A TEACHER’S COMPASS: Five Essential Elements of Exceptional Teaching (Part 5)

This is the fifth and final essay in this series.  The first four, Release Your Personality, Tap Their Spirits, Engage Their Minds, and Navigate Their Limits have been posted previously and can still be viewed on this blog.  Collectively, these five essays in A Teacher’s Compass were born of my attempt to conceptualize in plain language the essential elements of exceptional teaching.  They comprise my credo of teaching, my best advice to the novice and veteran teacher alike.  (Each element is discussed more fully in a book I am writing; these essays here are short summaries of the elements.)  As always, I encourage replies.

#5  Prove You Care. This is really different than saying you care.  Whoever said They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care was right on target.  When students believe that you really care about them as people and as learners, they are more willing to try, more likely to care themselves.  The lower achieving the students are, the more this principle rings true.  The research is abundant and clear:  low-achieving students respond positively to strong interpersonal relationships.  So, when threatening them with grades isn’t working, think about building relationships with them and proving that you care.

There are lots of ways to prove you care.  Here are a few:
•    Teach them as if they were your own children
•    Help them when they struggle
•    Encourage them at every opportunity with constant sincere praise
•    Acknowledge their individual outside interests
•    Ask them what they think about important things
•    Be patient
•    Teach them about integrity – be true to your word
•    Give them choice in things that don’t really matter to you
•    Offer them help when others won’t be around to ridicule them
•    Respect them even when they don’t respect themselves
•    Care about them even when they don’t care about themselves
•    Believe in them even when they don’t believe in themselves
•    Listen to their story
•    Ask them about their families, or boyfriends, or things that weigh heavy on their minds
•    Notice their new shoes, or earrings, or jacket or hairdo.  Say something.
•    Tell them they are important and that they matter
•    Go to their dances and plays and sporting events
•    Publicly acknowledge their good work, or even their attempt at good work

But beware:    Students can spot insincerity and hypocrisy a mile away.  If you don’t really care, they’ll know.  If you do really care, find a way to show them.  And always remember:  They may have no other adult in their lives who shows they care.  You may be all they have.   They need you.  They want you in their lives.  And, once they believe you are on their side and rooting for them, they may do anything for you.  They may try really hard for you.  Prove You Care.

(These five elements have made all the difference for me as a teacher and, I believe, for the thousands of young people who have been my students throughout the two and a half decades of my career.  I hope they have sparked inspiration and reflection in those who have read them.  I hope they have refocused our perspectives of why we became teachers in the first place.  After all, that decision most certainly had nothing to do with state exams or any of the other trappings that only tangentially have to do with teaching and learning. )

Release Your Personality
Tap Their Spirits
Engage Their Minds
Navigate Their Limits
Prove You Care
dven.

A TEACHER’S COMPASS: Five Essential Elements of Exceptional Teaching (Part 4)

This is the fourth of five essays over the past few weeks. The first three, Release Your Personality, Tap Their Spirits and Engage Their Minds have been posted previously and can still be viewed on this blog. Collectively, the five essays in A Teacher’s Compass were born of my attempt to conceptualize in plain language the essential elements of exceptional teaching. They comprise my credo of teaching, my best advice to the novice and veteran teacher alike. (Each element is discussed more fully in a book I am writing; these essays here are short summaries of the elements.) As always, I encourage replies.

