Beyond the Classroom

Teaching is hard. This week has been incredibly hard. It wasn’t one identifiable thing, but the culmination of lots of little things. My job, as an instructional coach, is to work with teachers on reaching their goals, both individually as a teacher and as a part of their team. In essence, I am still a teacher, a teacher of teachers. Just as a classroom teacher, I do not claim to be an expert or have all the answers. I just do the best I can with what I know and have experienced, and hope that the teachers I work with do the best they can.  This week, I sat down with a teacher who was struggling to figure out how to squeeze six days of curriculum into four days of instruction. Another teacher had the opposite problem, nine days to teach a unit and only six days of good materials. After observing a lesson, I helped a teacher set new goals for herself on instructional strategies she wanted to improve upon. I worked with a team developing new lessons because what they had wasn’t ...

"Your now determines your next." This is our school motto. We try to instill in our kids that every decision you make now has some kind of implication on you future. It teaches ownership and responsibility. Coming off seven years as an eighth grade teacher, I certainly embraced this motto as a freshman teacher last year and saw how important it was for our kids to truly understand. I have always been a huge proponent of modeling and teaching goal setting, both short term and long term. Sometimes my students would write their goals on index cards that we hung from the ceiling on colored string. Sometimes we would make a big poster of everyone's goals, handwritten and signed, as a reminder each day what they were working towards. Often, their short term goal would say: pass and go to high school. While that was my expectation for all of them, it was more of an accomplishment for some. For the last eight years of their schooling, each August is a fresh start, nothing fr...

If you have spent any time with a toddler, you are familiar with the popular question, "why?" Children have this beautiful curiosity and inquisitive nature about them. They really do just want to know why, and why, and why, and why. There is a sense of accomplishment when you finally satisfy the long list of whys and the toddler responds with, "okay." Later in life, when these toddlers become teenagers, this question comes back around - yet this time it is said with a little more attitude and a little less innocence. My favorite was always, "why do I have to learn this?" As a math teacher, I got this question a lot. I tried many things to get the "okay" - I probably threw in a because I said so in a moment of weakness. *hangs head in shame*  Sometimes, I feel as though I misguided some students, (because really, why do we have to know the relationship between the long leg and hypotenuse of a 30-60-90 triangle?) however, I know now that carrots...

I was participating in a twitter chat this week. Sidebar: If you haven't participated in a chat before, I highly recommend it! It's a great way to engage professionally as well as grow your network. I have gotten inspiration and ideas from others as well as felt empowered through the encouragement of my own ideas. Twitter is full of top notch educators! Back to the chat - the question posed was 'how does poor communication affect the culture of the school.' Sometimes I get so caught up in the fast pace of a twitter chat that I just start typing as I would if I were texting a friend. But, this time, I paused. I paused because communication is powerful. It has the ability to tear down walls. Unfortunately, it also has the potential to build them. I remember working with a particularly difficult student a few years ago. He wasn't trying to be difficult, he just didn't share my enthusiasm for math, or apparently the four other classes he was also failing. ...