Q: Any advice to a first year teacher two weeks before the beginning of the school year?
Jack: Stay calm.
In mid-August of every year, I would periodically remember that the school year was fast-approaching, and I would be awash in a sense of impending doom. It was particularly unnerving because I couldn't think of anything to do to be more prepared than I already was. For me, setting to work is the easiest way to deal with anxiety. Uneasy about a future event? Prepare for it. But what about when there's seemingly nothing to do but wait?
Ultimately, I did find things to do. I made lists of goals. What did I want to accomplish in the first class? The first week? What did I want students to be able to do by the end of the first marking period? I kept all of my lists taped to the inside of my gradebook, and checked in with it every afternoon. When I lesson planned, I took a look to see how well I was marching towards my goals. When I wrote assignments, I kept in mind the things I wanted my kids to be able to do.
In terms of a coping mechanism, this worked pretty well.
What worked even better was remembering one thing: I am not as important as I'd like to think I am.
Yikes.
On the one hand, that sucks. I want to be Jaime Escalante. I want to single-handedly change kids' lives.
But what if I screw up?
In the real world, each teacher is one of dozens of adults helping young people find their way - intellectually and otherwise - towards maturity. A child's future does not rest on the shoulders of a single teacher. Remembering that, it was easier to see teaching for what it really is - an amazing opportunity to work with young people and with ideas. It's pretty hard, it's pretty fun, and ultimately, capable people who try hard will do well.
One final thing - make your classroom look cool...it's worth it.
Douglas: Two pieces of advice:
1. Set clear expectations. When you start off as a teacher, everything is new to you and kids can sense that immediately. They'll test you. Setting clear expectations, preferably in the syllabus, gives certainty for both you and your kids. It helps you establish that you are the adult and this is your classroom, something you need, and deep down, they need too.
2. Stay very organized. Again, since everything is new to you, you won't have a sense of what's important to keep or remember and what's not. Keep an updated gradebook and attendance calendar. Try to return homework and papers promptly. Keep all handouts in folders. An ounce of organization today equals a pound of tomorrow's heartache.
Moses: The very short summary: be thinking about how to look out for yourself, in addition to the students, as you navigate this first year.
Two weeks before: start thinking about setting some reasonable, tangible goals for yourself. What is it that draws you to teaching? How can you organize your class to keep you (the teacher) in close contact with that? It is OK, even necessary, to organize your class in a way that sustains YOU (not just for the good of your students). For example, I have realized now that what I love most about teaching is the relationships that I form with students. So, going into this year, I'm thinking about what structures I can put in place in my classes that will allow for the formation and building of those relationships. I am planning to have more one-on-one conversations with students about their progress, to try to talk more with my classes about the way in which they're learning (as opposed to focusing on the content), etc. This good for the kids, I think, but I also hope it will keep me invested and engaged and ultimately allow me to be the best teacher I can be. In short, let it be about your needs, too.
Once school starts: find some structures that will help you debrief. That could be other new teachers, or an administrator, or faculty members whose perspectives you trust. There is always an abundance of things to talk about in teaching, from the nuts-and-bolts to the bigger pedagogical principles to the emotional maintenance to the venting, and that's even more true in that first year. I think having a support network, whatever it looks like, is the single most important thing you can do for yourself.
Two more general thoughts for you, Mr. or Ms. New Teacher, both of which I was told in my first year and still think about today.
1. Teaching has its ups and downs, but never are those more intense than the first year. That is daunting - the lows for me were pretty deep - but it also means that you will likely experience highs that are incredible. I hope you can savor those highs, because they're awesome. And if the rollercoaster-ness of it begins to wear you out, trust that you ARE going to make it through the year and that you'll never have that exhausting a year again.
2. You can always pour more energy into teaching, always find something to improve or doubt or pick at...and that's exhausting. But being a good teacher requires energy and I remember my first year as a constant battle for that energy. Be kind to yourself - as my mentor said to me in my first year: sometimes the best thing you can do for tomorrow's class is see a movie tonight (instead of working more on the lesson plan).
Good luck, have fun.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Sunday, May 13, 2007
On Finals
Q: Should I give a final project or a final exam?
That's a real assessment of understanding.
Moses: One of the teachers who is a hero of mine once said 'make it possible for everyone to succeed'. I often make my tests too hard, trying to uphold the standards of my subject area and push the kids who are grasping it well. And I don't think those are bad things, but every so often I think you've got to make sure that every student feels like the time and energy they've put in have been worth it in some way. And I think the final is a great time to do that. The assessment shouldn't be so straightforward that students are able to do well without having taken the class, or without putting in time/energy...but I am feeling today like it should leave them feeling good about this whole process called physics.
So, in the end, I am planning to give them a cumulative test that asks them to do the things I feel are most fundamental to physics. Can they explain how we know the mass of the sun? Can they predict where a ball will land if thrown in such and such a way? Can they wrestle with why, in reality, it doesn't land there? I plan to tell them up front many of the things that will be on the test, too. (To my students who are reading this: I don't care that you know what's going to be on the final! ha!).
The real benefit of a cumulative assessment is what goes into getting ready for the assessment. I've considered telling them about the final, helping them prepare but working with them as they did to keep things in perspective - have you learned how to prepare? Do you know what sorts of holes you need to fill? Look how much you know already! Tests are just another type of assessment, etc. etc. - and then not giving them a final. That feels like too much of a misuse of their trust, and so I'm not going to do it...but in the end, if the kids are putting themselves into the final I don't really care what their score is. Yes, it is important to me that they have learned physics, but they've already showed me that in the previous 179 days (or however many) way more than they can show me in the 1 last one.
It's occurring to me as I write that a lot of my opinions about finals has to do with whether or not there is time and energy for quality reflection. If the final test or presentation is on the last day you'll see them before the summer, the assessment will be very different than if you will see them again to hand back their work and reflect on it with them. I think if there's time to reflect, then it becomes much more like all other assessments; if not, you need to think about how to make the experience of _doing_ the final, or preparing for it, the point (as opposed to the quality of what they do, which they may never know).
Another wrinkle: I agree with
- Giving them the final ahead of time (or a list of questions from which the final will be taken)
- A group test...just because
- Just having class up through the end of the year, learning more about more great things
- Having them rework a piece of work from earlier in the year that they didn't feel great about
- Having them devise finals for one another
- Reflecting on the course/their work/their tendencies/learning in general, instead of giving them one more hoop to jump through
- etc.
So I think the answer to the question that it's great to do something but not critical. If you can do something awesome, do something awesome (and know that there are more options for awesomeness than you might realize). If not, it's OK to trust that the kids have learned deeply earlier in the year and that the success of your class doesn't hinge on that last thing.
Monday, April 2, 2007
On Difficult Students
Q: How do you deal with a consistently disruptive student who spoils lessons with his/her attitude and behavior?
Jack: Shame them and love them, deal with them publicly and privately, ignore them and focus on them. It's a tall order.
Disruptive students want attention and often don't know what is or isn't appropriate in seeking it. That being the case, they need to be shown exactly what will and won't fly in the classroom - I remember spending half of my young life in various administrative offices wondering what had gone wrong and never getting much help figuring how to stay out of those offices. Class rules, whether formal or informal, need to be clearly articulated to the class as a whole and to the student in question. They also need to be consistently enforced.
If disruptive students don't figure out how to get positive attention, the clarity and consistency of class rules won't change behavior, though. They need to be told outside of class what you need from them and how you're willing to help them, and then shown in class that you're willing to hold up your end of the bargain. A lot of teachers have trouble recognizing the fact that their status as teachers doesn't automatically make them trustworthy; in fact, it often signifies the opposite.
Disruptive students have also probably been through this a number of times before, though clearly not successfully enough to have made a real and lasting difference. Keeping that in mind, students who have shown some progress in classroom behavior should be allowed to slip up from time to time just like any other student. They and their parents should be given usual feedback on how they are doing, and they should be given realistic goals to meet.
Finally, you as a teacher have to remember that the presence of a disruptive student in your classroom is not your fault. It is also important to keep in mind that something can be done about the problem and that given the choice between succeeding and being disruptive, almost all young people will choose to succeed if they can just figure out how. Being an ally and a mentor to young people is ultimately what teaching is all about, and sometimes it doesn't have much to do with your curriculum.
Douglas: I have a short and simple answer for this one: I treated attendance in my class as a privilege. I would send any student who acted inappropriately out of class and tell her/him to come back when he/she was ready again. That went for acting out, speaking out of turn, insulting a fellow student, whatever behavior I didn’t want in my classroom. This has to be applied evenly, so that all students, even normally well-behaved students, get sent out when they do something the crosses the line.
Kids (and I guess adults) act inappropriately for attention, so I removed the chance for attention. Usually a kids sent out would try to come back immediately but I would usually not allow them back for a few minutes. A timeout, so to speak. Almost always they would come back much more well-behaved and over the school year, after expectations were set, it happened a lot less. One or twice, a student wouldn’t come back in and would sulk outside for the rest of the period. I ignored that too. The message I was trying to send was that learning is something valuable and if you act inappropriately, I’ll take it away from you.
I don’t know if this would work for everyone or in every school environment, but it worked for
me.
Moses: 1) Have clear expectations for student engagement/involvement/behavior. By making your expectations clear at the start of the year (and creating some sort of student buy-in to those expectations), you have a leg to stand on...if not, I've learned that you leave yourself more open to students feeling that they're being picked on. Plus, as an added bonus, thinking about your expectations beforehand will help you to arrive at a clearer sense of what's important to you as a teacher. Is it being on time? Being respectful? What do each of those actually look like, specifically?
2) Think about why this student or this student's behavior feels so disruptive. Is it keeping them from learning? Is it hurting other students? Is it not bothering anyone except for you? I've sometimes found that identifying what it is about the distraction that's actually helps me to be more clear and effective in the rest of the process.
3) Ask yourself: how can you use this to make your classroom a better place for learning? There are a lot of reasons for students to be disruptive, but I think a major one is feeling like the class doesn't have a place for them. How can you create that place? Does it mean adding some variety to your lessons? Changing the pace? Crafting an activity that plays to the disruptive student's strengths? Give them a chance to be a success.
4) Talk to the student. I'm a big fan of calling a spade a spade: tell them what you see, emphasize that you think they can be a positive influence instead of a negative one, ask them what they see, ask them how you can help them to be a more positive contributor. If I have to err, I err on the side of making sure the student knows that I am on their side. I have expectations and a commitment to the other students, but I am on their side too.
5) If there's an advisor or homeroom system at your school, or someone who knows the student more broadly than in your class alone, tell them what you see and ask if they know of any helpful information. Classes in which they've had some success? A broader sense of what other teachers have noticed? Other important contextual information?
6) In the broadest sense, gather information from other parties. Check in with the parents - again, emphasizing that you're there to help and not to seek punishment. Ask the administrators: what options are open to you (sending the student out of the room, conversations with a school counselor, etc.)
7) If possible, don't lose sight of the other students in your classroom. If there are 20 students in the class and 1 who isn't focused on learning, you may still have 19 who are...but not if you spend all your time dealing with the 1.
Jack: Shame them and love them, deal with them publicly and privately, ignore them and focus on them. It's a tall order.
Disruptive students want attention and often don't know what is or isn't appropriate in seeking it. That being the case, they need to be shown exactly what will and won't fly in the classroom - I remember spending half of my young life in various administrative offices wondering what had gone wrong and never getting much help figuring how to stay out of those offices. Class rules, whether formal or informal, need to be clearly articulated to the class as a whole and to the student in question. They also need to be consistently enforced.
If disruptive students don't figure out how to get positive attention, the clarity and consistency of class rules won't change behavior, though. They need to be told outside of class what you need from them and how you're willing to help them, and then shown in class that you're willing to hold up your end of the bargain. A lot of teachers have trouble recognizing the fact that their status as teachers doesn't automatically make them trustworthy; in fact, it often signifies the opposite.
Disruptive students have also probably been through this a number of times before, though clearly not successfully enough to have made a real and lasting difference. Keeping that in mind, students who have shown some progress in classroom behavior should be allowed to slip up from time to time just like any other student. They and their parents should be given usual feedback on how they are doing, and they should be given realistic goals to meet.