#4 Navigate Their Limits. This element may well be the hardest one of all, but one that makes a tremendous difference in the amount and quality of learning we glean from our students. The good news is that it is easier to do if the other four elements are in place and practiced consistently. (We’ll talk about the final element #5, Prove You Care, next week.) Most teachers know the oft-spoken adage that it’s better to overestimate the abilities of our kids than to underestimate them. To be sure, it is always easier to suddenly back off than to suddenly become more challenging. That’s pretty good advice. But the idea here is to strike that space between, where kids are pushed to point of giving up without actually doing so. It is within this space that the greatest amount of quality learning occurs. The single most common gripe I hear during interviews with students is that their teacher is too easy and ‘treats us like we’re babies’. And the interesting thing is that this common criticism comes with equal frequency from high and low-ability kids. We sometimes go so slow – particularly with low-achieving kids - in our attempt to keep them from giving up and shutting down that we actually cause those behaviors to occur. Kids of all ability levels do not like being talked down to and they generally rise to amazingly high levels of expectation time and again if those expectations are clear, reasonable and supported by hard work and caring from their teacher. To assume they are capable is be right nearly always. To assume they are incapable is to be right nearly always as well. When expectations are low, students spot that quickly and respond in kind, becoming lazy and uninvolved as they sit back and let their teachers do all the work. I suppose this is human nature; teachers react similarly to administrators whose expectations of teachers are low. Worse still, teachers of low-achieving kids who underestimate what their students are capable of achieving serve to widen the achievement gap though all the while they believe they are giving these kids a chance. In actuality, they are inadvertently ripping them off.

I choose the word navigate very deliberately. It implies continually adjusting. It connotes the inherent obstacles and difficulties, and alludes to the care with which we must steer the level of our instruction in this space between too hard and too easy. There is a continuum between too easy and too hard; the goal is not to strike the middle, but to shoot for that place just shy of too hard. It’s important to realize that this continuum is not static, but dynamic, and must be carefully accessed for each topic, each unit, each lesson, each project; indeed, for each student.
too easy                                                  shoot for this   too hard

In my 20-something year teaching career, I have been blessed to have taught Algebra 1 to a class of high school seniors populated with 19 year olds (several of whom were convicted felons) as well as having taught high-achieving juniors in AP Calculus. I have learned that the continuum holds true for both. And while the endpoints of too easy and too hard may be defined differently, the notion is the same: Decide their limits by shooting high and assuming they can, assess their progress constantly, support them at every turn and be amazed at their accomplishments. And yours too. Navigate Their Limits. dven.

(to be continued…)

A TEACHER’S COMPASS: Five Essential Elements of Exceptional Teaching (Part 3)

This is the third of five essays over the next few weeks.  The first two, Release Your Personality and Tap Their Spirits have been posted previously and can still be viewed on this blog.  Collectively, the five essays in A Teacher’s Compass were born of my attempt to conceptualize in plain language the essential elements of exceptional teaching.  They comprise my credo of teaching, my best advice to the novice and veteran teacher alike.  (Each element is discussed more fully in a book I am writing; these essays here are short summaries of the elements.)  As always, I encourage replies.

#3 Engage Their Minds. When all is said and done, this is the point of education.  Nothing else really matters; if we fail at this, we fail – period.  It is never enough to have students do, if what they are being asked to do is not accompanied by thinking.  The litmus test must be what and how much students are learning at any given time in any given class.

We sometimes confuse the how with the what and how much:
•    The how is comprised of the means by which learning is apt to occur.
•     The what and how much are the ends, the actual learning.

When we confuse these, we find ourselves doing things that, while research supported and possible avenues for learning, may or may not be achieving the end result of significant student learning.  For example, we put kids in cooperative work groups, assign time-consuming projects, or have them perform with manipulatives or other “hands-on” tasks even when the work groups may be dysfunctional, the projects may contain trace amounts of substantive content and the “hands-on” activities often have no benefit of being “minds-on” or have no connection in the students’ minds with the concepts they are supposed to be learning.  There are countless examples of cases where we focus on the means – often because of administrative insistence – and forget all about what the students are actually learning, the true ends.

It would be wrong to suggest that these things never engage minds or impact real learning.  It is to say that these strategies are not the goal in and of themselves and that we must not lose sight of the true goal.  Done well, all of these things can cause a great deal of learning to occur.

Engaging their minds means putting content in relevant, student-meaningful contexts.  It means exploring and exploiting their natural curiosities.  It means pushing them to think about ideas, to grapple with various perspectives and solutions, asking “What if…?”, and doing so with rich, complex tasks that are very often messy and may well raise more questions than they answer.  It’s hard work for them and for us.  But the multiple choice questions they may face on state tests in May are no match for students who have basic knowledge and have been taught to think.   Engage Their Minds.  dven.

