Knowing the Name of Something

"Knowing the name of something doesn't mean you understand it." - Richard Feynman

My blog is usually for any teacher, but this one has a much more science teacher focus.  You might still get something out it if you don't teach science, but expect it to be more about teaching science.

This week, I taught Archimedes' Principle, which explains why some things float and others sink.  It's one of my favorite things to teach because of the conversation I get to have with each of my 8th-grade classes.  Here's how it goes.

• I hold up a golf ball and ask if it will float or sink when I put it in water.  Those who have apparently never golfed think it will float.  I drop it in the water, and it sinks.
• I hope up a practice ball that is the same size, but the interior is foam (I've never figured out why they exist as practicing with them would not be the same, but I digress).  They're on to me, so they know that one will float.
• I ask why.  First I get the cheap answers, like "because they are made of different materials" and "because one has more air in it."  I say, "Well, sure, but the question I'm asking is why does that matter?"  
• At some point, a kid who has listened in elementary school says either the word "density" or "buoyancy."  Now, we're cooking.  I respond with, "You say density like you know what it means.  Do you."  Chagrinned expressions abound when they say, "Well, actually, no."
• I tell them that I am going to explain the reason things float or sink without using the word density and that I will then bring it around to density in the end because, while they are not wrong, I want them to understand what that means, not just know the right word.

While this is the most explicit example of this phenomenon of the year, it happens about three times a week in smaller ways.  Students have learned that if they say the word the teacher is looking for, they'll be told "good job" and moved away from.  They know the standard textbook definitions of matter ("anything that takes up space and mass") and energy ("the ability to do work"), which are stupid definitions.  Those definitions aren't wrong, but they certainly aren't helpful.  

Science teachers, we have to slow down and take the time to ask students to elaborate.  When they give the right word, it does not always mean they know what they are talking about.  We have to find out which it is.  If I did not engage in this Archimedes' Principle conversation, students would go on throughout their whole lives knowing the right word to say without understanding the role density plays in floating.  While you might not think that matters, I'm not teaching science if I am only teaching words and not complete ideas.  

This is where it helps to have students understand that you are the expert in the room.  I know the recent "guide on the side rather than sage on the stage" movement has taught you that kids can discover everything they need to know, but they can't.  They can float things and sink them all they want and come to very wrong conclusions, just as people did for thousands of years before Archimedes.  They can go on thinking heavy things fall faster than light ones just as people did for thousands of years before Galileo.  They need you to explicitly tell them things, even if you decide they should experience it afterward.  I have students build aluminum foil boats to apply Archimedes' Principle, but I would never dream of having them do that without the direct instruction first and follow-up reflection on which boats held the most weight after.  

Richard Feynman was one of the great physics teachers of the twentieth century.  His quote above was his philosophy of education.  At one point, he went as far as to say it didn't matter at all whether students knew the name of something; they only needed to understand it, but he ended up reversing that decision because he said people would ask him about something by naming it, and when he told them he didn't know about it they would be shocked and start explaining it, only for him to realize he did know about it but hadn't recognized his name.  In his book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, he talks a lot about his father and the ways in which he taught young Richard to view the world.  His father was the one who told him how knowing the name of something wasn't the same as knowing about the thing.  That set him on the path to becoming the physicist and professor he eventually became.  Had it not been for his very-much-non-scientist dad, Richard Feynman might not have been the amazing scientist that he was.  

In your classroom, they are students, and you are the teacher.  Be the teacher.  That means that you decide what they are capable of learning from internet research and observation and what you need to explicitly tell them.  It means that when you have them do internet research and hands-on experiences, you have to follow up with formative assessment questions to find out if they learned what you wanted them to learn.  It means you decide what level of mastery they should have to achieve before you move on.  It means you find out whether they know the name of something or whether they actually understand it.

Credibility First

One of my favorite moments of each year happened this week.  A student asked a question, and, as I began to answer it, another student said, "How does she know all of this?"  Other students remind him that I am a teacher, to which he replies, "But she knows everything."  