Finally, you as a teacher have to remember that the presence of a disruptive student in your classroom is not your fault. It is also important to keep in mind that something can be done about the problem and that given the choice between succeeding and being disruptive, almost all young people will choose to succeed if they can just figure out how. Being an ally and a mentor to young people is ultimately what teaching is all about, and sometimes it doesn't have much to do with your curriculum.
Douglas: I have a short and simple answer for this one: I treated attendance in my class as a privilege. I would send any student who acted inappropriately out of class and tell her/him to come back when he/she was ready again. That went for acting out, speaking out of turn, insulting a fellow student, whatever behavior I didn’t want in my classroom. This has to be applied evenly, so that all students, even normally well-behaved students, get sent out when they do something the crosses the line.
Kids (and I guess adults) act inappropriately for attention, so I removed the chance for attention. Usually a kids sent out would try to come back immediately but I would usually not allow them back for a few minutes. A timeout, so to speak. Almost always they would come back much more well-behaved and over the school year, after expectations were set, it happened a lot less. One or twice, a student wouldn’t come back in and would sulk outside for the rest of the period. I ignored that too. The message I was trying to send was that learning is something valuable and if you act inappropriately, I’ll take it away from you.
I don’t know if this would work for everyone or in every school environment, but it worked for
me.
Moses: 1) Have clear expectations for student engagement/involvement/behavior. By making your expectations clear at the start of the year (and creating some sort of student buy-in to those expectations), you have a leg to stand on...if not, I've learned that you leave yourself more open to students feeling that they're being picked on. Plus, as an added bonus, thinking about your expectations beforehand will help you to arrive at a clearer sense of what's important to you as a teacher. Is it being on time? Being respectful? What do each of those actually look like, specifically?
2) Think about why this student or this student's behavior feels so disruptive. Is it keeping them from learning? Is it hurting other students? Is it not bothering anyone except for you? I've sometimes found that identifying what it is about the distraction that's actually helps me to be more clear and effective in the rest of the process.
3) Ask yourself: how can you use this to make your classroom a better place for learning? There are a lot of reasons for students to be disruptive, but I think a major one is feeling like the class doesn't have a place for them. How can you create that place? Does it mean adding some variety to your lessons? Changing the pace? Crafting an activity that plays to the disruptive student's strengths? Give them a chance to be a success.
4) Talk to the student. I'm a big fan of calling a spade a spade: tell them what you see, emphasize that you think they can be a positive influence instead of a negative one, ask them what they see, ask them how you can help them to be a more positive contributor. If I have to err, I err on the side of making sure the student knows that I am on their side. I have expectations and a commitment to the other students, but I am on their side too.
5) If there's an advisor or homeroom system at your school, or someone who knows the student more broadly than in your class alone, tell them what you see and ask if they know of any helpful information. Classes in which they've had some success? A broader sense of what other teachers have noticed? Other important contextual information?
6) In the broadest sense, gather information from other parties. Check in with the parents - again, emphasizing that you're there to help and not to seek punishment. Ask the administrators: what options are open to you (sending the student out of the room, conversations with a school counselor, etc.)
7) If possible, don't lose sight of the other students in your classroom. If there are 20 students in the class and 1 who isn't focused on learning, you may still have 19 who are...but not if you spend all your time dealing with the 1.
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
On Parents
Q: To what extent is communicating with parents necessary? Whose parents should be communicated with? Should the squeaky wheels get the oil? The quiet wheels? All the wheels? How should difficult parents be dealt with?
Douglas: Like voting, communicating with parents should be done early and often. Last year, within the first two weeks of school, I mailed a letter to parents introducing myself, detailing the expectations I had of their children, and inviting them to tell me with any specifics they had of their child that would help me teach them better. In addition, I kept a blog so it was transparent with both students and parents what was happening in class. I did this trying to put any problems that would later come up within the context of a pre-existing relationship as opposed to the problem becoming the context of the relationship itself. Did it work? Mostly. On several occasions a parent emailed me with a concern that was solved much more easily because we had built some trust between us.
I was once told that 95% of parents are reasonable human beings, anxious that their children succeed. Those parents you can work with by just listening and trying to understand them before working on a solution. 5% of parents are "toxic parents," parents who, once you've pissed off, you will never be able to please. When you face a toxic parent, I pray that you have an administration that supports you and is willing to deal with them for you. That's where your reputation dealing with other parents will take you a long way. If other parents have told administrators of your courtesy dealing with them or your success in finding common solutions, complaints by toxic parents will carry much less weight.
Jack: On back to school night in October I would get email addresses from parents and make a list, adding addresses to my list as I received messages from other parents, ran into them at school, etc. Ultimately, I had a pretty comprehensive list and tried to do two things with it.
First, I tried to be in touch with each parent at least once over the semester. That doesn't sound like a lot, but I feel like it was important just so parents knew that I was their ally, and sometimes doing a little is better than doing nothing. Relatedly, my second reason was to head off problems before they became larger. Being in touch with parents when an issue was nascent was appreciated by parents, but I did it more for myself. Sending an email home about a student who hadn't completed a few homework assignments, or who had failed a second essay, or who had lied to me, always ended up making my life easier than allowing students to hide their activities from their parents and bringing the issue to my door a month later.
The downside to all of this communication was that parents had the opportunity to express their anxiety in a way that involved me (and occasionally blamed me). So, I had to learn how to be diplomatic, calm, and pragmatically detached.
The upside to all of this communication was that parents also had a means of giving me positive feedback, which teachers need and so rarely get. Ultimately, it would only be two or three parents who took the time to write and say that everything was great, but those stayed in my inbox all year long.
A final note: email is so bad at conveying tone, so conducive to ranting, and still not available to all parents. It's great because it's quick, but sometimes, it was better to send an email asking a parent to just come in for a meeting, or to just pick up the phone and call.
Mike: In my first year of teaching, I had a pleasant, mild-mannered advisee named Mike. Mike enjoyed playing video games, math class, and hitting the bong. He and I spoke frequently and had a solid relationship, during which I encouraged him to pursue the games and the math, and not the reefer.
His mother was not as mild mannered. She called me almost nightly to check up on her son and behaved in a way I can only describe as bi-polar. Her calls were not helping Mike at all, and I felt harassed. Eventually, the head of the school made her sign a contract that stipulated if she ever called me again, her son would be expelled.
Clearly, not all communication is good communication.
Parents are one of the variables in teaching, and since they are variable, I don't think I could ever offer general advice. Family dynamics, gender, the age of the students, the goals of the class (and of the school), the student's personality. . . all of these factors will influence the frequency and method of my communication with parents. The teacher should set goals vis-a-vis parents that support the overall educational project.
For another extreme example, consider my current job in a Chinese University. I never speak to my students' parents, and couldn't really do so even if I wanted to (most of them speak dialects of Chinese I cannot understand). My students are emotionally quite similar to middle-schoolers in America. Parental contact might be helpful. But would it make sense? Perhaps it's time for these young adults to learn how to be independent, how to communicate on their own, and how to fight their own battles.
Moses: Communicating with parents is necessary because they're a critical part of the process of helping our students to mature and grow. That works tremendously well when you're on the same page, naturally, but I've also found that at my school there is a a population of parents who expects better-than-great things for their children. As all parents should, certainly, but there's a line between expectations and entitlement that gets a little blurry.
I have dealt with difficult parents by being clear about my goals, my philosophy, and my expectations for the students. That way, when it comes into question, I feel like I can speak clearly and confidently about why I'm making the choices that I'm making. When I first started teaching, this was really hard for me - who was I, a 22 year old kid, to tell them about what their kids needed? - but I've learned to trust myself as I've become more experienced. Hypothetically, I think if that weren't to work, I wouldn't feel bad looking to the administrators for some guidance. Do they support me? Am I out of line with the school's approach and philosophy?
In terms of who to communicate with, I think the squeaky wheel phenomena looms large. In some ways, it makes teaching feel like putting out fires but, like I said before, at its best parent communication allows you to form a wider net to support and help the student. I've found that being honest with parents has worked wonders far more often than its gotten me into trouble (never, I think)...diplomatic, yes, but honest.
On the subject of which parents, I did want to mention that there was a day a few years ago where I called all the parents of the students who were doing well in my classes, just to pass that along. It was, without a doubt, one of the most positive experiences of my life. The parents were surprised to hear from me, proud of their kids, glowing with love...it was beautiful and an important reminder of the need to communicate with everyone. (It also didn't hurt that many of these parents expressed a lot of gratitude towards me for the work I was doing.) It's a little sad to me that I've only found time to do this once in six years, but parent communication takes time and there's just not enough. So it's sad, but I'm glad to know that I did it and that I still have that to play when I'm not feeling so good about students or the work that I'm doing.
Douglas: Like voting, communicating with parents should be done early and often. Last year, within the first two weeks of school, I mailed a letter to parents introducing myself, detailing the expectations I had of their children, and inviting them to tell me with any specifics they had of their child that would help me teach them better. In addition, I kept a blog so it was transparent with both students and parents what was happening in class. I did this trying to put any problems that would later come up within the context of a pre-existing relationship as opposed to the problem becoming the context of the relationship itself. Did it work? Mostly. On several occasions a parent emailed me with a concern that was solved much more easily because we had built some trust between us.
I was once told that 95% of parents are reasonable human beings, anxious that their children succeed. Those parents you can work with by just listening and trying to understand them before working on a solution. 5% of parents are "toxic parents," parents who, once you've pissed off, you will never be able to please. When you face a toxic parent, I pray that you have an administration that supports you and is willing to deal with them for you. That's where your reputation dealing with other parents will take you a long way. If other parents have told administrators of your courtesy dealing with them or your success in finding common solutions, complaints by toxic parents will carry much less weight.
Jack: On back to school night in October I would get email addresses from parents and make a list, adding addresses to my list as I received messages from other parents, ran into them at school, etc. Ultimately, I had a pretty comprehensive list and tried to do two things with it.
First, I tried to be in touch with each parent at least once over the semester. That doesn't sound like a lot, but I feel like it was important just so parents knew that I was their ally, and sometimes doing a little is better than doing nothing. Relatedly, my second reason was to head off problems before they became larger. Being in touch with parents when an issue was nascent was appreciated by parents, but I did it more for myself. Sending an email home about a student who hadn't completed a few homework assignments, or who had failed a second essay, or who had lied to me, always ended up making my life easier than allowing students to hide their activities from their parents and bringing the issue to my door a month later.
The downside to all of this communication was that parents had the opportunity to express their anxiety in a way that involved me (and occasionally blamed me). So, I had to learn how to be diplomatic, calm, and pragmatically detached.
The upside to all of this communication was that parents also had a means of giving me positive feedback, which teachers need and so rarely get. Ultimately, it would only be two or three parents who took the time to write and say that everything was great, but those stayed in my inbox all year long.
A final note: email is so bad at conveying tone, so conducive to ranting, and still not available to all parents. It's great because it's quick, but sometimes, it was better to send an email asking a parent to just come in for a meeting, or to just pick up the phone and call.
Mike: In my first year of teaching, I had a pleasant, mild-mannered advisee named Mike. Mike enjoyed playing video games, math class, and hitting the bong. He and I spoke frequently and had a solid relationship, during which I encouraged him to pursue the games and the math, and not the reefer.
His mother was not as mild mannered. She called me almost nightly to check up on her son and behaved in a way I can only describe as bi-polar. Her calls were not helping Mike at all, and I felt harassed. Eventually, the head of the school made her sign a contract that stipulated if she ever called me again, her son would be expelled.
Clearly, not all communication is good communication.
Parents are one of the variables in teaching, and since they are variable, I don't think I could ever offer general advice. Family dynamics, gender, the age of the students, the goals of the class (and of the school), the student's personality. . . all of these factors will influence the frequency and method of my communication with parents. The teacher should set goals vis-a-vis parents that support the overall educational project.
For another extreme example, consider my current job in a Chinese University. I never speak to my students' parents, and couldn't really do so even if I wanted to (most of them speak dialects of Chinese I cannot understand). My students are emotionally quite similar to middle-schoolers in America. Parental contact might be helpful. But would it make sense? Perhaps it's time for these young adults to learn how to be independent, how to communicate on their own, and how to fight their own battles.
