Venetian Causeway. It wasn’t perfect. I still couldn’t brake. But you know what? It was fun. It was more fun than I’d had in a long time. I felt… like a kid.
The next Saturday, I bladed again, this time in Margaret Pace Park with the sole intention of practicing using my brakes. I felt silly in my pads and frustrated because it was still so hard, but the views and the music in my AirPods made it worth it.
The following week, Meryl and I woke up early and drove out to the Miami Beach boardwalk where we skated for an hour, laughing and gawking at the views, and then had a delicious brunch of açaí bowls.
Each time I skated, I felt a joy so authentic and innocent that it bubbled out of me. I came home feeling elated.
And then last Saturday, after blading and realizing that while I love to be independent, I was going to need some outside support if I wanted to make significant improvements, I miraculously found a rollerblading group class that was starting in a few days and signed up.
It’s a simple and generous rule of life that whatever you practice, you will improve at.
Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic
I’m climbing out of the Learning Pit now. This morning, I woke up early and skated to Dorsey Park to practice the new skills I learned during my Thursday class.
As I head home, I smiled and thought to myself, “I think I’m starting to get this.”
I’m not over the edge yet, but I’ve got the rope in my hands, and I’m enjoying the journey up.
I’ve always struggled to follow a curriculum. My first year of teaching, my fellow teacher newbie and I visited our new school a week before we had to report to get some materials and start planning for the first month of school. Our math coach placed the teacher’s guide for our school’s math curriculum in front of us and began narrating how a typical lesson would go, her finger tapping at the top of each page as she went. It felt sterile, void of life, indifferent to the human children that would be learning from its pages. The next week, I remember giving it a go like she’d shown us, playing the video that went along with the lesson, only to shut it off as the cartoon character’s high-pitched voice made me (and my third graders) cringe.
“Enough of that,” I said, and the students breathed a sigh of relief. So began my journey into developing my own curriculum for my students.
I had an assistant principal that year who, though not entirely helpful for much else, did say something wise about curriculum guides during one grade-team meeting: “The teachers guides are like a script, but you are the actors. You make it come alive.”
Corny metaphor aside, I saw what she meant. We weren’t meant to teach from the guide. We weren’t meant to have them in our laps as we spoke to the children, glancing down to make sure we were saying everything “correctly.”
Fast forward six years later, and teachers guides for me are just that: guides. Supports. A jumping off point when you’re not sure where to begin. The real planning? That comes from my heart, from what I am passionate about, and from that year’s students’ strengths and interests and passions.
I’m a creator, and creating is part of why I love teaching so much. Even in the grades that I’ve taught more than once, I’ve rarely taught the same lesson or unit in the same way twice. With each year repeating a grade, what I actually gain is more confidence and expertise in the content, the landmark skills that I know my students need to learn in order to be successful in their future academic careers. Additionally, I’ve witnessed my growth as a teacher by seeing the shifts in which “subject area” I focus on developing professionally. My first three years, it was math. My fourth and fifth, integrated studies and themed, project-based learning units, with a hint of writing revolution (Judith Hochman). All intertwined heavily with multilingual language-learning, as I was teaching in dual language classrooms at the time.
This year, I’m finally focusing on writing, thanks to a colleague, mentor, and friend who is pushing me professionally and personally (ahem… this blog). I find myself once again looking at curriculum guides for Teacher’s College Writer’s Workshop units and setting them aside in favor of creating my own units based on what I see my students needing and wanting.
This winter’s informational writing unit was a big success, for me and for my fifth graders. I grew in helping students to set and achieve goals through one-on-one and small group conferencing. A final mini-bend allowed students to transfer their new knowledge to quick-writes about our science content: writing informational brochures on the new Chromebooks, which ended up incredible. And last week’s informational on-demand provided confirmation in the data: almost all of them jumped up half a year to a full year’s growth.
