Later this month the PATINS Project will host the A2E Conference at the Crowne Plaza in downtown Indianapolis. This will be the 9^th State Conference, as we used to call them, in which I’ve participated. All PATINS/ICAM is looking forward to this, and the excitement is building.

No one is ever sorry that they’ve attended one of our conferences. Again, this year’s event is packed with relevant, enlightening breakout sessions that feature national and local speakers who are considered experts in their fields. Continental breakfast and lunch are provided on-site, which of course means the networking need not stop!  There will be 4 Keynote Speakers this year—please view the keynote addresses topics and conference schedule here.

This will be my 1^st conference that has not been prepared, organized and executed mainly by Glenda Thompson. I remember my first conference; all day long people were asking “Where’s Glenda?” “Have you seen Glenda?” “Did you ask Glenda?” And throughout the days I would see her blonde hair and friendly face making the rounds, taking care of things effortlessly, efficiently. I’ve seen this at every state conference, Tech Expo, staff meeting, or any other occasion we are together, that requires materials, food, planning and oversight. This organizing and implementing is her element, ONE of them, and when she is in ONE, she is a force. A presence. A capable, strong and comforting support who knows how to keep things evened out and moving forward.

I know everyone at PATINS/ICAM would agree that Glenda kept day to day operations of the Project running, with a good heart and a generous spirit. Oh, the times she has let me in after the deadline passed! The times she said sweetly, “No worries. I’ll fix it” after I’d submitted a form incorrectly…Again. Her text messages asking if I’d gotten home alright after an event; Glenda knows I have a long drive home and a poor sense of direction. We are all so blessed to have had Glenda show us by example how to be professional and personal, busy and calm, efficient and tolerant, even welcoming of interruption.

I’ll bet she will be thinking of us for those 2 days in November. Is all the technology set up and working correctly? Is the signage in place? Name tags ready, breakfast set up? Do our speakers need assistance with any little or big thing? For lunch, does the kitchen have special meals prepared and labelled? Are over-flow chairs needed in any of the rooms? When Glenda awakens on November 20, I’ll bet she gets a familiar flutter of nervous energy before she remembers.

And Glenda, we will be thinking of you too. Don’t worry. A2E may experience some glitches without your skilled hands in charge. Still, it will come to pass positively and many people will go back to their schools armed with new strategies, techniques and technology for their classrooms.  You left us with a model of how these days should go and in this way, you will be our guide and help. Thank you for that, and years of unsurpassed commitment and service to this project.

I miss you, my friend. Talk soon!

This week we have the privilege of reading advice for those growing up deaf/hard of hearing from the very talented guest blogger, Sara Miller, M.S. Ed. Enjoy! 

It was the late 1980’s when I was diagnosed with severe-profound bilateral sensorineural hearing loss and received my first pair of hearing aids. I was almost three and I’m told that I loved my hearing aids so much that I never wanted to take them off! 


It was during the 1990s and early 2000’s when I attended public elementary/middle/high schools in small rural towns in Northwest Ohio. I was the only deaf student in my grade to be mainstreamed full time. During these years, there were a lot of trials and triumphs. 

Looking back, there are a few things I wish I had known to help guide myself through the process of being the only deaf kid in my mainstream class. If I could, I would go back in time and share a few things with my younger self:

Number 1: YOU ARE NOT ALONE. There are many other deaf and hard of hearing kids out there who are also born into hearing families. In fact, 90% of deaf and hard of hearing kids are born to hearing families. 75% of those kids attend public school, just like you do. While you may be the only kid to be mainstreamed full time in your school, there are many others just like you out there in the world who are going through the same experiences you are. You will meet them later on in life and establish wonderful relationships. 

Number 2: DO NOT READ INTO HEARING PEOPLE’S FACIAL EXPRESSIONS TOO MUCH. Understand that we deaf people tend to naturally rely on visual cues much more than our hearing peers. If a person doesn’t smile, frowns, or has a neutral look on their face, it does not mean they don’t like you or are mad at you. They simply could just be having a rough day caused by something that has absolutely nothing to do with you. Acknowledge and understand this fact in order to save yourself from unnecessary hurt feelings over misreading someone’s emotions. 