Moses: Communicating with parents is necessary because they're a critical part of the process of helping our students to mature and grow. That works tremendously well when you're on the same page, naturally, but I've also found that at my school there is a a population of parents who expects better-than-great things for their children. As all parents should, certainly, but there's a line between expectations and entitlement that gets a little blurry.
I have dealt with difficult parents by being clear about my goals, my philosophy, and my expectations for the students. That way, when it comes into question, I feel like I can speak clearly and confidently about why I'm making the choices that I'm making. When I first started teaching, this was really hard for me - who was I, a 22 year old kid, to tell them about what their kids needed? - but I've learned to trust myself as I've become more experienced. Hypothetically, I think if that weren't to work, I wouldn't feel bad looking to the administrators for some guidance. Do they support me? Am I out of line with the school's approach and philosophy?
In terms of who to communicate with, I think the squeaky wheel phenomena looms large. In some ways, it makes teaching feel like putting out fires but, like I said before, at its best parent communication allows you to form a wider net to support and help the student. I've found that being honest with parents has worked wonders far more often than its gotten me into trouble (never, I think)...diplomatic, yes, but honest.
On the subject of which parents, I did want to mention that there was a day a few years ago where I called all the parents of the students who were doing well in my classes, just to pass that along. It was, without a doubt, one of the most positive experiences of my life. The parents were surprised to hear from me, proud of their kids, glowing with love...it was beautiful and an important reminder of the need to communicate with everyone. (It also didn't hurt that many of these parents expressed a lot of gratitude towards me for the work I was doing.) It's a little sad to me that I've only found time to do this once in six years, but parent communication takes time and there's just not enough. So it's sad, but I'm glad to know that I did it and that I still have that to play when I'm not feeling so good about students or the work that I'm doing.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
On Advice
Q: First year teachers get a lot of advice - from their peers, from mentor teachers, from best-practice authors - and sometimes it can start to get overwhelming. In fact, hearing about all of the amazing things that go on in successful classrooms can often make what is going on in one's own classroom seem pretty unspectacular. How should someone deal with information and advice?
Jack: I dealt with advice on teaching by compartmentalizing my understanding of the practice of teaching into teaching and my teaching. I would read people like Dewey and Freire and hooks and Gardner, I would talk with teachers I respected and admired, I would talk with Mike and Douglas and Moses, all in the effort to build my understandings of what good teaching is. But never during my first year did I compare myself to the standard that I was developing. Part of that is because I tend to think I know what I'm doing, even when I don't. But another part was a conscious effort to keep from feeling inadequate. I was overwhelmed already and didn't need to feel like there was any more to do than I already felt.
So what was the point of building "my understandings of what good teaching is" if I wasn't going to directly apply it to my own teaching? For me it was a matter of trust. I trusted that as I grew more comfortable in my classroom I would begin challenging myself to improve. Of course, as I continued to push myself to be better, I had an understanding of what "better" was. I was building my potential as a teacher, not my current competency.
To some extent, I am continuing to do that now. As a doctoral student, I'm away from the classroom, but I frequently think about teaching as a practice. If I stepped back into the classroom tomorrow and failed to implement everything that I know, there is certainly a part of me that would be frustrated. But I would also like to think that I would continue being patient with myself knowing that teaching, when it's done right, is a profession and not a job, and that it takes a lifetime to perfect it.
Douglas: I remember attending a lot of my colleagues’ classes during my first year, earnestly taking notes on each teacher’s class management, particularly effective phrasing, or course philosophy. Some teachers were great at lecturing, some were great at leading class discussions. Some were great at leading students through a logical progression, others were great at letting kids muddle around until they solved problems themselves. Some teachers had close relationships with kids, others were more formal.
All the styles worked or didn’t work. But it wasn’t about the style, it was about the teacher. There’s a lot of talk of best practices, but a lot of what happens in the classroom is the personality and passion of the individual teaching. Lecturing to a class is passé now since it doesn’t teach to all learners, but I’ve seen a class where students sat for 50 minutes mesmerized by a teacher’s lecture. It was the only way this teacher taught and kids LOVED it.
I’m going to steal an idea from Mike’s last post on coherence: you’ve got to have a thesis statement. Your thesis statement will be your declaration of educational belief, the ideal that you’d like your course and your classroom to reach. I think we all have one subconsciously, but writing one out is a good exercise. When you receive advice from peers or mentors or read pedagogy books, take only what makes sense to you and your thesis statement. You’ll be a better teacher for it, the teacher YOU were meant to become.
And talk a lot with others passionate about teaching. During my first few years teaching, I had many experienced mentors and went to a lot of professional development but I think what was most helpful for me was hanging out with Mike or Jack over dinner or after basketball, talking about what happened in class that week or what we were planning next. Finding colleagues willing and excited to talk about teaching, as equals, is the best way to feel alive in education while figuring out what will work for you.
Moses: I'm not going to try to answer this one, so much as reflect on the answer. I think Douglas has already said the bulk of what I'd like to say.
This may apply more after one has taught for a few years, but I think there's some inertia involved in planning your classes. Doing what you've done before requires less energy than reinventing the wheel. For new teachers, this might be adapted to 'doing what you that you'd do'. In both cases, though, it is harder to change directions than it is to do what you'd been planning to do. To borrow a metaphor from chemistry, there's an activation energy to any chemical change.
I think the only advice that ends up taking hold will be the advice that you want to let take hold. You take what feels like it works and leave what doesn't. A new idea or advice can be exciting, energizing, so much so that it feels worth it to go spend the energy to change your previous direction. This is where teaching can give back more energy than it takes, when the excitement of doing something that feels like it connects to the kids more smoothly is more than enough to overcome the effort it takes to put it into place.
In that sense, then, there's no science to what advice you take and leave. Take the ones that you want to take; leave the ones that don't make you excited to take them. Trying to shoehorn some advice in just because it sounds like you should but doesn't resonate with you will only leave you more tired in the end, I think. And I don't think students benefit from teaching that the teacher isn't invested in. It's sort of freeing, I think: you don't need to worry about passing on some bit of perfect advice because if it doesn't work for you, it just isn't perfect.
Jack: I dealt with advice on teaching by compartmentalizing my understanding of the practice of teaching into teaching and my teaching. I would read people like Dewey and Freire and hooks and Gardner, I would talk with teachers I respected and admired, I would talk with Mike and Douglas and Moses, all in the effort to build my understandings of what good teaching is. But never during my first year did I compare myself to the standard that I was developing. Part of that is because I tend to think I know what I'm doing, even when I don't. But another part was a conscious effort to keep from feeling inadequate. I was overwhelmed already and didn't need to feel like there was any more to do than I already felt.
So what was the point of building "my understandings of what good teaching is" if I wasn't going to directly apply it to my own teaching? For me it was a matter of trust. I trusted that as I grew more comfortable in my classroom I would begin challenging myself to improve. Of course, as I continued to push myself to be better, I had an understanding of what "better" was. I was building my potential as a teacher, not my current competency.
To some extent, I am continuing to do that now. As a doctoral student, I'm away from the classroom, but I frequently think about teaching as a practice. If I stepped back into the classroom tomorrow and failed to implement everything that I know, there is certainly a part of me that would be frustrated. But I would also like to think that I would continue being patient with myself knowing that teaching, when it's done right, is a profession and not a job, and that it takes a lifetime to perfect it.
Douglas: I remember attending a lot of my colleagues’ classes during my first year, earnestly taking notes on each teacher’s class management, particularly effective phrasing, or course philosophy. Some teachers were great at lecturing, some were great at leading class discussions. Some were great at leading students through a logical progression, others were great at letting kids muddle around until they solved problems themselves. Some teachers had close relationships with kids, others were more formal.
All the styles worked or didn’t work. But it wasn’t about the style, it was about the teacher. There’s a lot of talk of best practices, but a lot of what happens in the classroom is the personality and passion of the individual teaching. Lecturing to a class is passé now since it doesn’t teach to all learners, but I’ve seen a class where students sat for 50 minutes mesmerized by a teacher’s lecture. It was the only way this teacher taught and kids LOVED it.
I’m going to steal an idea from Mike’s last post on coherence: you’ve got to have a thesis statement. Your thesis statement will be your declaration of educational belief, the ideal that you’d like your course and your classroom to reach. I think we all have one subconsciously, but writing one out is a good exercise. When you receive advice from peers or mentors or read pedagogy books, take only what makes sense to you and your thesis statement. You’ll be a better teacher for it, the teacher YOU were meant to become.
And talk a lot with others passionate about teaching. During my first few years teaching, I had many experienced mentors and went to a lot of professional development but I think what was most helpful for me was hanging out with Mike or Jack over dinner or after basketball, talking about what happened in class that week or what we were planning next. Finding colleagues willing and excited to talk about teaching, as equals, is the best way to feel alive in education while figuring out what will work for you.
Moses: I'm not going to try to answer this one, so much as reflect on the answer. I think Douglas has already said the bulk of what I'd like to say.
This may apply more after one has taught for a few years, but I think there's some inertia involved in planning your classes. Doing what you've done before requires less energy than reinventing the wheel. For new teachers, this might be adapted to 'doing what you that you'd do'. In both cases, though, it is harder to change directions than it is to do what you'd been planning to do. To borrow a metaphor from chemistry, there's an activation energy to any chemical change.
I think the only advice that ends up taking hold will be the advice that you want to let take hold. You take what feels like it works and leave what doesn't. A new idea or advice can be exciting, energizing, so much so that it feels worth it to go spend the energy to change your previous direction. This is where teaching can give back more energy than it takes, when the excitement of doing something that feels like it connects to the kids more smoothly is more than enough to overcome the effort it takes to put it into place.
In that sense, then, there's no science to what advice you take and leave. Take the ones that you want to take; leave the ones that don't make you excited to take them. Trying to shoehorn some advice in just because it sounds like you should but doesn't resonate with you will only leave you more tired in the end, I think. And I don't think students benefit from teaching that the teacher isn't invested in. It's sort of freeing, I think: you don't need to worry about passing on some bit of perfect advice because if it doesn't work for you, it just isn't perfect.
Friday, January 19, 2007
On Coherence
Q: Sometimes courses feel arbitrary, like students are learning things that don't connect. What can a teacher do so that at the end of the course students can answer in a few sentences what they learned? Is that possible? Is it desirable?
Jack: If my students are anything like I was at their age - and I'm sure most of them are - they have all long since forgotten most of the details of our course content. They will remember that we studied the Ottoman Empire in Intro to Modern World History, for instance, but they will have no recollection of Suleyman (Suleyman the Magnificent, at that). And can I blame them? I can't remember when to use the imperfect tense in Spanish. I can't remember what I had for dinner a week ago. I can't even remember the names of some of my family members.
Knowing that my students would forget at least two-thirds of the details, I tried to first structure my courses so that there was a theme (or at least no more than a few major themes). This was pretty difficult, because it meant even more filtering of the material by me (meaning even more room for brainwashing if I so chose), it meant leaving a lot of cool things out of the curriculum (or just not emphasizing them), and it meant spending a lot of time trying to figure out what story I could tell about certain periods of history. Ultimately, for World History, it was a story about the rise of a more global world and the consequences that new globalism brought for powerful and less-powerful nations.
After coming up with that story, I then had to frame every unit in those terms. Why are we looking at this period? Why are we reading about these people? Why are we discussing this region? For my more concrete students (always a little difficult for me to relate with), I had the students keep a section of their notebooks for tracking our story. Then, at the end of each quarter, we would wrap up what we had covered up to that point. Have we seen the rise of a more global world? Does this represent a distinct historical departure? What, up to this point, have the consequences of globalization been? What evidence can you use to support your opinion?
It was much easier to do that sort of framing in a world history class - where there is far far too much to teach - than in an American history course, which though daunting, represents significantly less material. Still, there are distinct storylines to American history. On the first day I handed out questions that Mike and I had developed - five or six questions about themes in American history - and had the kids put those questions at the front of their notebooks. After each period, we would return to those questions. How does the Populist Era begin to answer the question about how government works and whom it is for? How does it begin to answer the question about who Americans are?