Let me be clear.  I know a lot of things, but I do not know everything.  I make no attempt to convince students that I know everything.  In fact, I probably say, "I don't know" at least once a class period every day.  They tend to forget that, in part, because I often follow it up with, "but my best guess would be . . ." Rather than recognize that as educated speculation, they forget that I opened with the admission that I didn't actually know.  The reason it is one of my favorite moments isn't that it is good for my ego; it is because I know at that moment that I have established credibility with my class.

There are teachers everywhere who use the phrase "relationships are everything" on their social media and in their conversations and wax eloquent about how they spend the first two weeks just building relationships with their new students.  While I appreciate their intention, I always think about how creeped out I would have felt as a student if any of my teachers had spent the first two weeks trying to bond with me.  We don't expect that from other relationships or professions (with the possible exception of ministers).  When I go to a new doctor,  I first want him to have a medical degree from a good university.  While I want him to be professionally warm and have a good bedside manner, I don't want him to try to make friends with me.  If I needed a lawyer, I might appreciate a personable approach, but before that, I would want to know how many cases he has successfully tried and what kind of law he studied in school.  Relationships would not be "everything" to me; credibility would be.

Please understand that I am not saying the opposite is true.  I'm not saying that relationships are nothing.  I am simply saying that credibility comes first.  Only then do students have any reason to want a relationship with me.  Relationships follow credibility, so let's talk about how to build credibility.

1. Convey your credentials - In the same way, I would want to see a diploma on my doctor's or lawyer's office wall, I do the same thing in my classroom. My college diploma and my teaching certificate are both framed and hanging behind my desk.  I tell my students how many years I have taught the subject I am teaching them.  It may seem like you are bragging on yourself, but what you are really doing is making students comfortable that they are in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing.
2. Keep your word - You tell students a lot of things in the first few days of school.  It may be about rules or procedures or what you are going to put on their first test.  It is always important to keep your word, but it is especially vital during those first couple of weeks.  If you tell them a question is going to be on a quiz, make sure you put that question on that quiz.  If you tell them that something will happen if they don't follow a certain procedure, you have to follow through on that the first time it happens.  (That means you don't make empty threats or promises, so don't say things just to be dramatic.) If you introduce yourself to your students as a person whose word cannot be trusted, you will never get to the point of developing relationships.
3. Take your job seriously - Students can tell the difference between teachers who plan lessons intentionally and those who wing it every day.  They can tell the difference between teachers who grade with care and feedback and those who just give everyone an A (They may say they like the latter, but I've heard them talk about them behind their back. They don't respect them, and they certainly don't do any valuable work for them.) Students can tell the difference between a teacher who manages their classroom to ensure everyone can learn and those who let the class run wild (or conversely are on a power trip).  If you take your job seriously, students see that and respond to it. 
4. Show your enthusiasm - You chose teaching for a reason. It may have been purely that you loved kids or it may have been a love of learning or an excitement for your subject.  Show that to your students.  History was not naturally my favorite subject, but when I had a teacher who truly loved it, he inspired me to read books about Russian Czars (in 7th grade, no less).  And if you want to build relationships, showing enthusiasm is one of the best ways to do that.  People are drawn to those who enjoy things. I get emails from students during breaks, in which they share something they saw out in the wild that reminded them of something I taught them.  They only do that because they know I will be excited about it.

After you have earned credibility with your students, then they will be more naturally inclined to want a relationship with you.  It won't be creepy that you are asking them questions about their lives if they trust you as their teacher. 

Cost Benefit Analysis - Teaching Techniques

If you are a teacher, there is a ton of advice out there about how to do your job better.  While that is a good thing, it is also a daunting thing.  Most of the advice is contradictory because many people write books out of their own philosophy, not out of the results of research.  Some of them try to make you feel guilty for having a different philosophy than that of the author.  Just put those books down.  There is no technique good enough to put yourself through a guilt-inducing book from an arrogant author.  

Even if we filter out all of that and focus only on the good books by authors who care about research, there is still an overwhelming amount of information and advice.  You can't go into your classroom on Tuesday and completely turn your practice upside down to match the book you just read.  Change has to be incremental to be sustainable or even possible.  So, this is a little meta, but I'm going to give you advice about advice to help you sort through all of the advice.