(to be continued…)

A TEACHER’S COMPASS: Five Essential Elements of Exceptional Teaching (Part 2)

This is the second of five essays over the next few weeks.  The first, Release Your Personality, has been posted previously and can still be viewed on this blog.  Collectively, the five essays in A Teacher’s Compass were born of my attempt to conceptualize in plain language the essential elements of exceptional teaching.  They comprise my credo of teaching, my best advice to the novice and veteran teacher alike.  (Each element is discussed more fully in a book I am writing; these essays here are short summaries of the elements.)  As always, I encourage replies.

#2 Tap Their Spirits. This is akin to releasing their personalities.  My first essay in this series, Release Your Personality, was about you.  The focus here is on them.  Adolescents have such abundant spirit.  Isn’t that partly why we chose to teach in the first place?  We like the age.  If we didn’t we’d sell houses or something.  Truth is, teachers spend a great deal of energy trying to suppress teenagers’ spirits.  And this is done often for good reason.  But mostly, we choose to oppress it rather than tap into it.  Their spirits are a great source of enthusiasm and curiosity, if we know how to tap them.  For example, consider the following list.
Most teenagers like to talk.
Most teenagers like to talk about themselves.
Most teenagers appreciate sincere compliments.
Most teenagers like to move around.
Most teenagers like to text message.
Most teenagers like to be on the computer.
Most teenagers like to create things that reflect their developing identities, such as MySpace or FaceBook pages.
Most teenagers want to look good in front their peers (physically and otherwise).
Most teenagers like to laugh.
Most teenagers have an opinion.
Most teenagers want to feel like their voices are heard.
Most teenagers like to be better at something than other teenagers.
Most teenagers have expert hypocrisy-radar.
Most teenagers are curious about your life.
Most teenagers want an adult in their lives who they can trust, someone who     resides in that place between parent and peer.

So the question becomes:  How can I arrange my instruction so that these things they want and like are encouraged but also channeled into the content and structure of my course?  How can I engage students in activities, for example, that get them to talk about themselves while building community?  Or allow them to move around during a controlled activity that is embedded in content?   Teenagers have opinions but they are more afraid of being wrong in front of classmates than they are interested in sharing those opinions.  So, how can we build safety into our lessons so that they can freely share opinions or answers but be protected by validation or anonymity?

One way is to have them write a question they are having about the topic being discussed on an index card.  Then collect the cards and read a few aloud, without names, and answer these questions for the benefit of the whole class.  This allows students to ask questions anonymously – without fear of appearing dumb – and allows you to clear up misunderstandings that many students may be having.  When I have used this, I’ve noticed that I get way more questions than when I publicly ask the class “Does anyone have a question?”.

I use index cards for lots of things.  I use them to allow students to give me suggestions about how to make our class run better.  They fill them out whenever they wish and leave the cards in a Suggestion Box in the back room labeled RESPECTFUL SUGGESTIONS CONSIDERED.  Every few weeks I read a few aloud and announce changes to how we will operate as a class based on their suggestions.  This builds tremendous community and lets them know their voices are heard.  Of course, if I don’t agree with a suggestion I might still read it aloud and tell them why that suggestion isn’t feasible.

There are lots of ways to tap their spirits – too many to mention here.  I tell them about my life, I laugh at my own human frailties, I tell them something dumb my dog did, or what happened when I was in line at Wal*Mart.  And when I do, I find that my captive audience is feeling good about me, our relationship and our class, and I seize the moment to infuse my subject matter.  They become primed and ready and the research shows that learning and retention are highest when students feel good about their learning community.  It costs me nothing and the dividends are high.

I have discovered that a class’ collective spirit is directly connected to my enthusiasm, my ensuring safety at all costs, and the degree to which I nurture that spirit.  It burns brightest when I feed it.  And once the spirit is high, I can do anything.   Tap their Spirits. dven.

