Recently I have had resources removed from Teachers Pay Teachers for these two reasons: "Resources where students are required to speak from the perspective of victims of or participants in traumatic events may trivialize the experiences of affected individuals or groups" and "Activities where students write from the perspective or otherwise roleplay as people from specific cultures may disrespect or marginalize individuals from associated communities."

Now I would understand removing resources that are disrespectful of certain groups, but I don't understand removing resources that CELEBRATE the heroes or culture of marginalized groups. Specifically, my worry is that so much of our curriculum already barely mentions other cultures in a positive manner. If we now take down the resources that we do have, teachers are even less likely to teach about these cultures in a positive manner.

Why are we removing celebrations of other cultures?
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There are hundreds of Christmas plays available. In these students can act out the Judeo-Christian Christmas story and no one blinks an eye at it. However, my Light Up the World with Celebrations holiday play which has students pretending to be various students from all over the world celebrating different celebrations, in different ways, all with the joining theme of light, was removed. So now when a teacher is looking for a way to include diverse ideas into her classroom, they will have one less option. But none of the Christmas options are removed. This means that rather than making these other holidays, like Kwanza, Hanukkah, Eid and Diwali less marginalized, it makes them more so. Now I have other resources for these holidays - Vocabulary Packets, Presentations, and Cookbooks. However, this play is what the teachers actually use during those crazy, harried, days before winter break.

Since Teachers Pay Teachers chose to remove the play from my store, you can now find it on my Free Resources page here on my blog. I want to make sure that teachers have a chance to use it if they feel as I do that all holidays should be celebrated for their importance, not just Christmas.

Does acting out interviews trivialize the heroes of other cultures?

The other three resources that I have had to update are my Mister and Me Novel Study packet, my Black History Project and my Women's History Project. All of these included an acting out element. Playing pretend. Looking at life from a different perspective. All of those higher level thinking skills that make critical thinkers.

I removed those acting out activities because I was told that this was trivializing an experience of a marginalized population. I would like to note that the activity I took out of my Mister and Me Novel study is the EXACT same activity that is in my Charlotte's Web Novel study. I was not asked to remove the activity from the Charlotte's Web Novel study, which means that kids CAN act out a chapter from a fictional book about a white girl, but CANNOT act out a chapter from a fictional book about a black girl. To me this increases marginalization, rather than decreasing it.

​Now, please don't get me wrong. I don't want students acting out a slave auction. I don't want them acting out segregation. But interviewing an African American hero about all of the success they have had? I think that is a great way to learn about the heroes of all groups. Again, no one blinks an eye at someone doing a mock interview with George Washington. Why is it wrong to have students create the same mock interview with Barrack Obama?

As a white woman, I always try to double check everything to make sure that my resources celebrate all students. I don't ever want to have students feel left out in my class, even inadvertently. But by removing these resources, I feel that many teachers will just not bother to teach about diversity. I wish we lived in a world where our African American, Native American, Asian American, Women and other marginalized groups were celebrated in our general ELA and Social Studies curriculums. But for the most part that is not true. So we as teachers need to bring that element to the classroom. We as teachers need to make sure that the heroes of all groups are celebrated, not just the heroes of white males. ​

Bulletin boards are a great way of having information readily available for student use. They can be used as a visual cue of information students already know - like the steps to solving a word problem. Or they can be used as a place for students to "grab" information they aren't sure of yet - like the meaning or spelling of a word.

However, bulletin boards can also be very visually overstimulating to students. This is especially true when we add multitudes of decorations, pictures, quotes, colorful borders and such to our bulletin boards. This overstimulation can cause the students who need bulletin boards the most to use them the least.  Often, sorting through all of the extra, pretty stuff, takes too long for students who are visually overstimulated. When it takes students too long to find what they are looking for, they often get frustrated and stop looking for the information they need.

