I think about this a lot. Your comfort zone as a teacher. It’s everything in the beginning. Finding what works. Finding what doesn’t. Knowing your kids.  Making sure your kids know you. You are not meant to be the sole expert in the room.  You are not there to outshine kids thinking. You are a supporter.  You can openly admit you aren’t sure, you don’t know, and that you learned something from a  kid.  Why? When we stop and celebrate the idea that we have learned from a student, something happens.  Kids know we value learning. Kids know they matter.  Kids know we ARE learners.   Releasing control of learning can be a scary feeling. It’s not how many of us were taught to teach, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important.  One day, maybe after a lot of days, you start to see that your kids are more engaged than ever before. You realize their growth is coming out of the idea that they are learning because it’s their learning.  That’s the day you realize that your comfort zone is overrated.

You know when you have one of THOSE days.  The great ones.  The kids make you laugh extra hard. A turning point occurs with an issue that you’ve been working so hard to have an impact on.  You get one of those notes from a parent that makes your day (year, actually) and you tuck it into your desk drawer.  Your book order comes in and you got extra books for free.  You finally get to see a project your kids have been working at fall into place.  You walk out of school and the sun is shining and you think, “Wow, I was meant to be here, doing this.”  You know that no matter what, working in a school, around learning, with kids, is your niche in the world.    Then you realize.  That’s why you work so incredibly hard.  Because every kid needs to find their niche and you are a part of that journey.

Learning. It’s what we were born with an instinct and natural curiosity to do. It’s almost undefinable. But, it’s the thing I love most about working in a school. Our schools should be alive with learning everywhere you look. Kids collaborating, building on each other’s thoughts, reflecting in their own ways, building structures, taking risks, writing new thoughts, and developing ideas. Is your school oozing with creativity, bursting as the seams with new ideas, and the kind of place where kids dreams and passions are discovered? I hope so. Because that’s exactly what kids need.

She hears the buzz of the lights that fall silent on most ears.  The tag in your shirt that slightly bugs your back is like a knife sticking into hers.  The water droplets from the pool sting on her skin until she experiences the freedom of slipping under the water and disappearing from them.  She sees patterns where you and I see nothing at all.  She sees a work of art in dotted porch lights in the neighborhood.   Her cry comes out of frustration for a world that doesn’t “get” it. She could read before she could talk.  She could recognize letters before she could walk.  She doesn’t notice a different tone in your voice, but she’s watching your face to look for something she can interpret.  She makes sense of the world in pictures. In cartoons.  Everything is in living color, but every situation is answered in black and white.  I used to want to try to help her think like me. But the biggest lesson she’s taught me is that all I need to really do is think like her.  Then? I understand.  No judgments and no preconceived notions.  The everyday in her eyes? It’s amazing.

I will never see autism as a disablilty. I will simply see it as a different way of seeing things.  Different, never less.  Different, but an unexplained kind of amazing.

April is Autism Awareness Month.  There’s a parent in your school who is struggling.  There’s a child that needs your understanding.   I know because I was that parent and that girl? She is my daughter.  April may be the chance to raise awareness, but everyday is your chance to make a difference for someone else. 

Worksheets are awesome. Imagine the learning that you can do with them.

1.) Ask each student to take the 8.5 by 11 worksheet and create an airplane, in their own design, that will fly the farthest on five attempts. Take those five attempts, and the rest of the class’s data, and do some graphing, data analysis, and comparing numbers. Make a day of it. Allowing kids to research air resistance, wind, aviation, and even the Wright Brothers.

2.) Give the students five worksheets. Ask them to build a structure, using ONLY those five worksheets, that will support a stack of five text books as high off the table as possible. They are allowed to cut, tear, and manipulate the paper in any way they choose and the more out of the box? The better.

3.) Use the back of the worksheet to play a collaborative game of “Scribble.” A small group of students sit in a circle, each with a different color marker, and without speaking, pass the paper, each getting to draw one mark. The paper is passed for about five minutes and the team draws a picture together… without speaking. Afterward, discuss how collaboration and compromise mattered. It’s fun, but it also builds teamwork.

4.) Get out some Sharpies, take the pile of worksheets out in the grass, flip them over, and just sit under the blue sky and dream up ways your students’ can have real, authentic learning experiences. Solving community issues. Raising awareness for a cause. Record your thoughts on a worksheet. Even better, ask a colleague to join you in collaborating on the worksheet.

5.) Give kids ten minutes, in a small team, to develop a scale model of our solar system so they can understand the relationship between the size of Jupiter, the Sun, Earth, and so on. They’ll also be working on scale model in the process. The worksheets can be used to cut up to create the planets and make them to scale. It won’t be easy for kids to figure out a scale that will work or to get all on the same page in what scale to use… but learning? It’s not easy. Wait til they see how tiny Earth really is.  It’s something they don’t notice when they see a diagram of the solar system, but when they build it? They see it.

I don’t really think worksheets are awesome.  We have to be careful of asking kids to fill in blanks or search for words.  We have to be even more careful of exchanging exploration and play for wrote memorization and things we can put stickers on.   Instead, we need to be encouraging thinking, creativity, collaboration, and authentic learning. The kind that’s far bigger than a copied page from a workbook.  The kind that’s built on experiences in the world.

I don’t think creativity is welcome in education. Not the way it should be.  Schools and classrooms should be oozing with creativity.  Because kids are oozing with creativity.  Sure, we have things to teach kids along the way. Writing structure. Mathematical algorithms. Data analysis. Reading fluency. Main idea.  The standards everyone loves to talk about. But, then there’s the creativity. It’s not a standard, it’s not a focus, and many times it’s reserved for art and music class.  We condition our kids to color inside the lines, to keep their answers inside the box, and to bubble the right answer with the perfect pencil.  But, creativity? It’s asking the questions no one else thinks of.  It’s developing your own ideas, building new thoughts, making new and different things.  All of the standards? Embed them.  But don’t make the mistake of trying to make learning look the exact same for every kid so we can evaluate it in the exact same way.  That kind of makes it seem like every kid is exactly the same. Something we’re lucky isn’t true.  Our world thrives on new ideas, innovative practices, and the uniqueness that each of us bring to the table through our own creativity. It’s time to embrace it.