1. Let me shamelessly rip off two quotes from friends of mine.  Andrew Watson opens every session with "Don't do this thing.  Think this way."  He will tell you that knowledge of working memory or growth mindset or any other piece of research will look different in your classroom than it does in the classroom next door.  The researcher had a very specific methodology that you may or may not be able to do, so allow the knowledge to guide your thinking rather than dictate your actions.  Similarly, John Almarode ends his presentations with, "Don't adopt.  Adapt to your context."  In the same way as Andrew, he is telling his audience that they can't just drop a technique and hope for the best.  The way you implement a new technique will be different if you are a high school science teacher than if you were a 3rd-grade Spanish teacher.  So when you read a book, an article, or a blog post, figure out the deeper meaning behind the technique and use your professional judgment to choose the implementation of the idea.
2. Only fix what is broken.  It can be so easy to sit in a professional development session and feel bad about yourself.  If you don't do the thing that is being presented, you may feel like a bad teacher.  Yet, you know that a lot of what you do works.  You have students who learn concepts, develop skills, pass your tests, perform well on AP tests, and succeed in college; so lighten up on yourself.  You also know you have room for growth because everyone does (and you are part of everyone).  Look at your yearly map.  What is the one concept you have trouble explaining clearly or that your kids struggle with most?  Is there a way to approach that differently?  Then, address that one thing this year.  You don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater just because you attended a conference.
3. Some techniques are complex, and they don't work if you don't implement them fully.  It's okay to choose not to use those, but if you only implement the easy parts, don't then blame the technique if it doesn't produce results.  You may have seen recently, for example, some negative feedback about growth-mindset in online conversations.  Schools who were attempting to implement it were not finding the results they felt Carol Dweck had promised.  When looking deeper, however, what happened was that some teachers were introducing it on the first day of school and then never doing any of it again or hanging posters about learning from mistakes but then speaking as people with fixed mindsets.  After a 20 minute seminar, they took away, "Sure, I can tell kids they aren't good at math YET" but didn't take the time to recognize that there is more to it than that.  It's not the fault of the researcher that we apply only a tiny part of a complex practice.  When choosing a technique, take the time to find out if it is okay to pick and choose parts or not.
4. Now, you are ready to choose a technique, guided by the input you just received from a speaker, a book, or a podcast.  How do you choose?  I'm going to suggest that you do a little cost/benefit analysis.  Some techniques are difficult or time intensive to implement.  Not everything that takes a long time to develop or implement is worth the time you put into it, but some things are.  Look at the breadth and depth of the outcome.  If the technique can be used for multiple chapters with the results you want, then it might be worth investing the time it takes to do it.  If there is a technique that takes very little time to implement, try it because any benefit you get out of it will be a good return on that small amount of time.  For example, I recently read a blog post about framing your objectives as questions instead of statements (I would cite this, but I read so many things that I have forgotten the source - like the Learning and the Brain website).  According to the post, evidence shows that students have more sustained attention and slightly better test scores when the objective is presented as something to explore.  This takes me ZERO time to implement because I was already writing the objective on the board, so now I write it as a question rather than a statement.  If there is any result at all, I am looking at an infinite benefit-to-cost ratio.  

Don't be afraid to tweak or drop something that isn't working.  Not all techniques are for everyone.  Even the best technique is not the best match for every class.  Teachers are humans and are able to do some things better than others.  Choose those that will work for your class, with your philosophy, based on your goals.  The science of learning is not meant to prescribe what every teacher must do.  It is meant to give you knowledge of the impact of a variety of strategies so that you can choose what matches you and your classroom goals.  Some may work exactly the way they did in the experiment; some may need a little adjustment to adapt it to your environment.  Some may just not be a good fit for you, and that is okay.