Number 3: PEOPLE ARE NOT STARING AT YOU WHEN YOU SIGN BECAUSE YOU’RE WEIRD OR DIFFERENT, THEY STARE BECAUSE THEY ARE FASCINATED WITH SIGN LANGUAGE. I know... This is so hard to fully believe or understand. When you know you are different, you feel as if everyone is always staring at you. Staring at your Phonic Ear box strapped to your chest. Staring at the long cords from that box that lead up to your ears. Staring at your hearing aids. Staring at your hands when you choose to communicate using sign language. That’s when the staring seems to be the worst. But what you don’t know is that those people stare because they wish they knew how to sign too. Reach out to those individuals and ask if they’d like to learn. Teach them the joy of signing.

Number 4: ADVOCATE FOR ACCESS. Hold your teachers accountable for making content accessible. Request captions for all videos and movies. No exceptions. Utilize note-takers in all subject areas. Let your teachers know not to talk towards the chalkboard and to face you when instructing. Ask your peers to repeat themselves when you didn’t quite catch everything they said in class discussions. And yes, even consider having an interpreter for your core content classes. You deserve the right to have access to ALL that is going on around you. Things you don’t even know you’re missing can be filled by having an interpreter present. Learning these advocacy skills early on will benefit you later in life. 

Number 5: YOU WILL FALL IN LOVE AND GET MARRIED. In your high school years, you will often cry yourself to sleep wondering if you’ll ever find love and get married. You’ll question how someone would ever want a wife who cannot hear. Why would they choose to love someone who is deaf when they could have someone who can hear perfectly like all of your peers. Those nights of self-doubt and the tears you cry will be for nothing. You will meet your soulmate in the spring of your senior year of high school and get married that very summer just before entering college. In fact, you’ll be the first in your class to marry and he will even surprise you by signing a portion of his vows to you at your wedding. Your husband is the kindest and most loving soul who will accept and adore every part of you, especially your deafness.

Number 6: ENCOURAGE YOUR FAMILY TO LEARN SIGN LANGUAGE EVEN THOUGH YOU CAN SPEAK. You are the only deaf individual in your entire family (Extended family included). Your parents will bombard you with language and read to you on a daily basis. You’ll fall in love with reading. They’ll have high expectations for you to soak up any and all language learning opportunities around you and you will exceed those expectations. You will acquire and utilize spoken language with relative ease. Therefore, English will be your first language. In your first few years of school, you’ll learn Signed Exact English, but the only person who you’ll teach sign language to at home is your older sister. (She will later become an educational interpreter.) 

However, you really need to teach your parents (and family and friends) to sign as well. They are not against it. If they knew how much it would help you in social situations, they’d learn in a heartbeat. (Looking back, they wished they had). Since you speak so well, it’s easy to fool yourself and everyone else around you into thinking that everything is being understood. But deep down, you know you are not understanding everything around you. That sickening pit in your stomach that you get when you’re about to enter a challenging environment: basketball games, dark restaurants, the mall, birthday parties, movie theater, etc., that’s a direct result of the anxiety you subconsciously have knowing how hard you’re going to have to work just to keep up with a small amount of what is going on. This is where sign language can benefit you. It can bring to life what you would normally miss. It can give you complete access to your surroundings. It can reduce your anxiety and allow you to enjoy your surroundings.  So, please teach those closest to you how to sign. You’ll thank yourself in the future.

7: EMBRACE YOUR DEAFNESS. You will go through a phase in your middle/high school years where you will reject anything and everything to do with deafness. You’ll stop signing and refuse to carry your FM equipment with you to class. You’ll hide your Phonic Ear box and cords under your clothes to try to blend in with your peers as much as possible. You’ll hate being different. You’ll spend a LOT of energy and emotion simply trying to become “hearing” like everyone else is in your class. 

STOP! 

Embrace who you are. Love yourself for who you are. Stop trying so hard to become something that you were never meant to be: “hearing.” Embracing your deafness will save you a lot of heartaches and emotional energy. Know that there are strength and beauty in being Deaf. That there is an entire community of individuals in this world who are just like you. Who knows exactly what it’s like to be deaf. Who will welcome you with open arms? Sadly, you live in a small rural town with no Deaf community or Deaf adult role models. You won’t even meet a Deaf adult until you attend college and are already a deaf adult yourself. However, as soon as you are able, seek out those who are like you. They will fill your heart in a way that the hearing community cannot. In a way that even your closest friends and family cannot. Only when you make these connections will you feel complete and fully able to truly embrace every part of who you are.

