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!

After a summer away, it sure felt good to get back together in front of our microphones. This first episode for season 10 is really just catching up on all the things we’ve been doing since we last recorded in May, and sharing about all the cool stuff we have coming up in the next couple of months as well. We’re excited to be back with you, friends, and we hope and pray that our hallway conversations here on the podcast will be an encouragement for you all to have hallway conversations of your own. Looking forward to connecting with you–here on the pod, or in person when we have the opportunity to see you!

We are at the end of another semester, and at the end of another season of this podcast adventure. In this episode, we reflect together on our practices, on the things we are taking away from this year, the nature of teaching as “planting seeds,” and the importance of Sabbath for educators. We hope that this conversation encourages you all to wrap up your own academic years well, friends. With this episode, we are going on hiatus for the summer, but we plan to be back with you with new episodes in the fall. We hope you’ll have time to rest, recreate, and re-create this summer!

After recording our last episode, we left the microphones running as we sometimes do, and had another amazing interaction full of wisdom from our pal, Erik Ringsby. We are including it here as a shorty bonus episode, and we hope it spurs more thinking about how to care well for your students!

This week’s episode is a conversation with our good friend and colleague in the Education department, Professor Erik Ringsby. Erik joined our team last year and teaches a variety of courses in special education and learner diversity, and draws on a long career as a special ed teacher and instructional coach. He is a talented, thoughtful educator, and one of our favorite things about Erik is his deep passion for supporting ALL students to make learning come to life. We are confident that this episode will be a blessing and an encouragement to you to think deeply about ways your school can support all the kids you get to serve! 

This episode was prompted by an email Dave sent to the rest of the crew–we’ll let you listen to hear the details–but it has to do with finding lots of joy amidst some frustration. This got us thinking about the nature of joy, and we share some of the joyful memories we have from our growing up years as we begin. Then we shift to talking about finding joy in the work of teaching, even when it is challenging, demanding, and downright frustrating. How can we look for joy, and help our students learn to see joy as well? We hope this will be an encouragement for you too to choose joy, even when things are frustrating!