Visiting Our Colleagues

It felt wonderful to be with so many of you at the last CFG meeting.  We made two commitments:

1) To visit at least one other CFG member's classroom (or to watch a traveling teacher teach) before the next meeting.

2) To bring our calendars to the next meeting prepared to make concrete plans for more time in one another's classrooms.

Because we shifted last week's meeting, our next meeting is coming up fast! We will meet in a little over a week on November 5th.  With conferences this week, that means we'd better start visiting!

If you want some guidance, I'd suggest these first visits following an observer as learner format, where the visiting teacher comes in with his/her own question (i.e.: What accommodations are other teachers making for children who need to move to listen? What kinds of mini-lessons are you using to launch your Readers' Workshop sessions? What language or actions are children using to show they are listening to one another?) and visits to learn more from the teacher s/he is observing.  Jotting a quick note to the teacher you visited afterward with a thank you and a 1-2 sentence note about something you learned while visiting or a question you hope to apply to your own classroom can help start a dialogue and can help foster trust for peer observations.

I can't wait to find out what we'll all learn from one another! May the inspiration begin...

“If we want to grow as teachers -- we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives -- risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract.” -Parker Palmer-

Developing a Teacher Research Question

Claire asked for some examples of teacher research questions and I thought there might be others who would like to see some resources.  Here's a helpful excerpt from an article on teacher research by Amy Anderson:

THE RESEARCH QUESTION
A research question is designed to get to the heart of what goes on in the classroom, asking “what’s going on?” in relation to behaviors or strategies. It’s worth spending significant time thinking about this central component of teacher research. MacLean and Mohr suggest using guiding questions in order to focus attention in the research process:
What are you curious about in your classroom?
What puzzles you in your classroom?
What problems do you want to solve in your classroom?
What seems most or least successful about your teaching?

It might be helpful to frame inquiry as a “What happens when…?,” “How…?,” or “What is…?” question.

“What happens when…” allows teachers to explore the effects of a particular practice, strategy or intervention. “What happens when I implement read-alouds in my classroom?” invites teachers to observe the effects of read-aloud strategies from a cognitive or behavioral perspective, for example.
“How…” questions lead teachers to consider the details of a practice or behavior. For example, “How do ELL students interact during recess?” invites teachers to try to understand social behaviors of particular students that might suggest ways to facilitate interaction in the classroom.
“What is…” questions suggest thoughtful consideration of a method or strategy and its place in classroom practice. “What is the role of inquiry in my science classroom?” requires careful reflection on the role and possibilities of inquiry in the classroom, its potential for student learning, and the qualities of inquiry in the classroom.

Choosing a compelling question is critical for it guides the research process. It can be tweaked over time as teachers discover that they are really interested in thinking more broadly or narrowly about an issue, for example, but the research question needs to emerge from an area of inquiry about which teachers are passionate, for this keen interest sustains the research process. 

Free Educational Lecture

The Arbor School is sponsoring a free lecture on 'Mastering Self Control' 

by Professor Walter Mischel

Sunday November 23, 2014
3 pm at the Lincoln HS Auditorium

You can hear an interview with Walter Mischel, read a book excerpt and see a recreation of the marshmallow test here.

October Meeting

It looks like moving the CFG to October 23rd works for everyone I heard from, so we'll make that change. We will meet in the Platt Global Classroom. At this meeting we will take a look at where we all feel like we currently are on the Cycle of Inquiry in relation to a teacher question we'd like to pursue in our classrooms this year.   We will also spend time at the meeting reading the article Janet sent faculty called "The Right Questions," and participating in a text-based protocol, as well as considering observation and student work protocols that could help inform our teacher research questions. There is a collection of protocols in the previous blog post for your reference.

Looking forward to seeing all of you a week from Thursday!

Kirstin

Our First Meeting of the Year

Hello, friends,

I'm looking forward to seeing all of you on 9/25 for our first CFG of the year!  Our agenda should have reached you by email; please let me know if you didn't receive it. To welcome our new members we'll spend some time going over our touchstones, doing a reflective activity to help us think about the relationship between our teaching style and individual students (related profiles here), and we'll take a look at protocols for observation/looking at student work that may guide us through the months to come. You can find the protocols in that collection here.

We'll see you at 3:30 in the Morris House Conference Room!  Please bring your CFG binder if you have one, a journal or notepad and a pencil or pen.  You may want to grab some water, tea, etc. before you head up, too.
See you soon!
Kirstin

2014-2015 CFG Calendar

Thanks so much to everyone who joined us for lunch or gave feedback about calendar dates.  It looks like a Wednesday-Thursday rotation will again allow the maximum number of participants this year.  I had to switch one date due to a HAC retreat, so you'll notice a break in the pattern early in the school year, but most of the year will follow a Wednesday-Thursday pattern.  Please add these dates to your calendar!  All meetings are scheduled for 3:30-5:30.  Locations are unconfirmed and may change--I'll update you as I learn more.  Janet, Colesie and Erin have offered alternative spaces, so we may have some meetings in their cozy spots!

To all meetings please bring a journal or paper, pencil or pen, your CFG binder if you have one.  If you're a new member, you may want to obtain a binder for keeping protocols and articles. Our dates are now as follows after receiving some date change requests from Lyn:

Thursday, September 25th in Morris House Conference Room
Thursday, October 16th in Morris House Conference Room
Wednesday, November 12th in the DVR November 5th in Morris House Conference Room
Thursday, December 11th in the DVR
Wednesday, January 14th in the DVR
Thursday, February 19th, location TBA
Wednesday, March 11th in the DVR March 18th, location TBA
Thursday, April 16th, location TBA
Wednesday, May 27th, location TBA

Our September meeting is open to all faculty/staff, whether exploring to see if the CFG meets your professional development needs or committed member.  Please join us!

Welcome Back!

Ah, friends, it's good to be together again!  Please join us on Thursday, August 28th for our annual back-to-school lunch gathering. This will be a time for us to welcome interested faculty/staff who want more information about the CFG and to set our calendars for the year! Grab your lunches and meet us in the outdoor seating outside the Dining Hall (on the south side).  Not quite as beautiful as the garden near Morris House, but easier to get your lunch to!  Please bring your calendars so we can find the most inclusive dates and times possible.

I'm reading a wonderful book by Terry Tempest Williams called When Women Were Birds:  Fifty-four Variations on Voice.  It's a book of reflections by the author after her mother had, in a long tradition of Mormon women, willed her daughter all of her journals when she died.  When the author opened them, she found each and every one blank.  When Women Were Birds is the author's reflection on all the myriad of possibilities those empty journals might say and mean about her mother's voice.   A few passages in this book remind me of all of you:

'The stars are our ancestors,' write Mary Evelyn Tucker and Brian Swimme in The Journey of the Universe. 'Out of them, everything comes forth...For stars, creativity depends on maintaining a state of disequilibrium...It is the dynamic tension between gravity and fusion...outward expansion and contraction...Stars are wombs of immense creativity.

***

Conversation is the vehicle for change.  We test our ideas.  We hear our own voice in concert with one another.  And inside those pauses of listening, we approach new territories of thought.  A good argument, call it a discussion, frees us.  Words fly out of our mouths like threatened birds.  Once released, they may never return.  If they do, they have chosen a home and the bird-words are calmed into an ars poetic.  The [members of] my family didn't always agree, but it was in their company I felt inspired and safe.

Thanks to all of you for being that family of safety and inspiration. I can't wait to see what ideas we test, what new territories of thought we explore this year together.