Ferguson in Class

Watching the Grand Jury decision on Monday, I knew that class would be focused on Ferguson Tuesday.  I had worked with my students earlier in the year about stereotypes and how young people, specifically young black students can be viewed by others.  We had not talked about the specific events of Ferguson, Mike Brown, race or justice.  All things I wanted to bring into my classroom Tuesday.

"Where to start?  I teach nine year olds.  Fourth graders."  These were my thought following the announcement of the grand jury decision to not charge Darren Wilson.

My students!

  I went directly to a resource shared on Twitter under the hashtag #FergusonSyllabus.  This is a resource teachers have been contributing to since the events this summer when Michael Brown was killed.  First, I didn't know how much my students knew about the events, I started with a NewsELA article and talked through some ideas around race, grand juries, and the focus on race in these events.  I allowed my students to journal about feelings, questions, reactions and reflections.  I used parts of the Facing History Michael Brown lesson to have students determine the meaning of stereotype, prejudice, justice, repair, fairness, peace, and community.  We discussed some of the questions from the lesson and some of the bigger ideas connected to the definition of the words above.  We then listened to J. Cole's Be Free, and the Sam Cooke 1963 song, Change is Going to Come.

First, we re-established our classroom norms of this is a safe space, ideas and opinions are respected even if we disagree, sharing ideas is a choice and some may choose not to share.  I also had the honest conversation about the challenges of discussing these topics and issues.  It's hard, challenging and people of all ages and backgrounds struggle to discussion it, express themselves and engage in it.  Yet, it is necessary to discuss to create change and develop understanding of the issues.

After the work, students shared on Todays Meet ideas, feelings and understandings.  Here are some of their ideas I shared on #FergusoninClass.  If you haven't checked out the hashtag on Twitter, do, as many students are sharing their ideas.


"I feel sad because we don't have a lot of peace."

"I'm afraid of the people dying in our community."

"I think it's important to talk about this because when you just keep all the things in your head that creates stress."

"It's hurting me and others."

"I think that people should speak up and show love to different races."

"You need to give people justice.When someone says stop that mean stop because people are hurting people."

I am so proud of their work, their engagement with tough topics and their work to make their community a better place.

Discovering Play

It seems that the classroom has many influences and pressures that in turn become the influences and pressures on our students.  As a math and science teacher, I feel the constraints of testing windows, lesson plans, assessments, grading and making sure my students are best prepared for what's next academically.  In that pressure we tend to take everything very seriously and expect nine year olds to take it just as seriously.  I am passionate about my job, educating my students and making sure they are doing the best they possibly can each and everyday.  Yet, in all the education business that all of us are focused on, we sometimes forget about who our kids are.  They are our nine year olds.  Let us not forget what it means to be nine, to be a kid. So it needs to be asked, where is the play?

Play has become a dirty word in school.  I use it daily to get kids back on task, by saying, "quit playing, quit playing around, etc."  With all we have to do there does not seem a place or time for play.  Albert Einstein told us, "Play is the highest form of research."  We know that play can lead to creativity, exploration, build relationships and enrich our lives.  Why can't playing and learning happen together?

Some Chicago colleagues and I were so inspired by Kevin Carroll's 2014 ISTE keynote about his journey and the themes of play, creativity, and relationships that led to his great success.  We decided this was something our kids must experience as well.  Kevin was kind enough to invite us to his Chi-Talk Event in which he and his team worked to inspire Chicago's kids to listen, learn and lead and rise up.  Kevin's work is truly where it started, we simply hope to continue his great work.

Ben Kovacs and I decide to work on a unit of study for our students at two very different schools.  Ben works on the North side and I work on the South side, yet play is universal to us all, we decided the plan could be collaborative and reach all kids no matter their zip code. We worked to create the #ChicagoPlay site to host our inspiration, essential ideas and questions, and our kids' work. We hoped to use Kevin's inspiring work and then allow our students to play again.  We aspire to have our students become ambassadors of play and bring it to others.  But first, we had to bring it back to them.  We started by having kids define play, what it means to them and its feelings and emotions.  We let them see a great video from Kevin's work at Nike about Tag and play.  The truth is, they struggled.  No one has asked them about play, many of them have lost touch with play.  After blogging, we looked at which words we saw the most using a word cloud.

We have work to do around play.  But it's the best kind of work, it's thoughtful, inspiring, creative, imaginative, freeing.  My students next task was to think outside of the box, literally.  We used the book,  Not a Box by Antoiniette Portis.  In this book, the box can become anything you imagine.  My students were nine again when we read and predicted what the box was going to be on each page.  My students then had a chance to recreate, Not a Box using their imaginations and the Book Creator app.   Just as the rabbit in the story is pictured simply in the box so were my students.  Then they used their imaginations to create something much better than a box.  

One of my students commented after finishing our work for the day with play, "I haven't used my imagination this much in a really long time."  It's time to let them play.