Engagement is a Tool, not a Goal

I was scrolling through Twitter and found this tweet.  Before I clicked on the video to watch it, the title put me off.  "What message is this guy sending to students?" I thought, "that they have to be entertained for learning to be valuable?"  I want to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I thought maybe he means something different by the word engaging.  Maybe he means engaging in a way I might agree with (like valuable or interesting), so I clicked on the video and realized why Tom Bennet had commented that it looked exhausting.  Tom was right.  This video is an ad for the guy's professional development seminars, and it is filled with teachers in training, doing a lot of energetic dances at the instruction of the trainer.  There is not a single moment (at least as portrayed in this ad) where anyone has a chance to sit and reflect on what they have learned.  They may be energized; they may be having fun (although I imagine the introverts among us would be miserable).  I'm not sure they are learning.  I'm not sure what they will take back to their classrooms that would add anything other than motion.

This causes me to ask the following question.  What's the sweet spot?  Where is the line between fun for the sake of fun (which is fine for recreation) and fun that actually enhances learning (which is what I want if I am going to spend class time on it)?  Are there times when having students dance while learning might be useful?  The research is clear that some movement while learning is good.  But, where is it just movement for the sake of movement?  I fear that is happening because well-meaning teachers hear "Movement is good" at a conference and don't take the time to find the nuances of what kind of movement is good and whether it should be connected to content.  

So, let me start by exploring what we mean by the word "engaging." I did a quick google search and found the first definition was "occupy, attract, or involve someone's interest or attention."  I'm on board with that.  I want to have my students' attention and interest.  Next question.  What do I want them to pay attention to?  What do I want them to be interested in?  The answer should obviously be "the thing I want them to learn."  I can put on a good show without teaching them a dang thing, and that is the opposite of what I want.

If you follow me on social media or have read a few blog posts, then I hope you know I am not in favor of boring students to death and just telling them to deal with it.  I believe strongly in involving students in their own learning and teaching with appropriate hands-on activities and technologies.  I assign projects to deepen learning in a way that my talking in class might not achieve.  But, teachers, please hear me - We must be intentional to choose activities that engage students in learning, not just in class.  When I tell my students about the time my cat ran up a tree and would not come back down, it is a little bit to get them to view me as a real person, but it is mostly to give them a visual image of gravitational potential energy transforming into kinetic energy so that when I give them similar problems to work on, I can say, "It like the cat in the tree," giving them something to connect to.  The seeming aside of that story doesn't just engage them in hearing a silly story; it has an educational payoff.   I show a lot of short videos in my class, often those that demonstrate things I cannot, but I have very few that last a full class period.  When I do show one of those, it isn't just because it's fun and engaging to watch videos (otherwise I would show them Marvel movies).  It's because the videos I have carefully chosen give them a view of something more effectively than I can.  For example, Steven Johnson's How We Got to Now: Glass shows students how their lives would be very different today without mirrors, lenses, phone screens, fiber optics, etc. and they leave with a different view of a seemingly mundane thing.  When I take kids into the lab to electrolyze salt water, I am aware that it is not going to involve fire or explosions or other things they might find more engaging, but I also know it is the most valuable lab we do because I refer back to it during the bonding chapter, the solutions chapter, and the electricity chapter (and tangentially in the acid/base chapter).  I have chosen it because while it is less engaging than another lab might be, it has more academic value.  When I blow something up, it is to demonstrate pressure and Boyle's law or synthesis reactions, not just to blow something up.  Are those things engaging?  You better believe it.  But what makes them valuable is the lead-up to and the reflection after the explosion.

We cannot out-entertain their phones, and we should stop trying.  It doesn't make us engaging; it highlights how lame we are compared to the entertainment industry.  I like to think I'm a pretty entertaining speaker, but they aren't going to choose me over Disney or Batman.  They have a budget that allows them to be immersive, but it is more than just that.  The end goal of the entertainment industry is, not surprisingly, entertainment.  Ours is learning.  For us, engagement is a means, not an end.  Learning is the end.  We're educators who use entertainment, not entertainers who might teach you something along the way.

As you lesson plan, choose activities that engage students in the thing you are trying to teach, but don't waste time on dancing and jumping around and taking laps around the room if they don't connect in some way to what you are teaching (that's possible, by the way, if you plan it well - I have a "States of Matter Dance").  Ask yourself how it will benefit your students, and if the answer is engagement with no objective or learning words after that, choose something else.  Engagement is a tool, not a goal.

