6 Things My Students Have Taught Me

Twenty-one years later, I still remember my first day of teaching and how misguided my perceptions were about the career upon which I was about to embark. Like so many others, I thought that the primary role of the teacher was to deliver information to students. I couldn’t have been more wrong. 

Now, years later, I have come to understand that being a good teacher is as much about building relationships with students while modeling determination, curiosity, compassion, and helping others through the process of learning. I am constantly learning new things from my students. Here are six things they have taught me.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. I don’t think you can be an effective teacher if you aren’t willing to make mistakes in front of your students and laugh at yourself. When I first started teaching I wanted to make sure my students knew I was in control of the classroom. I had great classroom management, but very little classroom empowerment. Now I am much more comfortable allowing my students to see me as a fellow flawed human. There is a culture of respect in my classroom. I respect my students, they respect me, and they respect each other. Within that culture, we understand each of us makes mistakes on occasion, and that they are learning opportunities.

Passion is powerful. Years ago, when I was teaching 5th grade, I started shifting my classroom to be more focused on letting students learn through their passions. Instead of everyone reading the same non-fiction text to learn our reading standards, students were able to choose books on topics that interested them. Instead of each student having to write a persuasive essay on a prompt that I gave them, they were able to blog about an issue they cared about and publish it to a global audience. As they were able to discover and pursue their passions, they became more engaged in learning. They also helped me see how important it was to pursue my passions and to use my voice to share them with others.

Autonomy is necessary for empowerment. When we find ways to give autonomy to students in the learning process they flourish. I’ve seen this many times in my own classroom, but the example that sticks with me happened during a visit to the HIP Academy in rural western Kenya less than 2 weeks after the school opened. I brought with me some donated tablets and an internet connection. The teachers told me that few of the students had ever seen a screen before I arrived. During my visit I facilitated a Skype call between those children and 2nd grade students in Australia. I told the Kenyan children that they were in charge of teaching the Australians the names of different animals in Swahili. After a few moments of nervousness, the HIP students began to shine with confidence as they picked up stuffed animals and taught their new friends. Being given the chance to be in charge of the call allowed those students to take ownership of the lesson.

You can’t change the world if you don’t know much about it. I teach in the small, rural town where I have lived almost my entire life since I was 11 years old. Like all teachers, I want my students to believe that the learning that happens in school matters, and that they can use it to change their world for the better. I have learned to give them opportunities to see beyond our school walls and make a difference in their local and global communities by connecting with community members and using videoconferencing tools like Skype. As a result, my students have taught me how those experiences allow all of us to see ourselves as interconnected like never before. 

Everybody has the capacity to impact their community for the better. Each time we collaborate with a scientist, astronaut, park ranger, international teacher, or group of students from around the globe, it is a great learning experience for students. So many times those connections have inspired my students to develop ways to make the world a better place. They have designed and fund-raised to build a bridge in Africa so that students could go to school. They have started gardening projects to grow produce for the local food pantry. They have worked to provide clean drinking water for children in the Kibera Slum of Nairobi. They have stopped using plastic straws in the cafeteria in an attempt to save penguins from plastic pollution. Through these student-driven projects and so many others, I have learned that children of any age or background can make their world a better place if given the opportunity.

Teaching is the greatest job in the world. Again and again, my students have taught me that there is no better job on the planet than being a teacher. Teaching is an emotional roller-coaster. Because we care about our students so much, we experience the joys of success with them and the pangs of failure. We deal with the anguish when there are situations out of our control that cause our students pain, and we rejoice when we watch them overcome obstacles to reach their potential. But, we get back so much more than we put into it. Each day we are with our students, we have the opportunity to make the world just a little better for each of them. More importantly, we get to teach them how to affect positive change and feel the joy of doing good for others. Over the years, my students have taught me how lucky I am to get the opportunity to love them and to watch them grow.

Friday's Five - Our Students Need to Believe They Matter

It's human nature to want to matter.  We all have that desire.  It motivates much of what we do.  For some, it motivates them to seek financial success.  For others, it motivates them to do charity work.  For me, it was a driving factor in why I became a teacher.

Our students have this need as well.  Unfortunately, many of our traditional practices in education make students feel that they have no worth.  It's a primary reason why our students are lacking motivation.  Why work hard if you and what you produce don't matter?

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I've heard many educational experts tell me that the way to solve this problem is to tell students why what they are doing in school will relate to their life when they get out of school.  Our students don't care about this.  The long technical reason is that their frontal lobes aren't completely formed, and such rational, unemotional thought is not possible for them.  The short reason is that asking a kid to trust you and be motivated by something that may or may not benefit them 5, 10, 15, or 20 years down the road is absurd.  Our kids need to feel important now.  If we want them to learn, we'd better start meeting this need.  Here are five ways to allow kids to feel that they matter.

