You Are Loved...

Before I started having children and before I went to school to become an educator, I worked with teenagers at my church. I wasn't much older than they were but I was their counselor, leader, listener, and controlled chaos maker. After countless heart to heart discussions with kids, I realized that down deep many insecurities came from a lack of feeling loved.  Hard parent-child relationships made youth wonder if their parents' love was conditional. Breakups during early dating years made them wonder if they were worthy of being loved. Not finding someone to date made them wonder if they would ever be loved. Insecurities about everything from their looks, their laugh, the car they drove, bad choices they made, to the pimple on their forehead that made them feel as conspicuous as a unicorn make teenagers wonder about their value.

It was during and after those years I started signing letters, creating handouts, making bulletin boards, posting on social media, and saying regularly YOU ARE LOVED. Three simple words that make a world of difference! For me, it is a reminder that no matter how poopy the day is, how much I feel like a failure, how deeply I feel rejected...I am loved by the God of the universe, unconditionally. It's easy for me to share that with others. I live it and feel it daily.  I also feel there is a need for me to share it often as a reminder. Even for students that might not believe in God, to have someone let them know they are loved builds them up for the task at hand, the day ahead, or the disappointing moment.

Each child we teach has something inside them worthy of our love. Relationships matter between us and our students; word choice matters. I would never walk around telling teenagers "I love you" because of the possibility of it being construed as inappropriate. I will say "You are loved" to gird them up to help them with their self-esteem. Our students need more than a person with all the answers, they need someone they can trust daily, they need consistency, they need to know someone believes in them, and they need to know they are loved. Saying "you are loved" with a side hug or fist bump works wonders. "You are loved" has been my mantra for around 25 years, what is yours?

Educators as Learning Catalyst Collaborators

Collaborator - Educators dedicate time to collaborate with both colleagues and students to improve practice, discover and share resources and ideas, and solve problems. Educators:

• Dedicate planning time to collaborate with colleagues to create authentic learning experiences that leverage technology.
• Collaborate and co-learn with students to discover and use new digital resources and diagnose and troubleshoot technology issues.
• Use collaborative tools to expand students' authentic, real-world learning experiences by engaging virtually with experts, teams and students, locally and globally.
• Demonstrate cultural competency when communicating with students, parents and colleagues and interact with them as co-collaborators in student learning.

"Research has shown the power of collaboration in improving educator practice" (Ronfeldt, Farmer, McQueen, & Grissom, 2015). Creating opportunities in the day for students to have authentic learning opportunities while collaborating with myself or others makes learning relevant to our students.  To acknowledge the fact that teachers no longer have to be the "sage on the stage" imparting all knowledge on our students creates a sense of collaborative learning that grows both the teacher and student. Leveraging technology to knock down the walls of our classrooms to multiple viewpoints and experts creates opportunities for all of us to grow in our learning journeys on any topic.  

Last year we had a group of middle school students that would secretly look up information that their teachers shared with them to see if they were "true" or not. What a great opportunity for teachers to allow those challenges in the classroom and grow forward from them with their students. Personally, I can see a future of using iOT devices in classroom for just these types of challenge moments. Siri, Google, or Alexa could share information with all the students at the same time on the challenged topic. This would allow for students to learn how to do better key internet searches together.

Many teachers fear that their students know more about technology than they do and therefore they don't want it in the classroom. What if we harnessed their knowledge by empowering them to diagnose and discover educational technology issues and tools? Last year I had the joy of working with a group of elementary students that chose to be a part of an elementary tech team. This team empowered them to help others in our school with tech issues. See their website here: https://sites.google.com/a/ccsk12.com/ccstechteam/

I am so thankful for the Google Suites for Education that allow me to collaborate with teachers and students in real time through the use of Google Hangouts, Calendars, Docs, Slides, etc. Leveraging digital real-time tools allows for more group projects to enhance the 21st century skills they need for the future. One of my favorite lessons was when a teacher friend of mine that lives in the Philippines stayed up despite the 12 hour difference for a Skype call with seventh graders learning about Eastern Civilization. This teacher's father actually is in the history books in the Philippines because he was a key soldier during the 1989 coup.  What a real world opportunity for our students! Creating learning environments that teach us and our students about cultural identities can be enhanced through the use of technology to understand those cultural differences. 

What I love about this standard is that there is no expectation on a teacher to know know all the answers. The onus is on the teacher to learn along side the student. This creates a culture of teachers as facilitators of learning and gives ownership to the students for their path of learning. In the immortal words of Albert Einstein,  "education is not the learning of facts but the training of the mind to think."