Joy of Education

I listened this morning to the BYU Devotional Speech that James Gordon III gave on March 26, 2013 titled  “The Joy of Education and Lifelong Learning."  I felt he expressed some great thoughts for us at Esperanza. 





Three reasons we should learn are to develop personally, to increase our ability to serve others, and to be prepared in all things,” Gordon said.

He quoted President Thomas S. Monson, saying, “Your talents will expand as you study and learn. You will be able to better assist your families in their learning, and you will have peace of mind in knowing that you have prepared yourself for the eventualities that you may encounter in life.”

“Learning can also be challenging,” Gordon said. “When we are acquiring new knowledge or skills, we may feel uncertain, and we may make mistakes. However, being stretched means that we are growing."

So, “how can we make time to continue learning?” Gordon told of his own experiences throughout his lifetime, reading a wide variety of books and looking up and learning new words.

15 Ways to Motivate Your Students in a New Year!

15 Ways to Motivate Your Students in a New Year!
  

January 18, 2012

The following guest post was written by Toby Rothstein Gruber, Eye On Education's Director of Professional Services and the moderator of Eye On Education's professional development webinars.

It’s a New Year and time to recharge! As a former teacher, I always took this opportunity to reset expectations and implement new strategies. Eye On Education aired a webinar on Student Motivation and Classroom Management with Larry Ferlazzo on December 14. For those who missed it, you can view it on-demand. Strategies for building intrinsic motivation were discussed and our participants had lots to contribute. Thank you to our attendees for sharing innovative and practical tips about how they motivate their students. Here are 15 tips to get your students motivated in the New Year!

• Praise effort!

• I LOVE a lesson based on celebrating mistakes!

• Create circumstances for students to recognize their own progress.

• In my classroom we don't have rules - we have rights and responsibilities

• Call parents! It's important to not only call parents for bad behavior but also for praise of good behavior - especially if it is a student who is typically difficult but has done something good. Even my gang member parents loved the "your kid was awesome" call.

• When talking with parents remember Unity Criticism Unity. Sandwich negative behavior with two positive things.

• If a student is overly disruptive, ignore them and keep tick marks of how many disruptions they make. Then discuss with the student after class, "Today you disrupted the class x amount of times. What's going on? Don't you want others to succeed?"

• I tell my students "If you want to learn today move to the front. If you don't want to learn or don't care just move to the back and find something to do quietly. Let other students learn.”

• I offer tutoring to my students and once every week or two and I offer "math and muffins" where I bring in doughnuts and juice and offer a more relaxed environment to teach math but it also allows me to learn more about my students.

• When students misbehave have them write a letter home about it.

• Catch them being good and praise them for it.

• Write a letter to your challenging students asking them why they act out.

• A communication journal is a wonderful tool between students and teachers.

• When you do cooperative learning, try assigning students a role that he/she can be successful in doing.

I’d like to leave you with one last tip by a very wise participant: If you sweat the small stuff, so do the students! We set the example!
Best of luck in the new year!

A Beautiful Lesson From Africa

What a BEAUTIFUL thing to do!

 

 

I was recently told of an African tribe that does the most beautiful thing.

When someone does something hurtful and wrong, they take the person to the center ...

of town, and the entire tribe comes and surrounds him. For two days they’ll tell the man every good thing he has ever done.

The tribe believes that every human being comes into the world as GOOD, each of us desiring safety, love, peace, happiness.

But sometimes in the pursuit of those things people make mistakes. The community sees misdeeds as a cry for help.

They band together for the sake of their fellow man to hold him up, to reconnect him with his true Nature, to remind him who he really is, until he fully remembers the truth from which he'd temporarily been disconnected: "I AM GOOD".

Source: Dharma Comics
Photo by Hugh Sitton (Getty Images)

Grades

Some thoughts from David Ginsburg on grades: 

The power to compel some students to do something by giving them points for it. And the power to compel other students to not do something, since kids who lack confidence often blow off graded assignments (or cheat on them to avoid a bad grade).

Fortunately, it isn't true that students will only do something if it's graded. As a substitute teacher, I gave students brainteaser worksheets when teachers didn't leave me lesson plans. And students worked on them bell to bell. Many kids even stayed after class to ask me for the answers and get more worksheets. And guess what? I didn't collect or grade their papers. I was a sub, and students were unaccountable to me. They weren't engaged because it earned them points. They were engaged because the activities were engaging.
     