Engaging students has always been a challenge, and in this day and age, it is more than ever. As educators, we are competing against a digital age in which students are growing up with social media and Internet algorithms that keep them clicking and offer immediate gratification with chemical shots of dopamine (a neurotransmitter associated with our reward-motivated behavior) when their Instagram post gets another like. 

Online gaming feeds into the need for immediate gratification and visual engagement and has become a worldwide obsession with eSports offering young winning gamers the opportunity to take home millions of dollars. Other streaming services like Netflix and YouTube also play into our students’ immediate gratification. We’ve got to face it, long-term goal planning as an executive function just isn’t what it used to be with on-demand Internet gratification at our fingertips. To be honest, we as educators fall victim to this need for instant gratification as well.

So, wouldn’t you agree that the task of student engagement is almost as difficult as it is to whistle and yawn at the same time?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to attend some professional development (PD) on engagement and its impact on behavior. I was reminded that in nearly all cases, desired behaviors including academic outcomes are directly tied to your students’ levels of engagement in the classroom.

Yet, engaging students is no walk in the park. In fact, genuine student engagement is layered, making it more complex than finding the perfect “hook” for your new lesson topic.

The essential first layer and building block requires a genuine relationship with each of your students. They need to know that you care about them as people in and out of the classroom. I find it staggering that according to the PD session led by Susan Hentz, 56% of learners don’t believe that their teachers care about them as people. While upsetting, we should let this motivate us as educators to do better using the following exercise. 

First, let’s zero in on our relationships with our students and get real with ourselves, possibly pushing us beyond our comfort zones. Think about your students who are easy to get along with and easy to like. Next, picture the students who often push you to your limits. Can you name students that exist in the gray area in between, too? They are the ones that may have actually fallen off your radar because they quietly comply with requests and are getting decent grades. Finally, let’s map these thoughts on paper. 

Start as an individual, with your colleagues, or with your entire school’s staff. Put up pictures or names of all of your students on the wall and identify the students that you have positive relationships with using paper clips, stickers, or something of the like. Next, look closely at the students that don’t have any markers. Warning, this may be shocking. 

Now take some time to discuss and record the positives and strengths of these students on the wall. With your team (or by yourself if working alone) devise a plan to reach out and create a positive relationship with each of those students. Learn more about how to create meaningful, positive relationships with your students in this article from EdWeek.

Positive relationships with students can be supported in countless ways. Consider these strategies on your next school day:

• greet your students at the door
• ask them to share something they like about themselves
• give them the time to talk, while you genuinely listen
• attend their after school drama, sporting, extra-curricular events 
• share good news about your students with their parents/guardians
• set your students up for success and give them the credit
• be genuine and avoid sarcasm when prompting on-task behavior

Once positive relationships are established or being built, you can focus on the second layer of engagement - ways to hook your students into the curriculum content:

• Designing a year-long bulletin board that only requires changing the topic, and allowing students to share anonymously on Post-Its what they know or what they want to learn about the topic
• Asking students to make and share predictions on a Padlet wall (or another backchannel) about what they will learn or what will happen when 
• Connecting your content to use in their daily lives (i.e. - connect ratios & proportions to cooking)
• Creating lessons that solve real community problems in or out of the school while tackling multiple standards at once; students want to make a difference!
• Offering your students opportunities to respond approximately every 5 minutes. Think:
  • Thumbs up/down/sideways
  • Individual whiteboard responses
  • Head nods/shakes
  • Stand up/sit down
  • Think/pair/share 
• Getting students moving and incorporating music into your lessons
• Taking virtual field trips with Google Cardboard

While genuinely engaging students takes intentional design, effort, and creativity, it is worth it. Engaged students are more likely to have a positive perspective of their classroom experience and to feel like they belong because they know their educators care and are listening. They are more likely to persist, participate, and achieve. You, too, will experience the benefits in and out of your classroom.

Read more about the positive impact of student relationships from the American Psychological Association.