3.) Consider color and design when choosing borders and background paper or fabric.
Sometimes the desire to have all of our boards match in a "theme" will cause the bulletin boards to be busy for the brain before we have even hung anything on it. Other times the background clashes with what we are hanging on it, or makes that information hard to read. Use contrasting colors, with little to no design to make the information that you want kids to access to "pop" out for them.

4.) Consider leaving bulletin boards blank at the beginning of the year.
Add items to your bulletin boards with your students, instead of ahead of time. If possible allow students to be part of the process. For example, when I add word family words to my word wall, I pass the word cards out to students. Each student "presents" their word to the class. We discuss the word (the phonics, the meaning, etc.) and then the student tells me where to put the word on the word wall. This buy-in will help them be more willing to use bulletin boards. It will also increase the likelihood of them being able to locate items if they have a visual and auditory memory link of you hanging it up.

5.) Make bulletin boards interactive whenever possible.
Using bulletin boards for items like Number of the Day posters that are reviewed regularly gives students another form of buy-in. If you can, have a student or two write the answers on these posters. However, even if you are writing, by going over it daily, students can more easily locate the information for various skills.

6.) Consider having interactive notebooks in place of certain bulletin boards.
Interactive notebooks give students the same information that might be on an anchor chart or bulletin board, but in each students' individualized notebook. In addition to being a great way for students to build organizational skills, as students write in their notebook, they are building visual memory links for themselves.

7.) Don't put everything on a bulletin board. Instead, try O-Rings.
Another alternative to bulletin boards, especially for word walls, is to have things like sight word cards put onto an O-Ring where students can easily and quickly reference them. These O-Rings can be hung on a hook on the side of a desk, or be kept in a pencil case, for easy access.

8.) Use O-Rings to "layer" anchor charts and posters.
This is great for things like the success criteria to different writing genres. At the beginning of the year, we can have the narrative writing success criteria (or rubric) on our bulletin board. Then as we move into informational writing, we can add that success criteria to the O-Ring. Students only see the front poster of the O-Ring, but they know additional items are behind it if they should need it.

It never fails! Every year you show up to pre-planning and there's a new curriculum, a new program, or a new idea that is supposed to solve all of the problems of education. So as educators, we are supposed to throw out everything we know and jump on this new bandwagon (for a year or so, until something new comes along). Generally these are really repacking of an old idea. If you stay in education long enough, you see the same ideas cycle through every 8 - 12 years, branded as new and shiny.

But in reality what we did last year (and the year before that, and the year before that) WORKED.  Can it be improved on? ALWAYS! But should we throw the baby out with the bath water? NO. In fact very often, I will find myself trying to put some supplemental material together to make this new program meet the needs of a group of students (because these lovely educational programs that districts spend fortunes on DO NOT provide everything) and halfway through I'll say to myself "I made something like this before." So I'll go dig through my stuff and lo and behold there it is.

So I obviously can't make your school tell you that you don't have to use their shiny new program. However, I have learned how to  "wiggle" inside the box you are given. First, use any "extra" time to your advantage - morning work, transitions, centers, etc. Second, use pieces of the curriculum in your own tried and true way. ie. Yes, we're reading Stellaluna, but we're going to act it out instead of reading it for the 12th time. Third, allow yourself to think outside the box - seek out creative ways to present the information from the curriculum. Fourth, listen to your students! Let them have some input and some choice into the activities they will be completing. 

If you are able to find that wiggle room, or if you are lucky enough to NOT have a boxed curriculum, here are a few things that might work to teach the basics, while still allowing for teacher and student choice and outside the box thinking. For so many teachers bringing outside of the box ideas into a boxed curriculum classroom would take hours and hours of extra work. I hope that some of these resources will take that stress away from you. 

Back in 2012, when I taught English Language Learner exclusively in Morocco, I began a series called "Tuesday TESOL Teaching Tips". The series was long after a variety of website changes, so I have decided to revise it. I will be sharing one tip each Tuesday, starting with the original tips and expanding on them with the additional knowledge I've added in the last 8 years. Today's TESOL Teaching Tip is to use pictures and videos.

Teach ELL Students Tip #1: Use Pictures, Videos and Displays

One of the thing teachers are often surprised of with English Language Learners is how they can understand some difficult academic vocabulary words, but then not know basic every day words. For example, students will often know about interrogative sentences and the commutative property, but might not know what an olive is.  Remember that when English Language Learners are learning, they are not always understanding every word. Additionally non school vocabulary is often not taught at all, or is mentioned in passing.

The concept of "a picture is worth a thousand words" is not new. However for English Language Learners, a picture can build vocabulary faster than hearing the word a hundred time. But of course, we shouldn't just show the kiddo a picture and move on. When we hit a word they don't know, use an image to get them over the hump. Then ask them if they know the word in their native language. This will help them build a connection. Finally, have students use the word in a sentence or in context, asking them to make that picture in their head. By helping students build these neuropathways, they are more likely to bring that picture into their head the next time they encounter that word. ​

Of course with verbs and more complex concepts, videos are even more effective. Stopping a lesson to watch a 30 minute video isn't ideal, but ten to twenty seconds of ballroom dancing is enough for students to understand the meaning of the word waltz.

Teachers are busy. That should be news to no teacher reading this. However, because we are so busy, we often only see teaching as what WE are doing in our own school in our own area. We forget that there are so many teachers teaching in other parts of the world, in other circumstances, in other ways. For a long time I have wanted to help us as teachers connect with each other, to learn from what is happening in different schools around the world. Then COVID happened and the differences between areas became more and more apparent. So I have reached out to some teacher friends and put together a series called Teaching Hive Mind: A Worldwide Window into Education.

Movement breaks and brain breaks are definitely not a new concept in education. However, never have I taught a school year that required brain breaks more than 2020. Due to COVID restrictions, this year I have 14 first graders who are not allowed to leave their seats all day. Six year olds, at desks six feet apart, all day long. No centers, no "find a partner who..." activities, no real group work, not even the option to get up to sharpen a pencil or grab a piece of paper. We have truly no movement naturally built into our day.  So, I started the school year by intentionally planning movement breaks and partner activities that would be a part of every school day, to protect the mental and physical health of my students. 

I have always actually leaned away from formal brain breaks, like the ones posted on Go Noodle, because they often get students wound up and then require me to lose teaching time to get us refocused. Instead, I have always just built natural movement into our day, with center rotations, group projects, allowing students to get their own materials and work in every corner of our classroom. However, with all of those things being big no-nos, I went into this school year with an intentional plan to give students movement without taking away from instructional time. Here are a few of the things I have done:

"Action Break" Transitions 
Even though my students can't rotate through centers, I am continuing to teach through small group rotations. Only this year the students complete the activities at their desks and I move from one small group to the next with my rolling whiteboard. In between each rotation, when students would normally be moving from one area of the classroom to another I have created "action breaks".
For these action breaks, I typed up a list of different actions, everything from basic exercises (like jumping jacks and pushups) to yoga poses (like chair pose and boat pose) to imagination activities (like pretending to drive a car or pretending to hula hoop). I cut up my list and during each transition, I pull an action and the kiddos have thirty seconds to a minute to complete it. This is about the same amount of time that I would normally give students to transition between center rotations, so no lost teaching time and the kids get out of their seats.

The lack of movement and conversation our kids are experiencing due to COVID is very concerning to me, as a parent and as a teacher. It is not good for anyone's mental or physical health to sit still all day, or to be isolated from their peers. While I understand that this disease is dangerous, the measures we are taking to prevent disease spread are also dangerous. Please, as a teacher, find ways to add movement and conversation into your classrooms, whether you are teaching virtually or face to face. And if you have a great way to add this into the classroom that you'd like to share, please leave a comment with that information. Let's learn from each other to make the best decisions for our students.