Humanize Your Classroom.

I have a student, super anxious student, a lot of anxiety, very nervous all the time, but she just glowed during these conversations. She was so open, so honest, so intellectual, you just saw this different side of her come out.

This girl reads novels in Russian. Her writing is awful in English. She cannot speak because she’s embarrassed because she’s so smart. That was the first time she’s raised her hand, by the way, today.

My student from Uganda, she never has really spoken in class. She’s extremely quiet. And every time we did one of these, she would share experiences from home.

I did have a kid who would rather not be in class at all. And during that discussion, he’s like, I’m having so much fun, I don’t want to leave.

This class is full of basketball boys who don’t care about history. They actually made the best connections and the best claims and counterclaims for that quote out of all of my classes.

The quote was dealing with the idea of immigration and feeling foreign, and she related that to how she’s felt kind of foreign with her autism diagnosis.

About a week after we had done the activity with a quote, I had a student, not even one of my stronger students, come up and go, hey, hey, that’s blind obedience. It’s in your brain. You really did listen and you paid attention.

I’m 25 years into teaching, so I’ve seen and done an awful lot of things. This is something I wish I found really early.

I’ve had a hard time getting kids to be engaged and talk in class. It really has transformed my class discussions from surface level to something more meaningful.

I was never really taught how to run a discussion. Going through this program just taught me how to run a classroom discussion.