The Power of the Positive Phone Call Home

Calling students’ parents or guardians with good news encourages more good behavior and creates strong teacher-student bonds.

When I first started teaching and was overwhelmed by the demands and complexity of the job, my survival strategy was simply to take all the advice that came my way and implement it. So when my wise mentor suggested that after the first day of school I call all of my second graders’ parents, I did.

In spite of my exhaustion, I called each family and introduced myself. I asked a few questions about their child. I said that their kid had had a good first day. I said I looked forward to working together.

POSITIVE PHONE CALLS: TIME-CONSUMING BUT WORTHWHILE

Throughout that year, and the years that followed, I continued this practice. I had a feeling that these positive phone calls home were important. After the first few days of a new school year, as soon as I’d identified the kids who might be challenging, I made it a goal to call their homes with positive news every week.

I would share this goal with my students, greeting them at the door with something like: “I’m so excited to see you this morning, Oscar! I’m going to be watching you really closely today to find some good news to share with your mom this evening. I can’t wait to call her and tell her what a good day you had!”

When I taught middle school, this strategy made the difference between an unmanageable group of kids and an easy group. You’d be surprised, perhaps, how desperately an eighth-grade boy wants his mom (or dad or grandma or pastor) to get a positive call home.

On the first day of school I’d give students a survey that included this item: “Who would you like me to call when I have good news to share about how you’re doing in my class? You’re welcome to list up to five people, and please let them know I might call—even tonight or tomorrow!”

First I’d call parents of the kids who I knew would be challenging, those I suspected rarely got positive calls. When an adult answered the phone, I’d say, all in one long breath, “Hi—is this Mrs. _____? I’m calling from _____ middle school with great news about your child, _____. Can I share this news?”

If I didn’t immediately blurt out the part about “great news,” sometimes they’d hang up on me. or I’d hear a long anxious silence.

Some of these kids were difficult, extremely difficult. However, I was always able to find something sincerely positive about what they had done. As the days passed, I kept calling: “I just wanted to share that today when _____ came into my class, he said ‘good morning’ to me and opened his notebook right away. I knew we’d have a good day!” Sometimes I’d stop in the middle of class and, in front of all the students, I’d call a parent. The kids loved that. They started begging for me to call their parent too. It was the first choice of reward for good behavior—“Just call my mama and tell her I did good today.”

I was saddened when parents would say, “I don’t think anyone has ever called me from school with anything positive about my child.” I occasionally heard soft sobbing during these calls.

I first used this phone call thing as a strategy for managing behavior and building partnerships, and it worked. However, after 10 years of teaching, I became a parent myself, and my feelings shifted into some other universe. As a parent, I can’t think of anything I want a teacher to do more than to recognize what my boy is doing well, when he’s trying, when he’s learning, when his behavior is shifting, and share those observations with me.

I know how many hours teachers work. And I also know that a phone call can take three minutes. If every teacher allocated 15 minutes a day to calling parents with good news, the impact could be tremendous. In the long list of priorities for teachers, communicating good news is usually not at the top. But try it, just for a week—try calling the parents of a few kids. It doesn’t have to be just the challenging ones—they all need and deserve these calls. See what happens. The ripple effects for the kid, the class, and the teacher might be transformational.

Calling students’ parents or guardians with good news encourages more good behavior and creates strong teacher-student bonds.

Reference: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/power-positive-phone-call-home-elena-aguilar?fbclid=IwAR38iCN1hKXbSP-amhTL9zoliXCVNE3VhpslCbUBZe4ky3NgZ_-RWvHZEcU

9 New Ways to Use Flipgrid in the Classroom

The popular tool has features that teachers in any subject can use to help students connect with each other and share their learning.

The video-sharing tool Flipgrid, as we all know, is popular in schools—so popular, in so many countries, that its rapid rise been attributed to “Flipgrid Fever.” The tool has been free for educators to use for over a year now after being acquired by Microsoft.

One of the main things going for Flipgrid is its ease of use. Teachers set up an account and create grids, which act as communities for students to work in. Within each grid the teacher creates prompts called topics, and students post video responses to the prompts and replies to each other’s videos. Most of the videos are quite short, just a minute or two long, and the tool is simple enough that kindergartners use it.

9 NEW WAYS TO USE FLIPGRID

1. Sharing book reviews: With Flipgrid’s new augmented reality (AR) feature, classrooms and classroom libraries can use the video QR code to create an engaging way for students to share book reviews. After a student records their review, the teacher can print the QR code and tape it on the book, and the student’s classmates can use their devices to scan the code and watch the review as a way to help them decide if they’d like to read the book.

2. Practicing world language skills: Flipgrid makes it possible for teachers in different districts and different countries to collaborate. For world language teachers, this creates opportunities for students to practice their speaking skills with a larger group than just their class. Students can post videos to get practice with the vocabulary they’re learning, and instead of being limited to practicing with the people in their physical classroom, they can engage and build their skills with other students around the world studying the same language or have conversations with native speakers of the language.

3. Increasing accessibility for all students: Flipgrid has expanded many of its accessibility features to ensure that all students can participate. Students can use closed captioning when viewing videos, which also generates a full transcript for each video. Microsoft’s Immersive Reader can be used within both the closed captioning and any text within a topic to read the texts aloud and break up words into syllables for easier decoding.

4. Inviting outside speakers: Using Guest Mode, teachers can invite guest speakers to participate in classroom discussions. Guests can watch student videos and post their own videos. This option provides a way for experts in a field to share their knowledge asynchronously, with students posting videos of their questions for the expert to answer at a convenient time in a video response. STEM teachers, for example, could invite engineers or scientists to discuss their careers and research and to answer student questions.