In the end, students remembered those discussions and were able, by and large, to sprinkle their opinions with historical evidence. And the sprinkling was important, because if all they could do at the end of the course was make a vague statement about what they learned, there would be no power behind the learning. But I found that when students bought into an idea as being true, examples to support that idea came pretty naturally to them.
In terms of other subjects that I've taught, I've thought about how I can build the same storylines. What does a collection of literature say cumulatively? How do certain authors speak to each other?
Moses may feel differently, but Bill Bryson's history of science (A Short History of Nearly Everything) is so powerful because he identifies connections in science and explores science thematically, always reminding his reader how some aspects of the natural world work with other aspects. I don't know much about geology, but I do know that the Earth's core is connected pretty fundamentally to the Earth's crust and that rocks aren't always rocks; I could support statements like that by discussing the conveyor belt at the bottom of the ocean. I don't know much about molecules, but I do know that everything in this world is composed of molecules, which as far as I can tell, are not alive.
People and rocks are both made of molecules. Holy Toledo.
Moses: Holy Toledo indeed. Try this on for size: the only atoms created by the Big Bang were hydrogen and a little bit of helium. All other atoms were created by the nuclear fusion in the hearts of stars and then distributed (i.e. blown to smithereens) across the universe when that star supernova'ed. That carbon that makes you up? Star stuff. The oxygen you breathe? Same thing.
I started teaching because I loved science, and I wanted to share that love with people who would listen. I enjoyed working with younger people but really, for me, it was about the content. As I taught in those first three years, I began to see how much I loved getting to connect with the kids. Sometimes that connection was in geometry or geology or some other class, sometimes it was as an advisor, sometimes it came from going to the JV basketball game after school...more likely it never came in a singular moment but a combination of all those experiences.
I feel like, somewhere in my third year of teaching, I had a realization that felt like getting the joke of teaching: that it wasn't about the content, that the content was just my backstage pass that allowed me access to working with kids. And so, when I set goals, they're rarely about the content. I hope that my classes give my students insight into who they are - as learners, as young adults - and I hope it leaves them feeling that if they want to learn more about anything, they picked up some tools in my class.
So in that sense, the material IS arbitrary. I still love teaching physics and astronomy specifically because I love the material, and the feedback that I hear from the kids convinces me that my own love helps to open them up to all the other stuff I'm trying to do. The skills that they learn in a science class can be very narrowly defined - calculating how a ball falls through the air, learning why we know the universe is expanding, etc. - or broadly - how can I pose and answer a question? Does 'science' add legitimacy to the things I hear? How do I react when I am challenged? I think both are valuable, but that's just because I think science is awesome. Imagining a student who doesn't agree, though, I hope that my class would still be worthwhile because of the broader goals.
I think, as Jack said, the important part is to be clear in your goals and to keep coming back to them. Keep coming back to them explicitly, telling the kids what you're trying to do and reminding them as you/they do it, and keep coming back to it implicitly in your own planning and reflection. I think it's OK if the few sentences they write at the end of the course are different than what you'd hoped they'd write, as long as they reflect some growth, some well-founded confidence, some thoughtfulness, some excitement for learning. [Allow me to say, though, as disclaimers, that in spite of all this I am still always racing to fit in more content, and that even though I have the advantage of teaching almost all seniors in electives, they still so rarely make progress in the ways that I'd hoped...]
Douglas: Having students understand how things connect to each other is more than desirable, it’s the main goal of teaching. I used a pedagogical framework called Understanding by Design, which makes a distinction between simply teaching knowledge and fostering intellectual depth. Basically, students need to understand how the ideas and concepts in your course connect. When they do, they understand the big picture and that in turn gives a context to understand the specifics of ideas and concepts.
Jack: If my students are anything like I was at their age - and I'm sure most of them are - they have all long since forgotten most of the details of our course content. They will remember that we studied the Ottoman Empire in Intro to Modern World History, for instance, but they will have no recollection of Suleyman (Suleyman the Magnificent, at that). And can I blame them? I can't remember when to use the imperfect tense in Spanish. I can't remember what I had for dinner a week ago. I can't even remember the names of some of my family members.
Knowing that my students would forget at least two-thirds of the details, I tried to first structure my courses so that there was a theme (or at least no more than a few major themes). This was pretty difficult, because it meant even more filtering of the material by me (meaning even more room for brainwashing if I so chose), it meant leaving a lot of cool things out of the curriculum (or just not emphasizing them), and it meant spending a lot of time trying to figure out what story I could tell about certain periods of history. Ultimately, for World History, it was a story about the rise of a more global world and the consequences that new globalism brought for powerful and less-powerful nations.
After coming up with that story, I then had to frame every unit in those terms. Why are we looking at this period? Why are we reading about these people? Why are we discussing this region? For my more concrete students (always a little difficult for me to relate with), I had the students keep a section of their notebooks for tracking our story. Then, at the end of each quarter, we would wrap up what we had covered up to that point. Have we seen the rise of a more global world? Does this represent a distinct historical departure? What, up to this point, have the consequences of globalization been? What evidence can you use to support your opinion?
It was much easier to do that sort of framing in a world history class - where there is far far too much to teach - than in an American history course, which though daunting, represents significantly less material. Still, there are distinct storylines to American history. On the first day I handed out questions that Mike and I had developed - five or six questions about themes in American history - and had the kids put those questions at the front of their notebooks. After each period, we would return to those questions. How does the Populist Era begin to answer the question about how government works and whom it is for? How does it begin to answer the question about who Americans are?
In the end, students remembered those discussions and were able, by and large, to sprinkle their opinions with historical evidence. And the sprinkling was important, because if all they could do at the end of the course was make a vague statement about what they learned, there would be no power behind the learning. But I found that when students bought into an idea as being true, examples to support that idea came pretty naturally to them.
In terms of other subjects that I've taught, I've thought about how I can build the same storylines. What does a collection of literature say cumulatively? How do certain authors speak to each other?
Moses may feel differently, but Bill Bryson's history of science (A Short History of Nearly Everything) is so powerful because he identifies connections in science and explores science thematically, always reminding his reader how some aspects of the natural world work with other aspects. I don't know much about geology, but I do know that the Earth's core is connected pretty fundamentally to the Earth's crust and that rocks aren't always rocks; I could support statements like that by discussing the conveyor belt at the bottom of the ocean. I don't know much about molecules, but I do know that everything in this world is composed of molecules, which as far as I can tell, are not alive.
People and rocks are both made of molecules. Holy Toledo.
Moses: Holy Toledo indeed. Try this on for size: the only atoms created by the Big Bang were hydrogen and a little bit of helium. All other atoms were created by the nuclear fusion in the hearts of stars and then distributed (i.e. blown to smithereens) across the universe when that star supernova'ed. That carbon that makes you up? Star stuff. The oxygen you breathe? Same thing.
I started teaching because I loved science, and I wanted to share that love with people who would listen. I enjoyed working with younger people but really, for me, it was about the content. As I taught in those first three years, I began to see how much I loved getting to connect with the kids. Sometimes that connection was in geometry or geology or some other class, sometimes it was as an advisor, sometimes it came from going to the JV basketball game after school...more likely it never came in a singular moment but a combination of all those experiences.
I feel like, somewhere in my third year of teaching, I had a realization that felt like getting the joke of teaching: that it wasn't about the content, that the content was just my backstage pass that allowed me access to working with kids. And so, when I set goals, they're rarely about the content. I hope that my classes give my students insight into who they are - as learners, as young adults - and I hope it leaves them feeling that if they want to learn more about anything, they picked up some tools in my class.
So in that sense, the material IS arbitrary. I still love teaching physics and astronomy specifically because I love the material, and the feedback that I hear from the kids convinces me that my own love helps to open them up to all the other stuff I'm trying to do. The skills that they learn in a science class can be very narrowly defined - calculating how a ball falls through the air, learning why we know the universe is expanding, etc. - or broadly - how can I pose and answer a question? Does 'science' add legitimacy to the things I hear? How do I react when I am challenged? I think both are valuable, but that's just because I think science is awesome. Imagining a student who doesn't agree, though, I hope that my class would still be worthwhile because of the broader goals.
I think, as Jack said, the important part is to be clear in your goals and to keep coming back to them. Keep coming back to them explicitly, telling the kids what you're trying to do and reminding them as you/they do it, and keep coming back to it implicitly in your own planning and reflection. I think it's OK if the few sentences they write at the end of the course are different than what you'd hoped they'd write, as long as they reflect some growth, some well-founded confidence, some thoughtfulness, some excitement for learning. [Allow me to say, though, as disclaimers, that in spite of all this I am still always racing to fit in more content, and that even though I have the advantage of teaching almost all seniors in electives, they still so rarely make progress in the ways that I'd hoped...]
Douglas: Having students understand how things connect to each other is more than desirable, it’s the main goal of teaching. I used a pedagogical framework called Understanding by Design, which makes a distinction between simply teaching knowledge and fostering intellectual depth. Basically, students need to understand how the ideas and concepts in your course connect. When they do, they understand the big picture and that in turn gives a context to understand the specifics of ideas and concepts.
So the main goal of teaching is helping students make these connections and helping them understand “the big picture.” I used “essential questions,” foundational queries that run through every unit of a course. For example, in my modern world history class, “Global Interdependence,” an essential question was, “Who do we care for? How do we identify ourselves?” Another was, “Does global interdependence help or harm people?” These issues ran through each unit of the course: industrialism, nationalism, imperialism, Communism, the Cold War etc., so it was easy to understand how nationalism or Communism were related to issues of group identity. Even when we talked about current events, like oil dependency and conflict in the
Having these thematic questions run through a course help students connect ideas and understand history: understanding factories in 19th century
The cool thing about essential questions is that in addition to helping them understand content, they connect to students’ everyday lives. For example, the essential themes of science: observation, hypothesizing, testing and measurement of error, are all things we do all the time. Once kids understand that their schoolwork connects to everyday life, their educations take on more relevance and meaning. Having ideas and concepts within a context of the big picture helps them continue their own inquiry and learning long after your course has ended.
Mike: Perhaps this question can be read a little differently: "should your course have a thesis statement?" We teach out students that good academic writing is meaningless without one. Are our classes the same?
A class with a thesis statement will function like any other piece of academic writing. It will make arguments. It will provide a variety of ways to support the thesis, perhaps from differing perspectives. The thesis statement of my American Lit class was "reading American Literature will teach you more about who you are and who you are not." The final project for the course asked the students to teach me who they were, using figures from the literature as guideposts. Perhaps the thesis statement of my Postmodern American Lit class (taught here in China to Chinese graduate students) is, "Postmodernism is a threat to the CPC because it will teach you who you are." Obviously I like identity as a theme.
I've taught courses with a stated thesis that has served as the spine for the entire course. I've taught others that have only the course title offering cohesion ("Oral English", for example, which is about as broad as a title can be). Jack and I taught our U.S. History course paying careful attention to a few "essential questions", which was somewhere inbetween these poles.
I preferred teaching the courses with thesis statements. I had an easier time organizing the classes, and I saw more opportunities to help the students hone their critical thinking skills. But I've been in situations where a thesis statement would not have helped the
students.
Perhaps this question will have different answers based on subject matter and circumstance.
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
On Failure
Q: How much failure is acceptable? How much can you chalk up to "being a first year teacher" and what needs to be viewed as simply bad practice? How do you know the difference? What should one expect from one's self during the first year in the classroom?
Jack: Lots of failure is acceptable. It has to be for two reasons. First, if you don't accept major amounts of failure, you're going to be totally miserable all year and perhaps quit teaching. Some new teachers (like me for my first semester as a teacher) don't know enough to see that they're failing in major ways, and that can be a good thing. At the end of the year, or earlier, you recognize how far short you fell in so many areas, and you make corrections and move on.
You also, however, have to recognize the failures and not simply plough confidently ahead. No first year teacher is a good teacher. No second year teacher is a very good teacher. No third year teacher is a great teacher. And that's important to recognize.
