Category Archives: Education

Education

Looping

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Looping is the practice by which a teacher follows his or her class into the next school year. As this is more common in elementary schools, I was quite a few years into teaching by the time I experienced it for myself. The IB Diploma Programme is a two-year course for grades 11 and 12, meaning I taught my grade 11 psychology and Theory of Knowledge students, as a cohort, again in grade 12.

This is quite different from the secondary school practices I encountered in the US. In that context, for example, if I teach grades 9 and 11, I might indeed teach a student for the second time in grade 11, but the entire cohort hasn’t moved up together. Teaching a student multiple times is a coincidence of scheduling, rather than a design. That being said, there are a number of pastoral care models in which a homeroom remains together with the same homeroom teacher over a period of years.

When I first heard about looping as part of an elementary school model, I could imagine the positives and negatives. Knowing the students, having ways of working together, and having spent a year establishing routines and expected behaviours makes for a smoother second year together. However, if relationships are rocky, classroom structures haven’t gone as planned, and certain individuals (adults or students!) just don’t click, that could make for a challenging round two.

Moving to Germany, I was introduced to a very different model of education. Student cohorts stay together for all of primary school (grades 1-4), and then again for all of secondary school (grades 5-9/10), after having been mixed up due to significant choice, including finishing level, in their type of secondary school. At my school, groups are mixed up when needed for social reasons, or to balance out the number of students in each cohort. Scheduling in the upper school, where we all teach multiple grade levels, is deliberately planned so that we loop with our students, either as homeroom or subject teachers. I have always followed my grade 9 students into grade 10, and will teach the ones who choose psychology in both grades 11 and 12. Considering I also teach grade 7 and used to teach grade 8, some students and I are beginning our fifth year together.

Obviously, we know each other very well, and that is precisely the point. My students understand my classroom structures and expectations, and they know how to meet them. And because I have seen the students grow up and change, experience good and bad days, and try out new friend groups, I have learned how to work with them however they present. They have had a lot of opportunities to make an impression, and I have years of evidence for what works and what doesn’t, who might need extra support and who needs a challenge, which friends work well together and which need to be separated. And as things change, we change together.

Another aspect of looping that I really enjoy is the relationship it has allowed me to build with the families. We have parent-teacher conferences twice a year, and there are some families who come at every opportunity. Knowing what to expect with these meetings allows me to approach them in a way in which the family will respond, and this helps us create better partnerships.

Naturally, there are also downsides. The students who pushed my buttons in grade 9 kept right on doing so in grade 10, and the families who have an antagonistic relationship with the school have minimal incentive to turn over a new leaf. Sometimes, it can be a real drag knowing that we are in it for two years rather than just one.

Overwhelmingly, though, I have found that this system of looping works. We celebrated our 25th anniversary at school on Friday, and the day culminated in a summer fair in which all members of the community took part. My partner attended, too, and could not stop commenting on the feeling of positivity and joy, the sense of belonging, the ways that the students presented themselves, and the ways that they interacted with me and with each other. The atmosphere was a particularly special one, given the face painting, raffle, and international food offerings, but in no way unusual. This is a school built on relationships, and we really are all in it together.

Education

Commencement: Words on Friendship

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Over the weekend, I had the very great honour of being one of two teachers to give a speech at our class of 2025 graduation.

These were my words to these young people, and to young people everywhere:

Thank you for the honour of speaking to you today. A former colleague once told me that for a teacher, this is as good as it gets. I’d have to agree.

But the thing about giving a speech is that one must know what one wants to say. And, feeling rather like a student presented with a long-term writing task, I didn’t. So I did what many of the young people sitting before us have done in this situation, and, despite what I have told you all, either as your I&S teacher, psychology teacher, or EE Coordinator, I procrastinated. For months. Naturally, I collected ideas along the way, but the writing itself happened in a relatively short amount of time in a sort of self-imposed IA jail. Like I’ve been saying, we’re all in this together.

When I first met this group of young people in August 2021, it did not take long to realize that something very significant was afoot here. After a short time getting to know you in the classroom, we spent four nights together in the Thuringian Forest and by the time we came back I was convinced: This was a group of friends who bickered like siblings, deliberately pushed each other’s buttons, and loved each other in ways that demonstrate what love is – a verb.

