What Gets Me Up In The Morning

I often hear educators talk about what keeps them up in the night. Sometimes it’s grading essays (why I taught mathematics), or the new standardized assessment, or that one student who knows how to play basketball on your last remaining nerve. There are lots of things that can keep educators (and other professionals) up at night. I prefer to focus on what gets me up in the morning.

My first year teaching was at an inner-city Catholic school. I know that many readers will see Catholic school and think it was a cushy gig with smiling angels for children. It wasn’t that way for an instant. It was every bit an inner-city school that focused on Catholic values within the curriculum. Many of the students were on vouchers and almost all of them were living in poverty. Now, that does not mean they were bad kids, they were just growing up in a challenging environment. In fact, when I look back at my time in the classroom, it’s one child, symbolic of many, that gets me up in the morning. Her name is Alba Kozlov*.

At the time, Alba was in sixth grade. She was quiet and a bit socially awkward at a time when fitting in with your peers is highly valued. Alba and I spent many a lunch together. Sometimes she needed a little help with her math and other times she would offer to sweep the classroom floor or anything to keep from having to go to recess with her classmates. I was always available to help students with math during lunch, but every once in a while I thought it would have been nice to have a lunch period to myself. Sure it was great to have Alba help keep the classroom tidy, but that also meant I didn’t get any downtime. As a new teacher, I didn’t realize how valuable my time with Alba was going to become to both of us.

Alba shared a lot about her home life and sixth-grade-girl drama with me. I began to understand her as a person, not just as a student. As we grew to know each other, it’s not surprising that Alba’s math scores skyrocketed. What was surprising was how excited I was to get to school each day to hear about her night and see how she was doing.

I won’t sugarcoat it. My first year teaching was rough. I paid more in gas to get to school than I was making. I had some rough times and even fled the classroom in tears one day. I thought about leaving. After all, I had just left a lucrative business career to become a teacher, so I could go back to Plan A. The teacher next door to me, who I relied on as a friend and colleague, didn’t come back from Christmas break. There were discipline issues and there were limited funds for teaching supplies and resources. On some days, I was all my students had. But thanks to Alba, I had a reason to get to school in the morning.

As a parent, I had spent lots of money and time taking my children shopping for teacher gifts each Christmas. As my first Christmas as a teacher approached, I was fully prepared to get an assortment of lotions and candles. What I wasn’t prepared for was the gift that Alba gave me. Alba couldn’t afford to buy me a traditional gift, but Alba valued my presence in her life and wanted me to know. So Alba did the best that she could. She grabbed one of those fold over plastic sandwich bags from home and filled it with things from her room. Things that mattered to her. Alba gave me a baggie with three used crayons, a sheet of Disney princess stickers, a few small colored erasers, and some paper clips. She gave it to me during one of our lunch sessions with an apology because it was all she could afford. I looked at that bag and cried, but for the first time that year I was crying because I realized how much I meant to a child.

I came home that day with a variety of teacher gifts, all of which have disappeared somewhere along time, except for Alba’s bag. It sits in a curio cabinet in my home along with Alba’s handwritten note. I pass it each day as I leave for work and it reminds me that as an educator I have an opportunity and an obligation to leave the things that keep me up at night outside my classroom and allow the things that get me up in the morning to make me the educator that my students deserve.

*Not her real name

Ode to the Swans

Let me start with an apology to my friends who are English teachers. Someone once told me that if you want to get your blog read you have to have a catchy title. Hence, I named this post “Ode to the Swans.” You have to admit that if you’re reading this now you either found the title catchy or you’re related to me by blood or marriage. My apology stems from the fact that this is not an ode, nor would I even know how to write an ode (or a haiku for that matter). You see, while I have a few friends that are amazing English teachers; I don’t recall ever having had an amazing English teacher, or a Swan of an English teacher.

