This is the first post in a series on how I approach the work of teaching. Everyone’s had teachers, but how much do we really know about what they do?
This school year marks my fourth year of teaching. In my very first year, I remember a veteran teacher at my school saying to me, “Don’t be afraid to experiment and try new things in your classroom. Trying new things is the best way to find what works for you.” I nodded eagerly in response as I went back to planning my next lesson, even though I hadn’t totally grasped what he meant by that. What should I be experimenting with exactly? Wasn’t each lesson kind of the same, especially in math? Just give kids a problem to try out, then have a mini-discussion until we land the key point of the day, then do an example together before kids get to practice. What else could I really do with that?
This idea was particularly difficult to implement at the beginning of my career because my charter school network essentially provided 100% of our lesson plans, made-to-wear. The teachers were given a scope and sequence for the year aligned to Common Core curriculum, unit overviews for each unit, and daily lesson resources. The daily lesson resources were extremely specific. Not only was there a ready-to-use classwork handout for each lesson, but also each plan included a literal script that mimed the flow of discussion or questioning that teachers could engage in with students. Below is an example of the level of detail each lesson provided, taken from a portion of an 8th grade math lesson on calculating the rate of change from tables. The bolded statements represent what the teacher would say, and the unbolded statements represent anticipated student responses that teachers would look for before asking the next question.
All the teacher needed to do individually was to solve out the problems included in the handout and internalize (i.e., memorize, from the network’s point of view) the questioning sequence.
For the first two years I taught, I was simultaneously working towards a Master of Arts in Teaching. In my graduate school classes, I learned how to backwards-plan a unit aligned to state standards. This included writing a unit overview (a description of what the unit was about), a calendar of aims and objectives, an assessment with a rubric, and a few fully fleshed out individual lesson plans. This knowledge and skill set is vastly useful to any teacher and the end result was of practical use in the classroom. However, the primary feeling I remember back when I was actually completing the course work was how the whole thing was a total waste of time, since my network already did all that work for teachers. What a spoiled brat I was.
I was extremely lucky not to have to plan a single lesson from scratch my first year of teaching. Having those daily lesson resources saved me an immense amount of time and stress. The lessons were not without their flaws, but looking back, I feel a colossal sense of gratitude for the people who wrote and refined those documents. On the other hand, those lesson resources quickly became a crutch, and buried any sense of urgency I felt to get creative and truly experiment in the classroom. The resources were there and were for the most part proven to be effective after years of implementation. At least, if the metric is student performance on end-of-year state exam scores. The wheel had already been invented. As a first-year teacher, what more did I need to do? What more could I even do? What was left to experiment with?
The answer is, as I’m sure anyone who has been in the classroom for a while knows: there is a LOT you can experiment with. There is an almost limitless amount of work you can put in to make your class the best it can be. Most people draw the line at sustainability, because anyone would get burned out of the job if they tried to do everything they really wanted to do. A few examples of seemingly small yet time-consuming tasks we’re all familiar with and know make a substantial difference in education quality: grade more assignments and provide more individual feedback to students, contact families to update them on student progress and partner to improve student outcomes, connect with students individually to build more relationships, connect with students to work on mastery of content, revise key points to be more clear and in student-friendly language, edit plans for errors…
Like most first-year teachers, my focus ended up not being on the quality of my lessons and more on how to manage my classroom (i.e., get kids to stop talking while I was talking). So when my veteran colleague encouraged me to experiment, my eventual interpretation of it was: aha! He must mean experiment with how I respond to student misbehaviors. What if instead of issuing a demerit for everything that happened, I tried…an anonymous whole group correction instead!**
Little did I know that I had barely scratched the surface.***
*A back-pocket question is one a teacher would ask to help students get to the exemplar student response if the students were having difficulty.
**An anonymous whole group correction goes something like this: Instead of specifically calling out the names of individuals not doing the thing they’re supposed to be doing, the teacher says something along the lines of, “Two more people need to get to work.”
***The great thing about teaching is that if I look back on this in 5 or 10 years, I will probably think the exact same thing.
