‘conversations with great teachers’ tonight!

In the interest of sharing a worthwhile idea, I’m taking a break from my usual blogging topics for a brief education-related advertisement:

I am tremendously excited about the Parent Education event at our middle school tonight – “Conversations with Great Teachers… at SMS!”. We have Dr. Bill Smoot, author of “Conversations with Great Teachers” and a panel of six SMS teachers. I hope the turnout is incredible as this is a must-see for parents in the California public education system.

The discussion will illuminate the creative teaching that goes on right here at our local middle school! Dr. Smoot will moderate a panel of six SMS teachers (representing grade levels as well as subject areas) who will share interesting and engaging stories of their secrets to our students’ success.

Bill Smoot, Ph.D.,  teaches English at the Castilleja School in Palo Alto where he has received the Outstanding Teacher Award. In his book, he investigates what it is that passes between the best teachers and their students to make learning happen. His insightful questions elicit thought-provoking reflections on teaching as a calling and its aims, frustrations, and satisfactions.

How did this come together, you might be wondering?

Several months ago, I read an interview with Bill Smoot in the SJ Mercury News. I was immediately intrigued by the possibility of him coming to our school to help shed light on the innovative teaching that goes on – mostly undetected by parents in my opinion. I contact Bill the next morning and to my delighted surprise, he emailed me back within an hour and said he would be happy to moderate our panel! When in life does this happen? My feeling is – when you make a bold move! What’s the worst he could have said? No? I can handle a “No”. In this case, however, the stars were in my favor and I started planning the event (one of my hats is the Parent Ed coodinator at the school).

The past week or so, I’ve been frantically preparing for tonight’s event. Back in October, I purchased 30 copies of Bill’s book in order to give the teachers a basis for the type of anecdotes we wanted to illustrate in the program. At first, they were a little reluctant to check out or read the book. But I started teasing them with excerpts and all of the sudden, the vast majority were hooked! (Giving prizes for correctly identifying details such as page numbers or names didn’t hurt, either).

So the teaching staff is totally jazzed about tonight and so am I. If you live in the Bay Area and want more details, send me an email.

I will leave you with my favorite anecdote from the book. If this doesn’t get you excited about what teachers can accomplish with our students then I don’t know what will!

EXCERPT——————————

Could you give us some examples of these projects?

…The ultimate project I did with them was that I emptied out the entire classroom and they arrived on the first day of school to an empty room. Their challenge was to design, fund, and then build their classroom. This was my favorite of all projects because I love to take stuff away from these kids, and then they get nothing except what they worked for and figured out how to get on their own.

…

In the year that they started with an empty room, what did they come up with?

We had to study the Pilgrims. That was a big part of our curriculum. So every time we came to a problem, that was our excuse to go do research about Pilgrims to see if they met that problem, and if they did, how they solved it.

The first problem was about getting money, so we looked into how the Pilgrims got the money to fund their voyage. We found that they got it from companies investing in them. So we tried to use the model we learned from the Pilgrims for our own work. We learned what investment was, and the kids wrote hundreds of letters to every business in our town inviting people to buy a share. They sold forty-four shares. A carpenter bought a share, so we asked him if he would come in and design a desk to build. An accountant bought a share, so we asked her to come in and show us how to set up books to keep track of all the money we had. We had banks buy a share, so we had the banks explain how interest worked. A retired handyman bought a share, so he came in and helped us build the desks. We didn’t finish building the desks until February. They were these beautiful desks with tops that flipped up. That was a pretty exciting year. That was a pinnacle year in my teaching…