Walking the Tightrope

Friday morning I had some of my most difficult students with me for our remediation period. Students who, I'll be honest, I breathe a little sigh of relief when they're absent. Don't get me wrong-- I have NOT given up on them -- but some days it's nice not to have to participate in the struggle for a little while. I'm human. I only have so much energy.

Anyway, all of that aside, today was not what I expected. The three students I'm thinking of made up a quiz they were absent for. None of them did very well on it. We talked about doing quiz corrections. I used to do remediation sessions with retakes for quizzes weekly after school that were very successful. Now that we have no late activity buses and a half-hour remediation period, that really isn't practical. I haven't figured a good way to replicate it, so they get to correct quizzes for half points back.

After that, there was some time left so they were socializing. As it always seems to, conversation turned to teachers. Ms A was mean because she told them to be quiet. Mr B was great but if he didn't like you he'd just kick you out for anything. Ms C was always so rude. I asked them: "Why do you all like me and tell me I'm cool? I'm hard on you, I give you a hard time when you interrupt me, I write you up." (Every single one of them has had multiple detentions or referrals from me for behavior.) "Yeah, but you're not mean about it. You let us do groupwork sometimes. Ms A just wants you to listen to what she's saying bell to bell. And she's rude." "You have to push your buttons to get written up. It has to be serious."

I have been trying so hard this year to stay polite no matter what. To connect with some of these students who seem off-putting at first. To remember to love more than the easy-to-love. I wasn't sure if it made a difference at all. I guess it has?

I have also in the last month or so been working on remembering that along with the politeness, the patience, and the belief in every kid, comes the hard core. The alpha. The expectation that they will do what you say, that unquestioning confidence in authority. Teenagers don't respect authority that questions itself when it matters. Not that they don't want you to be human, and sometimes vulnerable, and apologize, but there's a time for taking no prisoners and they know if you have it in you.

 I recently found Singing Pigs. I love her blog - you should read it! Reading some of her posts helped me a lot with this. In particular, she reminded me that it's okay to let my snarky, sarcastic self out with them at times. I talked about this with a couple of building colleagues whose classroom management I respect. They are well-liked by students, the sort of teachers who the kids say are strict, but funny and interesting. They both are not hesitant to let the snarky side out because it works. They are also both people who the kids know they can go to for help when they need it and not get turned away. This is a hard balance to walk and I feel like I'm finally starting to find my way on the tightrope.

Singing Pigs recently posted about being Alpha with teenagers. It reminded me I need to remember when to do that. This was one of the hardest things for me to learn - I am naturally a mediator, a conciliator. Not only that, but as a fresh-out-of-college 23 year-old, I was incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of being an Authority Figure. Me? How could I be one? How could I enforce rules that I wasn't even sure I agreed with?

I've learned that it's another tightrope. Sometimes you can use it to your advantage--teenagers love to think they're in on something with you. Give them a little leeway but tell them they better be good when the admins come in. Ask them not to get you in trouble.

I'm still not a natural alpha, but I have my days. Days where I've got It. You know what happens on those days? The ones where you come in full of determination and plans on what to do if you have problems in class? They're good. They ask you if you're having a bad day and you say "No, I just need you to stop talking to him and pay attention for the rest of the notes. We'll be done in 15 minutes." And they do it. They can feel it in you, the readiness to Bring It when the problems show and most of them respect it.

Then there's the days when you're exhausted, you don't have the energy for confrontations, you just want it to be over so you can go home and get in your pjs and be in bed by 7pm. They know. They walk all over you.

This is why I came to the conclusion a few years ago that the BEST thing I could do to improve my teaching was to get enough rest. No more than 2 weeknights with less than 7 hours of sleep a week allowed. Sleeping in on Saturday until I'm fine. If I'm tired, I can't bring it. Now, sometimes the tired is emotional -- which is why I try to respect my own need for the periodic off-night. I don't have to grade papers for two hours every night. If I want to always get things back the next day, sure, but you know what? I think my students benefit more from a teacher who's awake enough to bring their A game than papers handed back right away. Yes, quick feedback is good, but does it matter if we get nothing of value done that day?

