Tag Archives: Teaching

Education

See Me

4 Comments

My thirteenth year as a teacher comes to an end this week. As all the years before it, it has gone quickly. There has been, as always, joy and sadness, disappointment and surprise, stress and smooth sailing. I keep track of seasons based on what we’re doing in school and refer to years according to the school calendar. In August I’ll buy a new pocket agenda.

There is a lot on this blog about teachers and teaching, about schools, students, and learning. I admit to loving, really loving, the work that I am privileged to do. If you ask me what I teach, I’ll give you the easy answer: I teach history, psychology, social studies, Theory of Knowledge. It’s true, but far more important to me is the human element. I teach young people and I watch them grow up for a little while. And then they go off into the world and I smile.

Last week I received an email from a student who I’ve taught since grade 10 who just completed grade 12. He is one of many students who has come to me over the years to talk about something that was on his mind, and one of a few who have written to me about it afterwards. What he said struck me and reminded me of things that matter. I wanted someone to see me and you saw me. I needed to talk and you listened.

Maya Angelou had it right: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

It’s not uncommon for me to raise an eyebrow at a student and ask, “You okay?” Or, when it works better, those words go on a sticky note that I pass to the student when moving around the room. I usually get a nod and sometimes a change in behaviour, and then we go on our way. Occasionally a student comes back to me later and I find out what was going on. Sometimes I receive messages, on a few occasions even years after the fact, telling me about a student’s feelings in that moment.

Young people are crying out to be seen and to be heard, and I think it’s not only young people. When we choose to engage, we don’t always know what our level of involvement will be. We don’t know what we’ll hear and therefore what we will be required to do. And we don’t do it for the possibility of thanks at the end.

To see a young person how they want to be seen, to sit across a table and pass a packet of tissues, to really listen to someone who just needs to talk – this is what I do. And I am so, so lucky to be able to give those moments and the accompanying feelings. This is all part of being a teacher.

Education

What I Learned from Action Research

Leave a comment

I started my graduate work in education the day after I accepted my undergraduate diploma, the day after my parents and I packed my school things into the car and I unpacked into my childhood bedroom. I spent that summer working my usual summer job, taking the first required courses of my Master’s degree, and applying for every teaching job that I could find. By the time summer ended and I had secured a teaching job for the fall, I was decidedly less enthusiastic about said degree and wasted little time in letting my advisor know. At the time, my coursework seemed too theoretical, too academic, too highbrow, and no match for the reality of being a new teacher. Balancing the time spent on teaching work and coursework meant that all other time ceased to exist, and I was in no state to actually learn much from the early stages of my degree. But I did, though I didn’t recognize it until much later.

In the second semester, at a time when I was decidedly more focused as a result of surviving the first months of teaching, one of our required assignments was a very traditional action research project. Action research has several theoretical frameworks, but the basic idea is that a teacher does research based on what is going on in a classroom and takes simultaneous action. Reflection is a key component of this process, and the hope is that transformative change will occur. Looking back, I don’t remember much of the paper I submitted, but the experience of doing action research indeed transformed the way I understood teaching and learning, a transformation that is a core component of my practice today. As a rule, I do not recommend being a first-year teacher when entering a graduate program, but I cannot deny that being a first-year teacher during my graduate program (and then a second-year teacher, which makes a remarkable difference) meant that I was malleable, enthusiastic, and highly motivated. This project caught me at a good time.

As it was, I was very lucky to be teaching a psychology elective course to grades 11 and 12 students. In the first semester of the school year, I taught one section and my department chair taught another, giving me someone to lean on. In the second semester, at the time of my action research project, I was having the wonderful experience of having taught something once and being able to revise it, a process I still very much enjoy. I was now the only teacher of this course, meaning I could really do whatever I wanted. Unlike the history courses I was also teaching, which culminated in state exams, this psychology course had no specific requirements aside from a broad set of standards. I was constantly trying to juggle the amount of information I felt responsible for giving my students in history (my approach to teaching and learning has changed dramatically in twelve years!) and psychology was a breath of fresh air. What if, I wanted to know, I took a step back and let my students lead?