(to be continued…)

A TEACHER’S COMPASS: Five Essential Elements of Exceptional Teaching (Part 1)

This essay will be written in five installments over the next few weeks. Collectively, the essays in A Teacher’s Compass were born of my attempt to conceptualize in plain language (each element is just three words) the essential elements of exceptional teaching. They comprise my credo of teaching, my best advice to the novice and veteran teacher alike. (Each element is discussed more fully in a book I am writing; these essays here are short summaries of the elements.) As always, I encourage replies.

#1 Release Your Personality. When I was in my third or fourth year teaching at a public high school in the Hartford, Connecticut area, one veteran teacher who was highly respected and effective casually made a comment in the then smoke-filled faculty lounge. She said, “Teaching is 99% personality.” Well, that seems a little high to me but the point was well made and the notion stayed with me for the next couple of decades of my career. Teaching is about personality. Theirs (the students) and yours. In fact, everything that happens in the classroom does so in the context of the personalities present. The acts of learning and teaching, reduced to their most basic truths, are steeped in human interactions. No content was ever learned from a teacher outside of this context.

Around the same year this happened, and not completely unrelated to the veteran teacher’s comment, I had an aha! moment in my teaching career that permanently changed my teaching style. Because I was very young when I started teaching – I turned 21 two months into my first year – and because I had the common discouraging experience of classroom management gone awry during my student teaching, I was very careful to maintain great distance between me and the 18 year old seniors I was teaching. More, I thought I was supposed to be that boring, stodgy, and uptight math teacher so many of us have had. So I played this role for my first three years, counter to my true nature and spirit but consistent with control and the math teacher stereotype.

After having three years under my belt with decent classroom management, it was during that fourth year that I decided to allow my own personality, my own true spirit, to come out. Essentially, I released my personality. This is not to say I became interested in being friends with my students. They remained the students and I the teacher, complete with rules and order. But I discovered I could be academically demanding and young-at-heart and free-spirited all at the same time. I look back now and know why the students responded so well to that style and why they outperformed all of the students I had taught years previously. They began to see me as a person – the one I really was – and they could appreciate our interactions. Teaching and learning became authentic. The vulnerability that accompanied releasing my personality was transformed into an atmosphere of trust. That fourth year was a turning point for me and made all the difference in the twenty-plus years that followed. Release your personality. dven.

(to be continued…)

Breaking it Down or Just Breaking it?

I don’t know exactly how I wound up being a math teacher when I think of all the crappy math teachers I had.  In fact, I cannot point to a single pre-college math teacher and say, “He/she was a really good teacher.”  I went on to study the subject because I had natural ability in it – whatever that is – and I always knew I wanted to be a teacher.  So, I guess in some sense, I wanted to become the math teacher I never had, one who dared to break the stereotype and turn kids on to the subject.

One math teacher I had reduced everything we studied into a series of steps to follow.  For every problem type, she had six or eight steps that, if followed accurately, would produce the answer.  It was a cookbook of math she was offering, a recipe for every problem type.  She thought she was a great teacher for doing this, it seemed to me. I suspect she had absolutely no idea that this kind of teaching is problematic in two significant ways.

First, this method provides virtually no conceptual understanding. There is no sense of why things work as they do, no sense of the connection to other math (or to real-life), and no sense of discovery or wonder.  Math is reduced to procedural knowledge and “learning” it this way essentially becomes memorizing the steps with complete disregard for the why or the what if.   Nobody cares why it works and the mentality of the students becomes:  just do A, B and then C and you’ll get the answer.

The second problem I see with this kind of math teaching is that there is no long-term retention once the test is over.  Since kids aren’t really learning any concepts, they quickly forget the memorized steps to this problem or that problem.  Why wouldn’t they?  It is the concepts that underlay the procedures that give meaning to the procedures and aid in retention.  But these kids who dutifully study these collections of recipes generally pass the course.  And when they do, they move up to the next course where they invariably struggle because their background is spotty at best. This unfortunate situation is exacerbated if they have a real math teacher in the next course who won’t give them recipes for everything.  In fact, it’s the second teacher who gets grief because the students now have to think and are not being spoon-fed with a steady course of steps.  Often, the students are very vocal saying things like, “Mrs. Soandso gave us steps last year and it really helped.  Can you be more like her?  She helped us.”  Even parents chime in with a similar request.  It may not be until the following year when the second teacher is appreciated for teaching concepts along with those procedures and making her students think and apply and wonder.

