Beautiful Work

Fostering a strong culture of joy, connection and learning is the foundation on which our classrooms are built. It is the first thing we do as we step into our classrooms as teachers and leaders. For this assignment, each Fellow submitted their classroom culture plan for their placement classroom. 

Their task was to ensure that the plan had all elements present and well detailed out so that someone with limited context of their classroom may envision what they have put down and understand their thought process. 

At Institute, we explored the foundations of planning for deep understanding across different content areas. As part of this submission, Fellows shared three lesson plans across three different content areas that they teach. They also executed this plan and shared images/ videos of student artefacts from this class along with their reflections on what teacher actions enabled strong outcomes and what might have strengthened outcomes in this lesson.

Morning Meetings/ Sharing Circles are sacred rituals where relationships and belonging is built. As part of this assignment Fellows designed and facilitated between three to five morning meetings with their students to build community, explore a big question and help them learn about their children more deeply. Each assignment submission captures a short description of each morning meeting with the big question for the day clearly stated and a brief reflection on what these morning meetings helped them understand about their students and how they might use this understanding to teach and lead their class more intentionally.

Every child we work with has a story to tell. After reading the chapter Lucas from Troublemakers by Carla Shalaby, each Fellow wrote three portraits of students in their classrooms. They select students across performance buckets. Like Shalaby, they learnt about these children as human beings: with care, curiosity, and deep love. As she writes, “If we only ever think of children in terms of their behavior, we miss the chance to know them.” Fellows didn't just focus on how they behave or perform. They capture what brings them joy, spending time with them in different places... the playground, the community, spaces we don’t generally think to look. They thought about what students might they be carrying with them into the classroom. What might be hard for them right now? The writing aimed to help a reader see each child as a full human being.

To support our students meaningfully, it is important to understand the communities they live in. This assignment required Fellows to create a visual community map based on what they learn by spending time in their students’ surroundings.The map aimed to include places that are important to students, such as where they go after school, where they feel safe, where they play, study, or gather. It also included people and structures that influence daily life, like local leaders, school staff, shopkeepers, or religious spaces. Through this beautiful task, Fellows tried to understand what shapes the way the community works, what matters to the people who live there, and how different factors show up in the classroom. Each submission includes a visual map and a reflection on what they did and learnt through this assignment.

In his book, “A Matter of the Heart”, Anurag Behar writes, “Hope remains alive in education.” This assignment invited Fellows to read the passage linked here and then pause and pay attention to the people who keep that hope alive,  often quietly and behind the scenes. Whether it’s a school teacher, the principal, the caretaker, or a support staff member, each person holds stories we may never truly see. Our roles as leaders begin with the ability to truly listen. This assignment was an invitation to listen with curiosity and care, build a relationship and listen without judgment, and challenge the biases we may hold.

To this end, each Fellow picked a stakeholder from school, preferably one whose perspectives they don’t fully understand. They engaged in one or more activities to learn more about them. They then write an essay on this stakeholder and what they learnt from the time spent with them.