Once we got to the school we were introduced to the concepts of our purpose and the expectations for the collaborative project. We broke off into our groups from the emails and started discussing our challenges as we awaited the Marymont students. It was amazing to finally have face to face conversations with my South African counterparts after corresponding with them via email for three months. We redid our introductions and what we hoped to gain from this experience. After this we discussed the challenges that we faced in the classroom and found that we were conflicted between the issues surrounding behavior management and parental involvement. I knew that we came to a focus when Mavis, one of the South African educators, interrupted everyone and stared me down and asked me how I would handle a student that threw a pencil at another student and wouldn’t sit still. I went over the restorative nature of my responses and even utilized my teacher voice to model how I would approach the situation. Mavis appreciated the fresh perspective but then asked how she thought I would be able to do that with seventy-five students in the classroom. Classroom management and the diverse approaches and tools we have as teachers to combat these concerns became the focus of our group presentation. Allie, from Marymont, added the strategies of providing space for students to get out their anxiety to rejoin the class, for example what she called “ADHD corners”. Beyond the strategies and concerns that Mavis brought up another of our South African educators, Mgabo, asked how we could use parents as a resource to control for student behavior by giving them checklists or timelines for their children to follow in order to find an ally at home. This became a large conversation as we all had different experiences with the levels of parental involvement, remember it was possibly the main challenge we were going to discuss, and we had a group with quite a diverse background, with preservice teachers, substitute teachers, up to three decades in the classroom and a principal. Ultimately the desire for food, as we had yet to eat after our bike ride, and the unknown timetable for working on the presentation focused us on creating a series of slides that addressed and presented a multitude of different strategies and perspectives on common concerns on student behaviors across culture. We made an outline and then were able to eat and while doing so found out that we would have no more time to work with our group on the presentation. As such, Kadesha and I were responsible for putting together the presentation that night and bringing it into the symposium the following day.
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