I’m nearing the end of my seventh year in education. There are plenty of people who have more experience in education than I do, but these are the things I wish I’d known on my first day.
1) Tomorrow will be better than today (the first day teaching was really, really rough… that story is another blog post).
2) If you need something (and you need plenty, first year teacher self), just ask. You work with amazing teachers who will help you!
3) Those student behaviors that are driving you nuts? They can be changed, but you’ll have to teach and re-teach your expectations throughout the year.
4) Go visit an elementary school. There’s so much a high school teacher can learn from the models set up in our elementary school classrooms.
5) Just about every teacher feels like they’re faking it at some point. Stop worrying about it; instead, talk about it and help others through the things that stump them.
Whether you’re finishing your career or just starting it, take time to reflect on where you started and where you are today. Think through what you can do to help an educator in your building make the most of the last stretch of this school year. You won’t regret it!
There’s something really powerful about demystifying learning in front of students. If we’re serious about the power of ideas like grit and growth mindset, this demystification process is a prerequisite for increased student success. But how do we do that?
Planning is an incredibly important part of teaching, but in hindsight, I think I often spent too much time planning in the wrong direction. As a teacher, especially as a young teacher, I thought I was successful if I could make my students think that I knew the answer to every question imaginable and that it was easy for me (undoubtedly baggage from growing up thinking that I was smart, not that I worked hard to be smart). As a teacher, I spent a lot of time in the name of “preparing” that was really me investing in protecting myself and finding my identity in places I shouldn’t have been looking for it.
Whether you take this as far as I did or not, I think many educators value this idea of having everything together so much that it may be hurting our chances with students.
We all know that learning is messy. If we’re failing to show our students this part of the learning process, we’re failing them.
Maybe teachers are scared off by this because of the vulnerability required. That could definitely be the case. I think what deters more teachers might be this fear of the unknown. What’s going to happen when I get into showing my students how I learn? What if I get stuck revising a passage in front of 5th graders? What if I can’t conjure up the right phrasing for a particular sentence in front of freshmen in high school?
Not far behind those questions is this: What will they think?
I don’t mean to ignore that question (it’s a huge one and one worth investigating more at another time). Still, does what students (or the teacher down the hall or the admin who’s a little more in the box than necessary) think matter more than the fact that students are learning how to think? For some reason, this wins out more than it should. Why?
Why do we let what people might think get in the way of helping our students think?
Maybe we’ve never looked at the upside of bringing students alongside the expert in the room (or giving ourselves freedom from the exhaustion associated with feeling like you should be the expert in every room we enter). Because we like to control things in life, most of us don’t immediately think of the positives associated with risks as we see them coming. It’s not our default, and the benefits can be so easy to doubt away at times. For many, we’ve just never thought about what’s the best that could happen if we made a change.
Maybe better than anything I can tell you, these two videos help drive home my point. The first shows the power of bringing in someone who might be a disruption and discovering he has impressive talent. The second demonstrates the power of joining in as a participant with students.
If your classroom looks more like a cooking show (you know, with each step perfectly measured out in impossible to replicate steps for your audience), it’s time to consider embracing a little vulnerability with your students. If you want to help students struggle through their learning, you’re going to have to show them a model of a learner struggling through something with a little grit.
Teachers–if students need to struggle through the writing process, you’d better be struggling through the writing process in front of them.
Administrators–if your teachers need to be using best practices, you’d better be using them in you professional development.
Get in there and struggle alongside the other learners on your campus!
Last semester, our coaching crew challenged teachers on our campus to take time to observe other teachers, encourage them in what they were doing well, and look for areas that could be improved in their own classrooms. It ended up being a great success. Our teachers completed 424 observations of 30 minutes and went back to their classrooms with many low effort high impact strategies to help their students learn. To make the deal even sweeter (and thwart any buy in issues on the front end), teachers who completed four observations earned two hours back in their day during a February staff development day.
As great as that experience had been, it wasn’t realistic for us to manage throughout the entire year. So, the conversation began to stall, and I began to wonder how to give new life to the conversation that had been going so well.
