Category Archives: bonding

True Life: I Actually Like Retreats.

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I have a love-hate relationship with retreats.

As a highschool student I hated retreats. As a high school campus minister who ran the retreats, I hated them. However, as a Carondelet faculty member, I love retreats.

Last year I dabbled in retreats by attending Alpha and Shalom. This year I went big….Alpha, Kairos, and then Shalom. (By the way, this was my first time every participating in Kairos and I wear my Kai-rock with pride) Each retreat was a unique experience. All of them gave me the opportunity to interact with students and faculty members in a way that created connection.

I led small groups on each retreat and had the privilege of getting to learn more about our students in a more relaxed environment. Kairos and Shalom really gave me an opportunity to sit and talk with fellow faculty members. It was legitimately fun to be able to laugh, eat, and share stories with faculty members outside of my department. It seemed on Kairos and Shalom that faculty members needed the retreat just as much as the students. Just as we hope the students relax and create bonds on the retreats, I hope that we, as a faculty, can relax and create bonds with one another.

Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are. – Chinese Proverb

Student-Centered Good Times

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Students in my honors English 1 class are writing research papers and they will present a rendition of the TED Talk based on their papers. During the last two weeks, students were tasked with teaching their peers different skills needed in order to start these research projects. The different skills taught are 1)what makes a good TED Talk 2) public speaking skills 3) Nuts and Bolts (paraphrasing, synthesizing and MLA rules) 4) using reliable sources. These are all the skills needed in order to create a successful research paper and TED Talk. Different groups were assigned different skills that they taught/presented to the class. After each student-centered lesson, the students individually assessed the group that had just taught, and immediately “shared” the assessment with the group members. Here is a link to the peer assessment doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ka2eKoDo6QlpiThQQQzLd5e77VrBHcNmbfdp9G_gkcU/edit.

My biggest critique of skills teaching with a student-centered approach is that it takes forever. Students in each group needed to learn the information pertinent to their skills; they had to create a lesson for teaching the information; and, they had to teach their lesson to the entire class. What I could have taught in a fraction of the time, took two weeks for students to complete. Plus, two weeks ago, I had a ton of students out sick, which put off the student-centered lessons as well. The second critique that I have for this type of student learning is that students didn’t always explain the material that they were assigned to teach in a clear and coherent way, so for those situations, I have to take more time to reteach the material.

However, a couple of the groups’ lessons were awesome, and I couldn’t have done a better job myself. The public speaking groups, in both of my two honors classes, killed it! The lessons were fun, engaging and informative. They were what I assume student-centered learning is supposed to be. Students left class that day really happy, and you could tell that they fully enjoyed class.

I conducted a survey at the end of this lesson. Here is a link to the results:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1VxlhniHoV6VNF6cgprPqR3xlsgmF41YbmaeEDZ5uNFk/edit#responses. The results are across the board. Most of the students seem ambivalent to this style of teaching/learning.

“Where I’m From” Reflection

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About a year ago my enthusiastic friend Ellen introduced me to the “Where I’m From” phenomenon that has spread across academia over the last several years. “Where I’m From” is a poem written by Ms. George Ella Lyon, a celebrated writer and educator. This is her poem, the original “Where I’m From” poem:

While Ellen and I had a robust and fulfilling conversation about using the “Where I’m From” poem as a community building activity in the classroom, I set this conversation and idea aside, because I didn’t have time to do it. 
I spent a lot of time last year thinking about what is the most important thing I do in the classroom. And, I came to the conclusion that, at least at the beginning of the year, my most important job is making sure the students feel connected to Carondelet. Remember that I teach all freshmen and that these girls come from 50 different feeder schools. I believe that their ability to feel a part of this community as quickly as possible directly affects their success at CHS, thus the success of Carondelet in general.
So, in late July when Tiz and I were collaborating and discussing community building activities, I remembered my conversation with Ellen and proposed having students create their own “Where I’m From” poems, while teaching the writing process (two for one). The result has been wonderful. The students who really worked the writing process and spent time on their poems love their work. They’ve been invited to read the poems out loud, and while only a few girls from each class take advantage of sharing their poems, when they do, I’m deeply moved.  
The following poem is an original “Where I’m From” poem written and shared with permission by freshman, Gabriella Pattillo: