Best Teaching Day Ever?

I haven’t been teaching very long. Perhaps this is why I cannot come up with a “best teaching day ever”. While there are some pretty tough days, many of the days I have are the best ever. It could also be that it’s Saturday morning and I am tired from the week’s endeavors and challenges (and also on allergy medication!) Each day, one student or another makes me smile. Just yesterday, one of my “project students” achieved an 80% on a math quiz. This student was grinning ear to ear! He also turned in his first homework of the year and came in at lunch to get some help. He started the year withdrawn, shy, and just genuinely disengaged. Last week, after about the 20th time I asked him to stay after school for our tutoring program, he finally confided in me why he couldn’t come to tutoring. I understood his challenge. Perhaps this is all he needed?

Best teaching day ever? How can you possibly label one event the best ever? Let’s rename this to “One of the (too many to count) great teaching moments”

A Week of Music

Noreen Gonzalez

One of my favorite teaching days was full of music and history. As a class, we spent a week analyzing music from different eras. Part of the fifth grade curriculum is using and identifying figurative language, so we listened to songs and analyzed the lyrics for metaphors, hyperbole, similes, and the list goes on. Each day we listened to a different song, and we each posted our finding on an interactive bulletin board. My favorite part of the week was discussing the history of musical devices; record players, cd player, mp3 players...etc. It was a good week.    

A great trip to Borneo

Shane Haldeman

I arranged for Google Expeditions to bring their new program out to our site and provided my students with access to their virtual field trips using google cardboard.  I took my biology classes on a guided tour of the Bornean Rainforest.  I led them through the forest where we saw the great buttressed tree roots.  We then visited a mangrove swamp and saw the effects of rising sea levels on coastal regions.

After spending some time exploring, we then discussed the effects of Palm oil production on the planet.  We discussed deforestation as well resource management.

My students left the classroom with the amazing experience of visiting a place they may never get to physically visit.

For me personally, my best teaching days are the days that I feel that I have made a real difference in my students’ lives. I had one of these days towards the end of last semester. This took place on a day when the students had  just received their yearbooks. During one of my AVID classes, I decided to give my students a few minutes of free time at the end of class to sign each other’s yearbooks. I noticed that one my students did not have a yearbook, I am assuming because she could not afford one. This student had made a makeshift notebook out of writing paper and staples and was having her friends sign it in substitution of a yearbook. I am not sure why, but something about this image broke my heart. I had already sponsored another student’s yearbook cost and could not afford to sponsor another one. Then I had an idea; what if I went to the  craft store and made this student a customized autograph book, something that she could really be proud of. I gave the student the autograph book the next day, and it was the look on her face that I’ll never forget and the reason why I consider this my best teaching day. I think it is telling that my best teaching day has nothing to do with content or lesson planning, rather it has to do with being in-tune with the needs of my students, and how a simple moment of empathy followed by action can make a real difference in someone’s life.

Guide on the Side

Raquel Castellanos

My best day of teaching are the days in which I am not teaching.  I sit back and watched my students explore their own thought and feelings, coming to their own conclusions,  With my 7th graders we read an excerpt from Nelson Mandela’s,  A Long Walk to Freedom..  In the unit of student we discuss apartheid in South Africa and Mandela’s background.  At the end of the unit of study we conclude with a socratic seminar.  The students come to class with 3 opened ended questions about the reading and have a dialogue with each other to pull and make their own meaning from the text.  The best discussions come out of this socratic seminar.  We discuss ideas of civic and familial duty, injustice, social justice, courage, bravery and the power of one..  Annually I am amazed at what 12 and 13 year olds have to say and I want them to be empowered to translate their ideals to actions.

Best Day Ever

Best Day Ever

It all started summer of 2015, 3 days of Google training! I signed up to be a Digital 1:1 classroom. Why? At that time I asked myself that question many times until one fine day…..

The school year started all was well, paper,pencil,markers, glue and PAPER (phew). Then THAT day happened, in walked Mr. Lambert and 22 Chromebooks. It was real I was now a digital 1:1 classroom. The Edtech team handed out Chromebooks, 22 of them, did digital citizenship and left. Now what? I remembered the one most important piece of advice. Take it slow, I decided to to set goals my first goal was to have my students create a Thinglink for an animal project. The date I decided on was March 1, 2016.Perfect!!

October 20, 2015, all of my 22 4th graders were presenting their Thinlink projects to our school administration and Edtech department.

BEST DAY EVER!

BEST DAY EVAH (yes, I’m from Boston)

C Collin
Simmons College
Boston, MA

I teach in a graduate level social work program at Simmons College in Boston, MA.  My best teaching day ever was in my Assessment and Diagnosis Class this summer, where students learn the inner workings of psychiatric diagnosis.  This course can be a total snooze, but not this day!  

The students role-played diagnostic characteristics in a totally twisted version of charades/pictionary/heads up.  Graduate students acting out word-salad, flight of ideas, catatonia, and paranoid delusions galore - slow clap it out.  The intention of the assignment to teach mental status evaluation and help students internalize the meaning of what otherwise can seem like clinical jargon.

A day in the life....