Be Curious: The Gift of Failure - Guest Authors - Rundle College Junior High Faculty

Stuck In The Middle With You...

Recently three Rundle Junior High faculty had the opportunity to attend the Association of Middle Level Education conference in Nashville, Tennessee with 3000 other educators who spend their days “stuck in the middle”. Except we aren’t stuck. We choose to be here because these kids are awesome!

Here are some of our biggest takeaways from an incredible 3 days of learning and sharing:

Mrs. Corbett: My biggest takeaway from the AMLE conference was the reinforcement to continually ask "Why?". Asking ourselves why we are teaching a certain way and asking our students why we approached a problem a certain way? If we want to cultivate creative students, then we ourselves must be creative. Learning is an act of creation, not consumption. Therefore, if the way we are doing things does not answer our why, we need to get uncomfortable and find a deeper learning connection.


Mrs. Sullivan: As a mom and a teacher, Jessica Lahey's keynote resonated with me. Her main message was that we need to give our kids three things: autonomy, competence and connection. She suggested that competence is confidence based on experience and that we need our kids to face "desirable difficulties" in order to gain this competency. In her words, "Kids who have been continually directed by parents and teachers are less likely to complete tasks that are frustrating for them. These kids do not have the ability to get centred and move forward. We need them to stick with it and complete those difficult tasks." I love this reminder!❤


Mrs. Kerney: Jessica Lahey's session really resonated with me, both as a teacher and as a parent. As she talked about students who were afraid to fail and who felt that their self-worth was connected to a number on a report card, I realized that everyone in the room was nodding along. It was encouraging for me to realize that regardless of the demographics of our schools or the subjects we teach, we all seemingly felt the same. A student's junior high experience should be about more than the numbers on a piece of paper and it was encouraging to be around so many educators who were committed to providing that.


Note: Jessica Lahey is the author of The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed.