On A Midnight Plane From Georgia

I’m sitting here in my window seat on a Southwest flight back home composing my thoughts for this blog after three days working with Social Studies teachers in Clayton County, Georgia.  First off, being a kind of a larger guy, writing in cramped spaces is a little tough, but hey, I’m listening Elton John’s “Mona Lisa and Matters” and I got a few hours left, so let’s get writing.

I’ve been to Georgia quite a few times in my travels with Teacher Created Materials, thanks to Petra Griffin, one of the most amazing sales reps I’ve worked with. This is my second Georgia trip in just two weeks and these kick off my summer travel season. I will be heading to Texas, the Bay area, So Cal, Central Cal plus throwing in an RV trip to Oregon all between now and when I return August. 
Blogging about some of my travels may not be the most rewarding for those of you who come here for ideas, tips, etc, but writing like this gives me the opportunity to reflect on my experiences. Reflection is one of those concepts which I would like to do more often since it forces one to look back and assess what you have done, but it is also one of the hardest since it takes not just time, but reflective time.

So, while I’m trapped in this silver tube flying at 30,000 feet, might as well try to reflect. 
Of all my Georgia stops, Clayton County seems to be the one which I’ve frequented the most and this most recent trip was for their Social Studies Summer Institute. First off, I would like to commend all their coordinators and teachers for putting social studies as such a priority in their district. From much of what I see in my district and beyond, social studies is being more and more marginalized as the conversations about ELA and Math test scores dominate. 
​
Side Note: turn on the Nightly News tonight and count how many stories are Social Studies & Science as opposed to Math and ELA. #justsaying

As with every workshop and training I do, I embed the conversations with instructional technology ideas and strategies. These include tips for helping analyze primary sources, how teachers can empower their own learning by developing their own Personal Learning Network, and my favorite how they can design lessons where students CREATE instead of just CONSUME. These include creating documentaries, digital magazines, and green screen historical flashbacks.
Probably my biggest take away was actually getting the opportunity to talk and share with teachers whom I’ve already worked with. In my three days of workshops I had roughly 1/3 of the teachers in my sessions who had already seen me present before. Instead of saying “oh crap, I hope I don’t bore you with some of the same stuff you’ve seen before”, I took the opportunity to listen to them and hear about their experiences.
​
Here are some of the examples of which teachers shared back with me about how they tried some new ideas:

“I started using the SOAPSTone strategy with my government students for virtually all of our primary sources”

“I created a Twitter account after you were here last time and I’ve found many ideas and inspiration from people I follow and from hashtag #sschat”

“I never tried a Gallery Walk before (having students walk around the room and analyze images and other primary sources, similar to Carousel Brainstorming activity) but it was great getting the students out of their seats and interacting with each other and the content”
​
I even heard from another teacher who was leading a session on review strategies and he said “I’m showing everyone your Frazzle game, and we having such a fun time” 

Oh… I have to share a non-education moment. On my second day some of the teachers said, you should check out the Civil Rights museum in downtown Atlanta. This sounded fantastic, but after looking up the times I might not have been able to make it before it closed. And then another teacher said, “you could check out the town where they filmed the Woodbury scenes for Walking Dead”?

SCREEEEECCHHHH

{That’s the sound of my rental car tires leaving the training to get myself 40 minutes south to Senoia, GA!, But now let’s be clear I did not CHOOSE Walking Dead tourism over going to the Civil Rights museum, that would be bad…. I just didn’t have enough time!}

Senoia was super cool! It looked just like it did in the show where that Crazy ole’ Governor ran the town. Sorry for those of you who haven’t seen it, but Wow…I was in super zombie fandom. Plus there was a Walking Dead Café and gift shop. I bought a poster and then walked to the end of the town where other super zombie fans had set up because, guess what, the show is again filming there! I stuck around for awhile but only got to see the other crazy fans and one passing glimpse of the actress who plays Tara (we think) on her way to film a scene. 

Here is a pic I took and then did a comparison using with a screen capture from the show.

IN every training or workshop one does you will always get something back in return. One of my favorite takeaways was a new idea on how to analyze visuals. We were discussing various Visual Literacy skills and one teacher simply said, "how about if kids drew what they thought was happening"? I loved this idea and in fact I'm adding it to my list for a future blog post about ways to teach Visual Literacy. Coming soon (except I have like 8 other blog posts drafts just needing to get finished; well, at least I got this one done!)

OK… my 70’s Easy Listening playlist is almost done and I think I accomplished my goal of reflecting on these three days.