Wow, now I sound like I'm a genius of classroom management AND work-life balance. Nah. I just feel like I've made a few strides forward over the last month.

One of the pieces I've just started to put together is about bluntness. I'm not sure that's the right word -- basically, sometimes the best way to deal with teenagers being crazy is to name their sh**. Say things like "Did you really pour all the holes from hole-punch in her hair and think that would be okay?" Also "Since you're a terrible shot and can't actually make the basket with all those paper balls, you better pick them up and put them in there by the end of class." "Next time you go sharpen your pencil, which apparently needs sharpening after every sentence you write, go around BEHIND the projector."

It's not about starting a confrontation in which they feel they have to save face. Those never go well. It's about calling them out on ridiculous behavior that they KNOW is ridiculous. Showing that you know exactly what sort of nonsense they're getting up to. Calling them out on the whispers they think you didn't hear. Using those eyes in the back of your head. ;)

On the one hand, I feel like I should've figured this one out in the previous 7 years of teaching. On the other, I'm just glad that I've finally started to be able to know what I'm doing and use this intentionally, as a strategy.

Having an "Invisible" Disability while Teaching

I do have some things to say about the AP Institute I attended last week and the last few chapters of Awakening the Sleeping Giant, but those posts are still incubating and this is really on my mind right now.

Let me start by telling you a story:

Once upon a time, last weekend, there was a couple who bought a bed. They'd been sleeping on mattresses on the floor since forever and finally decided to put them on a bedframe. Since they bought the bed at Ikea it took most of a day of frustration to assemble, only to turn out not to fit the mattresses. The mattresses claimed to be queen sized and so did the bed, yet the bed was too big for the mattresses. After some frustration  the couple gave up on having a bed and started to disassemble that one to return to Ikea. It was late and they were tired and frustrated and at one point the wife dropped a large chunk of the bed on her right foot, breaking her big toe. It hurt a lot. A few days later she went to get groceries while wearing the ugly shoe the doctor gave her for her right foot and was relieved at how easy it was to ask for a riding cart when she had such an obvious reason for it.

Enough third person. I've used the riding cart before, and probably should have more often, but normally I feel incredibly awkward asking for it. See, I'm dealing with the acute and temporary mobility issue of a broken toe right now but I also have a chronic issue: rheumatoid arthritis. If you're not familiar with the term invisible disability, I think it can be easily summed up by the image of apparently-healthy-looking me feeling awkward asking for a riding cart at the grocery store because I don't obviously need it.

Awakening... Ch. 3

 The book we are reading for the summer for the Teacher Leadership Academy is Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Helping Teachers Develop as Leaders by Marilyn Katzenmeyer and Gayle Moller. I'm blogging chapter by chapter my thoughts and impressions. 

Chapter 3: Developing Teacher Leaders 
Coming back to the idea that teachers can learn to lead, this chapter discusses professional development and the supports needed for teacher leaders. The criticisms of existing professional development are sound. Their ideas for what constitutes good professional development seem to include collaboration, problem-solving, follow-up support and applicability to the workplace. They all sound good to me! Generally I didn't underline or make many notes for this chapter - I agreed with a lot of it but nothing stood out to me as a new thought on the issues.

The chapter includes a self-assessment for how ready you are to be a teacher leader in different areas. My strongest area was self-awareness. My two weakest were communication and diversity - because although I can communicate, I don't do so enough. That has a lot to do with being an introvert. Diversity was basically seeing and accepting other perspectives - which surprised me to be so weak - but then I thought about the fact that I don't do that as well at work as outside of it.

After discussing self awareness the chapter also brings up the differences among colleagues that can make change hard: "whenever schools attempt to make change, conflict is a natural result." (p. 59) I have a very conflict-avoidant personality, and I'm realizing that my hesitance to get involved in anything I see as potentially creating conflict is a large part of why I'm so shy to stand out as a leader. The idea that conflict is almost inevitable and that's okay is actually pretty freeing in my mind. It shifts my perspective from feeling responsible for creating a conflict when I should have somehow avoided it to accepting that conflict will arise and learning how to do deal with it.

