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.

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).

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.

things to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

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

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).

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!

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

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.

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!"

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).

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.

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.