May: Celebrate and Appreciate
Endings are times for celebration and appreciation, which lay the foundation for resilience in the days ahead. Even during hard moments, if we can shift into a stance of appreciation, we'll build our resilience. Appreciation cultivates our trust in ourselves, in a process, and perhaps in something greater, which helps us respond to the inevitable challenges of life.
Try this: Close your eyes and take 30 seconds to think about something you're feeling grateful for in this moment. What did you feel like? What did you notice?
Appreciation is like a secret sauce. You need only a few drops of it every day - in combination with other key habits and dispositions - to create rich resilience. That's because feeling and expressing appreciation strengthens social connections, deepens our emotional intelligence and self-confidence, and heightens our ability to focus on the positive.
- adapted from Onward: Culivating Emotional Resilience in Educators, Aguilar 2018
4 Review Activities That Promote High Level Thinking and Student Discussion About Your Content
Based on the book 17,000 Classroom Visits Can’t Be Wrong by Antonetti and Garver, these four suggested activities will focus on students learning instead of the teacher teaching!
Muddy Paws
Purpose: To facilitate students surfacing unclear and confusing points from a lesson.
Steps:
At a good breaking point in a lesson or re-teach, have students in small groups determine what important points are probably muddy or unclear to someone in class.
Ask each group to record the muddy parts on chart paper as clarifying questions.
Next, ask students to move about the room and annotate points of clarification on each piece of chart paper.
Finally, have students to return to their seats. Use the chart paper to modify your lesson for needed clarity.
Morganne is CTE Teacher at West Cabarrus teaching Counseling and Mental Health 1. She graduated from Pfeiffer University in 2023 with a BA in Psychology and Counseling and Human Services. With a passion for the mental health of adolescents, she aspires to be an advocate for all student experiences. Aside from teaching, she is a sister, friend, and cat mom. During her free time, she likes to read, and spend time with family.
Morganne has handled challenges with such grace this year with some class rosters approaching the 40 mark. She continued to try and implement strategies that enhanced her students’ opportunities for learning. Students were able to participate in stations, choice boards, role play, and creating vision boards while gaining awareness about their peers, themselves, and the world.
She continued to show up for her students everyday and worked harder the second semester to improve her classroom management and routines and procedures. Her success with this is shown through her students work, behaviors, and her observations. Morganne we are thrilled with the growth and success you have made in your classroom this year!