The Men Who Look Over My Shoulder

I don't know how well you can see this, but this is the wall behind my school desk.  I believe it is important to establish credibility, so I hang my college diploma and my certification.  The thing at the bottom was added after the yearbook staff managed to surprise me with the dedication during the lockdown.  The two photos are of the two men who taught me what I now teach.  Mr. Sandberg, who taught me physical science 31 years ago, is the man in the color photo on the right; he is holding a Bible that I gave him as a goodbye gift we both left the school in which he taught me.  The man in the black and white photo was my physics teacher, Mr. Barbara.  (Incidentally, I took both photos, but for the black and white one, I not only took that photo, but I also developed the film and printed it in a darkroom.  I don't know why that matters to me so much, but it does.). Since the real first day of school is Monday, I thought it was a good moment to reflect on the power of these pictures.

These men look over my shoulder as I plan to teach students the same content that they taught me.  I've written about both of these men on this blog before and why they are meaningful in my life, so you can click the links at their names if you wish to read about them.  That isn't what I want to write about today, even though I would be happy to talk about them all day long.

What struck me this week as I pointed to these pictures as part of my orientation speech is the connection education provides to all of us, like a game of Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon.  

Education is a lot of things.  For some narrowly focused people, it is simply job training.  Those are the "When am I ever going to use this in life?" people.  They are the people who don't recognize they use algebra every day.  I'm glad that we can use the things we learn in school in our jobs, but if I thought that was the point, I wouldn't find it very compelling; so I am grateful it is more than that.  Others, including myself, have a view of education that is about knowing God.  As I told my students this week, "Education makes you a fuller human being.  We are made in the image of God, and He has given us all of this to help us know Him better, and learning it helps us to reflect that image more fully."  And, of course, there is a range of thoughts in between these two extremes that are also true of education.  But when I looked at these pictures before leaving on Friday, I thought about the fact that my students are being taught, in part, by these two men, which led me to think of education in a different way than I had before.  It is a connection to both the past and the future.

This isn't a new idea.  I just hadn't thought about it much before this week.  There are many examples of how people pass down knowledge to multiple generations through teaching. 

• Socrates mentored Plato, who passed philosophy on to Aristotle, who taught Alexander the Great.  
• Yoda taught Luke Skywalker who then trained Rey.  
• When Newton built on what Galileo had established; he called it "standing on the shoulders of giants" and credited it with his ability to "see farther than other men."  

Some of my students have become teachers, which means that it is possible there is something happening in their classroom because it happened in mine, which is true only because it happened in Mr. Sandberg's or Mr. Barbara's (and many others as well).  And the chain could go farther back and farther forward as they were taught by people before and my students will also have students who teach others.  I don't know if I am adequately conveying how powerful I think this is because I feel like I am rambling, but in my brain, this is really awe-inspiring.  

The world of education has been rocked in recent years.  The pandemic was tough and amplified some of the problems that were already evident.  Public education is experiencing a profound teacher shortage.  We are all exhausted.  But this - this idea that education perpetuates knowledge so we don't have to discover everything in every generation - this has not changed because it cannot.  

Thank you to these men who look over my shoulder.  Thank you to those not pictured who are also part of my teaching.  Thank you to those who taught them.  Thank you to Sal Kahn and Hank Green and others who teach online to provide a horizontal connection as well.  Thank you to all whose teaching has informed my own.  Your influence will carry farther than you or I can ever know.

Back to Normal and Moving Forward

About three weeks into the lockdowns of 2020, I saw it for the first time.  It was a tweet that said, "Before we reopen schools, we have to reimagine them."  I remember reading that tweet and thinking, "Oh, crud, here it comes.  A lot of agendas are about to get pushed."  A couple of weeks later, a video was made for teachers to watch, purporting itself to be about best practices for assessment in remote learning.  The first two minutes of this video mentioned remote learning, but after that, it was clear that this man had a decades-long beef with grades and had given this lecture a hundred times.  He took advantage of the fear of educators when it came to uncertainty about assessment during the pandemic to make money pushing an agenda he had clearly always had.  This is reprehensible.