Looking back at the last year as my building has tried to put into place a remediation period designed by the teachers, I can see this, and I can see that we have all developed a better understanding of the consensus process. Last summer, as we were developing the program, small disagreements led to long arguments and people were often unwilling to give in a point even after the vote went to another one. This summer as we worked on changes to the program, it felt much calmer. People brought up their ideas, disagreements were stated, we came to a decision and moved on.

Make them Think

One of the great things about planning for this school year was going back through my various journals, notes and so on from the last couple of school years. It was fun to see notes to myself to try ideas that I had done last year, and had made work. I really got a sense of making actual progress in my teaching skills over the last couple of years.

Last year the big thing was trying the History Alive! style notebook and really focusing on having a transformative/higher-level thinking activity to go with every topic. It is a pain to grade, as I was expecting, but the insights into what the kids actually understand have been so useful that it's worth it. So this year the big change has been focusing on making them think, including making them think about how they learn. I know, crazy, expecting self-awareness and metacognition from 10th/11th graders!

(Pause for a moment to imagine a classroom where "that's so meta" jokes can actually be made.)

There's a lot of issues rolled up in "make them think". It starts small -- refusing to answer questions that amount to "tell me what to do because I'm too lazy to read directions/look at the board" and instead pointing at the directions. Getting out of the habit of going over reading questions & giving answers but still finding ways to discuss the information with the class. Making them offer opinions and back them up.

Then we get to doing things like giving regular learning log assignments that amount to asking them to reflect on how various class activities affect their learning, what they're doing, and what they could do better. I am loving those! It is so fascinating to see students' varied opinions of themselves as students, where they're happy, where they struggle, and what they think of all my crazy activities. I leave comments here and there -- encouraging, offering suggestions, pointing out what they do well, asking for clarification. It gives me a chance to give detailed feedback that's not tied to a grade*, and also to hear a little more from my shy students and introverts.**

Here's a great example -- today in US History they worked in partners to rewrite a section of the Declaration of Independence in their own words and we posted them on a wall and did a Gallery Walk. Afterwards, I asked them to reflect on what they learned from the activity, what grievances seemed the worst to them, and whether the colonists were justified in declaring independence. I only got to read a few of the entries so far but they were very interesting. It shows you pretty quickly who is taking things seriously and who isn't, too. Sometimes the kids who would seem to be keeping up because they're good at getting the right answers from someone get revealed by the lack of depth in their answers.

Another example is that in World History I had them complete a Study Skills checklist survey a couple of weeks ago and make a study goal. I told them to make sure the goal was realistic, something they could achieve for the next few quizzes. Today I handed back their third quiz and asked them about how they're doing towards the goal. One student asked "Do you want the real truth?" I said "Of course." "Well, it's just that I know some teachers have an attitude of what I don't know doesn't hurt me." "Not me." "So I can put that I studied during watching 300 and didn't really learn a lot?" "Yup." That conversation is important to me because I want my students to see that I'm not doing this so they can write what I want to hear to get brownie points.

Another learning log that I had them do was when they got their notebooks back after the first check at the end of Unit 1. Since I have very specific and somewhat unusual expectations, I knew from the beginning that some students would need help meeting them. Some also need to realize that I'm serious about them -- you can tell them all you like your expectations the first week of school but if they don't see results (grades, reinforcement) from them they'll forget all about them. So after I handed back their notebooks I asked them to look through, read all the comments along with the grades and answer a few questions about it.

You get the idea. It was rather insane when I needed to grade all their notebooks at the end of the unit. I'm working on figuring out how to stagger it a little bit. It also didn't all go smoothly -- I have one class with some serious attitude and students who despite it all couldn't understand why they got an F.***

--------
* In reading through the research for grad school last year I learned that one of the key things to making formative assessment work is detailed, useful feedback. However, research also shows that many students will ignore feedback if a grade is also given and just look at the grade. So giving feedback w/o grades becomes important.