The reality, of course, is that grades are part of our K-12 system (college too). And in today's "gotta get through the curriculum before the test" world, you may not have the freedom to let kids work on Sudoku puzzles in class. (What a shame, since activities like this not only stretch kids' brains but can help raise scores.) But even if your job has been reduced to test prep, this doesn't mean you should assign a grade to everything students do.

Few entertainers or athletes would perform to their potential in shows or games if there were no room for error during rehearsal or practice. Similarly, the less pressure on kids to get the right answers in class, the more likely they are to get the right answers on tests. So let's stop slapping a grade on everything students do, and instead create classrooms that support risk-taking and learning from mistakes.

Let's do for students what directors and coaches do for actors and athletes: give timely, meaningful feedback. Let's assess what students know (and encourage them to self-assess) rather than grade them based on what they know.

Another Poster for Esperanza's Wall

The Miracle of Forgiveness

I listened this morning to the BYU devotional speech, "The Miracle of Forgiveness," that Michael Dunn gave on January 31, 2o12.  That speech and a short story I read about Mother Theresa making a mistake when putting a bandage on an injured man made me think of an attitude we want to have at Esperanza. 

All of us involved with Esperanza are ordinary people trying to do an extraordinary thing.  There is no doubt that we will make mistakes for which we need to seek forgiveness from others.  Therefore, it would behoove us to be quick to forgive. 

The Merits of Failure

Only when all of us at Esperanza are willing to fail will we find our greatest successes.

'Failure week' at top girls' school to build resilience

By Judith BurnsEducation reporter, BBC News

Headmistress Heather Hanbury said "Failure Week" should teach high performing pupils not to shun risk

 

A top girls' school is planning a "failure week" to teach pupils to embrace risk, build resilience and learn from their mistakes.

The emphasis will be on the value of having a go, rather than playing it safe and perhaps achieving less.
Pupils at Wimbledon High School will be asked how they feel when they fail.
The headmistress, Heather Hanbury, said she wanted to show "it is completely acceptable and completely normal not to succeed at times in life."
Ms Hanbury's pupils achieve some of the highest exam scores - but from Monday they will be invited to focus on failure.
There will be workshops, assemblies, and activities for the girls, with parents and tutors joining in with tales of their own failures.
There will be YouTube clips of famous and successful people who have failed along the way and moved on.
The emphasis will be discussions on the merits of failure and on the negative side of trying too hard not to fail.
'Courage in the classroom'
Ms Hanbury told BBC News that she had placed a great emphasis on developing resilience and robustness among the girls since she arrived at the school four years ago.
"The girls need to learn how to fail well - and how to get over it and cope with it," she said.
"Fear of failing can be really crippling and stop the girls doing things they really want to do.
"The pupils are hugely successful but can sometimes overreact to failure even though it can sometimes be enormously beneficial to them.
"We want them to be brave - to have courage in the classroom," she added.
Wimbledon High is an independent school, part of the Girls' Day School Trust.
GDST chief executive, Helen Fraser, said: "Resilience is so important in working life these days.
"Wimbledon High School is showing how making mistakes is not necessarily a bad thing, that it is fine to try - and fail - and then pick yourself up and try again - or as Samuel Beckett said, 'fail better'."

Remembering Who We Are

I listened to the BYU Devotional this morning given by Doug Prawitt on July 19, 2011. His comments caused me to ponder not only on my own life but also on how we want to help our Esperanza scholars. He said, “We are not here to prove to everyone that we are perfect." He explained there is danger in such a perspective, because when we commit mistakes we condemn ourselves and at the same time we justify and hide them. Making mistakes is part of living, he said, and those mistakes are the ones that make us stronger.

He went on to explain that it is important to remember who we are while striving to correct where (mistakes) we are. It is also important to remember this when working with others.

When our Esperanza colleagues and/or scholars make mistakes we need to help them remember who they are and their potential before focusing on correcting mistakes they have made. It's hard for a person to permanently change an undesirable behavior if he sees himself as a trouble maker and/or a bad person.

If we can help each other as colleagues and with our scholars to understand that mistakes are part of the process of reaching our potential, we will create a more inviting environment and experience more growth individually and as an organization.