School is starting up everywhere, after the longest break ever—up to 18 months in some places. That’s a lifetime for a small child, a series of unendurable groundings for a teenager. And it doesn’t look like we are in the clear yet.
This post is a reprint from Larry Ferlazzo’s Classroom Q&A blog at Ed Week. From time to time I will be reprinting my contributions to that space here. This one seemed appropriate since there are new teachers everywhere and some veterans who have probably felt like new teachers all through this COVID shut down—myself included.
Here’s my offering in the “what I wish I’d known when I started teaching” department:
There was a crisis point in my career at the four-year mark where I thought I’d never return to the classroom. Luckily, several shifts kept me in an intellectually and spiritually enlivening profession.
I learned three things that saved me.
First lesson: Frustration and questioning are features of the work. Embrace them. Like dedicated researchers, these qualities engage teachers in continual learning around the most interesting of topics: human behavior. Though I eventually discovered this by working with smart, committed teachers in the National Writing Project, I previously thought teaching was a flat career. Once familiar with the curriculum, just shampoo, rinse, repeat for the next 30 years. Not so. And what a bore.
Students bring challenges into class every day. Learn to love these for the human puzzles they are and search for a resolution to the student-presented question. Rather than viewing student behavior as a personal attack, an affront to the ego, or a power grab, consider behavior as a symptom. Teachers can and do make a difference by approaching practice as diagnosticians. Without an inquiry stance, we burn out, seeing our work as out of control and students or parents as the problem.
Second lesson: Learn what is under your control and what is not. Let go of what is out of your control and work with what you have. (Though if there are wrong-headed policy issues, keep speaking up. No one knows the job like a classroom teacher.)
What can you control? The time you have with students, and that is about it. So make the time important. Students value what we spend time on. Know what is valuable and spend the limited time there. Create meaningful time rather than marking time.
What can’t you control? The weather. Student illness. The world at large. Lockdowns. Fire drills.
Let it go.
Third big lesson: Let kids practice intellectual work. My best lessons are ones where I just shut up and let students describe, express, and present conclusions. This is not busywork. Let them grapple, create, interpret, discuss, read, write. All active verbs.
Kids are smarter than the school factory-model implies. They are not empty vessels. They are full to the brim with experience. Sometimes these experiences can open a window into understanding that instructors do not have. The diverse student population is an undermined resource. Invite these voices into the classroom to create a future we have yet to imagine. It will be their future, not our past, after all.
It is one thing to understand the three lessons--learn from problems, use time well, let kids think--but far more difficult to enact. A fourth lesson must be added here: Teaching is best done with many minds at work. Present your confusion or questions to your peers and start struggling together. Try things out. Report results. Experiment. Adjust. Succeed and fail together. Create the kind of cooperation in your work life that you hope to create for your learners.
Most teachers loved both school and learning. If teaching continually evolves and grows along with the students, the love affair with learning never has to end.