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"They’d predict that, looking back on the day at Disney, your overall rating would be a 9! That’s because research has found that in recalling an experience, we ignore most of what happened and focus instead on a few particular moments" (Heath & Heath, p. 4).

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This made me think back to the Barth reading and the following discussion from class today. Barth had quoted, "'I've come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It's my personal approach that creates the climate. It's my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous'" (p. 3). I thought back to this as I read Heath's explanation on why we remember certain moments. It made me think about how I want student's to remember their time in my classroom. It also made me think about how I can act thoughtfully and meaningfully in a way that will help students remember the important and positive things and have an overall positive learning experience that engages them.

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"John Deere’s First Day Experience is a peak moment delivered at a time of transition. When a life transition lacks a 'moment,' though, it can become formless. We often feel anxious because we don’t know how to act or what rules to apply" (Heath & Heath, p. 17).

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The First Day Experience is such a great idea! I feel it also applies perfectly to the first day of school. The first day of school is a time of transition, and some students can be anxious. Usually the first day is spent going over the syllabus and class expectations, which I feel has been pretty standard throughout my educational experience as a student. While this is helpful, it could go further, but usually anything memorable is saved for the 2nd or 3rd day.

There is one exception: my highschool spanish teacher Seniora Berrie. I remember that on my first day of class with her freshman year of highschool she had cute tiny greeting cards on each desk with a greeting in Spanish and its English translation underneath. We decorated our cards with things we liked and then used Spanish to English dictionaries to write a sentence about how and why we decorated our card. We used those sentences as part of an ice breaker actitivity. I think this set a great tone for the rest of the year, and I would want to do something similar with decorating writer's notebooks.

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In this padlet, I hope to note down and brainstorm about ideas from Heath's "The Power of Moments" text to apply to teaching, my future classroom, and my general life. I noticed the table of contents is organized into 4 categories: elevation, insight, pride, and connection, which I feel is a reasonable way to define positive moments. I am looking forward to reading, and I am currently wondering if each of these categories has a negative moment equivalent.

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"HARRIET WENT TO JACK’S BIRTHDAY PARTY.

THE CAKE TASTED AWFUL.

HARRIET LEFT JACK’S MOTHER A VERY SMALL TIP.

Wait, what? We have a clear 'birthday party script': parents giving gifts, friends eating cake, kids learning to bludgeon animals until candy comes out. But we never tip Jack’s mother—ever. The story breaks a script" (Heath & Heath, p. 51).

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The way this caught me so off guard with even with the authors' explanation of breaking the scrip leading up to it makes me wonder how often I expect/follow/rely on scripts. It also makes me wonder what scripts students have seen and come to expect in the ELA classroom. Does it go a bit like this?:

THE TEACHER ASSIGNED A TEXT.

WE WILL READ A CHAPTER OR TWO.

WE WILL TAKE A TEST.

In what ways can I break this script? Maybe...

THE TEACHER ASSIGNED A TEXT.

WE WILL READ A CHAPTER OR TWO.

WE WILL RESPOND TO THE READING IN DISCCUSSION GROUPS.

or

THE TEACHER ASSIGNED A TEXT.

WE WILL READ A CHAPTER OR TWO.

WE WILL HAVE A CREATIVE WRITING PROMPT PREDICTING WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

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"What they realized was that they didn’t need their colleagues to understand something, they needed them to feel something" (Heath & Heath, p. 58).

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This quote strongly applies to how I feel about poetry and teaching poetry. I think poetry can be a bit intimidating because students are so busy trying to translate meaning that they don't take a minute to just take in how the writing makes them feel emotionally.

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"Now, that sounds nothing like a moment of elevation! He’s not feeling joyful or engaged or “above the ordinary.” He’s been blindsided by negative feedback. Yet it’s not just an emotional low point, either. It’s a low point that holds the promise of a better future path. Ouch—I need to change

things to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Moments of insight deliver realizations and transformations" (Heath & Heath, p. 68).

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This wording of failure leading to/promising a better future path was very impactful to me. I feel that I personally am bad at responding to failure, and when I read this I though, "wow, this person responds in a very healthy way to failure." He didn't just accept it and move on, but decided to utilize it to better himself and avoid failure in the future. I think that's really wonderful, and I think that is a perspective that everyone (students, teachers, administrators) needs to have. I think it might be beneficial for anyone in a position to give feedback (such as a teacher, mentor teacher, etc.) to discuss healthy ways of responding to failure. Failure is an inevitable part of life, and it would benefit everyone in a school community if everytime there was failure, it was used as an opportunity for growth.

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"The tension is unbearable now. This is what Kamal Kar calls the 'ignition moment.' The truth is inescapable: They have been eating each other’s shit. For years.

Often at this point, the discussion spirals out of the facilitator’s control. People are agitated. They start challenging each other: We can’t continue this! This is madness! How can we stop this?

They often ask the facilitator what they should do. But he declines to answer. “You know your village better than I do. You’re free to choose anything you want, including continuing to defecate in public.” But the villagers are determined now. It feels intolerable to live with the status quo another day" (Heath & Heath, p. 73).