It seems to me that the underlying issue is the propensity for teachers – particularly in math – to break everything down for kids.  (Often this is done out of sheer frustration.) On the surface this is sensible and even prescribed by many educators.  I do it, you do it, we all do it.  But if we never put the pieces back into the cohesive whole to which they belong, the students never see the interconnections and never see the big picture.  That is, they never get the concept.  When we never put it back together into something more complex, we leave our students forever floundering in low-level thinking.  It is not possible to ascend Bloom’s Taxonomy by only breaking it down and never rebuilding the bigger, harder concepts from the little understandings.  I think this is where we often fail our kids.  To a point, breaking it down is fine – just don’t stop there.   And don’t mistake learning steps from a recipe for learning math anymore than you would mistake learning to type for learning to write.   dven.

Failure Is an Option

Failure is NOT an option is the most ubiquitous lie in education. It is on posters in hallways and on walls in classrooms. It stands proudly on school websites and appears in a mission statement or two. It reads on a six foot banner hanging from the counter in the main office in a low-performing, urban North Carolina high school. It was chosen as the title of a recent book on education. It is the battle cry of nearly every school district I am asked to visit. Yet it is a lie.

Of course, the sentiment is noble: We want every child to succeed, we want every child to pass. Then maybe we should say that. Maybe we shouldn’t tell kids that failure is not an option. It most certainly is an option. I know of no school in America having a 100% passing rate; therefore, failing must be an option.

We tell kids lies a lot. We post rules in classrooms that are not followed. We say an assignment is due and then hedge on the due date (admittedly, sometimes for good reason). We say we’re going to collect an assignment and then fail to do so. We promise extra credit and then never really enter the points. We post Honor Code posters in dozens of classrooms that are neither discussed nor, in many schools, followed. We tell kids their work is good when it is not. This happens when students try really hard and despite the work falling short, we cave to our sympathetic side and don’t have the heart to tell them. And while there is nothing wrong with sympathizing with our students – to not do so is wide of the mark – it is not okay to lie to them.

There is a prevalence to accept shoddy work and grade it as good, particularly in low-performing schools. I was recently asked to assist the math department in a rural South Carolina middle school. The students who attend the school are mostly from homes of low SES and the population of the school is 96% black, 3% white and 1% Hispanic. While standing in the eighth grade hallway awaiting a math class to begin, I passed the time by looking at a huge collection of student-made posters hanging in the hall outside a social studies class. The posters were all on the Holocaust and many were adorned with the disturbing photos that usually accompany the topic. Most had text, in large font or handwriting, explaining some aspect of the Holocaust. I was impressed at first glance. The social studies teacher had obviously spent a good deal of time on the topic and the students demonstrated that they (at least the ones who made posters) learned a fair amount. But when I looked closely and began to actually read the text in the posters, I realized they were littered with misspelled words. In one poster – the one specifically on Hitler – his name was spelled Adoft Hilter every time it appeared, seven times in all counting the title of the poster. How could this work be posted in the hallway? How could a responsible teacher not correct the student, allowing him the chance to be proud of and show off in the hallway a first rate poster?

When I happened to see the teacher outside his door several periods later, I commended him on the work he and his students had done on the Holocaust. Without seeming overly critical or picky, I suggested that I saw some posters with misspellings, include Hitler’s name. He retorted that, of the 80-something social studies students he teaches, only 32 bothered to make a poster (though it was a required assignment). “Hey,” he sighed, “I’m lucky I got these…”

Maybe he’s right. Or maybe there is a disturbing irony that the very students who tried, those who cared about the assignment and cared about their education, were the ones whose education got shortchanged. dven.