Leading learning

“I’ve come to a frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my personal approach that creates the climate. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized.”  - H. Ginott

Schools are busy places. It doesn’t matter what role you have, there always seem to be too much to do and no time left to get it done. I don’t think people realise that it is not easy to meaningfully plan, document and assess learning when the largest part of your job involves spending time alongside your students. 

I’m not winging here. There are plenty of tools to stay on top of the work – one colleague introduced me to the 3 folders rule, one folder labelled, ‘not due yet’ the other folder marked, ‘due today’ the final folder marked ‘due yesterday’. Another colleague introduced me to the eat the frog concept – and gave me a plastic frog to remind me about my frogs. That one is too long winded to explain, go and watch this youtube clip to learn more about that, http://youtu.be/0W7GB5Fh2XM . What I’m more interested in is how quickly and easy it is to lose sight of a teacher’s role in the classroom. 

Our first role is to lead learning. To say to our students, ‘Follow me!’ We are, as Ginott points out, “THE decisive element in the classroom.” It means that regardless of the pulls and pressures that are placed on us professional and personally, our first responsibility is to educating the students in our class. Now that part is actually an easy conceptual leap – teachers educate students, nothing new here. The hard part is what and how to teach. This is where the distractions start to come into play – curriculum says teach this, team leaders says teach this, parents want this taught government wants this taught. The number of opinions on what and how to teach is endless and it is very difficult to know where to start and even harder sometimes to know if you are doing a good job. When I started out it made my head spin. Still does some days. 

I think that’s why I like Ginott’s conclusion. It reminds us that at the heart of what we all do, the most important factor in improving our teaching and our students learning is the relationship between the teacher and their class.

Thank you John Proctor

I hope this blog does not turn into the epistle according to kayaker75. I hope to offer my thoughts, but also my practical ideas on teaching and learning in our ever changing world. But for my first post I think I have to sort of outline a philosophy – so here I go!

I wear many hats at the school I work at. Each day I juggle responsibilities as a team leader, digital leader, tutor teacher, associate teacher oh, and I still teach in a classroom.  I love my job to bits. I get up every day excited to go to work and work alongside my colleagues. I stretch that term to include my class, a group of 12 and 13 year olds. I include them because one of our guiding principles is that  we are absolutely a community of learners, including me. The factors that make this all work are complex but the longer I teach I am realising, with increasing clarity, that there are a 5 things that make learning work.

1. All curriculum content can be interesting

At the heart of the whole teaching and learning game is the simplest of things; a group of people sharing thoughts and ideas around a topic that is new. I love hearing the buzz of intellectual excitement that comes from presenting interesting and engaging ideas. This was thoroughly brought home to me recently when I was working with one of my reading groups and we hit the word inflation in a text we were analysing. They were not sure what it meant and asked. I could have responded in a number of ways but chose to say to the group of predominantly boys in front of me, “It’s one of the causes of World War 2.” Ears perked up around the room and the flurry of conversation began in earnest, not just between me and the students but between each other, “My dad is a banker and he says that…” or “I heard from my brother at high school that people in Germany had to buy bread with wheelbarrows of money.” A quick google image search and I was able to bring a picture of this up on my class interactive whiteboard to illustrate his point. Blame boring and bland lessons on whatever you like but if you, as a teacher, are bored chances are your students are too. Find an 'in' and make it work.

2. A genuine willingness to find out things and then share what you found out with others

If you have ever wondered something, gone as far as finding out the answer, and then shared it with someone else, then you have stumbled on the greatest educational secret ever! Everyone wonders, seldom go and find the answer, even less tell others what they found out yet this simple loop is teaching and learning. Acknowledge the importance of this loop in the classroom and you’ve got it made! Any subject any level. I do every day. When I wonder something, my class knows. When I find out the answer, my class knows. When my students do the same thing the whole class knows. We collaborate and we share. This is at the core of  our classroom culture.  

3. It must be our Darwinian imperative to aim for mastery but accept and applaud students’ mistakes

Classrooms are the place to try out what it is like in the real world without all the consequences of the real world. They are Darwinian evolution at work. It makes perfect evolutionary sense to have the experienced give the inexperienced advice before they put themselves in harm’s way. The oldest of classrooms involved partnering someone with experience with someone without. Socrates was the master at this style. Oxford University continues this tradition with its system of dons. Our classrooms are the industrial equivalent. One experienced member guiding a group of less experienced.  Everything we do in the classroom has to relate or even mimic to what happens outside a school and as adults we know that there are very few second chances and we have to always hit the ground running. The beauty of the classroom is that we can have the standard but we can support the mistake. The unique and defining difference in a school.

4. The realisation that ‘education’ is another way to say, ‘make changes’

We actually battle a hard dichotomy here. On one hand we are the institution on the other hand we are teaching our charges to find the new way and buck the institution. The best embodiment of this idea is the teacher who wears two badges on his lapel. One reads, “Trust me I’m in charge.” the other reads, “Question authority.” All teachers started teaching, I’m sure, with a multitude of noble and altruistic reasons but the overwhelming reason for most will somewhere involve the word ‘change’.  The good news is, the system actually agrees with you. They have other names for it and have very difficult measures for it - “students at this age must achieve these nebulous goals and ambitions measured by these diagnostic tools on this day blah blah blah.” It’s hard to believe, but comforting to know that somewhere beneath the bureaucratic heart telling you that you haven’t hit the target for the year is a desire to affect change.

5. 10,000 hours means a lot of practice!

Malcolm Gladwell introduced the 10,000 hours rule in his book, 'The Outliers.' Basically it takes 10,000 hours to reach mastery in a skill/task. Roughly ten years. In New Zealand that equals 75% of the total primary and secondary schooling a child because undertakes. It doesn’t count anything done at home, or early childhood and tertiary education. I’m sure I’ll be back to discuss this point more in the future because there is so much more to discuss but, here is what it means: For teachers it means we are a team, across year levels and schools. For parents it means miracles won’t happen overnight. For students it means get on with it because we are investing over 10,000 hours in you to be the masters of your future.

So…How do I know these things work? I can’t say how my students will turn out and I can’t say that if they are successful it was because of me. That’s kind if the problem isn’t it? Teachers never know if their influence worked. So I dedicate this post to John Proctor, my teacher in form 2 (year 8 in modern parlance) at Dilworth School, Auckland New Zealand. My 10,000 hours started with him.