{"id":72,"date":"2021-04-25T12:54:58","date_gmt":"2021-04-25T16:54:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/kathrynobrien\/?p=72"},"modified":"2021-04-25T12:54:58","modified_gmt":"2021-04-25T16:54:58","slug":"the-art-of-gathering-8-year-olds-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/kathrynobrien\/2021\/04\/25\/the-art-of-gathering-8-year-olds-online\/","title":{"rendered":"The art of gathering 8 year olds online"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Lucky<\/a><\/p>\n

When I opened this blog (for the first time since October), I was surprised I had only written one entry. I had many memories of profound wordsmithing and brilliant insights, but clearly, my sourdough-laden brain and overactive sleeping imagination were off the mark. I wrote one entry to mark this year of pandemic pedagogy.<\/p>\n

Summing up the past year and a half of teaching, learning and living:<\/p>\n

Each month felt like a year and each week felt like a month and each day felt like a week… and yet, it all went by in a blur.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

This has been a hard year for me, and I say these words while acknowledging my extraordinary privilege. I continued to work throughout this year, my friends and family are healthy, my students had the resources to access their online learning and I am a white, middle-class woman living in an affluent neighbourhood of Toronto.<\/p>\n

Early into the pandemic, I listened to a Ted Talk by Priya Parker. She wrote\u00a0The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters<\/em>. Her insights into the importance of building community stuck. Creating inclusive and supportive communities have always been essential to my teaching and learning. In March 2020, I was quick to realize that staring at 20 small icons of Minecraft paraphernalia while I lectured myself about healthy digital habits on a Google Meet did not inspire a community. At that point, I was terrified about pandemic pedagogy.<\/p>\n

I spent the fall working on my own self-care. I tried to gaslight my feelings of anxiety and burnout. I tried to read those inspirational quotes on my Instagram feed. I tried to bury myself in baking. I tried adding bling to my face guard with gemstones. It didn’t work. When the winter break came, I spent most days lying on the couch and checking my pension calculator.<\/p>\n

It took the winter return to online learning for me to actively reflect on how I could build community in my grade 3 classroom. My 15 minutes of HeadSpace meditation didn’t reveal a transformational moment of educator enlightenment,\u00a0 I simply realized I needed to feel connected to my class as a community.<\/p>\n

The following months have been slippery work. But I have found many things that “work” for 3Oville (as I call my class of 15 hyped-up riddle-telling mavericks). I put my ideas into this slideshow: The Art of Gathering 8-Year-Olds<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ll let the slides do the rest of the talking.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I opened this blog (for the first time since October), I was surprised I had only written one entry. I had many memories of profound wordsmithing and brilliant insights, but clearly, my sourdough-laden brain and overactive sleeping imagination were off the mark. I wrote one entry to mark this year of pandemic pedagogy. Summing … Continue reading “The art of gathering 8 year olds online”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":368,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-face-2-face-sessions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/kathrynobrien\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/kathrynobrien\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/kathrynobrien\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/kathrynobrien\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/368"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/kathrynobrien\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/kathrynobrien\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/kathrynobrien\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions\/75"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/kathrynobrien\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/kathrynobrien\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/kathrynobrien\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}