This week was short for us. On Monday, facilitators came together for professional development. Our building leadership did some really awesome unconference work where facilitators were able to choose sessions based on their needs. Sessions mostly focused on the ethical use of AI in education and inspired a lot of interesting dialogue. It even inspired my co-facilitator and I to start the conversation on AI with our learners.
Tuesday we participated in an all day culture day. This is one of those days that I think truly sets my school apart from the rest. It’s learner led and organized, includes academic focused workshops, activities for culture building, and time to work with kids as people. It’s messy and not perfect, but the longterm benefits are significant.
Wednesday and Thursday were mostly normal days, except Thursday there was a threat of winter weather that had the entire district preparing to get out of school early. Friday was our first real snow day of the year.
What do you do in a PBL school when the week looks like this? Well, like all teachers out there, we chose to roll with it. Here are a few activities we did in our classes that build culture, are low prep, and work really well for building relationships.

In our leadership class, we have learners who have worked together quite a lot over the past several years. Because of this, they can handle asking each other more serious questions. The Moth game of storytelling includes cards with prompts on them. For the actual game, you are supposed to write a story. For our classes, we just wanted them talking with each other. All of the cards start with “Tell us about...” and then there are three to four prompts. Some of the prompts include “A time you had to keep yourself afloat” and “A time you clashed with authority.” We put learners in random groups, made sure they introduced themselves if they had new group members, and let them answer the questions. What I noticed: eye contact and laughter. Relationships have to be built from learner to facilitator, but also from learner to learner. This is one way we build relationships.
How You See Your Friend Trend
In my creative writing class, I have a mix of learners who take the class for a full year and learners who joined in the second semester. It creates this weird dynamic where learners who already know each other don’t really get to know the added learners. I saw the “How You See Your Friend” Trend on Instagram and reworked it for my class to become “How You See Yourself.” Each learner created their own slide and added images that represented them. We’re going to share those as a sort of get to know each other presentation. While learners were working on their slides, I was able to walk around, talk one-on-one with my new learners and start the process of relationship building. I also learned that one of my new learners' hobbies is ironing. IRONING! It’s amazing. I have ironed maybe two pieces of clothing my entire life, and he irons his undershirts. We had a good laugh.


Above is the template that learners get. The second image is my mentor. I presented my ideas so they could see what their produce will look like.
These are just two activities we organized over the last week. Sometimes I think facilitators feel the need to jump right back into content after a break. I know I wanted to. While How You See Yourself will take a couple of class periods, the Moth discussion can just be a class warm up. And if you are thinking, man, I don’t want to buy a game for this, don’t. You can create your own cards, or just do slides and have all the groups talking about the same questions. The real focus is on having conversations and learning about each other. These can take as much time as you want them to. Either way, these moments of relationship building will pay off in the long run.
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Awesome work from such an awesome teacher and overall human!
I think it would be really fun to do How you see your friend again toward the end of the semester but have them do someone new the met or worked with throughout the class. How other’s see us is often so different than how we see ourselves!
Casey,
So that you know, I plan on sharing your post with a couple of teachers here in KC. Keep doing great work, one kid and one relationship at a time!