A ready-made curriculum is a map that promises to deliver your students to a certain destination. This year, I tried to follow one of those maps when I taught the realistic fiction unit, only to realize that the path wasn’t the right one for my students. So I continue to take the risk of scanning the map, situating myself in the terrain, and creating new paths, knowing that I have a pretty good sense of direction. And my fifth graders? They’ve reached the destination each time.
“Oh! You would be so proud of me,” I started saying to Ana at dismissal. She herded a child out the front door, wishing them well, and then turned back to me. I took a breath. “I—”
“Stop.” She grabbed my shoulder, cutting me off. “Why do you keep saying I ‘would’ be so proud of you? I am proud of you!”
I struggle sometimes to turn inward and tell myself, Look at you! You rocked it. I’m proud of you. But I’m trying to get better at it, so here we go: I made leaps and bounds in my conferring skills this past unit.
My big goal during this unit on journalism was to know what my students were writing so I could best support them through conferring and small groups. I had dabbled in conferring during the first two units, but felt ill-equipped to actually support my students apart from giving a compliment and moving on, which often felt like I was going, “You’re doing great! Keep it up, byeeee!”
Ana told me that in order to truly plan for conferring and small groups, I needed to know what the heck my students were able to do and what they were still working towards. And I could only do this if I actually read their writing.
So, the day after Thanksgiving break, I requested all students turn in their writer’s notebooks so I could see what was up. Skimming through the stack of notebooks was eye-opening, to say the least. I noticed which students weren’t generating ideas, which students had already written multiple news reports, and which students were still stuck writing what appeared to be narratives (which can happen during a genre switch like this). I did it again a week later, once students had started drafting.
In order to keep track of where students were at, I used a conferring notes document created by Amy Ellerman and outlined in depth in her blog post on Two Writing Teachers. I revised the teaching points at the top to work for my unit, and downsized it so it would fit on one page. Here’s what I ended up with:
Second set of conferring notes, taken after students started drafting out of the notebook.
This document is GOLD. Ellerman’s pattern-seeking strategy helped me so much, not just to figure out which teaching points I could revisit with which students in a small group, but also with my one-on-one conferring sessions.
With a quick visual of data, aligned to the major teaching points of my unit, I could come to a conference ready to go with both a compliment and a teaching point. This was a game-changer for me, and for my students as well. I believe many of them wrote better articles because I knew where they were at, knew where they still needed to go, and was prepared with supports for them when we met.
However, I did struggle with a couple of students (as we always do!). One of them is Enrique, who basically listened to my suggestions for revisions without implementing any. We had one small group session the day after I took stock of students’ notebooks that ultimately got hijacked by us butting heads (him: “Why do I have to _____” and me: “Because I said so!” Ohhh, shame).
Ana even had a short one-on-one conference with him where she suggested he keep his reader in mind as he drafted and revised, which he replied to with a, “Hm, yeah I’ll think about it.” She looked at me and shrugged.
But then something glorious happened. I had a small group conference with Enrique and his writing partner, Marcelo, who also happens to be his best friend.
As I could see from my conferring notes, neither of them had a lead that included the 5 W’s and H. Enrique was writing about new Disney Plus shows and had really just listed a bunch of items and saved his most important information for last, which was almost the opposite of the structure the students were supposed to be aiming for. Marcelo had written a catchy lead, but it was lacking some details that the reader really needed in order to understand what his article was about.
I started the small group conference with a compliment. I said: “You both generated a great newsworthy idea and are using an officious tone, just like a journalist! I think you are ready to look at the structure of your news reports to see if they follow the inverted pyramid. Let’s start at the top with the lead.”
They both flipped to the mini-anchor charts pasted in their notebooks and reminded themselves of what should go in a strong lead.
At Ana’s suggestion, I started including mini print-outs of anchor charts the class and I had co-created in my conferring toolkit. Both Enrique and Marcelo already had one of these already in their notebooks from a previous conference.
I had them take a highlighter to their drafts and highlight where they saw the 5 W’s and H. I did the same to my mentor article. Both boys realized quickly that their leads were falling short.