In short, there has to be a balance, a delicate one at that, between recognizing failure and accepting it. For me, the best way of thinking about it was to do the best I could and not be critical of myself until the end of the marking period. In the break between quarters, I'd spend a lot of time thinking about what went wrong, what didn't work like I thought it would, and what succeeded. And then, I'd adjust my plans for the next quarter, trying to write into myoutline for lessons reminders about what I needed to change; of course, by the time I had written them down, I understood them well enough to not need a reminder.
At the end of my first year teaching, I thought I had done pretty well. At the end of my second year teaching, I looked back at my first year and thought it had been average. At the end of my third year, that first year looked pretty weak. But that meant that where I was my third year was a lot closer to my vision of good teaching, and that felt great.
Douglas: Before anything, you need to establish a clear sense of what you think effective teaching is. Get out a sheet a paper and elucidate four or five principles of what makes good teaching toyou. It may be timely feedback, positive discipline, creating a safe learning environment, cultivating curiosity, developing logical reasoning… whatever combination ofcharacteristics good teaching is, write it down. As you go through your career, you’ll probably hone your principles but the point your first year is to simply have them.
If you’ve been intentional about what you think good teaching is, my guess is that you’ll be pretty effective. Your first year, and indeed the rest of your teaching career, is a laboratory to see which techniques and methods work towards promoting your teaching goals. The key is: be consistent on your principles, adjust your practices to fit. Pay attention to what didn’t work. Those failures and how you deal with them are essential to being a good teacher. After all, rare are the days that absolutely everything goes right in a class. So recognizing what’s not working and figuring out how to save it an important skill you’ll learn too.
The only first-year teacher that I would consider an actual failure is one who didn’t know whatshe/he was trying to accomplish and wasn’t paying attention to see if her/his practices were effective or not. Those people probably aren’t really trying. If you’ve articulated what you think good teaching is and been mindful to see if practices work, I believe that (1) you’ll have a real sense of accomplishment by year’s end and (2) you’ll have been actually pretty effective.
Moses: Feeling like a failure comes from caring about the job that you're trying to do, and from doubting the job that you just did. I also think good teachers are the ones who do both of those, that the teachers who don't open themselves up to feeling like a failure who are the bad ones. So how do good teachers survive? It seems like a cruel paradox.
There is no absolute answer to the first original question - how many units of failure are OK and how many aren't. I think the questions later in the list (what can you expect of yourself, how do you tell good failures from bad) are the real ones: how you take the inevitable failures and allow them to turn you into a better teacher?
The answer, for me, lies in structures. By structures, I mean regular elements of your profession as a teacher that give you some check against reality. Those can be internal: in my first year, I got huge mileage out of daily journal writings because by putting my day, experience, and thoughts down onto the page, I was able to step back and see a little more clearly. Or they can be external: now I do almost all of my processing by talking to my peers about teaching. I need some structures to hold me accountable and to ground me. I also loved the suggestion of trying to lay your priorities out clearly...I just did that for the first time this year and am finding that it makes success feel much more manageable.
Lastly, I think some of that grounding can and must come from the kids. I wrestle with that a lot, because I don't think you can trust their comments entirely: they want different things or sometimes see them narrowly or still have some growing up to do. In some fundamental way, though, I trust them: if they say I'm boring, then I probably am. Grains of salt all over the place...but taking feedback from the kids and honestly considering it is another way I can feel like I'm making progress as a teacher, turning my failures into successes.
The specter and possibility of teaching never goes away: I don't think I feel failure much less now (as a 6th year teacher) then I did as a first year teacher. But I think today failure is a pockmark instead of a crater in my self-image: that I have some more perspective about who I am as a teacher. Being open-hearted and -minded, thoughtful about your practice is no small task, but I think it's my answer to many of the questions asked.
Jack: Lots of failure is acceptable. It has to be for two reasons. First, if you don't accept major amounts of failure, you're going to be totally miserable all year and perhaps quit teaching. Some new teachers (like me for my first semester as a teacher) don't know enough to see that they're failing in major ways, and that can be a good thing. At the end of the year, or earlier, you recognize how far short you fell in so many areas, and you make corrections and move on.
You also, however, have to recognize the failures and not simply plough confidently ahead. No first year teacher is a good teacher. No second year teacher is a very good teacher. No third year teacher is a great teacher. And that's important to recognize.
In short, there has to be a balance, a delicate one at that, between recognizing failure and accepting it. For me, the best way of thinking about it was to do the best I could and not be critical of myself until the end of the marking period. In the break between quarters, I'd spend a lot of time thinking about what went wrong, what didn't work like I thought it would, and what succeeded. And then, I'd adjust my plans for the next quarter, trying to write into myoutline for lessons reminders about what I needed to change; of course, by the time I had written them down, I understood them well enough to not need a reminder.
At the end of my first year teaching, I thought I had done pretty well. At the end of my second year teaching, I looked back at my first year and thought it had been average. At the end of my third year, that first year looked pretty weak. But that meant that where I was my third year was a lot closer to my vision of good teaching, and that felt great.
Douglas: Before anything, you need to establish a clear sense of what you think effective teaching is. Get out a sheet a paper and elucidate four or five principles of what makes good teaching toyou. It may be timely feedback, positive discipline, creating a safe learning environment, cultivating curiosity, developing logical reasoning… whatever combination ofcharacteristics good teaching is, write it down. As you go through your career, you’ll probably hone your principles but the point your first year is to simply have them.
If you’ve been intentional about what you think good teaching is, my guess is that you’ll be pretty effective. Your first year, and indeed the rest of your teaching career, is a laboratory to see which techniques and methods work towards promoting your teaching goals. The key is: be consistent on your principles, adjust your practices to fit. Pay attention to what didn’t work. Those failures and how you deal with them are essential to being a good teacher. After all, rare are the days that absolutely everything goes right in a class. So recognizing what’s not working and figuring out how to save it an important skill you’ll learn too.
The only first-year teacher that I would consider an actual failure is one who didn’t know whatshe/he was trying to accomplish and wasn’t paying attention to see if her/his practices were effective or not. Those people probably aren’t really trying. If you’ve articulated what you think good teaching is and been mindful to see if practices work, I believe that (1) you’ll have a real sense of accomplishment by year’s end and (2) you’ll have been actually pretty effective.
Moses: Feeling like a failure comes from caring about the job that you're trying to do, and from doubting the job that you just did. I also think good teachers are the ones who do both of those, that the teachers who don't open themselves up to feeling like a failure who are the bad ones. So how do good teachers survive? It seems like a cruel paradox.
There is no absolute answer to the first original question - how many units of failure are OK and how many aren't. I think the questions later in the list (what can you expect of yourself, how do you tell good failures from bad) are the real ones: how you take the inevitable failures and allow them to turn you into a better teacher?
The answer, for me, lies in structures. By structures, I mean regular elements of your profession as a teacher that give you some check against reality. Those can be internal: in my first year, I got huge mileage out of daily journal writings because by putting my day, experience, and thoughts down onto the page, I was able to step back and see a little more clearly. Or they can be external: now I do almost all of my processing by talking to my peers about teaching. I need some structures to hold me accountable and to ground me. I also loved the suggestion of trying to lay your priorities out clearly...I just did that for the first time this year and am finding that it makes success feel much more manageable.
Lastly, I think some of that grounding can and must come from the kids. I wrestle with that a lot, because I don't think you can trust their comments entirely: they want different things or sometimes see them narrowly or still have some growing up to do. In some fundamental way, though, I trust them: if they say I'm boring, then I probably am. Grains of salt all over the place...but taking feedback from the kids and honestly considering it is another way I can feel like I'm making progress as a teacher, turning my failures into successes.
The specter and possibility of teaching never goes away: I don't think I feel failure much less now (as a 6th year teacher) then I did as a first year teacher. But I think today failure is a pockmark instead of a crater in my self-image: that I have some more perspective about who I am as a teacher. Being open-hearted and -minded, thoughtful about your practice is no small task, but I think it's my answer to many of the questions asked.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
On Lesson Planning
Q: How can you lesson plan without spending your entire evening on it?
Jack: My way of lesson planning certainly wouldn't work for everyone, but I think that aspects of it can be helpful for challenging both students and teachers. Essentially, I don't plan lessons, at least not in the same intensive engineering way that I have been known to plan vacations. Even though it's comforting to know exactly where a lesson is going to go, it ultimately doesn't leave room for some pretty important things.
First, an open lesson plan leaves room for lots of questions (this might necessitate teaching your students how to ask questions, what kinds of questions are productive, etc.). It leaves room for adjustment if the students get the material quickly or are totally disengaged by my presentation or aren't picking up on essential concepts. An open lesson plan also creates a sense of dynamism in the classroom and allows for some wiggle-room. Perhaps most importantly, an open lesson plan keeps me from spending all night trying to cobble together the perfect lesson despite my awareness of the fact that there is no perfect lesson. Ultimately, if kids are asking questions and struggling with material, if I'm paying attention to where they're failing and where they're succeeding, they're going to learn something.
So what is an open lesson plan? For me it was a lesson plan that consisted of just a few sentences that described what we would generally be looking at, what questions I would want the kids to be exploring, and what activities they would participate in. This is probably not very useful in a math or science classroom, but in a history class, this might look like the following:
Review basics of what we have covered on Civil War. What else is going on at the time of the war? Is there resistance to the war? Where? Why? What does this resistance have to do with race and class? Make list of groups and what they stood to gain or lose from the war and whether or not they supported it. Choose one and journal from that perspective. Share. Discuss.
Going into a class with only this can be scary, at least at first. But when it's scary in the classroom, (and here I mean because of adventurous teaching and not because of violence or negligence) it usually means that we're growing. In this case, it means that we all have to be able to think on our feet, to raise questions, to communicate, and to be flexible. Now, I should also note that the only way I can do this is by spending my summer planning out a year that makes sense, doing all the readings, and thinking about questions that are important. I lay out my entire year of lesson plans and then each day tinker with them so that they make sense given what we've done so far.
Then again, I don't have a curriculum-package that I have to get through...
Douglas: Preparing for class and creating class materials and homework takes a long time and is absolutely necessary for new teachers. I think you bite the bullet and do it. I would hasten to add that it’s important to under-plan each lesson. Think about the essential two points on your lesson and focus only on those. Leave a lot of time for questions and exploration; that’s where learning really is at.
SAVE EVERYTHING. Save the things you use, save the things you don’t use. Spend 10-20% of your planning time on organization. Keep a file cabinet of teaching materials and file actively. Save everything on your personal computer and your school network. It will help when you create more lesson plans but more importantly, it will save countless hours for the rest of your teaching career. Work very hard on lesson planning your first two years and you’ll thank yourself later. In subsequent years, all you have to do to lesson plan is take out and review your old materials and see what you want to use or how you want to revise.
I’d add something else: don’t neglect grading. Quick feedback is the key to learning, and thus, teaching. Reviewing student work is where you find out if students are actually learning what (you think) you’re teaching. It’s the mechanism where you and they can check whether they understand the material. Quick turnaround time is critical. Get feedback back to students while the material is still fresh, not a week later. Unlike lesson planning and unfortunately for teachers, it doesn’t get less burdensome over time. You’ll be spending evenings grading and preparing feedback for as many years you stay a teacher.
Mike: The best lesson plan I ever wrote was on a beer coaster. I was sitting at a bar called "Zinc" in western Massachusetts, relaxing with some fellow English teachers over some cocktails and - not surprisingly - discussing literature. If I remember correctly, we were debating the appropriateness of using The Bell Jar in a High School classroom. We unanimously agreed on its literary merit, but diverged from there. I remember one of my colleagues worrying about a man teaching this book; she felt the impact of the narrative on some girls was something only a woman would be equipped to understand. In the end, I agreed with her.
Our discussion was intense. I was also a couple of Sapphire and tonics into my evening. The bar was warm against the winter cold outside. All of this combined to put me into a trance, and I began jotting notes on my beer coaster. I was preparing to teach Capote's In Cold Blood. I worked quietly at my corner of the table for half an hour, tucked the beer coaster into my pocket, and rejoined the conversation.
