Sharing “Good News” In the Classroom and At Home!

Thinking positively can help start the day off on a good note. Sharing the important things in our lives is a wonderful way to show we care about each other.  Time is spent early in your child’s school day for students to share something they deem to be “Good News” in their life.

As students listen to each other, they develop a better understanding and appreciation for each other.  They also find things they have in common that might not have known before.  Sharing “Good News” helps to build stronger relationships between students and students, and the students and the teacher.

** Family Activity: Share “Good News” daily and build family relationships.  When you sit down to dinner, family members take turns telling something good or positive that happened that day. It can be as simple as Mom saying that when she was driving another driver slowed and let her go ahead. Your child might say someone new played with him or he got a favorite book from the library. Honor your child by really listening to the “Good News”. It shows your child you are interested in their world and it will help you know what is on your child’s mind and in his/her heart. Sharing your good news will let your child(ren) know more about you too.

The Best “Four Letter Word”….

By:  Peg  Chauncey  Cramer  M.A.

I am life-long learner, updating and implementing new teaching strategies and initiatives to help children reach their full potential. Over the years, it has also been my pleasure to share my expertise, collaborate with, coach, train, and supervise others in various stages of their teaching careers, and to also help them reach their full potential.

I have opened my classroom doors and welcomed eager high school and college students in for pre-teaching experience. It has been enjoyable for me, to plant the seeds of love for all children; so that these students might realize how important it is to be a teacher with passion, professionalism, integrity, and of strong character.   I have been happy to provide these somewhat sheltered students, with an opportunity to make connections with and support children from diverse cultural and social-economic backgrounds. In addition, I have supervised and guided three student teachers in their efforts to discover valuable skills and abilities that they have used as the foundation of whom they are as teachers.

I have also been a mentor teacher to a beginning teacher. Over the course of four years, she and I spent countless hours discussing practical teaching skills and strategies that she began to implement into her classroom including: organization, classroom climate, and management, as well as lesson development, pacing, and delivery.  I would guide and coach to help her identify areas of strength and weakness and model for her many of the strategies we had discussed. This was a very rewarding mentoring experience for me because over the course of our time together, not only was I able to contribute to her classroom success, but I also discovered I had acquired confidence and presentation skills to use to support my peers. Since then, I have facilitated staff development workshops for veteran teachers at the Kent Intermediate School District.

It has been gratifying for me to think that though my support of these teachers; in some small way, I touch children beyond those whom with I personally interact.

In my perfect world, accountability for our profession would be based on not only student test taking success, but on other student academic and personal successes as well. Teachers would have respect, love their work, and be held accountable in areas including relationship building and having high expectations for students. Success would be based on if rigorous, exciting lessons were delivered to help students learn not only subject content, but also on personal student success in finding the relevance and value of their education. However, no matter how hard I wish, we will never teach in my perfect world.

In our world accountability is driven by academic success, but what drives the need for academic success is neither the passionate teacher nor the motivated student. The basis of measuring accountability in the teaching profession is Education Yes! and it’s MEAP tests. Districts are also pressed to impress the community and retain students within the district for funding purposes. The difficulty is with the way student data is collected. For every child data is measured with the same tools, which on the surface seem adequate. However, educators are finding adequate can also denote unfair, impersonal, and inflexible when testing our global, transient, and impoverished students, who because of societal and family circumstances, are at-risk for academic failure.

“Data” is not a bad four-letter word, but it should not be the only four-letter word society needs to keep in mind when holding teachers accountable.  Even in this complex, data driven world, a teacher should have passion, professionalism, integrity, of strong character, and base teaching on the four-letter word “love”, to help all children reach their full potential.

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