What New Teachers Should Know...

6/25/2019

By Ryan Tibbens

Check out the CONTEST at the end of this article!

A new teacher recently asked for advice, claiming 'impostor syndrome.'

This was my response:

"Fake it 'til you make it, and don't be too upset if you never really feel like you make it (just trust student feedback and results). Ask for help; beg, borrow, and steal. Then steal more. Make the kids laugh in class and nervous when the grades are due. Make parents and principals confident; make students curious and aware. Make time for yourself. Find your favorite beer or wine, and keep it on hand. Find your favorite students and build bonds, but never let them or anyone else know that you have favorites. Tell yourself you'll go to bed early, and don't be surprised when it's 2am. Tell yourself you'll get up early, and don't be surprised when kids arrive at your classroom door before you do once in a while. Specialize in something. Attend as many conferences and as much professional development as you can in the first five years and then semi-regularly after that. Watch 'The Dog Whisperer.' Get on a first-name basis with the main office secretary and custodians as soon as possible (they run the school). Always be yourself: kids sense phonies like bees sense fear. Oh, and apply for other, better jobs ASAP."

ENTRIES ARE CLOSED -- Are/were you a teacher, coach, classified employee, or school administrator? Were you an observant student? We're offering a $20 Amazon.com gift card to the person who submits the best ORIGINAL advice to beginning teachers. Keep entries under 200 words and appropriate for classroom discussion. ReadThinkWriteSpeak must receive at least eight entries to activate the contest and prize, so tell your friends. Contact us using the form below, email, or private messages in Facebook or Twitter. Top submissions will be posted and voted upon in mid-July. All entries due by 7/10/2019.

8 Comments

Lisa Kulakowski

6/25/2019 08:17:17 am

That's spot on.

Jim Dunning

6/25/2019 11:36:39 pm

I'm curious what they learned in four years of college...

6/25/2019 11:41:49 pm

I might be hard pressed adding anything of value to 120 credit hours of instruction (what is that in real seat-time, something like 30 hours per credit, plus out-of-class time?).

Ryan Tibbens

6/30/2019 11:01:53 pm

You don't think practicing professionals have useful advice to share with people who otherwise only learned from textbooks and lecturers? I certainly want my doctors to have received practical, effective advice from other doctors instead of only via anatomy videos or direct instruction. Same for counselors, attorneys, plumbers, and just about everyone else. I want them all to know the 'tricks of the trade,' regardless of age. A man with as many ideas as you surely has something to share with new teachers.

7/2/2019 04:27:00 pm

I'm averse to dispensing advice in this format.

About a decade ago, Teach Like a Champion—a teacher self-help book guaranteed to provide "49 techniques to put students on the path to college"—was published and ended up in the teacher mailboxes at Broad Run. It's table of contents is a list of tips: No Opt Out, Right is Right, Stretching it, Board = Paper, Break It Down, 4 Ms, Tight Transitions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

https://blog.irisconnect.com/us/community/blog/7-tips-for-teaching-like-a-champion-led-by-doug-lemov

While I agree with much of what Doug Lemov preaches, actually practicing many of the techniques, I call it a self-help book for a reason: All of the "techniques" I had developed were not perfected (or not) in a vacuum — Lemov's, however, have no choice but to be. I learned and honed mine in the worlds of human resources training and development and sales and marketing presentations (and training others to sell).

According to Lemov, teaching is a "performance profession" and great teaching can be taught to others. This comports to Madeleine Hunter's model for developing teachers; she also believed that teaching is performance art, not that different from, say, acting or singing. But here's the rub: other performers have audiences on whom they rely for feedback; imagine an actor who has no house to judge her delivery by or a magician who never experiences applause — or the withholding of it. That's the stage on which a teacher performs and where the irony on which Lemov's book fails.

We use the same techniques, but I learned and lived or died by them through feedback from others. This was in the form of active coaching from peers and supervisors or the evidence of better employee performance or the closing of a huge software deal. We don't have that element at all in K-12 PD.

Employee development in schools completely lacks meaningful coaching and measurement against goals with consequence. So, even though Lemov means for his audience to learn and improve through instruction, his book ends up in teachers' mailboxes.

"Tight Transitions," which is instilling routines for transitioning from one class activity to another means time and energy for learning is maximized, can be covered in three pages, but becoming good at it in the classroom can only happen with a professional coach providing constructive feedback over time. That's not part of K-12.

Thus, any advice falls into the self-help category of education.

Even cubicle farm employees get more useful feedback than any teacher ever does. Such workers can overhear others on the phone and choose to model or not model their own interactions with colleagues and customers on them. Even knowing that others can eavesdrop on them informs their behaviors. Certainly, there's opportunities to have formal coaching or feedback exchanges, but even lacking that, humans are capable of picking up on all sorts of cues, even without Bene Gesserit training. But that only happens with an audience. And a coach.

And teachers have neither.

7/2/2019 05:59:04 pm

In other words, I'm ethically opposed to tips when there is no real training to provide important context. Maybe it's akin to refusing to supply beds to a CBP detention center.

7/3/2019 11:10:26 pm

Fair points about feedback and coaching. While I'm perfectly happy being left alone, when observations and evaluations do occur, I would prefer a bit more constructive criticism. I already know what I'm doing well; where I need help is spotting the little things that could be improved, the things that could be tweaked or tuned to provide maximum results in exchange for small to moderate changes. Still, at this stage of my career (and even early on, to be honest), I'd prefer being left alone to being preached at and criticized by an administrator who couldn't do it better. More (and better) instructional coaches could go a long way toward improving our craft, but I don't see that fitting in the budget. ;)

And if your post is a long, subtle way of asking for help, just let me know. LOL.

7/3/2019 11:34:21 pm

Why is it in most organizations in which I have worked, my supervisors have generally known more about how to do my job better than I—often even after the 10,000 hour threshold—but this doesn't seem to hold true in public education?

What New Teachers Should Know...

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