Fast-forward to your trip to Munich in February of this year. Once again, I watched as you looked out for each other and spoke up for one another. Even in the moments when you split off into small groups, you kept track of everyone’s whereabouts and plans. You knew who had internalized a city map and who could find the best restaurants. You knew who had extra cash for transport tickets and who was running a few minutes late. In short, you cared about each other.

Care is a verb. Love is a verb. It’s not enough to call oneself a friend. One must act like a friend in order to be a friend. Many of you know my thoughts on social media, and it will probably not surprise you to hear that I believe “friend” is a word we throw around too often without thinking about what it really means. I like the description by poet Mary Ann Evans, better known by the pen name George Eliot: “A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart . . . knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.”

Friends look at our best qualities and forgive us the rest. They care about us enough to be honest, which helps us become better than we are. We need those people sometimes. And we need to be those people for others. Imagine what type of world we could live in if we acted with kindness, if we looked for the best in individuals, seeking to build one another up rather than tear each other down. In the family that is this class, you have experienced just that. My hope for you is that you continue to create that community wherever it is that you go next.

Friendship is, writes poet David Whyte, “the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”

It is having and being a friend that allows us to navigate this complex world, one in which negativity frequently demands our attention and feeds off exactly that. The counter to this is the very real positivity and joy that we find in one another. These are our opportunities to love others, to care for them, and give our attention to those who deserve it. It is with one another that you have learned true friendship, an art that has shaped you and will stay with you. Some of the people beside you today will walk with you for years into the future. A beautiful thing about real friends is that they give us the courage to be ourselves. Be there for them and let them be there for you. For those who will let each other go after today, be gentle when you meet again, for these people, too, have shaped you as an individual.

Today marks a metamorphosis, the beginning of a new chapter in the journey of your individual life. It is as individuals that we are able to motivate, nurture, and challenge one another to be the best people that we can be. I’d like to take a moment to celebrate the very individual people that you are.

[Here followed a few words to each of my psychology students. My colleague spoke to the other half of the students, who had taken the business management course.]

Dear graduates, it has been a joy to observe your true friendships with each other, and the way you have embraced the individual that is each one of you. The world needs more people who are friends like you are.

Congratulations, Class of 2025. I can’t wait to see who you become.

Jena, Germany – April 2025
Education

No Straight Lines

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Beginning at the parking lot and continuing along the walking trail leading to my favourite climbing spot are whimsical painted stones giving life advice. One that I particularly like reads, in translation, “The crooked tree enjoys life. The straight tree becomes a board.”

I have to smile every time I see this modified teaching from Daoist philosopher Lao Tzu. Indeed.

Consider an individual who carves their own path versus one who unquestioningly follows a straight line. Think of creatives, often revered for their skills, who report having had difficulty fitting in. There are whole communities of “alternatives” who are so similar to one another as to not be “alternative” at all. As an educator, I find this important to keep the spectrum of difference in mind in working with students. To some extent, I need them to “play the game” of school because of the way society is structured, but there is wiggle room between adherence to instructions and stamping out individuality.

I can see my life path reflected in the saying, too. I spent my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood occupied with, out of a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic factors, what I was “supposed to” be doing. I had a plan and followed it, pretty predictably, until I didn’t. When I stopped the relentless, goal-oriented drive towards some imagined end, I realized that I didn’t actually want what the end had come to symbolize. I’d foregone the opportunity to “take chances, make mistakes, and get messy” in the words of Ms. Frizzle, everyone’s favourite science teacher, and came a little late to self-discovery.

But I got there, which is what had me in the forest climbing rocks in the first place.

This particular sign is placed so that you catch a glimpse of it on your way into the forest and see it full on when leaving. A little something to think about on the drive back home. I walked that way once with a friend whose oldest son is a good example of the crooked tree. He does not fit into any model called typical and things are hard for him that are not hard for everyone. But he can carry on a conversation like an adult, has genuine interests, and is afraid of nothing. My friend and I stopped together at the tree. Neither of us needed to say any more.

Thüringer Wald, Bad Tabarz, Germany – April 2024