** As hard as you try, some students talk more in class and some sit there quietly, doing what they should but not giving you any indication of what goes on in their heads.

*** Still trying to figure out how to deal with a certain attitude. These are the ones that complain every time we do anything that smacks of work, and everything is work to them. They take bad grades as a personal affront even when I can point to a clear rubric handed out Day 2 and where they fit on it. They think it's ok to shout complaints across the classroom and don't get why I ask them to wait and speak to me privately. So far my strategies involve being calm, polite and reasonable no matter what they say and making sure I've CYAed with clear expectations.

But how do you do that?

Sometimes I read articles/weblog entries about education and I see myself in their description of a student poorly served by the current system. Seriously, can anything be more depressing?

I was a good student. I worked hard without succumbing to the insane class-rank/GPA obsession of the overachievers I was surrounded by. I got complemented by college professors for my writing, discussions, analytical ability, etc. I've never thought of myself as slow, needing a lot of directions and so on, in fact, I thought of myself as comparatively independent.

Yet none of that has prepared me for the reality of being a teacher.

My senior year of college I took the hardest education course I'd ever had. I don't actually remember the title, but it was an educational media course that was also taught as an extreme constructivist class. It was the hardest thing I'd done in my life until I actually started teaching, and then I realized that all the things that had frustrated me about that class were what life was really like in the classroom. What felt like too much and yet not enough direction was a perfect replication of the situation of the classroom teacher.

Nowadays. I realize that there's a lot I want to do, and I read about it, but I just can't put it into practice. I see great ideas and then I think "So how do I do that in my classroom, in my circumstances?" and I get stuck. The fact that I sometimes feel like I need step by step instructions for management is part of the problem too. It's like I got so used to being told how to do things as well as what to do that I can't see it for myself.

I want to be a teacher who provides engaging, relevant education full of interesting activities, whose management style and confidence allows them to let go when necessary, who comfortably uses and teaches students about digital tools. (And a lot of other things, too. I have big goals.)

I don't know how. It's my favorite complaint. It's also something I need to get over.

(but I don't know how!)

Doubt

To be honest, I've been feeling a lot of doubt lately.

Doubt that I'll ever be the teacher I want to be, or at least good enough to not hate myself.

Doubt that I'll ever get this classroom management thing sorted out.

Doubt that I'm doing anything right, even when things seem to go well.

I have a lot of posts stored up in the old thinker (actually, over on my backpack) but I can't bring myself to write any of them because what's the point? I clearly don't know anything compared to everyone else out there.

I don't have a personality that makes classroom management easy to figure out. I'm non-confrontational and shy by nature. I have issues with the idea of myself as an authority figure. I have issues with the rules that make up high school that I still feel I have to enforce. Sometimes I can convince myself that I'm getting better at this, and maybe it'll take me longer than others I know to figure it out, but I'll get there anyway. Sometimes I think I'll never get "it" and maybe good teachers really are born and I should give up.

I don't know which one is right, and that's the problem. If I really am destined to be a terrible teacher forever because of my lack of classroom management skills, then I should get out sooner rather than later, right? (That's what I've been reading a lot this week.) Yet the people who've actually seen me teach don't seem to think so. Am I just too hard on myself? I don't know.

Honestly, I can't even begin to imagine what I would do with myself if I didn't teach.

Finding a Vision

I'm in a strange place with teaching right now.

On the one hand, there've been several reminders lately of how much work I still need to do at classroom management. I'm back to the place I was at the end of last school year, bemoaning all the situations that happen where I don't do anything, or do the wrong thing too late, because I don't actually know what I should do in response to that student. It's frustrating because just a few weeks ago I had a series of days where I felt like I was totally "on my game" and able to think quickly enough to make intelligent choices in classroom management. I started to see it, really, I swear I did! Where'd it go?

On the other hand, I've been starting to really get a clear vision of what I want my classroom to be. I have all these ideas I've been working on, introducing pieces of into the classroom, and generally spending a lot of time behind-the-scenes working out the details of how and why for everything from assessment to pedagogy. It's like I've been walking around blind in a maze for the last 3 years, occasionally stumbling into the right thing, and then suddenly I left the maze and got a chance to view it from above.