1. Problem Based Learning (PBL)  If you want kids to feel that that matter, have them do something that matters.  There are a multitude of problems that need to be solved in our communities. Challenge your students to solve them.  How can we help the local food pantry raise money?  How can we effectively publicize the upcoming blood drive in our school?  What data can we collect and use to prove that there needs to be a stoplight at the intersection near the school? 
2. Publish their work. It is insulting to a student to work hard on a project, paper, or other in-depth assignment with the end result being that a teacher looks at it, judges it, and hands it back with a number or letter on top of it.  Use a class blog, wikispace, or other avenue to publish their work.  Let them share with friends and family around the globe.  Let their research be used by others.  Give them an audience other than the teacher.  Better yet, let them publish their writing in a book using a site like lulu.com and use the proceeds to solve a community problem like the ones described above.
3. Stop expecting students to be motivated by grades.  Grades are a way to rank, sort, judge, and punish students.  They are not an effective way to motivate students.  A plethora of studies show that external motivation is not lasting and will not serve our students in life.  We need to give them the experiences of learning for the pleasure of learning, feeling the joy of helping others, and being valued for reasons other than being the best hoop jumper in the class. An emphasis on grades undermines our ability as teachers to give our students those experiences and does nothing to lead our students to believe they matter. 
4. Allow students opportunities to consult, collaborate with, and learn from community members.  If you want students to believe that their math lesson is important to their life, bring in a member of the community who uses that math in their job every day to share his/her experiences with your students.  Then allow the students the opportunity to be an accountant, small business owner, mechanic, home builder, etc.  The same opportunities can be worked into classes in almost every subject area.  In addition to the valuable career awareness that comes from these types of interactions, there is the chance for students to do work that is necessary in the community.
5. Allow students to use tools current to the generation in which they are living.  Forcing students to read outdated textbooks to get information, having them spend hours answering questions that have easily "googled" answers, and not allowing them to use 21st century tools to demonstrate their learning not only makes school seem woefully irrelevant, but sends the message to our students that we don't respect them.  If we did respect them we'd allow them to share their learning using tools and in ways that are familiar to them, regardless of our traditions and comfort with those tools and methods.  This is especially true when those tools and methods are much more aligned with the expectations of the workplace they will graduate into than what we have traditionally done in schools.  A zoologist would think nothing of pulling out their phone to find out the best diet for a pica, but our students learning about mammals must wait until their weekly computer lab time slot - even though they have a very capable phone in their backpack.  An advertising executive would think nothing of sending a text of a picture to a colleague to ask for an opinion on a piece of concept art, but many of our students would get an in-school suspension for sending a similar text to a peer.  I could list examples like this all day long.  I know someone will argue, "Many students who can text their friends won't learn anything because they'll be distracted."  I'll argue, "All of our students who believe school is irrelevant and that we don't think they matter won't learn anything."  Maybe we should teach them to use technology in appropriate ways instead of banning it. 

What are your thoughts?  Do you have other ways to make students believe they matter?  Share your ideas with us in the comment section below, and share this post with others in your network so that we can hear their ideas as well.

Friday's Five - Make Schools Better without Spending Money

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Friday's Five is a feature every week where I pick a new topic and list five items that I think fit best.  Then I ask you, my readers, to share your thoughts in the comment section.  For an archive of past topics, check the Friday's Five Page.  If you'd like to make suggestions about future topics or discuss topics I bring up on the blog with others, make sure you click the "like" button on the right hand side of the page to join A Teacher's Life for Me on Facebook.  Don't be shy about sharing the blog and Facebook Page with others.  Each post has a "Tweet" button on top and buttons on the bottom that allow you to share in several ways, including e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter.

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As educators, we should always be looking for ways to make our schools better learning environments.  Every day, new stories are surfacing about how school funding is getting cut.  In this post, I'd like to examine five ways that we can improve the educational experience for our students without spending a lot of money. 

