Pure Manaʻo

Na wai ke kupu o ʻoe? Whose sprout are you? Whose child are you?     As I prepare to start  fall semester in a few weeks, I go through the same motions that I have for the past 28 years. I create my syllabus, gather my resources, go over my notes from the year before, create my semester plan, my units, my day one lesson. This rhythm is familiar. But there is nothing familiar about this school year. In this year of pandemic, the new normal is that there is no normal. When our leaders shut the schools down at spring break, when planes stopped flying, businesses closed, when all we had was each other on the other end of a Zoom call to understand that there was a world outside of our house, we were just playing at normalcy because the end of the tunnel was summer when schools would be out, when we would flatten the curve, when we could start opening up again. As long as we could see the light at the end of the tunnel (June 1, July 1, August 1. . .) we could talk ourselves int...

To get professional conversations going, one strategy is the visual synectics strategy. The purpose is to select a visual and generate comparisons as a way to foster professional conversations within the table. Our visual options were: Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz , Peter Falk from Columbo , Michael Jordan, Winston Churchill, Oprah Winfrey. The cloze passage for the day was: Learning with other professional educators is like_______________ because_______________. Our tongue in cheek response: Learning with other professional educators is like Dorothy because sometimes we need to realize that we're just not in Kansas anymore, embrace the change, learn through the process, and only then can we find our way back home. Why is this strategy  better than an icebreaker? It's not busy work. It guides participants to start thinking as a professional. It's not personal. The word icebreaker connotes that there is ice to be broken. People ...