Hallway Conversations

Welcome to another episode of Hallway Conversations! This episode is all about finding joy in teaching, and how embracing playfulness might be part of finding a deep and abiding joy. Dave has lots of thoughts on this topic, and has been speaking about it at several different conferences this fall. We distinguish between “happiness” and “joy,” and think through the ways that we can find joy even when teaching is hard. Dave shares about an adventure in “playful practice” he is trying, recognizing that he’s bad at drawing…but is committing to being bad at it and playfully try it anyway. Abby and Dave share a bunch of other ideas for fostering more joyful, playful approaches to our work as educators. We hope you’ll be encouraged and challenged to look for more playful opportunities to make joy a regular part of your teaching! 

In this episode we are joined by our friend and colleague in the Education department, Dr. Trista Logan. Trista is a literacy expert, and we were delighted to get to hear her first-hand wisdom about teaching reading. Abby and Dave were delighted to learn from Trista–Abby already knew quite a bit about this important topic, and Dave fully admitted his lack of knowledge. In this episode, Trista explains the body of research behind the Science of Reading, and we discuss the strengths of explicit reading instruction, and some specific applications for the classroom. We hope it will be an encouraging listen for you, because every teacher is a reading teacher!

This episode is one of our favorites: book talks! After thinking out loud a bit about whether listening to an audiobook is “real reading” or not, we share a bunch of things we’ve read in the past few months that we really enjoyed and appreciated. This time around, it’s mostly fiction choices! In our conversation, we celebrate the way fiction can help you think deeply about real life things, and we close this episode exploring the idea that great literature uncovers truth–including the nature of sin in the world, which is why even “difficult” books, content-wise, can still be great reads and worth thinking about. We hope you’ll find some recommendations here that you will enjoy and appreciate, and maybe at least one you’d put on your to-be-read list. 

Welcome to a new season of Hallway Conversations! Abby and Dave are excited to be back on the microphone, and we are planning out a whole season of new conversations that we are looking forward to bringing to you. In this first episode of the new school year, we are thinking about that special excitement that comes with the beginning-of-the-year things that happen in the fall. We talk through our first days of school for the new semester, and we hope it brings you some reflection fodder about your own joys and trepidations that come with all the getting-to-know-you of the new school year. We’re looking forward to connecting with you regularly through these conversations!

We are always interested in hearing from you, dear listeners. You can drop us an email at [email protected]

Hallway Conversations is sponsored by the Center for the Advancement of Christian Education. You can learn more about the good work CACE is doing at https://cace.org/ 

Our semester-long hiatus is over! We’ve missed you, friends, and we wanted to check in this spring. We’ve both been busy with many things—both in our work here in the Education department at Dordt University, and in other things we also get to do. In this episode, Abby shares about her adventures in school leadership, and Dave shares about his adventures traveling all over the place. We talk about things we are continuing to learn even as we teach, the fun things we got to do this year, and a fair bit about the role of AI in education today (which is one of Dave’s favorite topics to talk about lately!) We hope that this episode is also an encouragement to you, dear listeners, as we draw toward the end of this academic year. And don’t worry; we plan to get back on a more regular recording schedule in the fall!

Christmas is coming! It’s the end of a very busy semester, and both Abby and Dave have rich and full lives. We start by checking in and talking through the things we’ve been up to in these past few weeks, including international travels and adventures in school leadership. From there, we pivot into our year-end sharing of great things we’ve read this year, and the things we’re hoping to read over Christmas break. We hope that this conversation gives you some inspiration to pick up a book for your own Christmas break time–and maybe take one of our recommendations! Blessings to you as you wrap things up for the fall term, and we hope you’ll experience a true sense of Christmas hope, joy, and wonder in this season of the year.

Today we are delighted to have a guest joining us for our hallway conversation: Abby’s long-time friend and former colleague, Katie Reitsma. Katie currently serves as a high school teacher in Iowa, where she is a master at connecting with kids. Abby invited Katie to her Applied Educational Psychology class as a guest speaker as they focused on classroom management strategies. Abby interviewed Katie, and our future teachers raised questions as well–and we put them in front of the microphone to turn it into a podcast episode. Katie and Abby have all kinds of great ideas for building relationships with students and mitigating challenging classroom behaviors. We hope you’ll learn a few things as you listen in as well!

Today we are delighted to have a guest joining us for our hallway conversation: Dave’s long-time pal, Paul Lapka. Paul currently serves as principal at an elementary school in California, and we’re excited that he will be moving to Northwest Iowa next year to become the principal at the school where Abby’s kids attend! In our conversation, we pick Paul’s brain about the kinds of things he sees successful teachers doing: from exceptional teaching practices, to a learner mindset, to the humility to be willing to keep trying. We talk about the “tricks of the trade,” and also the importance of practice as a key part of ongoing growth and development. We also examine some of the things that make teaching more challenging today than when Paul and Dave started teaching almost 30 years ago. We hope this conversation will spark some conversations of your own about successes you’re seeing, and opportunities for ongoing growth as well.

Abby and Dave start off this conversation reconnecting after a week of not seeing each other, because we were both presenting at different Christian education conferences. After a little catching up and reconnecting, we shift to our main topic: parent teacher conferences. (‘Tis the season!) We share stories of our own experiences as young teachers, learning how to lead a parent-teacher conference, partly through the school of hard knocks. We describe lessons we learned, and things we found that worked well for getting on the same page with parents, because we all care about the kids. We also share a bit from our perspective of parents about what we hope for in a conference with teachers. We hope that this conversation encourages you, educators, when you meet up with parents to collaborate with them for the good of the kids.

We are in a season of transition! It’s been a wonderful journey as a trio, but with changing demands, Matt is going to step away from the podcast. We are grateful for the time and conversations we’ve had over the past four and a half years(!) and we wish him well as he moves into other adventures. Abby and Dave have decided to continue to record new episodes, and we hope you’ll continue to join us in the metaphorical hallway.

In today’s episode, we are thinking about what it looks like to be in the middle of the semester when things feel a little stale…or maybe “the honeymoon is over!” We share some ideas and strategies we use to mix things up to look for ways to increase students’ engagement, making the curriculum accessible and meaningful for our students. We hope you’ll be encouraged to talk about your own strategies for mixing things up with colleagues in your hallways as well!