•  the Weekly | 1.25

     

  • For Your Hands: Daily Dedications

    From A Daily Ritual That Builds Trust & Community Among Students, by Henry Seton ()

    " 'I dedicate our learning today to my dad. He grew up working class in Baltimore, and when he was your age, his mother was dying of cancer. Every day after school he would have to come home to bathe her and clean her sores. Later, he became the first person in his family to attend medical school, and today he is a leading cancer doctor. He is one of the most humble, hard-working people I know.'

    "The five sentences above about my father are an example of what I call a daily dedication, a 30- to 60-second presentation delivered each day by a student or teacher. It usually occurs right after the initial do-now or warmup but before we introduce the day’s objective and agenda. It takes less than five minutes total each week, but it’s a prized moment in the day, one that refocuses us, fosters community, and reignites our motivation.

    "I can’t recommend this simple ritual enough, whether for the classroom or for larger school assemblies. And if you are heading deeper into winter, tired of remote learning, worried about dwindling student motivation, I encourage you to give the daily dedication a try, to make it a new year’s resolution for your virtual classroom.

    "The daily dedication takes inspiration in part from the work of Kelly Gallagher, who invites one student each day to share a brief 'reading minute,' by reading a few lines from a poem or something personal that has meaning for them. It also reminds me of parochial schools that ask a student to choose a daily prayer to read at the start of class.

    HONORING OUR TIME TOGETHER
    "It’s a simple, brief ritual, but one that recenters us. It reminds us explicitly and implicitly that the classroom is a sacred space, that the opportunity to come together and learn alongside one another—even virtually—is something special and should not be taken for granted. It hopefully emphasizes that our time together is precious, that we should honor it by using it purposefully.

    "As Matthew Kay has written, rituals like this absorb a tiny fraction of the lesson while fostering 'an environment of humility and genuine interest in each other’s lives and passion.' And it is culturally sustaining and student-centered in that students get to take the lead in honoring and celebrating their own diverse identities.

    "Setting up this ritual is simple. I often model the daily dedication on the first or second day of school by sharing something about my father like the paragraph above. I put up a photo of him, and students love identifying our similarities (and pointing out his better looks!). I then explain how the dedications work and the rationale for them, that they can choose anyone living or dead, real or fictional, who provides inspiration. I ask for a few volunteers for the next few days and then usually go alphabetically from there. There are usually a few students who at least feign reluctance, but my students are so brave, their dedications quickly get more vulnerable and powerful than mine. Students are sucked in and buy-in quickly.

    "Students snap for each other at the end...Students love this ritual." Read the rest of the article .

     

  • For Your Heart: Daily Dedication Sample

  • For Your Head: Creating Classroom Community

    Years ago, I'd joined a team of educators to open a new school in Phoenix. One of my colleagues and I started talking about ways we might go about creating culture and tradition at the school in an effort to help build a sense of community and belonging. The book, Life in a Crowded Place (Ralph Peterson), provided a great deal of insight on the topic and on the important role ceremony, ritual and rites play in creating classroom - and campus community. A couple of weeks ago, I came across the Edutopia article featured in this week's post, which called to mind my work from years ago. More recently, Shona shared with me the podcast, Unlocking Us with Brené Brown. In the podcast, Priya Parker, who wrote The Art of Gathering, speaks with Brown, one of my favorite authors, about how paying attention to how and why we're gathering can be transformative. I thought it might be useful to share this collection of ideas with you all. We've had so many shifts in our way of meeting this year, that spending some time considering how we can intentionally create community and belonging could be valuable.

    This week's post focuses on the book. I hope to share more from the podcast next week.

    Here are a few notes from the first chapter of the book, which introduces ceremony, ritual and rite.

    • "...community in itself is more important to learning than any method or technique. When community exists, learning is strengthened - everyone is smarter, more ambitious, and productive" (p2)
    • "One could use the word 'family' to describe life in a learning community, since the same underlying structures that apepar in a healthy family occur in a classroom...As teachers, we can choose to provide a healthy place for our students - a place where they belong and are helped to grow in their learning, feeling and thinking" (p3)
    • "Teachers who make communities with their students are cultural engineers of sorts. The primary goal at the beginning of a new year or term is to lead students to come together, form a group, and be there for one another...It is by establishing values of caring and trust in the classroom that social ties and interest in one another's welfare comes into existence. Making meaning requires students to be responsible for their own learning, collaborate with others, and learn from their failures as well as their successes. Students don't need to be in agreement with one another, but they do need to see themselves as being responsible for others and find value in group life" (p13)
    • "Teachers face the challenge of creating a place where students feel they belong and where they want to be. In making learning communities with their students, teachers make sure of ceremony, ritual, and rite in an effort to create a place where students feel they belong" (p15)
    • "Ceremonies aid students in making the transition between daily life and classroom living by turning thoughts toward schooling...Where study is concerned, ceremony brings about an internal readiness, pushing aside that which might interfere and helping students to participate wholeheartedly by concentrating thought and feeling on the work at hand" (p16)
      • Opening Day / Class - reflection and gaining readiness, creates intellectual and emotional order (songs, greetings, silent writing, reading minute, announcements, acknowledgements & appreciations, dedications, poem, calendar, meditation, etc.)
      • During the Day / Class - creates order like chapters in a book, clear air before next activity (movement signal / activity, stretching, gather in particular 'place', mini-lesson that settles students or introduces next work, etc.)
      • Ending of Day / Class - makes the time complete, slows the working rhythms of the class, ties up loose ends (share a take away / learning, recount events of the period, frame next day, etc.)
    • "Ritual is a way of connecting to a larger community...It is made up of symbolic acts that ground family and community life" (p20) It is a part of our lives from the moment we wake up until we go to bed, and it does not stand apart from ceremony.
    • Rituals often help students leave the hear-and-now of one reality and symbolize that "participants are entering into a different reality" (p20)
    • They are "symbolically tranforming experiences that no other form of expression can adequately express" (p21)
    • Incorporated in various ceremonies, it can get everyone on the same page, and can provide a centering effect.
    • It "allows teachers to use one of humankind's most prized form of expressing meaning and creating order" (p22)
    • One must guard against letting the ritual become an end in itself that "threatens students' opportunitiesto learn and enjoy" (p23)
      • Some examples: taking up a position in a circle, taking an oath, lighting a candle, activities to prepare for a story time, students preparing for independent writing time, types of greeting, ways to enter a space, celebrating achievement, etc.
      • Individual Rituals: "predictable, personal acts we performin the process of creating an internal order or desired disposition" (p23)
      • Community Rituals: "best observed in activities such as celebration, play, conversation, and dialogue" (p24)
    • Rite involves marking times of passage in a particular way and is most often an element of ceremonies and celebrations.
    • Three kinds of rites occur in learning communities: transition, incorporation and separation.
      • Transition = threshold rites (how we mark crossing physical or metaphorical thresholds) and competency rites (how we mark passage from one state of competence to another)
      • Incorporation = using rites to initiate new members to the community & create a sense of belonging, caring and acceptance
      • Separation = rites to prepare for the ending, leaving, or closing of a group (ie the end of the school year)

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