Tag: mental-health

Quick Thoughts

Quick Thought: Reframing Makes the Difference – Change My Mind

This morning started in chaos. The WiFi was down. I scrambled. I needed something fast, something engaging, something that didn’t rely on the internet—but still moved our learning forward.

I could’ve defaulted to a worksheet. Basic questions. Called it a day.

But that’s not really my style.

I knew today’s goal: students needed to be able to explain the importance of suffrage to the women’s rights movement. So I reframed the whole thing.

I found the textbook section on the Seneca Falls Convention. Pulled a quick video to provide a visual. And then we did a Sketch and Tell-o using three basic questions pulled from the reading. Nothing flashy. Just layered and intentional.

But here’s where the shift happened. Before anything else, I put this statement on the board:

“Suffrage wasn’t that important to the women’s rights movement—it was just one of many demands.” Change my mind.

I didn’t ask for answers. I didn’t ask for agreement or disagreement. I just planted the idea to frame the entire lesson.

Reframing like this shifts the role of the student. They’re no longer just receivers of information. They’re investigators. They’re critics. They’re thinking, “How can I change Moler’s mind?”” It forces them to process the content with a lens—to notice not just what’s said, but what’s emphasized, what’s missing, and why it matters.

By the time we got to the end of class, they weren’t just summarizing facts. They were defending ideas. They were deciding how important suffrage really was—based on what they had just read, watched, and sketched.

It’s the same content. The same objective. But the task changes the thinking. That’s the power of reframing. And it didn’t require anything fancy.

Quick Thoughts

Things I Wonder

14 years in.

I wonder if I can do this the next 20 years.

Middle. School. Social. Studies. Teacher.

My goodness.

I often wonder if I’m doing things in the best way…

  • Am I challenging students enough?
  • Am I meeting everyone’s needs?
  • Do my policies fall in line with school-wide policies?
  • Is it a bad practice that I accept work anytime without a late penalty?
  • Is it bad practice that I let a certain student sleep in class because they need to?
  • Is it bad practice that I don’t keep track of tardies and simply say, “Glad you’re here?”
  • Is it wrong that I hand out candy just because I want to? Should I only save it for a reward?
  • Is it bad practice that I refuse to use a textbook and hodgepodge my own stuff together?
  • Should I fall in line and lecture more? Use more worksheets? Use a more structured way of teaching?
  • I wonder if I’m too far outside the norm, or if the norm just isn’t what’s best for kids.
  • I wonder if I should care more about test scores or if the real success lies in the moments when a kid says, “That actually makes sense now.”
  • I wonder if the things I let slide—like a kid putting their head down because they didn’t sleep the night before—are the things they’ll remember most about my class.
  • I wonder if my flexibility in deadlines is preparing them for the real world or if I’m just making their lives a little easier because I know life is already hard enough.
  • I wonder if some of the things I do that aren’t “best practice” are actually the best practices for the kids in my room.I wonder if the lesson I spent hours planning will even land the way I hope it will—or if the thing they’ll remember is the random conversation about history that had nothing to do with my slides.
  • I wonder if I should stop worrying so much about whether what I do fits into a neat little box and just keep focusing on what works.

Because at the end of the day, I wonder if the real question isn’t “Am I doing this the right way?” but instead “Am I doing right by my students?”

And as long as the answer is yes, I think I’ll keep going.