Preparing For a New Kind of Teaching

I have never had such a productive spring/summer. What made this one different?
  • I found myself at home. My job as "Mom's Taxi Service" was closed. We didn't go anywhere.
  • The heaviness of the pandemic and the racism running through our culture weighed on my heart. My answer to that heaviness was to dig in and get something done. 
I tried to greet the challenges as "opportunities" and look at them with a "what if" mentality. Eternal optimist here chose to think about “what we could learn from this” rather than dwell on what we lost or what we are missing out on.
  • "What if" we can make something better out of this situation?
  • "What if" I can use this to grow something I never would have imagined before?
  • "What if" I can learn something about myself/my students/my community through this?
I spent a significant amount of time looking at new tools and looking at features new to me on tools that I was already using. I prepared my "toolkit" to embrace a year like none other.

 

Wakelet

As soon as our schools closed, I went to work on my Wakelet as an alternative to a static library newsletter.  Now that I lost regular access to children and their backpacks through which I sent newsletters, and parents' inboxes were flooded with e-mails, I decided I needed a stand-alone tool that could change with the times.  I fine tuned a Wakelet that provided resources and a sneak peek into our library.  I know I live on Twitter, but our parents do not.  Wakelet allowed me to take my tweets and repackage them for parents.  What we ended up with was a fine visual collection of "What's going on in our library."



Anti-Racist Study Group

The heaviness of the spring was on my heart and I reached out to our staff to see if there was interest in a summer anti-racist study group.  I found myself on a team with 3 colleagues developing a study group.  When we struggled with which book to choose, amidst such an array of books to rich books to read, we decided to ditch the idea entirely and curate our own resources to tailor the needs to our group.  We met with a small group for 4 weeks, digging into articles, podcasts, and videos.  Rich discussion led us through our summer and we planned for a small group to keep the thinking going throughout the year, providing regular communication to staff with anti-racist resources.



Social Justice Standards

I read several books about race this summer and joined several discussion groups, but I wanted to DO something proactive about racism.  My sphere of influence is my classroom and my students.  I decided to use my skills and talents to be an activist of sorts, and teach from the Social Justice Standards while linking them to the AASL Standards and anchoring the concepts with picture books.  This idea has been percolating since November's AASL conference where I attended a session by Donna Mignardi, Jennifer Sturge, and Marianne Fitzgerald and saw the Calvert County Public School's Elementary Library Curriculum which did just this.  A casual conversation with my friend Laura D'Elia became a serious conversation about what this could be and what this could look like.  We spent many weeks and hours developing a curriculum.  We launch our teaching this fall and have every intention of sharing our work as it unfolds.



Graphics with Tony Vincent

I took Tony Vincent's Classy Graphics class this summer to build my graphics skills to better communicate with students,  teachers, and families.  I created all kinds of tools to use in my classroom this year including post-it notes for classroom book deliveries, posters, and interactive tools for digital learning.



Google Certification

I finally took my Google Certification exam and am officially a Level 1 Educator.  The best preparation I had for the exam was the spring of remote learning, living and breathing Google Classroom, Google Meets and the google forms and spreadsheets I used to sign children up and manage them over the course of three months.


My takeaways

Learning so many new things made me feel a little more in control of our crazy world.  While I like to think that I am prepared, it is going to be a year of challenges but I am excited to exercise my new skills and take on what 2020-2021 has to offer.


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