Making the Unthinkable Thinkable – Learning to Move On
By Jennifer Stark
A number of months ago, I wrote an article about the infamous “mood cups” which helps students with mood identification. In past years, they have been very successful in my classrooms, as students were extremely responsive to this non-verbal, and highly visual way to express their feelings. Well, this year they lost their luster pretty fast. The mood cups became a colourful sea of bongo drums in which students would tap their latest rhythms; others found ways to make them into airplanes as though they were demonstrating what they had learned from their science unit on flight. Others thought it would be fun to poke holes into the bottoms because they could; and of the few students who did keep them on their desks quietly, they became part of the room decor rarely being used purposefully. Eventually, these mood cups became one big colourful stacked tower on our supply shelf blending in like the rest of the furniture. So what did I do about it? Absolutely nothing! In fact, I let the mood cups go.
So many adults think educators have the answers. They assume that because we are the professionals in teaching children that we know what works professionally. Well, let me let you in on a little secret…sometimes trial and error happens in the classroom too! And what works one year does not always work the next. What one group of students may love, another group of students may hate. What some students value as a necessity to their growth, others may see as an inhibitor to their growth. And the strongest of educators can a) admit it; b) abandon it; c) change it!
We cannot expect a group of students to always adapt to our styles; at times, our teaching styles MUST adapt to meet the needs of our students. So what the mood cups were a flop this year?! I still love them! And maybe my students next year will too. But for this year, I cannot keep using them! They were not a successful alternative to mood identification among my classroom anymore. And that’s okay! Why you ask? Because it is not the only way for students to express themselves. And having that conversation with them only solidifies that it is a) okay to admit when our ideas fail; b) acceptable to abandon ideas that do not work; c) healthy to try new ideas instead!
One of our responsibilities as educators is to help students grow as people. We need to help them learn how to accept failure at times, become resilient, and use strategies to bounce back from failure so they can find successes in other ways. When we let ourselves be somewhat vulnerable in front of our students, and let them know that educators are human, we teach them that it’s not just students who have both successes and failures, but that all people do. And when we demonstrate the beauty in being able to “move on,” we actually teach students one of the most valuable lessons of life.