Life Long Learner

This morning while I was tutoring a high school student I saw another former student walk by in the hallway. I waved to her and continued on with my tutoring lesson. Next thing I knew this young lady was stretching her arms out exclaiming, "Mrs. Birkhead!!!! You're Back!!!!" We embraced, and I explained to her that I come once a week to the high school to work with a student. She went on to tell me about how successful she has been in school, and that, thanks to me, she loved to read and has moved from self-contained English to inclusion English. This little story is the reason I teach. I want to make a difference in the world, and I know I can do that by teaching students how to read, and how to positively contribute to society. I taught this young lady English in 9th grade 2 years ago. I no longer work at the high school. Yet, when she saw me this morning SHE stopped what she was doing. SHE turned around, SHE entered the library, SHE walked all the way to the back room...

As I mentioned in my last post, I spent a week learning about the Responsive Classroom Approach. One part of RC is allowing students to share community news with eachother. In order to make this successful in the classroom the teacher must scaffold the sharing. First, the teacher may provide a sentence starter (My favorite sport...) and all students are given an opportunity to share during sharing. But, the goal of the sharing session is to have students share an appropriate piece of news from their own lives. After they have shared it is up to the other students in the room to ask 3 questions or make 3 comments about the news they heard...and this is the hard part. The questions or comments must be focused on the sharer, not on the person who asked the question or made the comment. We watched a video showing how students were successful with this concept, and it was amazing to see students can do it! Over the past few days I have watched conversations between adults. The first speaker...