A year later, most of what I saw online was a desire just to "go back to normal."  A spring of remote learning and a year of either remote or masked hybrid learning had exhausted people, and we were feeling nostalgic for "precedented times" again.  The next year was supposed to be better, but the Delta and Omicron variants ensured otherwise, resulting in tired educators being even more exhausted than before.  Few people have had the energy to reimagine anything.  We just wanted this to be over and to return to something familiar.

As with most things, the views on the extremes are not ideal.  They might even be damaging.  To turn education upside down, throwing out everything from the past in the name of change is a terrible idea.  It would be bad for both teachers and students, experimenting with kids on a large scale, not knowing what the results would be for a decade or more is reckless and wrong.  In the same way, pulling out our 2018 lesson plans and moving on as though we have not learned anything in the past three years is equally irresponsible.  Teachers have learned to use tools in ways we had not before, and we should continue to use them (even if we use them in different ways).

Prior to the pandemic, I had taught for 20 years.  I know which things were working.  I will continue to do those things.  One of the things remote and hybrid teaching confirmed for me is that paper tests are superior to digital tests.  I used digital platforms from March 2020 to May 2021 because it was necessary.  While it made grading easier, it was not good for kids.  Since they couldn't write on the tests, they couldn't do the things we have always advised them to do, like underlining keywords, crossing out answers they know to be wrong, and skipping questions to return to them later.  I was using GoFormative for tests.  It is a great tool, and I will use it in other ways, but I hope it is never my testing platform again.  Digital labs have some value, in that it is programmed to work correctly, but it is hardly the same as doing a lab.  Since it does work correctly every time, there is no troubleshooting involved, which is one of the soft skills taught by lab experiments.  Direct instruction by me as the expert in the room works.  I'm sorry for those of you that believe it isn't learning if the kids aren't discovering it for themselves, but the research doesn't support that.  I believe in labs and projects and group work and all of those things, but only after I have taught them a concept and before I follow up with reflective practices about what they have observed.  I knew that was true prior to the pandemic, and it is still true.  

As important as knowing what was working pre-pandemic, I also know what wasn't working.  I wasn't doing nearly enough formative assessment and had just begun engaging in regular retrieval practice.  Finding a tool like GoFormative during hybrid learning will now help me to solve that problem.  This year, my students will use it daily to retrieve something from the last lesson, the last week, and the last chapter (interleaved and spaced retrieval).  I used FlipGrid for open-ended questions during remote and hybrid learning.  My students used it creatively and well, and they showed me things in ways they could not have on paper because they could demonstrate things live.  I will use that for more homework assignments than I did before so students could make their learning visible.  These tools were used one way during the pandemic, but as I evaluate the ongoing practice of teaching, I will use them in a different way this year.

Are we going "back to normal"?  In most ways, thank God, yes we are.  We will be seeing each other's faces this year rather than masks or screen icons, and I am grateful for that.  I can return to well-established tried and true practices this year, and I am grateful for that.  But should I just return to those things and make no changes?  Of course not.  Any good teacher should be self-reflective all the time.  We should always be examining what worked and what didn't in the lesson we just taught, separating the wheat from the chaff, and finding new ways to improve on what we did.  This year provides the opportunity to evaluate it with more potential tools than we have had before.  So, as we get back to normal, we can keep moving forward.  

Known, Valued, Loved

I returned to school this week.  I was a little nervous the day before in a way I'm not usually.  I think, because last year was supposed to be "normal" and then was not, I was afraid to hope for this year to be normal.  But, when I got to school, saw my friends, and started listening to the creative and passionate professionals with whom I work, I got my energy back.

Our head of school always gives a speech about where we are, where we are going, and what will be our focus for the year.  He always starts with our mission statement, which I have written about many times, so search for it in the archives if you wish.  We pray through our vision statement, something you can also find in previous posts.  This year, his focus was on a sort of motto we've had for four or five years.  We started using it in meetings where we discussed what we hope our students got out of being at GRACE.  Then, it started coming up in open house tours.  What we have come to realize is that it is, in our head of school's words, GRACE's secret sauce.  It is that our students will be Known, Valued, and Loved.  