On the gripping hand, however, I realize that those sorts of visions are only part one of trying to get better at this teaching thing. I'm good at big-picture vision, and dreaming up interesting ideas. I'm also good at reflection, seeing where I went wrong. The problem is, I'm not so good at translating those two things into actually doing all the nitty-gritty work right and making the right decision in the moment. 'Great idea, poor implementation.' That's me.

I used to call this "follow-through" but that's not quite it. I got follow-through: I come up with an idea, I do it, I keep fussing with it. What I don't have is "not-starting-over-again-when-the-going-gets-tough", aka persistence. As nice as all these visions for next year are, they don't help me do a good job for the next 4 months. Rather than give up on working through this tough, winter stretch and planning how I'll do it better next time around, I need to be focusing on how I can bring all these ideas and realizations into the classroom now.

To that end, I've been giving myself assignments. These are specific things that I can work on, have a finite end point, and I can use in the classroom right now. Currently, my assignments to myself include:

• Fixing presentations. Less text, more images. Less bullets, more story. Seems to be in vogue around the ednet right now.
• Organizing test questions. My big plan for next year is to introduce an assessment scheme modeled on Dan Meyer's, but adapted for my standards, content, and students. To that end, I need a reliable bank of test questions on every standard I teach, organized by substandard (WHII9a,9b,9c, etc) and tagged by difficulty (still working on that part). So, every time I write a quiz/test for the rest of the year, I'm going back and tagging questions, adding new ones, and generally trying to do this as-I-go rather than all-summer-long. It's actually making me do a lot more thinking about the questions I write, which is good, because I hate writing tests and slack off on them usually.
  
• Including processing/transformative assignments in class time. I wrote about this a little before, but it's become a big thing for me. Any time I plan a lesson and I think 'there's not enough time, have them do it as homework' it's a sign that it's time to reevaluate the lesson, make sure I'm keeping it simple, and make time.

I'd been meaning to write about some more of my stuff that's worked lately, and post some good links, but I've been ignoring the internet lately. I'll be back, don't worry.

The Problem with Curriculum

This one is Dan Meyer's fault, again. Dan has a set of posts out there on good presentations* that I think any teacher who lectures even once a year should read and take to heart.

He said:

Expect your audience to have exactly 20% your enthusiasm. Thus, if your enthusiasm level is only at 70% throughout your presentation, the best you can expect of your audience is 14% enthusiasm. 14%! That's science, people, don't try to argue me on this. If you aren't feeling it, please don't inflict your tepid emotional state on the rest of us.

When I looked through various data and figured out what, out of the curriculum my students didn't learn last year, I realized that it all had something in common. The material my students don't learn is the stuff I don't ask them to do something with. Whenever I ran out of inspiration or time and ended up just lecturing/having them read about something, they tested poorly on it. This seems so obvious in retrospect, but seeing the pattern in the benchmark tests and making that connection was actually pretty amazing at the time.

So, for this school year one of my big goals was to have students transform information as much as possible. Even when I introduced a topic through lecture or reading, the goal was to make sure that I always did something else with that information afterwards. What that has meant for my classroom is a lot more creation on the students part, which is definitely a good thing. The less I talk and the more they do, the better.

I just finished up grading midterms and an overall end-of-semester grading frenzy last week, so I've been thinking about what I failed to teach in the first semester this year. There were a few things that I didn't spend enough time on the doing, or wasn't clear enough about originally, but overall the goal of doing things has been helpful. What's left on the pile of "things no one seemed to get" are now the things that I don't care about.

This is the problem with curriculum: How can I make them care when I don't?

I'm a history teacher because I love history. Love love love it. I'll spend hours discussing it for no reason other than the fun of it. But there are things on my curriculum that I don't care about. That I don't see as important. That aren't part of what makes me passionate about history. (There are also things on my curriculum that just aren't true, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.)