The next day, I brought my beer coaster in to class and kept it hidden behind my book. I used it to help me introduce the new novel to the class. It had about ten sentences written on it, most of them a series of questions. I was, admittedly, nervous about teaching a two hour lesson using only a beer coaster and the sketchy outline it contained. I was even more nervous because this was a group of students thoroughly disinterested in literature. Nevertheless, they all ended up reading every page of that book. At the end of the term, in their evaluations, many of them wrote something like "I didn't read any of the books this year except for In Cold Blood." They attributed their interest to the opening lecture.
I showed the beer coaster to my Dean a few weeks later. He looked it over. After a few moments, he cackled with glee: "how the hell are we supposed to convince people to take lesson planning seriously when you write your best stuff on beer coasters!?" He loved the lesson. He hung the beer coaster on his wall. It was meant to be a reminder that lesson planning is easiest when we are in an intellectually stimulating and simultaneously relaxing environment. I happened to be at a bar. But I've had similar experiences at conferences, on vacation, watching movies, and in countless other places that were NOT at my computer in my office or sitting at my desk at home.
Whenever I have a lesson planning crisis and hit a brick wall, I remember my beer coaster and close my books. Inspiration can come in many forms.
Jack: My way of lesson planning certainly wouldn't work for everyone, but I think that aspects of it can be helpful for challenging both students and teachers. Essentially, I don't plan lessons, at least not in the same intensive engineering way that I have been known to plan vacations. Even though it's comforting to know exactly where a lesson is going to go, it ultimately doesn't leave room for some pretty important things.
First, an open lesson plan leaves room for lots of questions (this might necessitate teaching your students how to ask questions, what kinds of questions are productive, etc.). It leaves room for adjustment if the students get the material quickly or are totally disengaged by my presentation or aren't picking up on essential concepts. An open lesson plan also creates a sense of dynamism in the classroom and allows for some wiggle-room. Perhaps most importantly, an open lesson plan keeps me from spending all night trying to cobble together the perfect lesson despite my awareness of the fact that there is no perfect lesson. Ultimately, if kids are asking questions and struggling with material, if I'm paying attention to where they're failing and where they're succeeding, they're going to learn something.
So what is an open lesson plan? For me it was a lesson plan that consisted of just a few sentences that described what we would generally be looking at, what questions I would want the kids to be exploring, and what activities they would participate in. This is probably not very useful in a math or science classroom, but in a history class, this might look like the following:
Review basics of what we have covered on Civil War. What else is going on at the time of the war? Is there resistance to the war? Where? Why? What does this resistance have to do with race and class? Make list of groups and what they stood to gain or lose from the war and whether or not they supported it. Choose one and journal from that perspective. Share. Discuss.
Going into a class with only this can be scary, at least at first. But when it's scary in the classroom, (and here I mean because of adventurous teaching and not because of violence or negligence) it usually means that we're growing. In this case, it means that we all have to be able to think on our feet, to raise questions, to communicate, and to be flexible. Now, I should also note that the only way I can do this is by spending my summer planning out a year that makes sense, doing all the readings, and thinking about questions that are important. I lay out my entire year of lesson plans and then each day tinker with them so that they make sense given what we've done so far.
Then again, I don't have a curriculum-package that I have to get through...
Douglas: Preparing for class and creating class materials and homework takes a long time and is absolutely necessary for new teachers. I think you bite the bullet and do it. I would hasten to add that it’s important to under-plan each lesson. Think about the essential two points on your lesson and focus only on those. Leave a lot of time for questions and exploration; that’s where learning really is at.
SAVE EVERYTHING. Save the things you use, save the things you don’t use. Spend 10-20% of your planning time on organization. Keep a file cabinet of teaching materials and file actively. Save everything on your personal computer and your school network. It will help when you create more lesson plans but more importantly, it will save countless hours for the rest of your teaching career. Work very hard on lesson planning your first two years and you’ll thank yourself later. In subsequent years, all you have to do to lesson plan is take out and review your old materials and see what you want to use or how you want to revise.
I’d add something else: don’t neglect grading. Quick feedback is the key to learning, and thus, teaching. Reviewing student work is where you find out if students are actually learning what (you think) you’re teaching. It’s the mechanism where you and they can check whether they understand the material. Quick turnaround time is critical. Get feedback back to students while the material is still fresh, not a week later. Unlike lesson planning and unfortunately for teachers, it doesn’t get less burdensome over time. You’ll be spending evenings grading and preparing feedback for as many years you stay a teacher.
Mike: The best lesson plan I ever wrote was on a beer coaster. I was sitting at a bar called "Zinc" in western Massachusetts, relaxing with some fellow English teachers over some cocktails and - not surprisingly - discussing literature. If I remember correctly, we were debating the appropriateness of using The Bell Jar in a High School classroom. We unanimously agreed on its literary merit, but diverged from there. I remember one of my colleagues worrying about a man teaching this book; she felt the impact of the narrative on some girls was something only a woman would be equipped to understand. In the end, I agreed with her.
Our discussion was intense. I was also a couple of Sapphire and tonics into my evening. The bar was warm against the winter cold outside. All of this combined to put me into a trance, and I began jotting notes on my beer coaster. I was preparing to teach Capote's In Cold Blood. I worked quietly at my corner of the table for half an hour, tucked the beer coaster into my pocket, and rejoined the conversation.
The next day, I brought my beer coaster in to class and kept it hidden behind my book. I used it to help me introduce the new novel to the class. It had about ten sentences written on it, most of them a series of questions. I was, admittedly, nervous about teaching a two hour lesson using only a beer coaster and the sketchy outline it contained. I was even more nervous because this was a group of students thoroughly disinterested in literature. Nevertheless, they all ended up reading every page of that book. At the end of the term, in their evaluations, many of them wrote something like "I didn't read any of the books this year except for In Cold Blood." They attributed their interest to the opening lecture.
I showed the beer coaster to my Dean a few weeks later. He looked it over. After a few moments, he cackled with glee: "how the hell are we supposed to convince people to take lesson planning seriously when you write your best stuff on beer coasters!?" He loved the lesson. He hung the beer coaster on his wall. It was meant to be a reminder that lesson planning is easiest when we are in an intellectually stimulating and simultaneously relaxing environment. I happened to be at a bar. But I've had similar experiences at conferences, on vacation, watching movies, and in countless other places that were NOT at my computer in my office or sitting at my desk at home.
Whenever I have a lesson planning crisis and hit a brick wall, I remember my beer coaster and close my books. Inspiration can come in many forms.
Monday, November 27, 2006
On Difficult Students
Q: What do you do when you don't think you like your kids and you don't think they like you?
Douglas: I’m reminded of what John Wooden would tell his basketball players, “I may not like all of you, but I love all of you.” His players were family to him and he accepted them as such.
There will always be people that you like more than others. With some there will be an easy connection. With others you’ll have a harder time. With most people you meet, you get to choose how much time you’ll continue to spend together. But as a teacher, you’re stuck for nine months with students who you don’t necessarily like and who don’t necessarily like you. That year-long teacher-student contract means no matter what happened today, we’re both coming back and trying tomorrow.
Looking back, I consider those lessons in patience and commitment were two of teaching’s great rewards. The first rule is to be fair to all. Students have an incredibly sensitive antenna to fairness (particularly if it affects them personally) and treating a student worse because of your personaldislike of them undermines your standing with all of them.
Favoring a student, however subtly, will do the same, though to a lesser degree. I think students can at least understand teachers have favorites but can’t accept teachers that have least-favorites.
Distinguish disliking behavior from disliking the person. We usually don’t articulate why we usually “like” or “dislike” particular people but it’s usually because of how they act. As a teacher, you get to set standards of behavior and to an unprecedented degree, influence the way people act towards you. When you get upset at someone for not following them, point to the behavior and be explicit about why it displeased you. Students can correct behavior but not personhood. They learn social and educational expectations if they understand you are reacting to their not doing homework, their making snide comments, or talking out of turn. Do that consistently and even-handedly and students will respect you. In turn, you’ll find that kids you “don’t like” aren’t so bad after all.
Lastly, remember that students are developmentally immature and the relationship is not equal. You are not supposed to get back what you give. It’s great when you like your students and they like you back. But that’s not your job. In the end, teaching is service. I’ve never heard Mother Theresa complain that she didn’t like a person she served. A doctor provides the same care to patients whether he/she likes them or not. Likewise, as a teacher, you teach people that in any other context you would never choose to be friends with. Eventually you’ll likely grow to love them. That’s a great privilege.
Jack: In my first few years I think I did a pretty good job of connecting with kids and helping them understand why I was asking them to care about the subject matter. So, when I added on a section of 11th graders, it seemed fair enough to me that I would have one of the two sections that wasn’t tracked with other subjects. Essentially, although the History classes weren't tracked, other subjects were, meaning that the honors Math, Science, and English students would also be together in History; I would have one of the other groups. They also put the few behavioral issue kids in my class, figuring that I would know what to do with them.
It was funny how different that class was from all of the other classes I had ever taught. They bad-mouthed each other, they didn't do their homework, a few even honestly told me that though they liked me, they had no interest in the class. Our school had great kids and a great school culture, so the attitude problems weren't fundamentally disturbing; but relatively, they were, and I started to resent them. I dreaded going to class. I watched the clock. But somewhere deep down I believed that I would turn them. I talked with them daily about their behavior and their efforts. I encouraged them and chastised them. I gave them more fun activities than I had planned to, but never lowered my standards. I told them what I wanted from them and asked them what they wanted, and we worked towards a consensus. And, eventually, they came around. I thought I was pretty good.
But then I taught a summer program for kids who were talented but who went to the city's worst schools. And even though I had taught the program before and liked it, I had a terrible summer. My kids didn't want to do the work I assigned them, they tried to sleep in class, they read magazines instead of their assignments, they didn't do their homework. And I suffered. I didn't want to be there. I counted the days until the end of the summer, and at the end of it, I had reached some of them, but not all, not nearly all, and I felt like I had failed.
Looking back, I realize that the one thing I didn't do well that summer was foster communication about why we were there. I didn't tell them what my vision for our class was, nor did I ask them about theirs. We didn't work towards understanding each other. I assumed that because they had volunteered for the program, they wanted to fill in the gaps that were created by their weak schools. But many, if not most of the students, were there because they had been told it was the way to get to college. The result was that I came off as a tyrant and they came off as lazy, and sadder than the inaccuracy of those perceptions is the fact that it limited how much learning took place. I drove them forward, but at the expense of fostering a sense of community or a love for learning.
Ultimately, teaching can't happen without buy-in - from the teacher and the students. Sometimes I got it by being funny, sometimes by being interesting, sometimes by demanding it. But when I didn't get it, the class stopped working. If I had that summer to do over, I think I would start by sitting down with each of my students and asking them why they were there.
The student who grew the most that summer was the student who had initially been the biggest distraction. As a result, I made him go on a number of short walks with me where we talked about his behavior. We also talked about what we wanted and how we could help each other. On the last day of class he walked across the auditorium and hugged me.
Mike: During their last year in High School, students across China take the gao kao, a sort of SAT on steroids. The test has four required sections— Chinese, English, Marxism and Mao Tse Dong Thought, and Math—and a section you can choose (Biology, Physics, more Math, Chemistry, more Chinese, etc). As the gao kao scores are calculated and released during the summer, the central government and provincial governments simultaneously release tables providing that year's standards for admission at every school in China. So, for example, a student from Guizhou province needed a gao kao score of 300 to be admitted to Guizhou University last year (out of a total of 750). They needed a score of closer to 700 to be admitted to Beijing University, China's top school (fourteen people from the province made it). The gao kao score is the only criterion used for college admission (although, as in America, the rich, famous, and well connected find they have an entirely different set of standards).
After being admitted, the school will tell you your major. If a significant portion of your 300 total points came from the English section, you will be an English major. If it came from the Marxism section, you will be a politics major. If you have high math scores, you get a coveted spot in the Engineering department. If your scores are all average, maybe the school will make you a dance major.
Guizhou University, where I teach, also has what are called "second class students." These are students with gao kao scores below the required score of 300. They pay extra and are granted admission.
Last year I taught a class of 37 "second class students." These teenagers were forced to major in English, could not speak English, hated studying it, and were always being told they were "second class." They had never in their life been allowed to choose a class and never would me; there is no such thing as an "elective" in China. They come from a culture that does not encourage dating, part-time jobs, or the other extra-curricular or creative activities that bring affirmation to American teenagers. Their lives centered on classes they did not want and could not control.
