5 Tips for teaching 'tough kids'

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This Blog has some great ideas (although some are common sense) on how to deal with that one student who you can't seem to get through to at first...

Every teacher remembers his or her first "tough kid" experience. Maybe the student ignored your directions or laughed at your attempts to utilize the classroom discipline steps. We all have at least one story to share, and for some teachers, teaching a tough kid is a daily challenge. It seems that no matter what teaching techniques you try to pull out of your educator hat, nothing changes their behavior.

1. Set the tone
2. Be a mentor
3. Make connections
4. Take it personally (in a good way)
5. Expect anything and everything

Mentors as Learners and Leaders - Summer Institute at UBC

Last week I attended a conference at UBC. It was 'Mentors as learners and leaders summer institute' put on by UBC and BCTF. With approx 40 other educators from across the province we shared, we learned, we listened, we planned.

I left feeling re-energized about mentorship, which has taken a bit of a hit in my district.

As a district funded program, our mentoring groups have been in place for the past 8 years. Due to budget cuts, we lost the co-ordinating position that managed the program, then faced the strike and lock-out and ended the school year with a lot of uncertainty about many things.

Despite all this, the conference went forward and was exactly what I needed to get inspired again. Now, more than ever, there is a need for mentoring of new teachers and teachers new to a position, which we continue to see more and more of with high numbers of laid off teachers.

Somethings I enjoyed at the conference that I wanted to share:

• We had an opportunity to share what our district model was. There were five models, Coquitlam was one of the five and I had the opportunity to present to educators, while my two Coquitlam colleagues rotated through other stations to hear about their models. This was especially useful because we have used a learning team model in Coquitlam for 8 years, but are moving towards site-based model for middle school next year. It was great to learn and share what works, what doesn't and ideas to overcome challenges and maximize benefits of each model.
• Home Groups. We had small "home groups" where we could share, brainstorm and reflect with each other about the information we were experiencing.
• Simulation. There was an incredible simulation activity run by Laura Servage and Jaime Beck from University of Alberta. This was something I'd really like to replicate in the future with mentors.
• Anne Phelan, UBC professor spoke to us and told such amazing stories that really brought the importance of mentoring to life.
• Linda Farr Darling was another amazing guest speaker who taught us the importance of 'place' and consciousness of place in mentorship.
• Carousel Activities that allowed us to delve deeper into some of the hot topics in mentoring such as stakeholders, funding, training, and so on.

Overall, it was an exciting and packed few days with colleagues from across the province. It really was exactly what I needed to be motivated again after a pretty challenging June.

Yes, it is summer 'break' however, the strike/lockout continues and September is uncertain.... but mentoring must continue and I am so excited to be a part of it all.

 

The Lollipop Moment

I went to see Lois Zachary at the mentoring conference last week. She opened with this video and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. So powerful.




If you don't have time to watch the video, here is the commentary written (of most of the video, missing some at the end):

I want to start just by asking everyone in the audience a question: How many of you are completely comfortable calling yourselves a leader?

See, I've asked that question all the way across the country, and everywhere I ask it, no matter where, there's always a huge portion of the audience that won't put up their hand. And I've come to realize that we have made leadership into something bigger than us. We've made it into something beyond us. And I worry sometimes that we spend so much time celebrating amazing things that hardly anybody can do that we've convinced ourselves that those are the only things worth celebrating, and we start to devalue the things that we can do every day.

I went to a little school called Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, and on my last day there a girl came up to me and she said, "I remember the first time that I met you." And then she told me a story that happened four years earlier.

She said, "On the day before I started University I was in the hotel room with my mom and my dad. And I was so scared and so convinced that I couldn't do this; that I wasn't ready for university that I just burst into tears. And my mom and my dad were amazing. They were like, 'Look, we know you're scared, but let's just go tomorrow, let's go to the first day and if at any point you feel as if you can't do this, that's fine, just tell us, we'll take you home. We love you no matter what.'"

She said, "And so I went the next day and was standing in line getting ready for registration and I looked around and I just knew I couldn't do it. I knew I wasn't ready, I knew I had to quit. And I turned to my mom and my dad to tell them that we needed to go home, and just at that moment you came out of the student union building wearing the stupidest hat I have ever seen in my life. It was awesome. And you had a bucket full of lollipops. And you were walking along and you were handing the lollipops out to people in line and talking about [a charity called] Shinerama. And all of a sudden you got to me, and you just stopped. And you stared. It was creepy. And then you looked at the guy next to me, and you smiled, and you reached in to your bucket and you pulled out a lollipop and you held it out to him. And you said to him, 'You need to give a lollipop to the beautiful woman standing next to you.' "

And she said, "I have never seen anyone get more embarrassed faster in my life. He turned beet-red and wouldn't even look at me and just kinda held the lollipop out like this." [shyly giving the lollipop] "And I felt so bad for this dude that I took the lollipop and as soon as I did you got this incredibly severe look on your face and you looked at my mom and my dad and you said, 'Look at that. Look at that. First day away from home and already she's taking candy from a stranger!'"

And she said, "Everybody lost it. Twenty feet in every direction, everyone started to howl. And I know this is cheesy, and I don't know why I'm telling you this, but in that moment when everyone was laughing, I knew that I shouldn't quit. And I haven't spoken to you once in the four years since that day, but I heard that you were leaving, and I had to come up and tell you that you've been an incredibly important person in my life, and I'm going to miss you."

And she walks away. And I'm flattened. And she gets about six feet away and she turns around and smiles and goes, "And you should probably know this too. I'm still dating that guy four years later." A year and half after I moved to Toronto, I got an invitation to their wedding.

Here's the kicker. I don't remember that.

How many of you guys have a lollipop moment? A moment where someone said something or did something that you feel fundamentally made your life better?

We need to redefine leadership as being about lollipop moments, how many of them we create, how many of them we acknowledge, how many of them we pay forward, and how many of them we say thank you for. Because we've made leadership about changing the world, and there is no world, there are only six billion understandings of it. And if you change one person's understanding of it, one person's understanding of what they're capable of, one person's understanding of how much people care about them, one person's understanding of how powerful an agent of change they can be in this world, you've changed the whole thing.

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Remember to tell people who made your lollipop moment. Thank them. Chances are they do not know it. As teachers, we create lollipop moments each day and often never know it. Be the change. Be kind!

The importance of mentorship for early career teachers

Miami teacher, David Cutler, writes about the importance of mentorship for early career teachers:

Today, my success as a teacher -- not to mention the lives of all the students I hope I have inspired and changed in my seven years in the classroom -- is directly related to the caring, high-quality mentorship I received during my first year of teaching. Without it, I would have become another statistic, quitting after my first few years on the job.

David talks about a mentor as confidant, observer, and confidence builder. I am part of our district mentorship program and enjoy hearing about other programs and how mentors have positively helped new teachers.

Read More Here