Staying Engaged

Hubris and Humility

Photo by Isabella Fischer on Unsplash

When I first started teaching, everything was important. I stressed about details from the desk arrangement in my classroom to the number of minutes I was allotted for every single lesson. I worried if I didn’t address each of the learning objectives (which must be prominently displayed), the lesson was a bust. No learning happened. Student discussions never went according to the scripted curriculum, and I would regularly cut things off mid-sentence to transition to our next content area. Teaching felt performative in a way, as I was constantly trying to “get it right.” I felt like there was one correct way to teach, with each day bringing another frenzied attempt to teach the way I felt like I ought to teach; according to my colleagues, administration, or curriculum guides. I remember those first five years feeling very stressful and exhausting, but I was young and eager and full of energy to be the best teacher I could.

Much of how I taught in those early years consisted of me throwing ideas at my students and seeing what worked. Some ideas came from veteran colleagues who felt confident in what and how they taught, and decided they had an obligation to tell me what to do. Others came from professional development touting “research-based” maxims. Teacher-led, direct instruction dominated my on-the-job training. I remember one morning, after a particularly frustrating lesson, I was complaining to a teammate. She politely listened and then grabbed a roll of masking tape from her classroom. I watched her tape a large X on the floor at the front of my classroom. “I’ve watched you teach. You move around too much trying to interact with the kids. Give all of your directions from this spot. When delivering your lesson, stand here. You’ll find that your students are more engaged and learn better if you teach from this X.”

I came to teaching with a constructivist methodology. In college, I had studied Piaget and Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development. I read John Dewey and Jerome Bruner. I came prepared to incorporate real-life activities and problem-solving in my lessons. I planned to have students build new understanding through discovery and building upon their prior schema. While everyone around me was standing at the front of the classroom, delivering their lessons, I was flitting around my room desperately trying to facilitate my students’ learning; trying to be a guide on the side.

In hindsight, I find it remarkable I lasted as long as I did. Teaching against the tide is exhausting; constantly working against a system that tells you everything you are doing is wrong. The energy in my classroom was great, but students were shell-shocked by the cooperative, student-centered learning environment I was trying to create. They went from silently sitting in rows to being expected to talk in groups. Other teachers were the sole authority, never questioned. I, on the other hand, was practically begging my students to advocate for themselves. I remember having a lot of fun teaching in my first decade, but always feeling like I was breaking the rules. I made a lot of mistakes field-testing all of the constructivist theories I had learned in my college teacher preparation program. My humility was high; my confidence, low.

Three weeks into my 24th year as a classroom teacher, and I’m feeling tired. I am very grateful for my career. I’ve been lucky. In my decades of teaching against the tide, I have never been reprimanded for my methods; never told that I need to fall in line or stand on an X in the front of the classroom. Even after No Child Left Behind (NCLB) accelerated standardization in the name of accountability and measurement, and everyone began “teaching to the test”, I never felt like I had to justify my pedagogical practice because of my low test scores. Every administrator I’ve ever worked for has always supported my methods in the classroom, even while they have been required to implement punitive measures to increase students’ test scores. For over twenty years, no matter how much I collaborate with colleagues, sharing new ideas, teaching has largely felt isolating. Year after year, as our world changes and our students change, I continue to resist, but public education remains the same. After almost 25 years, this overemphasis on standardized testing, basal readers, and standardized curricula has caused severe harm to teachers and students. It has made teaching banal and created homogenized classroom experiences. Even though our most marginalized students are still “severely victimized by a system not organized to support their learning and standardized testing is still not improving student learning, the status quo persists.

If I could go back in time and chat with my 20-something self, I would encourage him to keep honing his craft, and doing right by his students. I would tell him to trust his gut and form those honest connections with students because, in the end, that is more important than any data point or assessment. I would also tell him to find ways to persist because 20 years from now, not much will have changed. In fact, even with mountains of research supporting student-centered pedagogical practice, the public education system continues to expect teachers to conform and raise test scores. There may be some initial excitement around Project-Based Learning (PBL) or Inquiry-Based Learning, but mostly, professional development will continue to focus on curricula programs that make big claims and standardized pedagogical practices.