5. Building student portfolios: A teacher can create a grid for student portfolios. Within this grid, the teacher creates a topic for each student, and students post videos explaining their work, demonstrating a recently learned skill, or reflecting on an in-class experience. The teacher can share the link to a student’s topic with their parents or guardians so they can view their child’s work throughout the year. Since the topics can also be available to every student in the class, students can observe their classmates’ work.

6. Adding annotations: When students record a video, they have the option to write directly on the video, and they can add sticky notes with additional text. For students in math practicing solving problems or students in chemistry learning to balance chemical equations, this feature is a great way to show their thinking.

7. Building a mixtape: The mixtape is a way to curate videos from any topic or grid in a single location. A teacher can select any student video and add it to the mixtape, which can be shared with the entire class. Collecting memories from throughout the year is a great way to take advantage of the feature: As the year progresses, the teacher can save interesting videos or important moments from different topics. Watching the mixtape as a class at the end of the year will help students recall what they’ve learned.

8. Sharing and celebrating work: Celebrating completed projects or finished assignments is often forgotten in the classroom due to time constraints, but Flipgrid makes it fairly easy and quick. Using the student-to-student replies option, everyone in the class can view and respond to each other’s videos. For example, students in a history class could share a long-term project they have completed, walking through what they learned and what they created. Peers in the class compose video responses, providing positive feedback on the work completed. When I do this with my ELA students, I require everyone to comment on two or three classmates’ projects from any of my sections.

9. Supporting absent students: Flipgrid can be a catch-up solution for students who are absent. The teacher creates a topic for work completed in class, and if a student is absent during a given class period, one of their peers can post a quick video about what assignments were completed in class so the absent students can quickly learn about what they missed.

Reference: https://www.edutopia.org/article/9-new-ways-use-flipgrid-classroom?fbclid=IwAR3GF0dhGwCeCHQ7EWGbvk905JUtCwr5yLzuTe3J7t5B5Rhma27dlmjOPHc

Teachers Make Over a Thousand Decisions Each Day, and It’s Exhausting

“I’m tired,” I declared at 3 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon.

I had just ushered my students out the door and to the school buses when I turned to a fellow teacher and muttered the words that I usually keep to myself.

“I know what you mean,” she said, “I’m ready to get off my feet.”

I thought about my own feet that were smushed into my memory-foam Sketchers. It would feel good to sit down, sure, but that’s not what I meant when the tiredness hit me like a freight train hours earlier. It wasn’t physical exhaustion, although I have experienced that too. It was something else.

It was this feeling that my mind had stopped processing to an extent. It was this mental block I felt as I attempted to give a lesson or answer a question. I just couldn’t. I was desperate to give my brain a rest.

I caught myself falling into self-loathing. “Why can’t I just deal with it?” “Why can’t I get past this?”

Instead, I gave myself some grace. Instead, I asked myself just why I’d feel this way; and it clicked.

Teachers are the ultimate decision-makers.

I couldn’t think of a single time that day, that week, that I wasn’t making a decision.

There were the questions said out-loud that I was responsible for answering: “Can I borrow a pencil?” “Can I have an extra day to finish?” “Can you send the makeup work to the office?” “Can you call so-and-so’s parents?” “Can you cover my class?” “Can you work at the basketball game?” “Can you do this, grade that, help with this, finish that?”

Even more daunting were the questions never spoken aloud: “Should I ask her if she’s okay? I hope nothing’s going on at home.” “Should I help him more or let him learn from his mistakes?” “Should I finish grading last week’s essays during my planning period or make copies? Will I have time for both?” “Should I review more or move ahead?” The decisions are endless; the choices are relentless.

It’s not just me. According to data collected by busyteacher.org, the average teacher makes 1,500 decisions per day. For those of us who aren’t math teachers, that’s four decisions per minute.

That may be a surprising number to some, but my assumption is that teachers will merely nod their head in agreeance with this number. The results aren’t hard to believe when taken into consideration that teachers are often expected to be a support system for sometimes hundreds of students, a manager of a classroom, an educator, a content creator, and so much more.

In short, we make decisions for not only us but for all of the young people around us. We carry the weight of those decisions. We stress over those decisions after they’re made. Our brain constantly resembles our internet browsers with too many open tabs. Our minds look much like our too-full plates as we attempt to tackle a daily to-do list while simultaneously reacting to adversity at a lightning-fast pace.

I’m a teacher and when I say I’m tired, it’s not because I’ve been on my feet all day or because I’ve had to reorganize the books and desks and other little things. It’s not because I forgot to drink the coffee that I left sitting at my desk. It’s not because I’ve been up and down and up and down from my desk /one hundred times today.

It’s the minute-by-minute decision-making that makes me unbearably tired, but it’s the same decision-making that I believe is my superpower as a leader, a teacher, and a voice for my students. I will give myself some grace as I battle the strain that this process places on me and take comfort in the fact that I’m modeling good-decision making to those in my classroom with young and impressionable minds.

Reference: https://www.boredteachers.com/post/teachers-make-four-decisions-per-minute?fbclid=IwAR3VKTT_UfLacvQmArjD9z0g_fI0TPKpIPM-YM1VGL4-nYk6tWfMa4gAk8Y

You Have More Control Over Your Emotions than You Think

Can you look at someone’s face and know what they’re feeling? Does everyone experience happiness, sadness and anxiety the same way? What are emotions anyway? For the past 25 years, psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett has mapped facial expressions, scanned brains and analyzed hundreds of physiology studies to understand what emotions really are. She shares the results of her exhaustive research — and explains how we may have more control over our emotions than we think.