As we go through life, hopefully we have all had a teacher or two who left a positive mark on our life. Sure there were the teachers who effectively performed their job duties and the rarer few who it would be a stretch to even say that about. This post isn’t about them. You see those are the ducks and the occasional ugly duckling. The ones who swim about in the pond, let the water roll of their backs, and get through each day by maintaining the current state of affairs. Every once in a while a Swan enters the pond. The Swan is the epitome of grace and manages to fit in and stand out in any crowd, all at the same time. This post is for the teachers who are that metaphorical Swan.

I don’t think it’s a surprise that a Swan is loyal for life. The Swan teachers that I know really take the time to understand each student as an individual. The Swan builds a relationship with others that serves as the foundation for learning. A Swan is there to scaffold for you when you are drowning, to challenge you when you coasting, and to celebrate with you when you make it across the pond.

The Swan is adaptable. It has a plan of action for the day, but knows that the plan may change with the winds, that each day and each stroke has to be personalized to the unique needs of the classroom and the individual students. The Swan isn’t comfortable with just sitting in the middle of the pond and reaching most students. The Swan understands that there are students wading in the shallow end and others trying to see how deep they can dive. The entire pond, with all of its inhabitants, is within the reach of the Swan.

The Swan is a symbol of strength and power in a chaotic world. The inhabitants of the pond know that they can turn to the Swan in times of need. The Swan is a confidant - loyal and trustworthy. When the waters are rough the Swan makes a large pond seem like a safe backyard blue plastic pool.

As educators, we have a choice each day to either be a Swan, a duck, or an ugly duckling. The legacy that we leave as teachers is our mark on our students. That mark can be fleeting or enduring. The Swan helps to shape a child into a remarkable adult. The Swan touches the soul of the child. What kind of teacher will you be today?

The swan stands out with

Rarest beauty leaving mark

On all who pass by

Thank you Mrs. Sawan for being a metaphorical Swan for my children.

I challenge you to share this post with your Swans. Add your Swan’s name in the comments below.

If You Build It They Will Come - LIterally!

About this time last year a group of Ohio educators collaborated on Twitter to start #OhEdChat, a weekly Twitterchat. This is a completely grassroots effort where topics are selected democratically, participants DM questions, and different educators volunteer to moderate the conversation each week. In fact, #OhEdChat is only sixty minutes long, but there are always a few hardcores continuing the famed #OhEdChatAfterParty conversation. A few of these same educators planned the first ever #OhEdChat Tweetup this summer at COSI with the support of @M_Bloom and StateImpact. Over thirty folks attended this event and even though @Dwight_Carter won Around The Horn, everyone walked away a winner. I’ve participated in #OhEdChat as both a moderator and a participant. In either case, I always felt challenged, inspired, and a better educator for the experience.


With my new career, I am often traveling and don’t get to attend #OhEdChat every Monday like I have in the past. Yesterday, I was excited to have the opportunity to attend #OhEdChat. I contacted a few friends and asked what the topic was only to see a sad tweet from @JR_Evans:

I was bummed. I promptly powered down for the night and enjoyed some family time with my son. Don’t get me wrong, I had a great time with my son (plus it’s not too often a 17-year-old is cool with hanging out with his mom).This morning I awoke to a flurry of texts from colleagues telling me about the greatest #OhEdChat ever. I missed a true Field of Dreams moment. You see, right after @JR_Evans layed down the #guilttrip, @mrwheeler rose to the occasion and tweeted:

