A disposition to wonder

Isn’t it interesting how you notice things more when you are open to the concept. I few weeks ago at a lecture, Ngaire Hoben shared the wonderful phrase in the title. “A disposition to wonder”. It really resonated with me, but as we all do, I got bogged down with the daily tasks of being a teacher and forgot about it.

Then on Monday I was lucky enough to go and have a workshop with David Eddy. He talked about re-framing your thinking – so instead of getting frustrated and with something, instead engage them in conversation, start of with “I’m genuinely curious about why you did xyz that particular way… I love this idea – the re-framing of the question.

As humans, and certainly as teachers we can be very quick to judge. To leap into an evaluative role. “Goodness, what were they thinking, they really should have done xyz.” or “Those students would have learnt much better/behaved much better if only xyz” But we so often do not ask – we leap into telling people how to fix the problem that we can see. However, if we re-frame that. If we ask instead “I was curious why you did it that way” then we have some answers. It gives a chance to see how or what the person in question was thinking. This is particularly important when mentoring PRTs or PSTs, to use questioning to find out what they were thinking.

Because – there is no one way to do something, and as we see in our classes all the time, 30 people will approach one task 30 different ways! 

Being curious, or having a disposition to wonder also fits in so nicely with the inquiry mindset. That idea of founding your inquiry on something that you have wondered about – wondered whether it would work or make a difference. The wondering ‘what if” and then taking the risks to to see what would happen if indeed you tried that.

Curiosity is a wonderful thing, something we should be encouraging in our classrooms but also in our selves – to wonder what can change, and what paths we can venture down next.

Mrs K

A permanent state of becoming

I am doing a post graduate paper this year at Auckland University. The lecturer is Ngaire Hoben. The paper is about learning mentoring skills, and becoming a mentor, both to student teachers, and to other teachers.

One of the things that she asked us one night was do you ever really finally become a teacher? Or are you in a constant state of becoming?

I really really liked that concept. I mean obviously I say that I am a teacher. I write it down as my profession when required, I talk about it with others, and I am very proud to say that I am a teacher. But I certainly never had an ah ha moment. Not when I graduated, not in my first job. Some days I am more than happy to admit that I am awesome. That I am really nailing this teaching thing! But other days, or even just other periods, I doubt myself more.

Is this the nature of teaching? Does anyone ever feel like they have made it? Should I define here between a teacher and a good teacher? Does being a reflective teacher help this process? Or does being a reflective teacher, where you are constantly striving for something more, mean that you are in fact always caught in this state of becoming.

This morning in class I reverted to techniques I have not used in years – my class got their names written on the board, and we moved to a 3 ticks and you are out system. Not quite sure what the ‘out’ would have been. But I was confident that I would never get there. And I didn’t. The last time I think I used that technique we got to two ticks and I was too scared to move to the third tick. Worried that if I removed them from the class it meant that I was not doing my job properly. That I was not a ‘good’ teacher. Today  – although no definite plan, I would happily have removed them if they got to three ticks.

In terms of content I remember trying to read everything I could as a first year and second year teacher, always frustrated that I did not know enough. I still have those moments, but experience brings a confidence to admit you don’t know everything, and to draw on the ideas that come from your class.

This week my year 9 class has taken me on an adventure in vocabulary, it was not one that I planned, but it happened, and it has been fantastic, along the way they have taught me things, and I know taught at least one other class and teacher things too! I love that I was able to foster an environment where that happened.

So – although I state my profession as a teacher. I am happy to say I am still in the process of becoming a teacher. That I am learning, experimenting, and reflecting. And sometimes, just sometimes, I am not the only expert in my classroom!

Mrs K

Motivation & Procrastination

I am not much of a procrastinator. Not anymore. Certainly there was a stage where I was. In fact once I handed something to my principal, and she looked at her watch, looked at me in confusion and said “But there is still 90 minutes till the deadline.”

These days I have trained myself out of it. Long lists on google keep remind me how much I have to do, and there is usually a range of easy and hard tasks, so it is easy to work through the lists and feel a sense of accomplishment.

Then you get the days like today. Today I woke up with good intentions. And now have sat at my desk for 50 minutes and copied some videos onto my hard drive. Let’s be honest. That is a 2 minute job. So that means 48 minutes of nothing. (We could take it further – and say that writing a blog post at this point is really just further procrastination. But just for me, can we pretend this was productive?)

