A Conscious Connection

Recently, I have been wondering what types of feedback would best support my students in preparation for first grade. Wishing to be a successful teacher, I have to ask the right questions, seek answers, and also extend questions to my students. I have kept searching for better ways to provide feedback and researching within my own classroom following the model below. The posted video is a short clip from a balloon math lesson in which students with a partner counted how many times they could bounce a  balloon in the air. Then they were to add their individual counts together to create a total number. This short clip is just to demonstrate an action and assessment period--the students' action was to turn and talk with a partner and my assessment what to collect their results. After this lesson I realized that I could have provided better feedback so I started asking myself deeper questions surrounding that aspect of this instructional triad. I have found throughout this year ...

Throughout this year I have been committed not only to the Minneapolis Residency Program, moreover my continued Master's studies in Holistic Health at St. Catherine University. While I have sometimes briefly mentioned my work in that program and the parallels I have witnessed from that work into my classroom, in this blog post it is an overt bridge and recognition of this research work I have been conducting in collaboration with two phenomenal teammates for the past year and a half. This work has been creating a new language for me--both awareness of the academic language of research, and literally new words and phrases in Ojibwe. Being a bi-lingual learner and a seeker of various perspectives is a life-long skill and it has profoundly impacted the way I which to teach children. I know before reflecting on the power of language, I need to create the context about our research work. The following are excerpts from our Master's thesis: the abstract and my personal lens. I hav...