Tag Archives: Relationships

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.

On My Mind

Bad Day

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I caught up to a new colleague while cycling home through the park last week. We’d had our first real conversation just weeks earlier at a wine tasting, which led us to meet in a café days later to continue our conversation. Like many of us who move around, she was looking to find her people. We’re a small school without much transience, and I appreciate that this can be hard to do. I was new once, too.

As one does, I asked about her day and was surprised by the response. “Actually it wasn’t that great,” she said, and I asked if she wanted to tell me more. We rode together until the path forked and I continued towards home.

She’d had a bad day and thanked me for talking about it with her. I was happy to listen, had related some of my own experiences, and had tried to ask questions that might prompt a change of perspective. It wasn’t until I was cycling home the next day, alone, that I realized how seldomly we actually answer the question, “How was your day?”.

I had an administrator once whose classic reply was, “Do you care?”, meant to prompt the asker into thinking about the question. That there’s only one real answer to that question presents its own difficulties. Based on personal observation, Germans tend to avoid the question entirely and just ask how you are. Whether talking about one’s day factors into the answer is purely optional.

Thinking about it from this perspective, I was flattered that my colleague had given me a real answer. It had meant some vulnerability on her part, and that’s not easy with people we’re trying to get to know. But that is the way to get to know people, according to the social penetration theory that my psychology students and I study. Relationships tend to move from superficial and shallow to deeper and more intimate, and people tend to like individuals who share more deeply, leading them to do so in return.

Through the conversation about the bad day, my colleague and I learned a little bit more about each other. We found some commonalities, recognized that others are there for us when we’re open to them, and strengthened a connection. And that’s not a bad way to begin building a friendship.

Education

See Me

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My thirteenth year as a teacher comes to an end this week. As all the years before it, it has gone quickly. There has been, as always, joy and sadness, disappointment and surprise, stress and smooth sailing. I keep track of seasons based on what we’re doing in school and refer to years according to the school calendar. In August I’ll buy a new pocket agenda.

There is a lot on this blog about teachers and teaching, about schools, students, and learning. I admit to loving, really loving, the work that I am privileged to do. If you ask me what I teach, I’ll give you the easy answer: I teach history, psychology, social studies, Theory of Knowledge. It’s true, but far more important to me is the human element. I teach young people and I watch them grow up for a little while. And then they go off into the world and I smile.

Last week I received an email from a student who I’ve taught since grade 10 who just completed grade 12. He is one of many students who has come to me over the years to talk about something that was on his mind, and one of a few who have written to me about it afterwards. What he said struck me and reminded me of things that matter. I wanted someone to see me and you saw me. I needed to talk and you listened.

Maya Angelou had it right: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

It’s not uncommon for me to raise an eyebrow at a student and ask, “You okay?” Or, when it works better, those words go on a sticky note that I pass to the student when moving around the room. I usually get a nod and sometimes a change in behaviour, and then we go on our way. Occasionally a student comes back to me later and I find out what was going on. Sometimes I receive messages, on a few occasions even years after the fact, telling me about a student’s feelings in that moment.

Young people are crying out to be seen and to be heard, and I think it’s not only young people. When we choose to engage, we don’t always know what our level of involvement will be. We don’t know what we’ll hear and therefore what we will be required to do. And we don’t do it for the possibility of thanks at the end.

To see a young person how they want to be seen, to sit across a table and pass a packet of tissues, to really listen to someone who just needs to talk – this is what I do. And I am so, so lucky to be able to give those moments and the accompanying feelings. This is all part of being a teacher.