Hubris and Humility

I’ve never been an overconfident person. I often second-guess my decisions and frequently chastise my efforts. Teaching and learning for as long as I have, hasn’t changed my personality. I still question whether or not I am teaching in ways that are best for my students. I still try to balance following mandated curricula and creating learning experiences that are anything but standardized and commonplace. And while I have gained some hubris, the biggest challenge I face as a veteran teacher is balancing hubris with humility. I know for certain that homogenized classrooms and standardized testing are not best for students. I will always teach to my students, not to the test. However, we are all working in a standardized public education system where grades and test scores are still viewed as the most important measure. Teaching 20 years ago, I may have been less sure of my abilities and methods, but I felt excited to try new things and work to constantly improve myself. My humility (mixed with naïveté) led to enormous amounts of curiosity and pushing my pedagogical knowledge. Teaching today, I must work to avoid stagnation and arrogance. The system isn’t changing any time soon, so I need to find ways to hold onto a self-assured humility that keeps me engaged and steadfast in teaching against the tide.

What’s keeping me engaged?

Be Transparent

One of my coping mechanisms in my early dissenting years, was to nod my head and close my classroom door. I would attend all of the trainings and participate in all of the team meetings, and then I would go back to my classroom, close my door, and teach in the way I felt was best for my students. When a new curriculum was introduced, I would quietly nod along during the staff meetings as they explained why this program would replace that other program or why this “research-backed” practice is better than the one we had been using previously. I never publicly questioned the majority, just quietly subverted the system. I wanted to be seen as compliant and a “team player.” I didn’t feel confident to push back in meetings.

Over time, however, as I gained more expertise in my content areas and craft, seeing programs come and go, I began to be more transparent with how I do things in my classroom. Keeping my door open naturally invites more eyes on me, but since I am now more open about the realities of the classroom, I felt less scared to hide what I am doing. If an administrator walks into my classroom as I am failing miserably, I have learned to pause, take a breath, and invite them to the messiness of the learning experience. Hey, welcome Ms. M. Thanks for coming in! We seem to be struggling to understand how best to explain [insert concept]. Perhaps you could help us wrestle with this concept? How do you understand it? When a colleague pops their head in to complain about the noise, I now own the infraction while explaining why we are so noisy. Oh! I’m so sorry for the noise, Ms. T. We were just demonstrating the difference between planetary orbit versus revolution with our bodies. I think the students are starting to understand it!

In meetings, I now ask more questions. Why are we doing it this way? Could it be done differently? What perspectives are we missing? What assumptions and beliefs are at play here? Are these assumptions correct? Has something changed that requires this new thinking? Can you help me understand why we are moving away from novels to this standardized program? Each question I ask shares my views. While there are still many times when I need to concede, at least I am doing so after voicing my opinion to the contrary. I have always known that students are curious. I encourage their questioning. By nature, curiosity is one of my strongest immutable characteristics. I’m curious about everything. Why do we do things this way? How does that work? Where does that word come from? Now, instead of only pushing my students to be curious and critical of information, my experience has allowed me to offer more confident critiques of my profession.

Pick My Battles

Experience has also taught me that while I can ask questions and critique the status quo, many times there will be issues with which I must concede. I cannot fight every battle. I have to be thoughtful and strategic in how I push back. Education, especially public schooling, is an infinite system, yet many of the mandated reform measures teacher see treat it as a finite system with set rules and concrete solutions. Since school reform is an ever-adaptive challenge, requiring shifts in mindsets and values, it is important to identify and manipulate design levers like space, time and rituals to make concrete changes in my school building. Now, when there is a mandate that I struggle to follow, and I’ve adequately voiced my opinion, instead of viewing it as an inevitable bane to my teaching existence, I adopt a hacker mindset. If I have to follow this boxed curriculum, how can I hack it to best meet the needs of my students? What high-quality resources can I use to supplement? Instead of blindly adopting (and then secretly subverting certain initiatives), I now look for ways to hack the initiative. This is quality time that I spend reflecting on what I truly value as a teacher. What specifically am I opposed to with [insert bane]. Picking my battles allows me to know what hills to defend and how to spend my energy as a conscientious objector.

Be a Mentor. Find a Mentor.

I’ve only ever had one student teacher in my career. James was a male elementary teacher, looking to teach the fifth grade. When my principal proposed the idea, it was an obvious choice to mentor another male elementary educator. Since then, I have done what I can to be a collaborative partner to anyone in need of guidance. My classroom door is always open and I love sharing what I do, and how I do it, with anyone willing to ask for help. When I am in need of some advice, I have a few trusted colleagues I go to for help. These tend to be educators who have taught at least as long as I have or longer. However, in recently listening to Joe Ferraro on The Broken Copier podcast, he mentions having a mentor colleague who’s a younger teacher, and what he has learned by having a fresh set of eyes in his classroom.

