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Giving Thanks as a Teacher

11/24/2014

Thursday is Thanksgiving. Across this nation, millions of families will gather and express their gratitude for good health and loved ones. What an important holiday! It forces us to stop in the busy hamster wheel of our lives to really appreciate all the gifts that sometimes go unnoticed or forgotten.

I'm sure we'll all spend time with our own families, (maybe) eating too much and (hopefully) laughing just enough, reflecting on the many gifts of our personal lives. Today, I open up a discussion with you, my professional family, about all the many things we have to be grateful for in our professional lives!

I'm thankful for children. They're the main reason that, like many of you, I entered this profession to begin with. Whenever I'm having a bad day, I just walk down the hall to the kindergarten to get some joy.

Watching children in the act of learning...trying, sometimes flopping, revising their thinking, and reinventing themselves again and again...asking questions and not being afraid of sounding curious...building towers of Legos and of ideas, helping to make sense of the world around them. These are great reminders of what we adults need more of: curiosity, innovation, and love for what we do!

I am appreciative to these short people for adding so much to my days, and to their parents for entrusting us with their present and their future!

I'm thankful for the printing press! That's right. For about 600 years, it's been the tool that created the revolution of books! Without the printing press, we wouldn't have lines that have changed the world of kids and adults alike.

Without the printing press, William Shakespeare's words might be long forgotten unless they were passed by memory for generations.

Without the printing press, Beverly Cleary, Natalie Babbitt, Patricia MacLachlan, Kate DiCamillo, Roald Dahl, Paula Danziger and many other now-famous authors would have just been eccentric storytellers with no place really to find an audience besides their immediate surroundings, and the world would be a place without girls named Ramona and Amber who teach others about growing up, we'd never know about what it's like to fly across the Atlantic in a giant peach, and Winn-Dixie would just be a chain of stores where some people in the South go for their groceries.

Without the printing press, there wouldn't be lines of wondrous words that make all the difference to readers dealing with their emotions, and knowledge would be shared at a much slower rate in a world without printed nonfiction.

Because of the printing press, there are teaching words, healing words, and words that change lives forever.

I'm thankful for professional friends both near and far. We know that teaching can be a very isolating experience. As a field we've become smarter about how to become smarter by uniting, so that we can think and learn together. Sitting together in PLC's, coaching one another, networking with colleagues across the hall, across town, across districts, across the country helps us all learn.

Professional organizations like NCTE, NCTM, IRA, ASCD and others formally help bring us together. Informal networks of professional friends like those formed at Teachers College, through our summer institutes, the Literacy Leaders' Network, and working in cohorts of all sorts helps bring us together. Reading professional texts, whether they are books, articles, blogs, or watching videos of good teaching is time very well spent that's made possible by professional learning organizations.

Sitting together with colleagues to pick apart a problem, to study a professional text, to teach in front of each other, or just solve the mysteries of how to reach each student is such a gift in what might otherwise be a lonely experience.

You may think it strange, but we also have to be thankful for the storm that's hitting our field right now. Common Core, new testing, teacher and principal evaluation systems, and other such things are creating a perfect storm around us. Politicians and businesspeople who throw their clout and their money behind a certain issue bring greater attention to the issue, and we can as a field choose to let it weaken us.

However, if we look back, we can see that several harsh winters and weak harvests and plagues preceded the very first Thanksgiving! Sticking together and working harder than they ever imagined is what gave the early Americans a bountiful enough harvest to celebrate, and one of the quintessential moments that built a new nation. It seems like the stage is set.

These parts of our new reality can weaken us...or they can make us work harder than ever, learning more about learning, reminding the world around us that despite this tough winter in the season of teaching, we will thrive and have something to be thankful for!

Kids that make us happy. Books that change our lives. Friends that make it easier. Storms that make us stronger.

Thank you all for reading!

Happy Thanksgiving!

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The Pressure of the Swim Meet

11/10/2014

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Every year, there is a high stakes swim competition. The winning team gets some money, and a whole lot of glory! There are two local teams who are longtime rivals at this swim competition, each using different methods of succeeding. Each team has ten members, and once the coaches are assigned the team, they cannot make any switches. Each team swims under a different color flag. The blue team and green team historically have each taken the championship many times and the rivalry is fierce. Each year, the judges of the competition change some of the parameters of the race so as to accentuate different swimming techniques.

The coaches of the blue team prepare their swimmers through rigorous exercise, and lots of time in the water. While in the water, the coaches work with each swimmer at customizing various strokes and moves, tracking each member of the team to achieving fluency as a swimmer. Seven of the ten succeed in just about every practice session. That's 70% of the team showing success through living a healthy, regimented life, through proper diet and exercise, getting the right amount of sleep, and lots of practice every day. However, the coaches of the blue team want more. They want the other three members of the team to succeed, so that the team as a whole can be more successful.

In the meantime, the green team prepares for the competition. They don't emphasize a healthy lifestyle with a balance of good diet, exercise, the right amount of sleep and the right amount of practice. These swimmers like to party! They stay up late, eat what they want, and think of swimming as just one more thing they do. Some of the team members don't actually like to swim, but do it because they're told they must. Their coach relates every conversation about swimming to the competition, pressuring them to do well. So how do they succeed?

The coaches of the green team have their swimmers take a special vitamin (not a drug, totally legal, but just gross!) At first the swimmers hate the vitamin, and learn to hate swimming, because of their association of swimming to this vitamin. They take their daily vitamin, because it will make them win, but almost out of rebellion, they avoid the water, because it's a part of what they think this pill is.

