Hallway Conversations

Christmas time is here! (Cue the “Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!” music!) It’s the end of the semester, and we take a little time to reflect on what we’ve done and what we’ve learned this semester. Matt prompts the discussion this week with a two-part question: 1) What gifts did we receive from our students this year? And 2) What gifts would we like to give to educators? We have a lot of great things we have found blessings from our students, from their reflective responses, to their self-knowledge, to their hospitality, welcoming nature, and idealism. We also have gifts we would love to give to our fellow educators, including bravery, collaboration, authentic professional development, and resources for mental health. Thanks, as always, for listening. We appreciate you so much! We hope that this Christmas season is a blessing for you amidst the blur of busyness, friends! 

For those who have been with us from the beginning, you might remember how this podcast started with just Matt and Dave, and how we didn’t tell each other the question we were going to bring in, and just stumbled our way through thinking on our feet about how we might answer that question. We are recapturing a bit of that feeling in this episode! We sat down at our microphones at our normally-scheduled recording hour…and looked at each other expectantly, waiting for someone to remind us what our topic was for this week’s episode. We quickly realized that we never agreed on a topic! But we decided to go forward, and record anyway. We hope that this conversation gives you a further sense of who we really are behind our podcast personas! Matt gave us a little direction by sharing an Advent piece by Frederick Buechner to begin, and we launched into a ranging conversation about what gives us hope right now. We also talk about recommendation letters, the amazing students we get to teach, some recent adventures in pedagogy, things we are grateful for, and other playful shenanigans. Maybe this episode will be a good reminder to take some time to check in and connect with your colleagues!

In this episode we start off with some random check-in questions from Matt, inviting us to share some things about ourselves. (Be ready for some silliness, dear listeners!) This leads us into Dave sharing a story about teaching while not feeling well…and how he nearly passed out in class. The question Dave raises: how much should we let students see us as “real human beings?” We talk through various aspects of appropriate self-disclosure for teachers, the role of liking students and being liked by students in return, and strategies for giving students glimpses of who we really are beyond being “just the teacher.” We hope you’ll laugh along with our banter, but also that this might spark some introspection and conversation with your colleagues about right relationships with students.

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/

We start off this episode sharing about the different things we’ve been doing lately, with different conferences where we’ve been presenting lately. (It was marvelous for Abby and Matt to meet up with many listeners at CEA!) Dave’s conference actually sparked the topic for this week’s conversation: so many of the sessions at his EdTech conference dealt with AI in Education. We have questions, and maybe the beginnings of some answers. We discuss a whole range of ideas, from what AI is and what it currently can and cannot do, the potential impacts on teachers’ pedagogy, and how to focus on having humans do the things that humans should do…while also imagining ways that we can have machines do things that machines are good at. These are murky waters, for sure, but we hope this somewhat-longer-than-normal hallway conversation will be encouraging, and might spark some more hallway conversations of your own about the role of AI in education.

• In this episode, we mentioned the fact that Dave recently had a chapter published in a monograph by the Association of Christian Schools International that is all about AI in Education. You can learn more about the book here: https://your.acsi.org/pdp-store/Product-Catalog/Product-Details?productid=%7B03BC9D7A-5D6C-EF11-A670-002248218222%7D&srsltid=AfmBOor-gBOI96z2BNH5J5x9hfa0p_as5MktUIpinVzf75ZYhOfXm4QP

This week we start off with a rant about Christmas decorations already being out in the stores (it’s only the middle of October!) which turned into a just-for-fun check-in question about our favorite Halloween treats from our youth. The heart of our conversation today stemmed from an impromptu conversation Matt had with a campus visitor about the Education profession, and the prospective student was definitely not planning to become a teacher. Their conversation prompted our discussion: why aren’t people coming into the profession today? We think around some of the narratives about the profession, and what parts are true, and what parts are…less true. Dave shares his take on why–and how–educators can work to elevate the profession and we brainstorm ideas about how those of us who teach can help encourage other people to join us in the joyful challenges and rewarding work we get to do as teachers. We have some specific words of encouragement for you all, listeners, to help encourage your own students to consider becoming teachers–we hope you’ll have those conversations too!