I was talking to our new AP and social studies overseer about this problem recently. He used to teach World History, so he knows exactly what I'm working with. He feels that the state curriculum is just a jumbled mess of facts, and if we're going to teach from it and teach well, we need to make the connections between those facts for ourselves and then make them explicit for the students. (What Dan calls the "through-line".) This really clicked with the problem of curriculum for me: I can't explain the connections when I don't see them myself.

I'm not familiar with the standards/curricula for history in every state, obviously, but in my experience they're mostly the problematic type. Have some facts your students should know. (Abe Lincoln was president of the US during the Civil War.) Standards shouldn't be a list of facts but a story framework. What matters is the connections, not the facts. History is interesting because its a story. So make the story the aim of the curriculum.

If nothing else, it'd make my job easier.

----
*Dan Meyer, How to Present

How Teaching is like Writing which is like Everything Else

One of my favorite authors is Elizabeth Bear, who maintains a slice of the writer's life blog that I find fascinating. She likes to say that "writing is like everything else" because of the number of analogies she and other authors come up with to explain the writing process.

Teaching, I suspect, is not quite like everything else, but planning is like writing and other acts of creation. You know: sometimes you get a great idea in a flash of intuition and you go into flow and it just keeps coming, sometimes it's like pulling teeth to get those words on the page but you have to do it, and sometimes you just plod along but the words get there somehow. When all's said and done, you wonder if the readers can even tell the difference between intuition like fire in your brain and the long slow pull.

The reason this connection between planning and writing is interesting to me is that it explains why I get so much more done on my last period planning days than my 2nd period planning days: flow. When I know that if I get into a groove I can just keep working until its exhausted, I'm much more likely to make the effort to put myself into the focused state of mind I need to plan. When I know I'll have to go back to class (not teaching--running a study hall, ugh) at 9:55 no matter what I'm in the middle of, I'd rather do something mindless like enter grades and copy things.

All that considered, no wonder people complain about students not thinking and not engaging with the lesson: why should they put the effort in when no matter where they are, the bell will ring and they'll have to go to their next class?

How do you learn?

One of those things we try to do as teachers is to teach kids based on their own learning styles. Sometimes we even try to help them think about how they learn. We give them learning style inventories, get them to reflect on what methods worked for their learning, get them to do that whole metacognitive thinking about thinking thing. (Well, some of us do. This is something that I'm not very good at, actually.) I wonder, though, how much other teachers understand their own learning processes. How do you all learn?

This question is inspired by the realization that my own learning style has been getting in the way of my teaching.

I learn very inductively. (After a distracted quarter of an hour of research, I'm still not sure if that's actually the word I want.) That is, I learn best by taking a pile of specifics and doing the work on my own to turn them into generalizations. I like to stuff myself to the gills with information on whatever topic I'm currently researching, and then I let it all ferment. I find connections, I sort, I sift, I go off on wild tangents that still connect back to the main topic, and after a while it all clicks. All that mass of information is organized into a nifty little outline, with conclusions and their supporting data, along with the occasional sidenote sticky fact. A few months later, I've forgotten the supporting data but the conclusions have become a firm part of my mind.

Because I learn like this, I tend to feel that everything needs context. "If I'm going to expect my students to understand x," I say to myself, "I should tell them about y and z so they can see why I think x is true."

Sometimes this urge is a good thing.

More often, it's not.

One of the main things that connect lessons I come away from feeling like it just didn't fly is that in my zeal to show you x, y, z and their funny cousin q, I got away from the basic principle of all design: keep it simple, stupid.

I need to constantly ask myself questions like:

• "Teaching with primary documents is great, but do I need to expose them to this many different sources on the topic?"
• "Do they really need to know the answers to all 10 of those questions to get the essential understanding I'm aiming for?"
• "Will this information actually help them make sense of things or just bog them down in more facts to memorize?"
• "Am I making the narrative behind the information clear enough or just expecting them to see it because I do?"

I'm actually pretty excited about this realization, because I've finally gelled a vague frustration into a thing that I can do something about and I did something about it today while planning. Nothing like a little success to build up confidence. ;)