I want to learn from people younger than me as well as older than me. And she's been super communicative with me where she'll literally come into a room with the old school legal pad and just take notes for it during a period. And I'll ask her how it went. And sometimes like she's so kind, but sometimes it's like kind of brutal.

Newer teachers have a lot to offer us older veterans. We may have more experience, but our experience creates cognitive bias blind spots in our pedagogical practice. Having a less-experienced teacher observe a lesson has the double benefit of a mutually advantageous situation, each teacher learning from each other.

I love asking for advice from teachers in the building who have been teaching less than I have. Their knowledge of pedagogical theory is fresher than my own and oftentimes, they have a new, and sometimes better way of teaching a concept.

Be Humble

I still have a lot to learn as a teacher. Sometimes this can be hard to admit, especially when at the start of a new school year, when there is more of the same systemic nonsense as last year. Change in public education, if it ever happens, does so slowly. I know that a boxed curriculum will probably not be around in 3-5 years, but that doesn’t mean I can’t still learn something from those teachers who are teaching it with fidelity. If I don’t keep my confidence in check, it can easily morph into hubris. So, while I may still not completely agree with mandating that we teach out of a boxed curriculum, I can still benefit from the collaborative conversations with my teammates. These conversations remind me of what I value as an educator, while seeing how my values align with my teammates, even if our methods are different. For example, I will never believe that reading out of a basal textbook and answering comprehension questions is superior to reading and discussing literature. However, I can gain techniques in how best to have students annotate text, which I can then apply to reading novels. Having confident humility helps me simultaneously balance the confidence I have in my abilities while recognizing that I am fallible. I may have been teaching a long time, but it’s important to recognize that I can be wrong about things. Just because I believe that novels are better than basals, doesn’t mean that there isn’t something I can still learn about the science of reading. Even if our school system is overemphasizing phonics through drill exercises, I can offer what cognitive science suggests in improving learning beyond phonics. As Natalie Wexler discusses with Holly Korbey in The Bell Ringer podcast, this includes “the importance of understanding cognitive load theory, working memory, the role background knowledge plays in reading, and how explicit writing instruction makes better readers.” I may know a lot about teaching, but I still have many areas for improvement.

Stay Hungry

Stagnation is one of the worst feelings. Lately, my family and I feel like we’ve been eating the same dozen dishes week after week. However, whenever we sit down to brainstorm ideas for dinners for the week, we keep coming back to our familiar favorites. Finding and trying a new recipe takes great effort. Sometimes it means looking for and buying unfamiliar ingredients from the grocery store. Following a new recipe always take me twice as long as when I’m cooking a meal I’ve made 100 times. And, there is no guarantee that the meal will even taste good. I may like it, but my picky teenagers might not. Knowing my ineptitude in the kitchen, more likely, I will probably mess it up somehow. Still, it is important to continue trying new things.

This year, I’m trying to have a reboot mindset. I may be teaching the same concepts as in previous years, but I’m working to tweak my methods to see if I can teach them even better. Last year, I loved teaching my students how to closely read using Marissa Thompson’s TQE Method. I combined TQE with Depth and Complexity icons, having students create dialectic reading notebooks. I loved how these tools elevated our classroom discussions and students’ thinking about short stories and novels in their book clubs. This year, I reflected, What if I spent more time at the beginning of the year teaching TQE first, and then layering on Depth and Complexity icons and Dialectic Notebooks? This thought experiment pushed me to understand the TQE Method and annotation on a deeper level, so that I can be more explicit in my direct instruction. So far, I’ve found that using very short stories, such as Sticks by George Saunders and selections from Telephone Tales by Gianni Rodari, and poems like Gate A4 by Naomi Shihab Nye, work great for multiple close readings. Then, moving onto longer stories like Eraser Tattoo by Jason Reynolds and Main Street by Jacqueline Woodson work well for synthesizing our thoughts, questions, and epiphanies using Depth and Complexity icons for our Dialectic reading notebooks. Teaching the same stories with more intentionality and in a different way helps keep my pedagogical practice fresh.