I spent my morning reading through the tweets that happened on #OhEdChat open mic night and let me tell you the group did not fail to challenge and inspire. In fact, it looks like even open mic night flowed into an #OhEdChatAfterParty. What I learned from this experience is that when we build truly collaborative learning spaces where relationships matter, we are literally building the educational equivalent of the Field of Dreams. #OhEdChat didn’t need a moderator and clearly didn’t even need a topic to continue the learning and dialogue. The foundation had already been set with the participants valuing the contributions from one another, They had their learning space and they weren’t willing to give it up. What a contrast this is from my undergraduate days when we waited 5 minutes if a teaching assistant was late to class or 10 for a full professor before we bolted for something we were interested in. No, what #OhEdChat proved last night was that real collaboration and growth needs a teacher/leader to build a solid foundation and trust so that he or she can truly step aside from time to time and let the learners/participants take the lead role. You see the originators of #OhEdChat build it and the participants kept it alive and improved it. Instead of sitting in the stands and waiting to see whether Shoeless Joe or John Kinsella was going to step out and lead, the #OhEdChat participants were the ones who stepped out of the cornfield and up to the plate last night. In my mind, they hit a homerun!

Thanks to @mrwheeler, @tobyfisher, @yettereric, @jakramer2, @schufgb, @McLane_Ryan, @mr_rcollins, @brueckj23, @NLHSprincipal, and others for the stepping out of the corn last night.

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Picture from Flicker by Wednesday Elf - Mountainside Crochet

iNACOL13 Reflections

Reflections from iNACOL  

Three years ago I attended my first iNACOL conference. I was a little sponge soaking in every session. I had been challenged to design and implement a blended program for my school district and turned to iNACOL to learn how to make my task a reality. I had my first exposure to Keeping Pace and was hooked to the point where I managed to scurry home with about twenty copies to share. A lot has changed in the past three years and, ironically, much has stayed the same.

I still enjoy attending sessions and learning about how blended and online learning is improving educational outcomes for students across the globe. Only now, instead of just attending sessions and taking notes, I am an active learner in the sessions. Active learners listen, absorb, process, share, interact, reflect, and repeat this process to make meaning of new information. You see, three years ago I passively took notes for my own benefit. Now I use collaboration tools like Twitter and blogging for recording kernels of wisdom. When my thoughts get shared to a larger audience, I am able to interact with others, both at the conference and away, to hear their perspective on the ideas that I am sharing. I then reflect on how different people with varying experiences interpret the ideas that I am sharing. This puts things in a broader perspective and enables me to reflect and process information on a whole new level.

I share this story because successful blended learning implementations require students to be active learners. While sitting in a keynote address with a few thousand people, I was designing my own learner-centric experience and that gets to the heart of blended learning.

At my first iNACOL conference (VSS for oldtimers) I was a consumer of knowledge, plain and simple. I came to learn and since blended learning was new to me I felt I had little to share. Since that time I have been knee deep in blended learning. While I will always be learning more about blended learning, I have crossed a plane and am now a producer of knowledge. I presented at this year’s conference and had the opportunity to share my knowledge and experience with others so that we can connect and continue to learn from each other. Quality blended learning programs ask students to go beyond being consumers of knowledge and urge them to create and share, thus enabling them to be producers of knowledge much earlier in life.

Blended learning was a relatively new concept in my area three years ago. I felt like what we were doing was cutting-edge stuff until I attended iNACOL and learned that there was a worldwide network of professionals that were designing a range blended learning programs. While blended learning is not the prevalent teaching model near me, it has grown in acceptance. If your blended learning model seems cutting-edge and innovative in your locale, I can almost guarantee you that there is an iNACOL member that is doing something similar. For this reason it is critical that you become involved with organizations like iNACOL that allow us to collaborate and grow. Education is not a competition. Education should always be collaborative because it’s about enabling students across the globe to achieve at their highest levels.

As I leave iNACOL 2013, I again depart with my copy of Keeping Pace, only this time a single copy will do because I plan on sharing what I read through social media so that I can gain a better understanding of the blended and online learning landscape. You see, I still see myself as sponge, only this year I am a living sponge. One that breathes in information, processes it, and breathes it back out to share and continue the cycle. Don’t let the connections and passion for blended learning that you experienced at iNACOL fade, instead breathe it all in, process it, and breathe it back out to share. Otherwise we’re no better off than the students of the past who crammed for a final, only to forget everything the next day.