I tell myself it is because it is Week 7 of term. That it has been a hard term. But other professions don’t work in these 10 week terms. Does the fact that we count down the weeks make it worse? or better? Is it because it is week 7, or am I just lazy today!

What is the best way to deal with this? Should I indulge myself, give myself the day, in 6 minutes I will be teaching anyway – and that certainly is productive. Or – should I have been more firm with myself and just got on with it. The reality is that there are no pressing deadlines at the moment. (Well reports are due on Friday – but that is still two days away!)

I wish I had the answers – my other question is, is this the byproduct of being organised? I know I can slack of for one hour, because I know it won’t change anything, all the things that are due are due.

How do we change this? I love my job – very genuinely love my job. All aspects of it. That is my motivation to get out of the bed each morning. I talk excitedly about all the things that I do. However that has not helped me this morning!

Oh well – onward and upwards. I promise a much more insightful blog next time. But for now – the bell is about to ring!

Mrs K

A stone chip across my window

Driving to work on Monday a massive stone flew off a truck and hit my window. It left a massive chip right in my eye line on the drivers side. Over the last two days I have spent a lot of time looking at that chip. I noticed tonight as I drove that the lines, the tendrils, from the original chip are starting to spread.

It made me think about how we can often feel about teaching. The chip is a bad feeling, a bad lesson or a bad idea. Or sometimes something that is imposed on us that we don’t like. It hits us to start with, and then if we allow it, slowly the chip spreads out across the windscreen. If we do nothing, and leave it unstopped then it will eventually take over the windscreen and I will no longer be able to see out. In the metaphor, we are unable to see beyond the idea, whatever it is it chokes us, and disables our ability to see the bigger picture, and to see the good in what we do. I think we all have these moments. These moments when it seems too hard, or we are not making progress. Where nothing seems to work, and we are getting the same results. It is easy to sit behind this and just feel frustrated.

I think the trick, which is always easier said than done – is to get it in the early stages. As the chip starts to spread – for my window they insert a resin, and can fill up the crack so that it seems almost invisible. For teaching, talking about what you are feeling at the beginning can help stop those tendrils spreading.

The flip side to this, is I think that good things, ideas, concepts also do the same thing – you might try something a first time (the stone hits) and then slowly it expands its tendrils out to take over your practice. In this example the consequences are not as dire as the negative stone chip. The tendrils here do not block your vision. However a single mindedness can also be a negative thing, and lead long term to an issue in practice.

So tomorrow I will ring my insurance to get my stone chip fixed. And in the school, I will talk to my colleagues about things I am trying, things that are annoying me, things that I want to try – I will get feedback, listen and try again – so that in both cases, the tendrils do not take over!

Travelling through the classroom.

This morning I was lucky enough to sit through a presentation by Claire Sinnema. She left us with the following quote from Alain de Botton:

What, then, is a travelling mindset?  Receptivity might be said to be its chief characteristic.  We approach new places with humility.  We carry with us no rigid ideas about what is interesting.  We irritate locals because we stand on traffic islands and in narrow streets and admire what they take to be strange small details.  We risk getting run over because we are intrigued by the roof of a government building or an  inscription on a wall.  We find a supermarket or hairdresser’s unusually fascinating.  We dwell at length on the layout of a menu or the clothes of the presenters on the evening news.  We are alive to the layers of history beneath the present and take notes and photographs.

Home, on the other hand, finds us more settled in our expectations. We feel assured that we have discovered everything interesting about a neighbourhood, primarily by virtue of having lived there a long time.  It seems inconceivable that there could be anything new to find in a place which we have been living in for a decade or more.  We have become habituated and therefore blind.

From Alain de Botton, ‘The Art of Travel’, p.246-247

Her argument to us as teachers was that we need to approach our classes, our students, teaching in general with a travelling mindset.

This really strongly resonated with me. I love the idea of taking into the classroom a slowed down mentality, one that enables me to be curious. And boy is there a lot to be curious about. Imagine, if I took that mindset to every discussion I had with a student – imagine the richness of discussion around “and why did you do it that way?”. But also the power of applying this mindset to myself – from a very basic “why do I want to teach that text?” to “Is that the best method”.