The great thing about trying something new, or teaching something you’ve taught before in a new way, is that it whets your teaching appetite for more. Thanks to Trevor Aleo, I’m already brainstorming ways I can teach literary theory to my fifth graders and looking for ways to improve how I model interpretative practices. Staying hungry means trying things, even if they don’t work, and learning from those failures.

Freedom Dream

Probably the most important thing I do to keep myself engaged in teaching and improving is what Chanea Bond calls freedom dreaming. On an episode of The Broken Copier, she explains how she freedom dreams over the summer.

My best friend is the teacher who teaches right next door. And so we always take time to freedom dream over the summer. If we could make one thing happen this year, what is it that we're going to do?

I love this! What can I make happen this school year for my students? Bond goes on to say that experience has taught her that she doesn’t need dozens of new ideas. Given the constraints of the current school year, with the students that are sitting in front of you, what is one thing you want to want to do? I have noticed that my students struggle to actively listen to each other. Honestly, this has been a problem for a number of years now, but this year, my big dream is to spend a lot of time intentionally teaching them how to listen. Experienced dialogic teacher, Matthew Kay, discusses in his book, Not Light, but Fire, how he creates a conversational safe space for his high school students by teaching them to listen patiently, listen actively, and police your voice. As much as I love and use discussions to facilitate learning, I’ve never explicitly taught listening skills. If I can make one thing happen for my students this year, I would love if they went to middle school with the necessary skills to have productive academic discussions with their teachers and peers about any topic.

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I’ve had a bumpy start to the school year. In the first three weeks of school, I got a terrible head cold that lasted much longer than I expected, I’ve had some incredibly challenging behaviors from students (much earlier than expected), and I’ve been inundated with a ridiculous number of meetings and non-teaching requirements that have left me feeling exhausted and uninspired. I’m grateful that my years of experience have taught me to prioritize what really matters to me and balance my hubris with humility. If I try to do all of the required things, I’m certain that I will burn out before December. If I resign myself to the myriad mandates to relentlessly improve test scores using standardized boxed curricula, I will quickly become jaded and derisive. Instead, this year, I’m choosing to lean into the values I’ve honed these last 20+ years, focus on the quality of my pedagogy over the quantity of objectives to teach, and stay engaged and steadfast so that I continue to teach against the tide.

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How do you stay engaged in your pedagogical practice? I’d love to hear from you!

Have a great week!

— Adrian

Resources

Questioning the Status Quo Playbook | Berkeley ExecEd

• Too often, many education reformers latch onto ideas in business world, and try to implement them in public education. The Haas School of Business from the University of California Berkeley, has four leadership principles that I do find helpful in navigating our outdated public education system: Beyond Yourself, Student Always, Confidence Without Attitude, and Question the Status Quo. This four-page playbook does a nice job of summarizing these principles.

The Inquiry Quotient (IQ) Quiz | Warren Berger

• Warren Berger, author of A More Beautiful Question, writes that the best way to understand others (and systems) is by asking questions. Want to know what type of questioner you are? Take Berger’s quiz. I’d love to hear your results!

• When I first learned about School Retool, I was giddy. A professional development fellowship that helps teachers redesign school culture? Count me in! Although I’ve never been able to participate in the fellowship, I frequently use many of their resources, compiled here in their Codesigning Schools Toolkit. If you are in any sort of leadership position, I high recommend reading this article, Empowering Principals As Designers Capable of Retooling School.

We're Gonna Keep On Talking How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Elementary Classroom by Matthew Kay

• After reading Kay’s Not Light, but Fire, We’re Gonna Keep Talking is next on my list to read. I loved Not Light, but Fire so much that I’m confident I will enjoy this one, too (and probably his most recently published book, Prompting Deeper Discussions: A Teacher's Guide to Crafting Great Questions).

How Humility Makes Us Better, Saner Teachers | Dave Stuart Jr.

• This article is a few years old, but still applicable. Stuart offers his learning from reading David Bobb's Humility: An Unlikely Biography of America's Greatest Virtue and how he applies what he’s learned to being a classroom teacher. Stuart offers some great examples of how he practices humility in his classroom.

• Over the summer, I followed CJ Reynolds on YouTube as he returned to the classroom, relocating from West Philadelphia to rural New Mexico. His classroom is incredible, but his Teach Your Class Off videos are even better! In this video, Reynolds talks about something simple that transformed his students’ writing. Want to try something new this year or level up an older lesson? Check out how Reynolds had his students create a silent movie comic strips!