1. Start school later in the day.  This change would cost nothing, and undoubtedly lead to increased learning for our students.  According to the American Psychological Association, adolescents need 9 hours and 15 minutes of sleep per night.  With travel times in some rural areas of over an hour to arrive at school in the morning, sports and activities that often last late into the evening, and school start times before 8AM, most students do not get the required amount of sleep.  Pushing back the school day by an hour would leave less students in a constant state of exhaustion, and more learning would occur.
2. Allow teachers control over their own professional development through PLNs.  Instead of paying for expensive "experts" to come into schools to deliver professional development to teachers, allow teachers to model life-long learning to their students through the development of Professional Learning Networks (PLNs).  In this way, teachers can learn about the topics they feel are most important from others in the field through professional blogs, social networking sites like Plurk, Twitter, and Google+, and other resources.  The reality is that most school/district sponsored professional development does not trickle down to changes in classroom pedagogy.  Networking with other professionals is something that is critical to growth in any profession, and something that has been lacking in the field of education.  
3. Buy fewer textbooks.  Textbooks are so 20th Century.  The textbook selection process in larger states all but guarantees that any controversial, thought provoking, or polically charged topics are left out.  There are problems waiting to be solved all around us that require research, writing skills, and mathematics.  We live in a time when information is ubiquitous and free.  Textbooks hold back students from having to think and teachers from having to be creative.  
4. Eliminate Standardized Test Prep.  Despite what the companies that sell test prep materials tell you, there are many studies that show that special test preparation classes and lessons lead to no additional learning.  We know from countless brain researchers that learning can only happen when students have an emotional connection to the material they are learning.  I've seen fewer things in my teaching career that are less emotionally engaging than test prep materials.  Requiring students to take time away from engaging, authentic learning to drill and practice using test prep materials is not only boring for the students and teachers, but it's ineffective and expensive. 
5. Involve students in the community.  In these rough economic times it is vital that we maintain a good relationship with the community, since a large part of public school funding comes from local taxes.  In addition, there are increasingly more community members that need help.  Students need to learn the value of helping others and the rewards that come with service.  Helping others in the local area is an opportunity for our students to solve real world problems with the skills they've learned in school, while also building a stronger bond between school and community. 

Now it's your turn.  Has your school adopted any of these changes?  Are there other ways we could increase learning without increasing the budget?  What obstacles would we face in implementing the above suggestions?  Leave your thoughts in the comment section below, and pass the blog on to others via Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, and Google+ so that we can hear as many points of view as possible.

Friday's Five - Benefits of Local Libraries

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Friday's Five is a feature every week where I pick a new topic and list five items that I think fit best.  Then I ask you, my readers, to share your thoughts in the comment section.  For an archive of past topics, check the Friday's Five Page.  If you'd like to make suggestions about future topics or discuss topics I bring up on the blog with others, make sure you click the "like" button on the right hand side of the page to join A Teacher's Life for Me on Facebook.  Don't be shy about sharing the blog and Facebook Page with others.  Each post has a "Tweet" button on top and buttons on the bottom that allow you to share in several ways, including e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter.

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This morning, while visiting family in Michigan, I picked up the morning edition of the “Oakland Press”, the local newspaper.  The lead article was entitled “Troy Group Promises Book Burning Party.”  From reading the article, I was appalled to learn that there is a strong push from residents of this town to not only close their local library, but to burn the 300,000 publicly owned items housed there.  At first glance, one would think that this is just satire or hyperbole to make a political point, but a Facebook page and Twitter account formed by the leaders of this movement make their incendiary intentions clear.    

I am sensitive to the need to balance the needs of publicly funded institutions like local libraries with the tax burdens we are placing on our citizens during these tough economic times.  I can understand why residents would not agree to a referendum increasing their taxes to pay for a library.  What I can’t understand is the desire to destroy public property and revert to the practices common during the Spanish Inquisition.  Have we really devolved that far as a civilization?  During the Dark Ages, knowledge and education were feared and persecuted.  It seems, with the numerous recent attacks on teachers and now books, that our society is headed back in that direction.  Perhaps our lack of history education is starting to show.  After all, if you don’t learn from mistakes in the past, you are doomed to repeat the consequences of your ancestors.  

With this in mind, today’s Friday’s Five will focus on five invaluable services that our local library provides to our community.  

1. A place to remember our local history - Without some of the books, documents, and artifacts saved by our local library, much of the history of our small, rural area would be lost. 
2. A resource for parents, students, and community members - For many residents, getting books to read for themselves and their children would be difficult without out local library.  For some, economic reasons would make purchasing new books difficult, and for many the half-hour drive to the nearest book store would be an obstacle.  
3. A place to connect with the world - several of my students each year tell me that they do not have internet access at home.  This makes researching and completing some of the projects we do challenging.  The local library has several computers that are connected to the internet for the public to use.  
4. A place for community meetings - The library has space where the community can gather for various reasons.  In addition to children's read-alouds and story time, my wife has taken exercise classes there and my children have met for arts-and-crafts activities with others their age.
5. A source of community pride - Like our public schools, our local libraries give our communities a sense of pride and identity.  When we look at these institutions and what they provide instead of only looking at what they cost us in property taxes, it's clear that they are of benefit to our towns and cities.  Culture, knowledge, and thinking are not evil ideas.  They are the very backbone of what lifted civilization out of the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance.  I, for one, hope that we are not headed back.

Now it's your turn.  What do you think of the book burning movement?  What benefits does your local library provide to your community?  Are public libraries worth the tax money that they take to operate?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below, and if you enjoy the blog, please pass it on to others.