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I think the takeaways from this quote, on how best to prompt insight and change without treating people condescendingly, are something everyone needs to know. Even if not in a position of authority, such as a teacher or administrator, this can be beneficial for anyone working together with others.

One of the problems I've observed from group work in and outside of the classroom is that there tends to be one or two people who feel they know what's best, and they often try to tell others what to do without explaining their reasoning or incorporating others' experiences.

This quote from The Power of Moments shows that its best not to tell others what to do, but to support them in finding and connecting the evidence together to come to a similar conclusion themselves. I love it!

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"One day in 2006, her husband, Sam, heard a story on the radio about a business that allowed you to 'test-drive' your dream job. For a fee, Vocation Vacations could arrange for you to spend a few days shadowing people who were living your dream. The jobs available for visit included cattle ranching, managing a bed-and-breakfast, owning a winery, and—

there it was!—starting a bakery" (Heath & Heath, p. 80).

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After reading this passage, it made me think that this is largely the intention of the student teaching internship. Future teachers shadow and work with mentor teachers who have that job to experience what it is like before then going on to be teachers themselves.

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"The comment crushed her: 'The rest of the class snickered, and I wished the floor would open and swallow me up.' For the rest of the year, whenever the choir sang, she mouthed the words" (Heath & Heath, p. 100).

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It really hurt to read about this story because I really related to it. I still remember being told by a teacher in early elementary school that I wasn't a good reader, that I should stick to lower level books, and I remember how her words negatively impacted me and my classroom engagement.

I think it's horrible that a teacher would ever tell someone they aren't good at something. Everyone spends their lives acquiring and developing skills, and this is especially true in the classroom setting. Telling someone they are bad at something is setting them up to be bad at it. This is something I noticed in real life and in the literature when researching for my action research:

The decline in reading ability in recent years most greatly affected students who were already struggling readers (Goldstein, 2022), worsening the literacy gap. In a vicious cycle, students with low reading abilities have low perceived self-efficacy, resulting in a lack of engagement with reading (Boyes et al., 2018; Morgan et al., 2008). Since some students are not confident in their reading ability, they may avoid reading whenever possible, which will not lead to improvement and growth.

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"The larger point is that most recognition should be personal, not programmatic. In our own research, when we asked people about the defining moments in their careers, we were struck by how often they cited simple, personal events" (p. 104).

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I feel strongly about this moment in the text because I feel it applies so well to feedback in both an academic and career setting. It is so important for growth and achievements to be recognized out loud, rather than only mistakes being corrected out loud.

When teachers give feedback to students or recieve feedback themselves from students, other teachers, or administrators, it can often be the negative things that are taken personally because they are often more specific. This is one reason I don't like the 'compliment sandwich' due to it coming across as disingenuous, becuase the negative always seem to be specific while the positive always seems broad, vague, and impersonal. For example:

"Great job with essay writing. Don't forget to properly format your citations; You have been using APA and not MLA. Nice conclusion!"

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"Was there a way for someone to 'get to the other side' without requiring the period of suffering he had endured? He wondered, How do I give people easy victories?

Clark started scribbling out a plan to ease people into running. People needed a goal, he thought. Something to look forward to" (Heath & Heath, p. 115).

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I love the idea of multiplying milestones, working steadily up to an end goal. I think this is often missing in the classroom and in teaching as a career.

Firstly, there is often little for students to look forward to. The end of the unit is a test or a project—more work. The way there, made up of classwork and activities, is often portrayed as a series of tasks to complete, rather than a series of achievements. I want to know more about what ways teachers have found to make these into milestones and recognize achievements to promote student engagement.

Secondly, teaching as a career doesn't have many milestones. You start, you are a new teacher for three years, and then you keep teaching up until you retire. The years are marked by cleaning up and setting up classrooms at the end and start of each academic year. If there are no clear milestones, it may not feel like anything is being achieved. I think this is why some older teachers I have observed start to view their career as a chore rather than a passion. I wonder how schools could go about making more visible milestones for teachers.

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Reading The Power of Moments has prompted me to reflect on both my view of myself and my view of education and teaching. It gave me a lot ideas that I want to apply to grow as a person, develop professionally, and apply to the classroom and how I teach and interact with others in my future school community.

There was an 11th moment that stuck out to me regarding interacting with others: "Relationships don’t deepen naturally. In the absence of action, they will stall. As Elam said above, 'we were strictly peers at work and really knew very little about each other beyond our roles at the company.' That’s a frozen relationship. But, as we’ve seen, acting with responsiveness to others can create tighter bonds: bonds between teachers and parents..." (Heath & Heath, p. 173).

I think almost all the excerpts in this text and their takeaways involve interacting with others in some way. I think it really prompts the question, "how do I want to impact others and how do I want to be impacted?" The text suggests that this largely comes down to how we choose to react to situations ourselves and how/if we choose to create such situations to prompt reactions in others.