So we went back to our strategy from a mini-lesson a couple weeks prior: jot down each of the 5W’s and H and fill them out, then make a sentence or two with all that information. (Note: This strategy is inspired by Judith Hochman’s strategies to help students write complex sentences.) They started filling it out, and that’s when the lightbulb moment happened.
“How do I choose the ‘what’ in my article? There are so many shows!” Enrique asked.
“Maybe it’s the one you’re recommending at the end,” I ventured.
“So, Loki?” Enrique confirmed. He started jotting it down.
“I don’t think the most newsworthy one is Loki,” Marcelo interjected. “I think it’s Hawkeye, since that just came out.”
Enrique paused, thought about it, and then nodded. He erased what he’d written down and wrote: “Hawkeye.”
He filled out the rest of his page with ease.
The two of them then moved on to the body, figuring out they could interview each other to provide alternate perspectives in their articles, and finally onto the tail, both deciding to conclude with a follow-up course of action.
When Enrique showed me his revised article at the end of the independent writing period, it looked nothing like his first few drafts. It was a complete overhaul—a “major surgery” as we often say in our workshop. I gave him a huge hug.
Later that week, when he’d finished his published piece, I sent Ana a scan of his writing, from generating ideas to final product.
“I am SO PROUD OF HIMMMM!” I texted Ana.
I smiled at her reply: “I am SOOO PROUD OF YOUUUUUUUU!”
I guess I am proud of me, too.
Generating seed ideasFirst draft in the notebookThird draft out of the notebookNotes during small groupFinal draft with editsFinal published news report before adding pictures Click through the images above to see Enrique’s writing process
Ana suggested I start blogging about my experiences teaching, so here I am.
I’m Amy, a born and raised New Yorker-turned-Miamian. After 5 years teaching Spanish dual language in NYC public schools in both Washington Heights and The Boogie Down Bronx, I find myself now at an independent, Reggio-inspired school in Brickell. Quite the jump, bringing with it a ton of change.
That said, in a strange way, I’m in somewhat familiar territory: founding a new grade for the third time in my short teaching career. Founding a grade brings with it the expected fear and anxiety, but also unforeseen joy and excitement. Through this blog, I hope to document this rollercoaster ride and reflect on what’s gone well and what could go better.
For, after all, founding a grade is in its way a shitty first draft, as the title states. There will be much to add and cut and revise for next year. I hope to give myself grace, quiet the perfectionist within me. You’ve got to write the whole thing before you can fix her up!
So here’s to it, and to connecting with other educators along the way.
I wake up and sit in front of the laptop, start the Zoom meeting at 8:30am, and watch them trickle in slowly. I say good morning to many who say nothing back. Cameras off. Microphones muted. Perhaps one will write “good morning” in the chat. I appreciate that. And of course there are a few who are up and at ‘em, ready to go, or don’t care that they’ve just rolled out of bed and their hair is a mess. The black squares don’t bother me anymore. I don’t think it’s right for a teacher to demand cameras be on, even if it hurts my soul to teach to what looks like nothingness. What I can’t take, though, is when there’s no response, no “reactions,” no chatting, no unmuting and speaking up. And as we creep ever closer to June 25th, the days are getting a lot quieter.
Any teacher will tell you that students and teachers alike experience burnout by the end of the school year. Of course, this year has been unlike any other. COVID closures robbed my school’s first graduating class of a trip to D.C., organized by our Parents’ Association, a real graduation, and the ability to say goodbye to their friends and teachers before heading off on summer vacation and potentially never seeing one another again.
Last year, we attributed the kids’ burnout mostly to the pandemic. We were all experiencing collective trauma unlike anything we ever had before. I had a panic attack the weekend before Mayor De Blasio closed the schools back in March of 2020, and most of those first few weeks online, I was simply trying to hold it together, taking deep, shaky breaths in front of my laptop, which was propped up on my tiny kitchen table, my chair backed into a corner against the spices, before starting the Zoom meeting. April was a frenzy of getting in touch with families who hadn’t connected yet to Google Classroom or Zoom, but in those early days, online learning was fun in the way that all new things are. The students were excited about being able to “do school” from home. The expectation was that we’d be closed until spring break, and then return afterward, so they saw it as a sort of 6-week vacation. We all know how that turned out.