A few weeks ago, I found my answer. Perusing Twitter one day, I stumbled upon a question George Couros (@gcouros and absolutely worth the follow) tweeted:
I loved the idea and immediately began to wonder if this could be our solution.
After a little bit of work (and thanks to the services Canva offers that make it easy for me to look more capable of design work than I am), I sent an email to my campus encouraging them to share the great things they are doing in their classrooms. I included this image with my email:
After hitting send, I realized what I’d done.
I’d given a tired, hardworking staff an extra, very optional thing to do two weeks before spring break.But people did it.
That day, ten long days from spring break, people started posting about what was going on in their classrooms.
Click here to see what we’ve seen so far via Storify!
So why share this?
This is not the most successful Twitter campaign in the world. That’s one of the reasons I wanted share it. Over two weeks, all it took for this to be productive was for a few teachers to step out and try something new. 50 posts later, we have a nice little conversation going.
Because of that, teachers are learning, teachers are encouraged, and students will end up better off.
So next time you hear that good idea that mightwork (whether it’s like this or totally different), do what you can to see that it willwork. Don’t sit back passively and wait for others to figure it out. Give it a shot. Take a chance. Do what you can to bring people together and make your campus a place where everyone is learning.
Think about it and commit to it (or it won’t happen).
A few years ago I was asked a simple question that has impacted nearly every academic or behavior conversation I’ve had since. Sitting in a training (with admittedly low expectations), this question surprised me:
If a student in your class made a mistake on an academic assignment, would it make sense to say, “You knew better than that” and move on expecting more from the student the next time?
You’d be hard pressed to find any research based teaching practices to back this tactic for academic purposes, but nearly anyone with teaching experience has seen this line of logic applied. Most have done it themselves. I did it, too. On particularly stressful days, I’ve found myself falling into my old habits more than I’d like.
This mentality creeps in not when we’re providing instruction on academic content, but it appears regularly when we address inappropriate behavior on campus. The reality is, we expect our students to know how to behave before they enter the door.
Much to the chagrin of some, our expectations for student behavior have to be taught for students to become the young men and women we hope to graduate from our schools. Still, in too many schools, that’s what we often do with student mistakes regarding behavior.
The more I’ve thought about it and read about it, the more I believe the issue is less about differing perspectives regarding the way we teach our academic concepts or correct identified behavior concerns. It’s much more closely tied into how the brain works and how people learn. Without looking at how we learn, we’re going to fall short teaching both academic content and behavior expectations to students.
More than likely, you have a vast repertoire of covert and overt methods of reteaching your academic standards to struggling students in your classroom. Maybe you intervene by asking the student where he or she got stuck (or figure this out by asking the student to explain his process for solving the problem for you). Maybe you ask one of his peers who understands the process to step in and teach the concept in a different way. Maybe you produce something visually that helps make sure you and your student are on the same page. Regardless of the particulars of your strategy, you have many effective options at your disposal.
Think about how powerful it would be to teach behavior with the same fervor and authenticity and passion on your campus. Next time you are frustrated by the way your students are behaving, remember that (in all likelihood), they’re not actively trying to drive you up the wall. Their brains forget and think of an inventive, novel way to reteach your expectations.
Reframe your best teaching practices for teaching behavior expectations and reap the benefits of a classroom and campus where nobody has to guess about behavior expectations.
While this sounds easy in some respects, so does good teaching (and we know what a challenge–albeit a very rewarding challenge–good teaching can be).
Here’s a model based on our first attempts at my school. Keep in mind that this is intended to be a model to spur you on to think of what will work for your learners on your campus. This was a start down the road toward the answer; not the answer. I hope it’s a decent first step in the right direction.
My goal was to keep in mind the principles of learning our district was refining and use them to clearly present a very brief overview of how people learn and reiterate our campus expectations for a few situations that had the tendency to escalate unnecessarily.
So, knowing that I have no future in a career as a video narrator and that I will do a lot differently next year, here’s a link to a video we showed our students that hits on a few of these issues.
Let me know what you think. I’d love to hear what you’re doing to help students learn how to learn.