• 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/ 

We’re (finally!) back in the studio (okay, Abby’s office with a creaky table) to record again. We’ve missed this so much! We start by catching up about some of the events of our summer, and the things we have upcoming–lots of opportunities for us to meet up with Christian educators in different places. We love connecting with colleagues across North America, and around the world! And along these lines, our main conversation this week is about “connection” in schools–as in, what does it look like for people to be “connected” to their school community? Matt shared some quotes to get the ball rolling, and once we got started, we found we have both lots of ideas as well as plenty of questions about what being “connected” in a school community looks like in the flesh. We discuss the difference between “welcome” and “belonging,” and we wonder together about what it looks like when students (or faculty) are disconnected from their school community. We also wonder about the benefits of “close-knit community” and if there is a shadow-side to this, though it certainly sounds appealing. Throughout this conversation, we share examples and stories from our own experiences, both in schools and in broader communities. We hope, as always, that listening to us thinking out loud will be a spark for some hallway conversations of your own!

• Dave mentioned that he is going to be speaking at ACSI’s Flourishing Schools Institute; this is going to be a pretty phenomenal conference! You can learn more here: https://www.acsi.org/flourishing-schools-institute 

Our final episode for this season–a little time to reflect on Matt’s question, “What does it look like to end well?” We shared some of the joys and sorrows we feel at the end of a term, ideas for how to end well, and some of the things we deeply believe about the rhythms of the school year. We also took some time to look back over this year and name some of the things we have learned. We recognize that we are all still works in progress and have not yet “arrived” as teachers and leaders. We hope you’ll be encouraged by this conversation to wrap up this year well.

• A programming note: we are going on hiatus for the summer. The hallway is going to be a little quiet for the next few months! But we anticipate picking up again in August. We hope that you too will find time to rest, recharge, and recreate during your summer season.

This week we are delighted to have a long-time listener and friend of the podcast joining us for a conversation: master educator, Al Bandstra. Al teaches 6th grade at Sioux Center Christian School, and has written substantially about effective classroom management. His forthcoming book is about what he calls “infectious behaviors,” and this conversation is all about what Christian educators can do to address the challenges of individuals and groups that aren’t behaving as we hope and expect they will. We share a variety of stories we’ve experienced, and Al shared with us from his ongoing research and exploration of ways he has found success to address challenging behaviors and broken relationships. If you have ever had a student–or group of students–that has been a challenge for you, we are confident that you’ll find both stories of solidarity as well as words of encouragement here about classroom culture, appropriate authority for teachers, and even acknowledging our own humanity. 

This week we are joined in the hallway by our friend and colleague, Gwen Marra. Dr. Marra teaches courses in Dordt’s undergraduate Teacher Preparation Program and Master of Education Program related to early childhood education and literacy. Her academic focus is especially on supporting all learners in developing essential skills for literacy. The hallway crew keeps hearing about “the Science of Reading,” and we have a varied understanding of what this means. Since we wanted to learn more, we connected with our resident expert on all things literacy! Gwen shares from the deep well of her education and experience to help us understand better. We hope that by listening in you’ll likewise be informed and better equipped to understand what research actually says about how people learn to read, and how we can help all students learn and succeed with literacy.

• Dr. Marra mentioned the Sold a Story podcast in this episode. You can listen to the whole podcast here: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ 

• Reading Rockets: https://www.readingrockets.org/ 

This week we are privileged to host our friend, Darryl De Boer, as a special guest. Darryl is a longtime leader in Christian schools, and currently serves as Director of Learning at Surrey Christian School in Surrey, British Columbia. Darryl is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Christian Education where he serves as the Director of Teaching for Transformation. Darryl is one of the co-creators of Teaching for Transformation (TfT), which is a framework being used by many Christian schools across North America to more intentionally ground their curriculum, instruction, and professional development to a Christ-centered biblical worldview. In this conversation, Darryl shares about the development of TfT, the core practices that are integral to TfT, and many other topics related to teaching and leading Christianly. Darryl’s wisdom, thoughtfulness, and passion are on full display in our conversation, as is his way of encouraging and agitating (in the most positive sense!) to help schools become more intentional about taking seriously the integral nature of faith and learning. No matter your role in education, if you are part of a Christian school, we’re confident you’ll be encouraged and challenged by listening to this conversation!

• 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/