There is much in the world of education right now about relationship building.  There are those who say, "Relationships are EVERYTHING."  I'm not one of those people, though I do recognize that they are important.  If they are "everything," you have ceased to be a school.  Then there are others who say, "Relationships FIRST."  They are those who would spend the first two weeks of school playing getting-to-know-each-other games in order to build relationships.  I'm not on board with that either.  You can get to know your students while simultaneously teaching them content.  I would be more likely to say, "Credibility first" because you can't build a relationship without credibility, to begin with (and perhaps I'll expand on this in a future post, but you establish credibility, in part, by taking your job seriously).  

So, if there are a lot of people building relationships, how is GRACE's Known, Valued, and Loved motto any different from other places?  Well, it starts with the belief I mentioned above - we can get to know students WHILE teaching them.  We can ask questions as it relates to our content area.  What's your favorite poem?  Who runs track?  Name your favorite sport (because we are about to talk about projectile motion).  We can chat with kids while we do lunch duty.  And, then of course, there are the games, school plays, band concerts, dances, etc. that every school has; but you would be amazed at how many teachers are in attendance at those GRACE events.  We find a lot of ways to get to know them and to make sure they feel known without sacrificing academic time.

Making students feel valued is relatively simple, and it takes just a little bit of time.  We send emails to students to say, "Hey, I noticed (insert positive thing) about you, and I wanted to let you know I appreciate it."  It could be a positive classroom attitude that makes your day better.  It could be that they helped a friend who dropped their tray in the lunchroom.  It could be that they didn't give up on the race in which they came in last.  "I'm proud of the way you persevered to the end and finished strong" will mean more to a student than we can imagine.  I know what you are thinking - that you teach 130 students or more and don't have time for sending extra emails.  Let me help you.  We aren't talking about a Jane Austen novel, so it goes much faster than you think it will.  We are talking about three sentences.  The first sentence (I am so happy to have you in my class) and the third sentence (I really appreciate that about you) are the same for all of your students, so you can save them in a template.  Then, you write the middle sentence for the specific student, but it's pretty short too.  "I've noticed how excited you are about fractions."  I would also advise that you not try to do all of them in a day or a weekend.  You can do this with 2-3 students a day during your planning period, which means it will take 9-10 weeks to get through your roster without taking much time each day.  I would recommend starting with the students who get appreciated the least.  That way, if you do run out of time to finish, you have covered the kids who most need the connection.  By the way, if you do have some extra time, take an extra two minutes and the price of a stamp and send the note to the student.  It is worth those extra minutes because they will keep it forever.  While I love writing because of its permanence, you can also let kids know you value them verbally.  I love when kids read for pleasure, so I like to comment on the books they are reading and let them know of an author they might like.  When you have a student doodling in your class, you can say, "Wow, you drew that person's hands really well.  I've heard that's really hard to do."  Even something like, "Hey, man, I really like your socks" lets a student know that you find something positive in them worth mentioning.  

If you don't love your students, I'm not sure why you chose this profession.  But loving them is different from letting them know they are loved.  You can tell them outright without coming off creepy.  I had a student last year who enjoyed saying strange things just to get people's reactions.  One day, I said to him, "Dude, you are so weird, I just love you."  I knew that he would appreciate being called weird because of the way he was, and it wasn't a mushy weird moment, which would have made us both uncomfortable.  It was a silly moment in which he knew his weirdness was valued and appreciated.  That worked for him, but it would not have been right for everyone.  Sometimes, it is about silently mouthing the words, "You OK?" to a student who looks sad or under the weather.  It may be wordlessly putting the tissue box on their desk when you hear them sniffing during a test.  Once you know your kids, you'll know what the best way to express love is for them.  At GRACE, it is also about praying for them and with them.

When we talk about this being the distinctive characteristic of GRACE, it is because it isn't part of an initiative or plan or program. We aren't instructed to do these things and fill out a form saying we've done it.  It's in our DNA as a community.      

Strong academics are a given.  They are what make us a school.  Our mission statement includes the words "spiritually equip, challenge, and inspire" and "impact their world for Christ."  That's what makes us a Christian school.  Making sure our kids feel Known, Valued, and Loved is what makes us GRACE.