Slice if Lucy: Insights

Insights

Every March, teachers at my middle school are given the opportunity to design a one week, deep-dive, multi-grade level class. Students are invited to rank their choices, and everyone is placed, as a result of the director's diligence, in one of their top two choices. All other classes are suspended, so students and teachers can engage fully in this week-long class. As you can imagine, all of the preparations leading up to Insights while teaching a full load is a bear. Someone recently asked me if all of that work and cost are worth it. Having just finished this year's "Insights" class this afternoon, I can affirm, although wearily, its value.

This year, I co-created an Insights focused on creating children's literature. We hung out in the stacks in the children's section of the local library to revisit stories we loved when we were children and to hear from the librarians what kids want from their books these days. We spent the morning in a workshop with a local author/illustrator/professor who shared her process and inspired thoughtful consideration of the relationship between the text and visuals in any book. We worked one-on-one to plan story arcs, develop characters, and fiddle with layouts and formatting. We visited an elementary class to field test our ideas and learned that little kids can be brutally honest, but also encouraging. We ate so many snacks, but we decided that was OK because creators need creature comforts to stay on task and push/pull our ideas into being. We laughed, disagreed, pushed gently, celebrated, and created. Their biggest challenges? Pacing themselves with the snacks and embracing the iterative process of creation. Physician, heal thyself; these are my growth edges, too.