For my project, my students and I divided up the psychology syllabus and students chose one topic for which they’d like to lead a discussion at the end of the unit. I don’t remember what the requirements were or what I expected students to hand in, but I do remember that it worked. I sat quietly in the back, taking notes as my students sat in a circle and went through the list of discussion questions their classmates had prepared. I remember one student who recorded herself having a conversation with someone about her topic, someone whose perspective she thought was missing, and playing it for her classmates before asking for their feedback. I remember my students really looking forward to each discussion, for the opportunity to share knowledge and draw conclusions. And I remember that the discussions got better over time, the students more prepared, the participants more involved. Ultimately, I concluded, my students didn’t need me to give them information. There was a whole lot they could find out and build and create on their own.

In terms of action research, I’d learned that a teacher can hand over to students and that this is an effective way to learn. A teacher creates the foundation, scaffolds, models, and supports, and this allows students to construct knowledge on their own. Beginning with this project, I began to understand the importance of both structure and flexibility, of the balance between time and resources. I learned that developing interpersonal skills is a part of learning and not an addition to it, and that mistakes and misconceptions are part of the learning process and not something to fear. I got used to saying, “I don’t know” in class and finding answers became a group activity.

As the world has changed, so has my approach to teaching and learning. This has also had to keep up with the way students have changed, and these changes have been dramatic. But at the end of the day, there is a lot that has remained the same. Learning is still a partnership and a process, and students need to know that they are critical partners in the process. Their devices know far more than I ever will, and my role is not to provide that information or to pretend I can keep up. Rather, my role is to raise young people who know how to work independently and together, who ask and answer difficult questions, and who see themselves as part of an interconnected community. I didn’t draw those connections in my action research project a dozen years ago, but I did learn that I could trust the young people who, for better or for worse, trusted me. And that has made all the difference.

Education

Teaching from the Heart

Leave a comment

Several years ago, sitting in the kitchen of a hostel in Interlaken, Switzerland on a rainy Christmas Eve, I was engrossed in a book that explained teaching as an emotionally demanding profession. Oh, I thought, well of course.

When I first started teaching, I remember thinking that my time with students was a bit like an improv show. You have a plan that is more of an outline because it needs enough flexibility for nothing to go according to plan. You’re working with diverse groups of students for a specific amount of time and each group is somewhat different and requires varying amounts of time on different activities, but you’re time-bound regardless. Whatever happened before the lesson may or may not be relevant to the tone in the room that day, and whatever is in store later may or may not make an appearance. You never know exactly who you’ll get or how they’ll respond, and if certain students are missing, the whole dynamic could change. So you need a plan that is clear enough to create a predictable environment and effectively use the time available, but you also need enough tools in your toolbox to be immediately flexible. You are always, and I mean always, thinking on your feet. Sounds like an improv show to me!

What makes teaching emotionally demanding is not only that you are constantly “reading the room” and responding accordingly, but that it is relentless. One class leaves and another enters, requiring a change of pace, change of style, change of content. A lesson might have gone poorly but there’s no space for the teacher’s emotion or sufficient reflection during that lesson, in which the teacher is likely trying to figure out what to change while simultaneously managing the current environment. Add to this that young people (any people) have a range of wants and needs that may or may not align with those of the whole class or of the teacher. If a student needs to talk in the five minutes of passing time between lessons during which the teacher thought they might be able to go to the washroom, the washroom will just have to wait.

And this does not even reflect the critical point that students need and deserve someone who is calm, collected, organized, and happy to see them, regardless of how the teacher might actually be feeling. Every interaction, even within the same lesson, should be a new interaction, which can be hard to do. After all, teachers are humans and have feelings even though they are not able to respond to them. Teachers can’t leave the room when a situation becomes stressful or unpleasant. They can’t take a breather to gather their thoughts and they can’t pivot to a different topic when they don’t know how to answer. They can’t pin failure on someone else, separate themselves from someone causing a problem, or attend to anything else that might be on their minds. This is what makes teaching emotionally demanding, and this is why I need quiet when I get home. And to sit down, just for five minutes, because I may not have sat down all day.

So it was a relief to read a book that described my daily experience, all the trials and the joy, the uncertainty and the real love that goes into what I do. It’s nice to know I’m not alone.

Three very recent examples come to mind to illustrate what I mean.

