{"id":1299,"date":"2019-11-01T05:15:17","date_gmt":"2019-11-01T10:15:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/?p=1299"},"modified":"2022-12-01T13:17:03","modified_gmt":"2022-12-01T19:17:03","slug":"when-bubbles-collide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/blog\/2019\/11\/01\/when-bubbles-collide\/","title":{"rendered":"When Bubbles Collide"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Not too long ago, I wrote a journal post entitled “Thoughts from Inside the Bubble<\/a>.”\u00a0 An article from the September issue of Kappan <\/a>magazine perfectly and memorably\u00a0 captured the essence of the bubble concept.<\/p>\n

In it, Gerald Fowler (now a professor at Shippensburg University) writes of his decision to get a class pet for his first grade classroom as a means of encouraging vocabulary development.\u00a0 After much deliberation, he settled on a pair of gerbils.\u00a0 On the first day of school, he set up the cage and then waited outside the classroom until the children arrived.\u00a0 He spoke briefly to them about how the classroom would be like their workplace. He said they were about to go into this wonderful new place and that they would all discuss some of the things they found there.\u00a0 Then he stepped to the side of the doorway outside the classroom and allowed the children to file in. Just as the last child stepped through the door, the screaming began.<\/p>\n

One of the first children through the door had caught sight of one of the gerbils, grabbed it by the tail, and beaten it repeatedly against the wall of the cage until it was dead.\u00a0 The class was in uproar.<\/p>\n

“Why did you kill our gerbil?”\u00a0 Mr. Fowler asked.<\/p>\n

“Gerbil?” said the boy. “That’s a rat.\u00a0 My dad says when you see a rat, you kill it!”<\/p>\n

To his everlasting credit, the teacher looked again at the dead gerbil and thought, “You know, it does look a little like a rat.”<\/p>\n

The child was from an impoverished family and lived in a rat-infested apartment building.\u00a0 In the child’s bubble, there was no ‘gerbil’, only a rat, and he knew what people in his bubble did about rats. What he did was completely logical and normal\u00a0within his bubble.<\/em> Or, to be more accurate, his action was\u00a0normalized<\/em> by his bubble.\u00a0 The teacher’s bubble normalized a whole different set of behaviors:\u00a0 in his bubble, ‘rats’ were held and fed and admired.<\/p>\n

Mr. Fowler noted that after a few weeks had passed, the boy who had killed the gerbil offered to catch a ‘gerbil’ at home to replace the one he’d killed.\u00a0 That was an indication of a child trying to process new information from school and connect it to his life at home.\u00a0 His bubble was expanding.<\/p>\n

As teachers, administrators, even whole districts,\u00a0 we have to be cognizant that our bubbles may be very different from those of our students.\u00a0 Condemning a child’s bubble, or overreacting to behaviors which to that child may be completely normalized at home, is counterproductive.\u00a0 Our job as educators is to expand our students’ bubbles through the most engaging, hands-on, cognitively-demanding instruction we can provide.<\/p>\n

This is what we do at CMSi; we provide the Curriculum Management Audit™<\/a> to help districts put in place the systems they need to make student learning their highest priority.\u00a0 We offer trainings for teachers and administrators <\/a>to help with the development of curriculum which focuses and connects learning from grade to grade and across classrooms district-wide, and to help refine classroom practices so that they are aligned to high-stakes tests in content, context and cognitive demand.<\/p>\n

Contact us!\u00a0<\/a> We would love to partner with you\u00a0 to improve student learning in your district.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Not too long ago, I wrote a journal post entitled “Thoughts from Inside the Bubble.”\u00a0 An article from the September issue of Kappan magazine perfectly and memorably\u00a0 captured the essence of the bubble concept. In it, Gerald Fowler (now a professor at Shippensburg University) writes of his decision to get a class pet for his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1299"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2808,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299\/revisions\/2808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}