To take the time to be amazed by what students produce, and to share it with others.  For me the travelling mindset is about slowing down and being curious. It is a chance to explore rather than just get on with the day to day life that becomes standard. That is why I so like this concept – I love the idea of slowing down, and exploring things. Of asking the students how things can best work for them, of what activities work for them. Of course there is a limit – while sometimes in your classroom students can be leaders and have the control, you are the trained teacher, and have the map clutched tightly in your hands. Despite the wandering and the curiosity you still need to get to the destination that has been stated by your department, your HOF, or by a higher national level. But along the way we want to make curious learners. Not just learners who are able to supply exam answers.

I like the idea. And today already it has made me think about how I approach my classes and how I get student voice. I know in the heat of the assessment term in term 3 this may change. But I sure am going to enjoy it in the mean time. Just travelling through my classes, exploring the curiosities.

Ice Breakers, Do Nows and Student Voice

My thought this week was that it was week 5. I have spent lots of time getting to know my learners, I have set up good habits – for my juniors I have changed my seating plan weekly so that they do not get too comfortable, we are well into our learning.

That must mean it is time to get some feedback! So today with two different classes I did two very different types of student voice.

With my year 13s I gave them two squares of paper each. One orange and one green. I asked them to write on the piece of paper that best reflected their attitude towards the current assessment. Then on the chosen square I asked them to write their name and answer 4 questions.  I went around and collected in the feedback; scanning their answers as I did. Their answers dictated how the lesson went today, and also how the rest of the week went. So today, instead of doing Creative Writing as I had written in my plan, we took a couple of steps back and went over some of the basics of the assessment, with me pulling up song lyrics and creating an example on the fly – before returning to conferencing with students. The lesson finished with all the students feeling much better about the whole assessment.

My year 9s I was much more subtle. I combined student voice with a new seating plan and a fun Do Now activity for a period 5 class on a rainy afternoon. We played This and That. I started off very generic, “Would you rather live in the city or the country” but as the game progressed I incorporated more specific questions, about what there preferences were for learning, and how they were finding English. The final question was “Do you prefer to read novels or poems”. From there they were told to sit down in the nearest seat. It mixed quite a few people up, but also has given me a group of slightly weaker students, which makes it easy for me to target them once giving instructions.

Both forms of student voice today had their purpose, and have given me something to chew over and work with for the coming week.

The Buck Stops Here

Today I got sent a really good article to read about student motivation. (you can find the article here.) I really enjoyed it as a light kind of read. Something to make me think about motivation, and growth mindset.

The section however that really resonated for me was the idea that the buck stops here. As the teacher in the classroom I have the most control. I do say ‘most’ not all. Because there are still some things that happen that are outside of my control. However. Despite what else is happening in students lives, I have some control over what happens in my classroom.

We have all seen it happen – students who are amazing for one teacher, and then less than amazing for the teacher they see after that. What is the difference? Relationship and expectations.  So it seems so simple – stop blaming the students for being motivated, and look at yourself. Certainly I like that aspect because it is what I can change – I can change myself, that is far easier than trying to make someone like English. Or like School.

My Grandma is 92. She went through a very different schooling system to what we have now. On Sunday she said to me “I feel sorry for kids who don’t like school; because there is no way out for them.” She said this more than once, and by the third time that I heard it, already my mind was starting to turn. It’s true, students have difficulty learning, that is a fact. Students have difficulty socializing. Another fact. But as teachers, I can help them enjoy my class. For at least an hour a day – I can make school a good experience for them. By have high, but realistic expectations, by having clear rules about what is allowed and not allowed. By knowing my students. So that together we are able to have texts, and issues raised in class that genuinely interest them. So that for one hour a day they are not focused on what they cannot do. Instead they are positive and upbeat.

It’s OK – I am not some crazy optimist – I know that it will not be perfect all the time. In fact some days it is really hard – however that is of course where the fun begins!

This is hard. This is fun.

The title today is a quote from Carol Dweck.  I was dwelling on the first blog post that I made, about expectations of students. A quick google search last night for quotes around expectations however was fascinating. It seems that the general consensus according to my very rustic google search is that in life people seem to think that expectations lead to disappointment. To get ideas other than this I needed to add expectations and growth mindset into my search. Which of course led me to Carol Dweck.

At the end of last year I was worried about having year 10s again – and knowing that I needed to have high expectations of them. What I found was that as I started this year I did indeed have high expectations of my year 10s. I also had high expectations of my year 11s. Both of these have been very useful. And the classes are running smoothly and they are working to a very high level.