These were not happy kids.
The other teachers in my department openly despised the "second-class" students. They complained when assigned to teach them, and brought an attitude of disappointment to their lessons with them. The second-class students come from either extremely poor families or extremely rich families. The poor families are so desperate to get their kids into the province's top school that they sacrifice everything to buy them a second-class slot. These kids experience a depth of guilt-induced pressure I had never before thought possible (and I'm Jewish). They know what their families have done, but they have lousy teachers who don't respect them, so their already stunted skills are given little chance to blossom. The longer they are here,the more desperate and unhinged they become.
The rich kids are here because daddy can buy them in. And daddy will buy them a job. They don't need a degree, but it's fun to go to college for four years. They certainly don't need to speak English. Of the 37 students, about half had a kindergartener's English proficiency. Six of them were at a 5th or 6th grade level. Six could understand nothing more than "hello" and "goodbye." The others were scattered in-between.
Each week I would enter class with a combination of dread, depression, and rage. I have never felt so incompetent, irrelevant, and frustrated in my life. The moment each two-hour class ended, I would feel a few minutes of elation; these would quickly fade as I began my countdown to the next week's class. Thursday mornings, 10am. T-minus one week and counting.
I tried every trick I knew. I tried using the textbook; I tried hands-on lessons; I tried singing songs; I tried taking walks outside with the class; I tried playing basketball with them; I triedpronunciation drills; I tried using movies. It all failed. It all failed…utterly. They would text-message each other, smoke, and spit on the floor during class. They would come late, leave early, and take 30 minute bathroom breaks. Forget about homework. Forget about studying for tests. Failing classes is impossible at our University—students pay a fine if they score less than a 60 and are then given a passing grade.
At times I hated them. Many of them seemed to hate me, too. They hated me for speaking English, and they hated me for being part of a system that had given them such a plate full of ass to eat for their entire life. I felt like they couldn't even see me. One of them—a girl's whose visage made me want to commit random acts of violence—would speak to me in Chinese and nothing else. When I could not understand her (which was most of the time since at that point I did not speak Chinese), or would ask her to speak English (it was, after all, an English class), she would snarl at me, open her cell phone, and call her father.
Failing her felt so good I almost laughed with delight as I entered her final score, "12." She, of course, didn't care. Daddy paid the fine, and she advanced to her junior year. The saddest thing about the "second class students" is that none of this - or at least not much of it - was their fault. They were put in an impossible situation, and were reacting as most people might in similar circumstances.
During my best moments, I remembered this. When I was feeling positive, I would be able to de-personalize all of the frustrations and failures. I would show the students I respected them, did not consider them "second class" and would do everything in my power to help them improve, if that's what they wanted. By the end of the exhausting year, they knew that I was the one teacher who would never give up on them. They knew I was working my tail off to make our time together worth-while.
They still hated English. They still hated our school. But we had reached a sort of equilibrium together.I think the cause of most classroom suffering is systematic. It has little to do with the student and teacher who find themselves at odds. They are pawns in a larger game. If they can remember that, and remind each other of that, they may form a kind of solidarity. If they can set the system aside and do what they need to do to educate each other, they win. If not, they shadow-box with an invented other who isn't really even there. The student sees authority, or the system, or another hypocritical adult. The teacher sees lazy or burn-out or another disrespectful child. In this case, a systematic labeling is taking place that has nothing to do with people actually trying to survive in a so-called "learning" environment.
The teacher's job, I think, is to advocate for the students and carve out enough space to let them do what they need to do in order to be open to learning. The teacher needs to fight off the gao kao, the SAT, the "curriculum", the labels, or whatever else is creating a poisonous environment. The students don't have the wherewithal to do so on their own. I couldn't really do that in my "second class" classroom. The system is too deeply embedded here. The "curriculum" is too rigorous. If I ever found myself in a school in America that felt similar, where despair was the norm and creativity was crushed, I would quit. I'm not made of stern enough material to survive that sort of thing.
But in some schools, there's enough wiggle room to build a bridge away from the negativity. If the teacher is given freedom to create, and if she has enough energy and time to do so, there's always a third way. Maybe my Conversational English class should have become an American and Chinese Pop Music class; maybe I should have turned it into a kung fu class; maybe I could have divided the 37 students into groups of about 9 and met the smaller groups for 30 minutes a week, instead of the large group for 2 hours; etc. If the material is changed, or if the class leaves the classroom itself, or if the grading policy is altered…if the teacher has the freedom to be radical, I think any group of students can be turned around. Most teachers, of course, don't have this freedom and are limited to the tools the system leaves at her disposal. The process of teaching in this way, and the results, are depressing, and this is one of the central flaws with schooling as we know it.
Douglas: I’m reminded of what John Wooden would tell his basketball players, “I may not like all of you, but I love all of you.” His players were family to him and he accepted them as such.
There will always be people that you like more than others. With some there will be an easy connection. With others you’ll have a harder time. With most people you meet, you get to choose how much time you’ll continue to spend together. But as a teacher, you’re stuck for nine months with students who you don’t necessarily like and who don’t necessarily like you. That year-long teacher-student contract means no matter what happened today, we’re both coming back and trying tomorrow.
Looking back, I consider those lessons in patience and commitment were two of teaching’s great rewards. The first rule is to be fair to all. Students have an incredibly sensitive antenna to fairness (particularly if it affects them personally) and treating a student worse because of your personaldislike of them undermines your standing with all of them.
Favoring a student, however subtly, will do the same, though to a lesser degree. I think students can at least understand teachers have favorites but can’t accept teachers that have least-favorites.
Distinguish disliking behavior from disliking the person. We usually don’t articulate why we usually “like” or “dislike” particular people but it’s usually because of how they act. As a teacher, you get to set standards of behavior and to an unprecedented degree, influence the way people act towards you. When you get upset at someone for not following them, point to the behavior and be explicit about why it displeased you. Students can correct behavior but not personhood. They learn social and educational expectations if they understand you are reacting to their not doing homework, their making snide comments, or talking out of turn. Do that consistently and even-handedly and students will respect you. In turn, you’ll find that kids you “don’t like” aren’t so bad after all.
Lastly, remember that students are developmentally immature and the relationship is not equal. You are not supposed to get back what you give. It’s great when you like your students and they like you back. But that’s not your job. In the end, teaching is service. I’ve never heard Mother Theresa complain that she didn’t like a person she served. A doctor provides the same care to patients whether he/she likes them or not. Likewise, as a teacher, you teach people that in any other context you would never choose to be friends with. Eventually you’ll likely grow to love them. That’s a great privilege.
Jack: In my first few years I think I did a pretty good job of connecting with kids and helping them understand why I was asking them to care about the subject matter. So, when I added on a section of 11th graders, it seemed fair enough to me that I would have one of the two sections that wasn’t tracked with other subjects. Essentially, although the History classes weren't tracked, other subjects were, meaning that the honors Math, Science, and English students would also be together in History; I would have one of the other groups. They also put the few behavioral issue kids in my class, figuring that I would know what to do with them.
It was funny how different that class was from all of the other classes I had ever taught. They bad-mouthed each other, they didn't do their homework, a few even honestly told me that though they liked me, they had no interest in the class. Our school had great kids and a great school culture, so the attitude problems weren't fundamentally disturbing; but relatively, they were, and I started to resent them. I dreaded going to class. I watched the clock. But somewhere deep down I believed that I would turn them. I talked with them daily about their behavior and their efforts. I encouraged them and chastised them. I gave them more fun activities than I had planned to, but never lowered my standards. I told them what I wanted from them and asked them what they wanted, and we worked towards a consensus. And, eventually, they came around. I thought I was pretty good.
But then I taught a summer program for kids who were talented but who went to the city's worst schools. And even though I had taught the program before and liked it, I had a terrible summer. My kids didn't want to do the work I assigned them, they tried to sleep in class, they read magazines instead of their assignments, they didn't do their homework. And I suffered. I didn't want to be there. I counted the days until the end of the summer, and at the end of it, I had reached some of them, but not all, not nearly all, and I felt like I had failed.
Looking back, I realize that the one thing I didn't do well that summer was foster communication about why we were there. I didn't tell them what my vision for our class was, nor did I ask them about theirs. We didn't work towards understanding each other. I assumed that because they had volunteered for the program, they wanted to fill in the gaps that were created by their weak schools. But many, if not most of the students, were there because they had been told it was the way to get to college. The result was that I came off as a tyrant and they came off as lazy, and sadder than the inaccuracy of those perceptions is the fact that it limited how much learning took place. I drove them forward, but at the expense of fostering a sense of community or a love for learning.
Ultimately, teaching can't happen without buy-in - from the teacher and the students. Sometimes I got it by being funny, sometimes by being interesting, sometimes by demanding it. But when I didn't get it, the class stopped working. If I had that summer to do over, I think I would start by sitting down with each of my students and asking them why they were there.
The student who grew the most that summer was the student who had initially been the biggest distraction. As a result, I made him go on a number of short walks with me where we talked about his behavior. We also talked about what we wanted and how we could help each other. On the last day of class he walked across the auditorium and hugged me.
Mike: During their last year in High School, students across China take the gao kao, a sort of SAT on steroids. The test has four required sections— Chinese, English, Marxism and Mao Tse Dong Thought, and Math—and a section you can choose (Biology, Physics, more Math, Chemistry, more Chinese, etc). As the gao kao scores are calculated and released during the summer, the central government and provincial governments simultaneously release tables providing that year's standards for admission at every school in China. So, for example, a student from Guizhou province needed a gao kao score of 300 to be admitted to Guizhou University last year (out of a total of 750). They needed a score of closer to 700 to be admitted to Beijing University, China's top school (fourteen people from the province made it). The gao kao score is the only criterion used for college admission (although, as in America, the rich, famous, and well connected find they have an entirely different set of standards).
After being admitted, the school will tell you your major. If a significant portion of your 300 total points came from the English section, you will be an English major. If it came from the Marxism section, you will be a politics major. If you have high math scores, you get a coveted spot in the Engineering department. If your scores are all average, maybe the school will make you a dance major.
Guizhou University, where I teach, also has what are called "second class students." These are students with gao kao scores below the required score of 300. They pay extra and are granted admission.
Last year I taught a class of 37 "second class students." These teenagers were forced to major in English, could not speak English, hated studying it, and were always being told they were "second class." They had never in their life been allowed to choose a class and never would me; there is no such thing as an "elective" in China. They come from a culture that does not encourage dating, part-time jobs, or the other extra-curricular or creative activities that bring affirmation to American teenagers. Their lives centered on classes they did not want and could not control.
These were not happy kids.
The other teachers in my department openly despised the "second-class" students. They complained when assigned to teach them, and brought an attitude of disappointment to their lessons with them. The second-class students come from either extremely poor families or extremely rich families. The poor families are so desperate to get their kids into the province's top school that they sacrifice everything to buy them a second-class slot. These kids experience a depth of guilt-induced pressure I had never before thought possible (and I'm Jewish). They know what their families have done, but they have lousy teachers who don't respect them, so their already stunted skills are given little chance to blossom. The longer they are here,the more desperate and unhinged they become.
The rich kids are here because daddy can buy them in. And daddy will buy them a job. They don't need a degree, but it's fun to go to college for four years. They certainly don't need to speak English. Of the 37 students, about half had a kindergartener's English proficiency. Six of them were at a 5th or 6th grade level. Six could understand nothing more than "hello" and "goodbye." The others were scattered in-between.
Each week I would enter class with a combination of dread, depression, and rage. I have never felt so incompetent, irrelevant, and frustrated in my life. The moment each two-hour class ended, I would feel a few minutes of elation; these would quickly fade as I began my countdown to the next week's class. Thursday mornings, 10am. T-minus one week and counting.
I tried every trick I knew. I tried using the textbook; I tried hands-on lessons; I tried singing songs; I tried taking walks outside with the class; I tried playing basketball with them; I triedpronunciation drills; I tried using movies. It all failed. It all failed…utterly. They would text-message each other, smoke, and spit on the floor during class. They would come late, leave early, and take 30 minute bathroom breaks. Forget about homework. Forget about studying for tests. Failing classes is impossible at our University—students pay a fine if they score less than a 60 and are then given a passing grade.