As the spring wore on, we saw our students’ withdrawal as a symptom of the trauma the pandemic was inflicting on us all. Slowly, more and more cameras turned off and we were left staring at black squares and teaching into the ether. Eventually we took any student contact with school as a win, counting them present, urging them to return to the next class, and to come back tomorrow too. My school set up weekly events to encourage participation and boost morale, and it worked for the most part. We were pleasantly surprised at our Zoom graduation ceremony to have 100% attendance, even from those who had never shown their faces on a Zoom call.
The group I’m teaching now has been fully remote since September, not counting the three months of last school year. They started the year with cameras on, smiling, joking, eager to learn and connect again with one another. In September, if I put on a dance video, they’d all stand up and get silly with me.
Now, I never know what to expect. Will they arrive with energy and laughter, willing to take on the day, leaving me ever impressed by their resilience and maturity? Or will they arrive late, stay muted and unresponsive as I call their names, their Classkick and Google Slides pages empty?
It’s still burnout, but different than last year’s case; my co-teachers and I are calling it senioritis. That’s really the only way we’ve been able to describe the atmosphere in our classes to our colleagues. In staff meetings, we wait our turn to share out and find ourselves leading with disclaimers: “So in fifth we’re dealing with a lot of resistance to work. Just keep that in mind as we share this…” Asynchronous work? Maybe 12 out of 39 students will do it. We scrapped that long ago. Everything we do is synchronous. Are you here now? Okay, let’s get to work then. Class is over? Go enjoy your free time.
Miriam Webster defines senioritis as a noun meaning “an ebbing of motivation and effort by school seniors as evidenced by tardiness, absences, and lower grades.” If you type the word into Google’s search engine, their English dictionary will specify that senioritis is a “supposed affliction of students in their final year of high school or college.” Fifth graders shouldn’t be affected by it, but I can assure you that ours are.
Perhaps it’s the knowledge that in a few months, they’ll be on summer break, going to a new school in the fall. Maybe it’s the hormones, some of them starting to have real crushes, and wanting to spend as much time socializing as possible. It could also be a defense mechanism: tamping down the hope they’d had for a “normal year.” Whatever the cause, fifth grade senioritis starts like a true virus, first infecting just a few, even the most prepared, and then spreading rapidly until you’re all consumed and trying to remedy it by any means necessary.
The coupling of senioritis with this second year of remote learning is extreme, and difficult. The parents feel it too. Just last week I received messages from a couple of them, echoing one another: “I just can’t anymore. I don’t know what to do with them.”
Fifth grade is supposed to be the magic year—in children’s literature, it’s the eleven-year-old protagonist who makes that leap from childhood to adulthood. I urge my students to turn on their cameras so I can feel their presence, imagining that for them, remote learning would be much more enjoyable if they were able to feel that sense of community too. But what about socializing in this 2-D world is normal? How are they supposed to test their voices, react spontaneously, show off their newfound autonomy, when only one microphone can be unmuted at a time?
Right now, our students are writing letters to their representative about water issues in their community, like the presence of lead in school plumbing systems, and the pollution of the Bronx River, which runs behind our school. They’re as engaged as they can be. But they’ll be done with the letters in a couple of weeks, and what then? We’ll still have four more weeks. Four more weeks of black squares, talking to myself, and hoping they engage.
Maybe we need to fully flip the script. We’ve already switched around our schedule, starting with an extended morning meeting to ease into the day, and it’s shown a lot of promise. Perhaps we can cure this bout of senioritis by putting the power into their hands for the end of the year: what do you want to learn about? And how do you want to learn it? Our year-long essential question is “How can you use your voice to create change in your world?” We’ll let students lead the way. We’ll step back, give them and ourselves some grace, and see what happens. Come the morning, when I start the 8:30am meeting, I hope they’ll be waiting, ready to share with excitement what they’ve come up with.
Writing With Abandon 