What I have discovered though, is my year 9s, who I did not consciously have the same thought about needing high expectations have totally taken me by surprise. So much so, that by the third lesson I was going “Oh well – this is a hard class”. This is where my title comes in. Yes they are hard, but if I know that going in, then we can still have fun. I just need to adjust my outlook a little bit. And so I have – and I have managed the ‘hardness’ and you know what? I have had some fun!

We get told a lot as teachers about how students make judgements about us in the first lesson. By the end of that 60 minutes they have decided whether the class will be easy, whether I will be nice, or mean, whether they will need to do homework etc. However what I have really discovered over the week is that we also make these judgements. By last week I had labelled my year 9s as my ‘hard class’ and had that tiny pit of dread in my stomach as the period approached. On Thursday I decided that I could not do this for the year. That I needed to change my judgements and my approach, so that we could have a fun year.

On Friday I found my fun again. I rolled with the million questions they asked rather than getting riled with them – better yet I preempted a whole bunch of them. I raised my expectations, and together we had a successful lesson.

Just because something is hard does not mean it is not fun. It is just a matter of perception. And as with anything in my classroom – it all starts with me.

So – At the beginning of week 4, I feel great. I have high expectations, I have turned around my thoughts about my ‘hard’ class, I have spent time conferencing one on one students, right from the start to help them step up their game, and I am having fun!

Bring on the rest of the term!

Goal Cohesion

I sat in a presentation this morning by one of my favourite speakers. Dr Howard Youngs from AUT. He always keeps it so real and it is so relevant to what is going on in schools. I also really like that the things he talks about work on so many levels. They work from the top, from an Administration point of view – to the leaders who are running the school, or parts of the school. But they also work from the point of view of a teacher, who is a leader in their classroom.

Today the message that really stuck with me was this idea of goal cohesion. It was part of a conversation about Navigating Paradox’s. The Paradox here is the pull between Goal Cohesion and Goal Diversity. If we are all working towards one goal then we are united, we have a common purpose, a common drive. However the reality is that we are all individuals – we are diverse, we have diverse needs and diverse concerns.  Therefore is Goal diversity not better?

Youngs took it one step further. With the idea that if we are all individuals, yet we all adhere to the greater good, and do the same thing then we lose our creativity. It is our creativity which makes us good and engaging teachers is it not? Creativity in the classroom which enables us to be excited. I know this is certainly true for me. I get excited when I create something new which works. I get excited when my students create a new link or a new idea on a text that I had not previously thought about.

So to take this idea further – In order to have successful teachers and successful students then we need creativity.  To be creative – we need to be individuals. We need to find a way to be ourselves, and chase our own goals, all the while working towards a bigger picture, one that brings the school to a higher level of thinking, achievement or whatever that goal might be.

Sounds tricky huh? It sure is – but is it not these complexities, these challenges that make it exciting to be a teacher?

I can’t wait to go and be creative in my classroom!

 

A Dangerous Phrase

One of my friends on Facebook last week shared a link. The image associated with the link said “The most dangerous phrase in the English language is “we’ve always done it this way” The quote itself seems to be credited to Grace Hopper, who was an American Computer Scientist, born in 1906. Let’s take a moment and consider the amazing feat there of a woman who became a female computer scientist in a time where that most certainly would have been a male domain!

Anyway – I am getting sidetracked. I did not read the article that my friend linked. I did not need to. Not because I know everything, but because that quote itself got me thinking.  I think in any situation if the only reason that you are doing something is ‘because you have always done it that way’ then perhaps you should not doing it. But likewise the same applies for the opposite. You should not be doing something different simply because it is different.

It comes down to a skill. That skill is about critical thinking. It is challenging everything – although not necessarily out loud – that may not be the best way to make friends. But it is about thinking about the why. Why are you doing whatever it is that is the focus of your concern? What purpose is it trying to achieve? Is this the best way to do that? Are there other factors at play here.

I think that it is important that you are not changing things for the sake of changing them. But likewise, you need to be open to change, to the notion of doing things differently.

Mostly as I write this I am thinking about administration examples. However the same applies in a classroom. I get worried by people who want to teach the same texts – ‘because they know them’. Again, it comes down to those critical questions – perhaps the biggest there being ‘But does it get my students the best results?’.

At the end of the day – teachers are human. We will make mistakes. But are we not better to make mistakes while taking risks, challenging the status quo and trying new things? Rather than making the mistake of doing something, simply because we have always done it?