Back at the blue team, the coaches also know about the vitamin. They have carefully examined the vitamin to know what is in there to help their swimmers. During each practice, they carefully infuse powdered samples of these vitamins, giving each team member the right dosage of the amount of the part of the vitamin that each one needs to build skill. The three swimmers who are having the most difficulty are given larger doses, but still swim just as much every day, even more than some of their teammates.

The day of the competition arrives. All the swimmers are nervous, because they want to succeed. They want their coaches to be happy with them. They want to win. It's a particularly tough drill this year, but in the end, the green team ends up taking this year's championship. Each team retreats saying that they'll see each other next year.

The green team celebrates their victory. The swimmers go off for their break, saying they'll see each other the following year, happy they don't have to take that vitamin any more, and staying away from recreational swimming because of it.

The blue team is slightly upset because they didn't win, but the scores show that they were just a little short. The swimmers go off on their break too, but they go off to swim some more, because they've learned to love it. They continue to live a healthy lifestyle filled with diet and exercise and good sleep habits, because it's who they've become.

The next week, the bosses of the blue team call their coaches in to say they're not happy that their team lost. The blue bosses heard that the green team relies on the vitamin and thinks that maybe the blue team should do the same. Confident that their swimmers are living like true athletes, continuing to swim and engage in good physical habits, the blue coaches shudder. The vitamin has its value as a part of the equation, but on its own, its foul taste will make the team hate swimming. They fear that if they change their approach, they might meet more success on the one day each year, but lose their swimmers the rest of the year and into adulthood.

All things being equal, if both teams just use the vitamin approach, then the competition really would just be a measure of who came to the team more naturally prepared to win anyway. The blue coaches are certain that the approach they've used historically doesn't always give them 1st place, but gives swimmers the ability to navigate any swimming situation, even the competition, sometimes.

So who has this right? The green team with its results-only approach, that yields short-term results? Or the blue team, raising its swimmers to really hold their own in any pool? Should the blue coaches switch over the the approach of the green coaches, and then hope that they are dealt the naturally superior team of swimmers? Which team will you coach? Who are you as a coach and as a teacher?

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The Power of the Compliment

11/8/2014

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Nothing is more powerful in teaching when we use positive reinforcement. It's helpful when we work on students' behavior and their learning. Outsiders might think we're just looking to boost kids' self-esteem (although there's nothing really wrong with that!), but it's so much deeper if we use it the right way. Compliments are an amazing teaching tool. Here are a few positives of being positive.

When you compliment a student, attribute the positive work to the student personally. When children do something we don't want, we often try to separate them from their behavior. However, when they do good things, we have to do the opposite. That means we want to compliment them, not just what they did. For example, instead of saying, "You really wrote a great beginning to your story by starting with a tiny action," we should say, "I can see you're the kind of writer who draws his readers in through paying close attention to very real sounding details," and then elaborate by naming what he did in his work that shows that. By complimenting the child personally, you are giving the message, "You did this wonderful thing, maybe without even realizing it, and this is something awesome you can continue to become!" Again, think about how we avoid this kind of language when encountering bad behavior. We don't label kids as liars, thieves, or any other lasting words. However, how powerful is that when we give them personal credit for the good things they've accomplished. Lucy Calkins tells us that when we compliment, we should compliment like a paragraph like a paragraph, not a sentence. By this, she means to make the compliment rich in detail about what the student did, but by attributing the good work to the student, not to the product. This will have a longer lasting effect.

Lucy Calkins also teaches us that compliments should be as dramatic as possible. When complimenting a child, you should genuinely be impressed with what they have done. Make it seem important so that kids will want to continue the good thing they have done.

Every good conference, or by extension, any teaching opportunity has something to compliment and something to teach. Every great conference or any teaching opportunity has something to compliment and something to teach that are related. This does several things.

First this helps us to avoid the trap of having deficit-oriented conferences. Marie Clay reminds us that when you build on a deficit, it's like building a house on a weak foundation, and why would you do that? Instead of teaching what kids aren't doing or what they're doing badly, Sometimes those are things they aren't even ready to learn yet. Instead, we should aim for the concepts they are already approximating, because we know they are ready to learn those things.

For example, if a student is using dialogue in her writing, we can aim to teach about how to use the dialogue more effectively, as a means of show, not tell, or in a way that moves the story along, or in a way that foreshadows upcoming events. By basing the teaching point on something the student is already sort of doing, the conference feels less like an attack.

The same thing can be done when principals observe teachers. Take a look at what the teacher is already doing, acknowledge it, and then build on it. It will make observations feel less like the anxiety-provoking inspection and more like an opportunity for growth.

The examples here so far have been about the work that students and their teachers do. One other place where this is effective is when talking to kids about their behavior. I mentioned earlier how we try to separate kids from their negative behaviors in hopes that they will avoid those behaviors in the future. Imagine how powerful it is when you talk to a child who has just lied to you by explaining how she is one of the most honest people you know, and how you've always been able to depend on her. It twinges a little of guilt, but it lifts the child to a higher level of expectation from you and from herself!

I remember when I was a child hearing teachers' tirades on children. The self-fulfilling prophecy is true. Kids do what we lay out as expectations of them! When we deal with negative behaviors, we need to pair them up with positive attributes that may have somehow been overlooked in the heat of the moment of childhood. If kids tease, remind them what good friends they usually are. If kids lose their tempers, remind them how patient they are known to be. If they give up, talk about how resilient you've known them to be!

A little compliment can go a long way. It's a powerful tool we own. Let's use it to help kids grow in every way.

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Giving Thanks as a Teacher

The Pressure of the Swim Meet

The Power of the Compliment

Tom Marshall

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