Just the other day while on my bike, I found myself thinking of a particular student who I find emotionally demanding. Her moods are volatile and need to be managed very carefully (and it’s fortunate that she wears her heart on her sleeve), she is often deeply affected by any number of things, she fixates on minutiae, and it can be hard to approach her about the significant academic concerns that she is doing her best to avoid because of the high likelihood of setting her into a spiral. (And this is just one example of one student in one class.)

Yesterday this student asked if she could stay for a few minutes after school to talk about a personal issue. She wanted to talk to me because I teach psychology, she said. Years of questions framed exactly like this have led me to respond very cautiously and always with some trepidation. I do teach psychology, but I am not a psychologist. I am not a therapist, I am not a social worker, I am not trained to help anyone through crisis. Often the best I can do is refer the student to someone who can actually help them. But because I teach psychology, and perhaps because I listen, students think I know things and they come to talk.

As it turned out, and it took me greatly by surprise, this student wanted to talk about difficulties in communication with some of her relationships. She did not specify or provide any details, but explained that she is bothered by communication problems that certain people do not see the same way that she does. She wanted a right answer for how to proceed; she wanted affirmation that she was doing the right thing. We talked about communication styles and preferences, about respecting what people are telling us even when it’s not what we want to hear, and about setting boundaries. We didn’t find a right answer and she left, about 15 minutes later, clearly more comfortable with the idea that there isn’t a single answer, much less a right one.

Musing over this interaction last night, I found myself surprised that a student who is so reactive and volatile was quiet, thoughtful, and reflective when discussing a complex personal problem. She had insights I wouldn’t have expected and was intentionally discreet, showing a greater level of self-regulation that I had previously seen from her. The interaction allowed me to understand her differently, to see a different side of her, and this is perhaps something I can tap into the next time she’s having a rough day and brings that into class.

Teaching is comprised of dozens and dozens of relationships, all of which are enacted at once. And an emotionally demanding element of teaching is being the right person for each of those relationships, each and every time. After all, we are not equals and we are not peers. This is what I mean when I say that every interaction should be a new interaction. The student above should have my listening ear any time she asked for it, even on a day that had already been challenging.

Today, for example, after setting the rest of the class a task, I pulled two students out into the hall after asking them three times to change a behaviour. I had found what they were doing really frustrating and told them so. I am rarely upset in class, and can honestly only think of a couple of instances, but today I was and I could feel it through my whole body. It was an effort to keep my voice very quiet and very steady, and I could feel my elevated heart rate for several minutes after we all returned to class. I don’t know exactly why I was so bothered and it bears further thinking about, but I do know that I was very aware of how I behaved towards these students for the remainder of our lesson, and it took deliberate effort to act as though nothing had happened. Perhaps they felt the same, and it was perhaps as difficult for them to ask questions as it was for me to respond as clearly and gently as I normally do. But after the first “normal” interaction, the ice was broken, and the tension I felt diminished. When one of the students asked a second question, I knew we were alright and we carried on like before.

I can be upset at a behaviour, but this does not mean being upset at a young person learning to regulate their behaviour. When I took these students into the hall, I asked them to consider time and place and explained why this, our current context in class, was not it. Teaching is teaching, all the time, and we cannot expect students to know something if we haven’t made it very clear what it is we want them to know.

Considering what transpired between the end of the school day yesterday and the first lesson of the day today, I had to laugh when a student in my second lesson asked how I can always be so happy. I gave two answers and they’re equally true. First, I explained, what my students see comes with how I see my job as a teacher, regardless of how I might actually be feeling, and I acknowledged that there’s some level of performance in it. And second, I assured the students listening, I love what I do and am genuinely so glad to be able to do it.

My students looked a little distressed at the first answer and much happier about the second, but I think it’s good to have a bit of realism. Teachers are supposed to be teachers around students, and that largely means one thing. One very complex, multi-dimensional thing, but one thing. Teachers are not expected to be human because humanness would require us to acknowledge that complex, multi-dimensionality that we bring to the classroom as part of us and tuck away somewhere deep inside.

This is what I mean when I say that teaching is an emotionally demanding profession, and this is something I wish more people could appreciate. It’s more than lesson plans, more than marking papers, more than meeting with parents or sitting in faculty meetings. It’s more than working with students, writing letters of recommendation, and redoing unit planners. Teaching comes from the whole heart and I can think of no other way to do it.