P.D Day- A Taste of Tribes

This past Friday was a P.D day, and unlike the last (where we attended staff meetings for the morning and had planning in the afternoon), we had the opportunity to attend teacher workshops. This was a great experience, and it was amazing to see just how many teachers come out to all the workshops.

I attended a "Taste of Tribes" workshop that was run by a teacher at my placement school. She is the grade 6 teacher, and she uses "tribes" in her classroom, and encouraged me to attend this workshop so I could get a feel for it. It was truly eye-opening.

Tribes is not something that you add to the curriculum- it is a WAY of teaching and enriching the curriculum. It focuses on community and respect, and there is a pathway that the teacher leads the students through in order to achieve the end result (which is respect for oneself, and for each other). Tribes does include group work, and this is great because it encourages students to work with individuals in their classroom that they may not have really spoken to before.

It also includes activities called "energizers". These are quick-thinking/high energy activities that do 1 of 2 things: they "wake up" the students in class who have lost focus and have drifted off, and they also "calm down" students after recess in order to get them ready for thinking and for participating in their work.

Tribes offers weekend-long training sessions (2 fridays and saturdays) where teachers have the opportunity to basically LIVE the tribes way, to see how they can use it in their classrooms. The statistics on this are truly in favour of the program, and in fact, many schools in the Niagara school board are enacting MANDATORY tribes training for all the teachers in their schools (especially for those schools in lower-income areas).

If any of you ever get a chance, I would definitely recommend finding out more about Tribes- it has worked in many difficult classrooms, and the respect that it brings about in students towards themselves, and towards others is reason enough to give this a chance.