At times I hated them. Many of them seemed to hate me, too. They hated me for speaking English, and they hated me for being part of a system that had given them such a plate full of ass to eat for their entire life. I felt like they couldn't even see me. One of them—a girl's whose visage made me want to commit random acts of violence—would speak to me in Chinese and nothing else. When I could not understand her (which was most of the time since at that point I did not speak Chinese), or would ask her to speak English (it was, after all, an English class), she would snarl at me, open her cell phone, and call her father.
Failing her felt so good I almost laughed with delight as I entered her final score, "12." She, of course, didn't care. Daddy paid the fine, and she advanced to her junior year. The saddest thing about the "second class students" is that none of this - or at least not much of it - was their fault. They were put in an impossible situation, and were reacting as most people might in similar circumstances.
During my best moments, I remembered this. When I was feeling positive, I would be able to de-personalize all of the frustrations and failures. I would show the students I respected them, did not consider them "second class" and would do everything in my power to help them improve, if that's what they wanted. By the end of the exhausting year, they knew that I was the one teacher who would never give up on them. They knew I was working my tail off to make our time together worth-while.
They still hated English. They still hated our school. But we had reached a sort of equilibrium together.I think the cause of most classroom suffering is systematic. It has little to do with the student and teacher who find themselves at odds. They are pawns in a larger game. If they can remember that, and remind each other of that, they may form a kind of solidarity. If they can set the system aside and do what they need to do to educate each other, they win. If not, they shadow-box with an invented other who isn't really even there. The student sees authority, or the system, or another hypocritical adult. The teacher sees lazy or burn-out or another disrespectful child. In this case, a systematic labeling is taking place that has nothing to do with people actually trying to survive in a so-called "learning" environment.
The teacher's job, I think, is to advocate for the students and carve out enough space to let them do what they need to do in order to be open to learning. The teacher needs to fight off the gao kao, the SAT, the "curriculum", the labels, or whatever else is creating a poisonous environment. The students don't have the wherewithal to do so on their own. I couldn't really do that in my "second class" classroom. The system is too deeply embedded here. The "curriculum" is too rigorous. If I ever found myself in a school in America that felt similar, where despair was the norm and creativity was crushed, I would quit. I'm not made of stern enough material to survive that sort of thing.
But in some schools, there's enough wiggle room to build a bridge away from the negativity. If the teacher is given freedom to create, and if she has enough energy and time to do so, there's always a third way. Maybe my Conversational English class should have become an American and Chinese Pop Music class; maybe I should have turned it into a kung fu class; maybe I could have divided the 37 students into groups of about 9 and met the smaller groups for 30 minutes a week, instead of the large group for 2 hours; etc. If the material is changed, or if the class leaves the classroom itself, or if the grading policy is altered…if the teacher has the freedom to be radical, I think any group of students can be turned around. Most teachers, of course, don't have this freedom and are limited to the tools the system leaves at her disposal. The process of teaching in this way, and the results, are depressing, and this is one of the central flaws with schooling as we know it.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
On Energy
Q: Teaching is an act of giving - mentally, physically, and spiritually. It requires not only giving in those respects in the classroom, but also engaging those parts of yourself in a way that is honest,challenging, and exhausting. Where does the energy come from?
Jack: My energy comes from feeling like I can live my life in my teaching. I can't make it through too many days feeling like I'm teaching for someone else; in many ways, it has to be for me. If I come home at the end of the day and feel like I need "me" time, it wasn't a good day. And that isn't sustainable - if the only time I'm feeling like I'm living the life I want to lead is the half of my waking day when I'm not in the classroom, I'm only living half a life. The summer isn't long enough to undo that feeling.
So what makes me feel like I'm living my life? I need to be able to engage multiple parts of myself. I can play the role of teacher, but I can't play the role of someone else. That means that I need to be able to be myself. And that's a scary thing at the beginning of the year. One of my intstincts is to be what the kids expect, to construct a stock-character who the kids will hardly even see - someone so standard that I'll be invisible.
But there's another instinct, much stronger, that drives me to take the risk of putting myself out there. Sometimes it took the kids a while to come around, but they did. And eventually they would start to be themselves, too.
I need to be able to think with my students. That means that we need to be tackling questions that are of interest to them and to me. I need to be intellectually stimulated and engaged. I need to be able to laugh with my students, to worship with them, to play with them. The day needs to be about me as much as it is about them. And if it is about me, I can go home and feel like I lived my life. I don't need anything but a good night's sleep.
Douglas: Teaching is a demanding craft; you have to be ready to perform four or five times a day, everyday. In most jobs, you can lay low on an off day, perhaps do a little less when you’re not up for it. Not with teaching. The responsibility of leading a classroom demands total attention for the time you have with your students and that responsibility gives teaching its meaning. You have to bring all of yourself to the classroom, or else it shows. To set high expectations for students means you have to model that and students sniff out hypocrisy and inconsistency like bloodhounds.
How does one stay true to giving your all? I’d say anxiety and adrenalin propelled me through my first two years. As a beginning teacher, I was just learning the material, learning how to effectively teach it, learning classroom management and the host of other skills in the craft. I think the novice’s desire and energy brought me to class, ready to give, my first two years. Once you’ve reached a manageable level of competency, you have to figure out how to remain fresh in the classroom. I think about it this way: a teacher is a conduit between students and material. My energy and my interest in the subject is a model for the students in my class. That means I have to find ways for material to be new and fresh to me. It can be new ways of teaching the same material or teaching new materials.
What’s critical is the role of professional development. Schools should be learning communities, which means necessarily, teachers should be modeling learning. A teacher that doesn’t seem interested in learning him/herself is a poor teacher and that’s why burned out teachers are poor teachers: they just don’t care anymore. Going away to conferences, taking classes, sharing with other vibrant teachers, are all ways to recharge.
Lastly, giving all of yourself requires that you have something to give. Again, the first two years are easy, ironically, because they are so hard. As your career progresses, how you take care of yourself mentally, physically, and spiritually creates the well from which you draw energy. What you’re creating in your personal life will determine how much you bring into the classroom. So keep investing in your personal relationships, stay intellectually engaged, keep running, and maintain your spiritual life. You and your students will be better off for it.
Mike: Teaching is an act of giving. In safe, caring environments, it is also an act of receiving. The teacher's relationship with her students is reciprocal; mental, physical, and spiritual energy is thus constantly burned and refreshed by each member of the learning community.
In unsafe environments, where teachers or students feel their identity is ignored or disrespected, this reciprocal relationship is impossible. Fear prevents us from sharing our energy, limiting the pool the community can draw on. The teacher therefore burns out in a rather literal way: without the help of her students, her energy is spent far faster than she can ever replace it. A few hours at home after school each day is not enough to refuel.
The teacher is running on fumes by February and crawls into the summer months a broken husk. Alternatively, the teacher simply stops giving. This strategy of self-preservation keeps her sane, but drains the job of any life. Boredom replaces burnout.
In safe environments, students and teachers learn and grow together. The teacher feels comfortable showing weakness and asking for help. In this way, she models humility. She lets the student see how the subject matter - be it literature, history, basketball, or mathematics - is part of her life. She is able to take learning seriously enough to be consistently life-altering. There is something raw and experimental in what she does, because she has not stopped learning. The students are the focus of this learning experience.
When I teach, my energy comes form my community. The more my school is integrated into my community - however I define it - the more energy I have. This means the best schools will be local and they will include the families of the teachers and students. The energy generated by the act of teaching and learning will be self-reinforcing, and will come in all shapes and sizes. At times, this immersion in community will be exhausting. But it is the only lifestyle of teaching that is ultimately sustainable.
Jack: My energy comes from feeling like I can live my life in my teaching. I can't make it through too many days feeling like I'm teaching for someone else; in many ways, it has to be for me. If I come home at the end of the day and feel like I need "me" time, it wasn't a good day. And that isn't sustainable - if the only time I'm feeling like I'm living the life I want to lead is the half of my waking day when I'm not in the classroom, I'm only living half a life. The summer isn't long enough to undo that feeling.
So what makes me feel like I'm living my life? I need to be able to engage multiple parts of myself. I can play the role of teacher, but I can't play the role of someone else. That means that I need to be able to be myself. And that's a scary thing at the beginning of the year. One of my intstincts is to be what the kids expect, to construct a stock-character who the kids will hardly even see - someone so standard that I'll be invisible.
But there's another instinct, much stronger, that drives me to take the risk of putting myself out there. Sometimes it took the kids a while to come around, but they did. And eventually they would start to be themselves, too.
I need to be able to think with my students. That means that we need to be tackling questions that are of interest to them and to me. I need to be intellectually stimulated and engaged. I need to be able to laugh with my students, to worship with them, to play with them. The day needs to be about me as much as it is about them. And if it is about me, I can go home and feel like I lived my life. I don't need anything but a good night's sleep.
Douglas: Teaching is a demanding craft; you have to be ready to perform four or five times a day, everyday. In most jobs, you can lay low on an off day, perhaps do a little less when you’re not up for it. Not with teaching. The responsibility of leading a classroom demands total attention for the time you have with your students and that responsibility gives teaching its meaning. You have to bring all of yourself to the classroom, or else it shows. To set high expectations for students means you have to model that and students sniff out hypocrisy and inconsistency like bloodhounds.
How does one stay true to giving your all? I’d say anxiety and adrenalin propelled me through my first two years. As a beginning teacher, I was just learning the material, learning how to effectively teach it, learning classroom management and the host of other skills in the craft. I think the novice’s desire and energy brought me to class, ready to give, my first two years. Once you’ve reached a manageable level of competency, you have to figure out how to remain fresh in the classroom. I think about it this way: a teacher is a conduit between students and material. My energy and my interest in the subject is a model for the students in my class. That means I have to find ways for material to be new and fresh to me. It can be new ways of teaching the same material or teaching new materials.
What’s critical is the role of professional development. Schools should be learning communities, which means necessarily, teachers should be modeling learning. A teacher that doesn’t seem interested in learning him/herself is a poor teacher and that’s why burned out teachers are poor teachers: they just don’t care anymore. Going away to conferences, taking classes, sharing with other vibrant teachers, are all ways to recharge.
Lastly, giving all of yourself requires that you have something to give. Again, the first two years are easy, ironically, because they are so hard. As your career progresses, how you take care of yourself mentally, physically, and spiritually creates the well from which you draw energy. What you’re creating in your personal life will determine how much you bring into the classroom. So keep investing in your personal relationships, stay intellectually engaged, keep running, and maintain your spiritual life. You and your students will be better off for it.
Mike: Teaching is an act of giving. In safe, caring environments, it is also an act of receiving. The teacher's relationship with her students is reciprocal; mental, physical, and spiritual energy is thus constantly burned and refreshed by each member of the learning community.
In unsafe environments, where teachers or students feel their identity is ignored or disrespected, this reciprocal relationship is impossible. Fear prevents us from sharing our energy, limiting the pool the community can draw on. The teacher therefore burns out in a rather literal way: without the help of her students, her energy is spent far faster than she can ever replace it. A few hours at home after school each day is not enough to refuel.
The teacher is running on fumes by February and crawls into the summer months a broken husk. Alternatively, the teacher simply stops giving. This strategy of self-preservation keeps her sane, but drains the job of any life. Boredom replaces burnout.
In safe environments, students and teachers learn and grow together. The teacher feels comfortable showing weakness and asking for help. In this way, she models humility. She lets the student see how the subject matter - be it literature, history, basketball, or mathematics - is part of her life. She is able to take learning seriously enough to be consistently life-altering. There is something raw and experimental in what she does, because she has not stopped learning. The students are the focus of this learning experience.
When I teach, my energy comes form my community. The more my school is integrated into my community - however I define it - the more energy I have. This means the best schools will be local and they will include the families of the teachers and students. The energy generated by the act of teaching and learning will be self-reinforcing, and will come in all shapes and sizes. At times, this immersion in community will be exhausting. But it is the only lifestyle of teaching that is ultimately sustainable.
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