Tag Archives: causing learning

The Teacher I Wish For You

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(This is a letter to our grandchildren. Each of our grandchildren will be in a public school this fall ranging from third grade to tenth grade. Our grandchildren know their Gramps is “old school.” Old as in living in his eighth decade and school as in being actively and constantly engaged in public education since 1970. And, they know that at the end of every school day, he will ask “Tell me what you learned today.”)

I wish for you a teacher who teaches you. Seems like a “No, duh!”, but it isn’t. The list of things a teacher is required to be in 2018 is long and teaching children is just one that can be lost in the many. I wish for you a teacher who expands your knowledge and challenges the ways you think about what you think you know. I wish for you a teacher who teaches you new skill sets and helps you to hone these skills so you will do things thereafter that you could not do before. I wish for you a teacher who builds your concept of personal challenges so that problems become opportunities and solutions become keys to opening possibilities and you begin to look for your next challenge with a smile. I wish for you a teacher who causes you to learn and to enjoy your learning.

Every teacher has a job description. Seldom do the descriptors say “Do this first – as in teach.” All descriptors are to be successfully enacted. That’s what a teacher is hired to do. Some teacher responsibilities are instructional: develop and submit lesson plans, assess learning, meet individual student learning needs. Teach class. Some responsibilities are managerial: keep an orderly classroom, maintain classroom supplies, submit required reports.   Some are supervisory: assure student safety in the hallways and on the playgrounds. All are important to the teacher’s supervisor. However, only one is essential for Gramps: cause all children to learn the grade level or course curriculum. The rest of a teacher’s responsibilities will take care of themselves when children are actively learning from a proactive teacher.

Your learning is between you and your teacher. I hope your teacher will give you a smile frequently. Smiles are a good thing and help to connect children and teachers. But, I also hope she will give you a frown or a shake of the head when your learning or learning behavior is not on target. When teachers take causing children to learn as their personal duty they are invested in how well each child does every day. A smile rewards and a frown corrects. Your teacher should focus you on achieving the day’s lesson every day.  Smiles!  Teachers cause learning.

I hope your teacher talks with you every day. Teacher talk helps you to know how close you are to getting things right. Many times each day you will not be getting things right. If the day’s lesson is designed properly, the work should be challenging and you will make mistakes. Teacher talk helps you iron out the mistakes. Talking with your teacher also is your teacher listening to you talk about your learning. It is essential that you talk to your teacher. In listening to you talk, your teacher will know more about how you are learning and cause you to learn more.

I hope your teacher laughs a lot. Learning at school may seem like work to you and sometimes hard work, but learning also is fun. A teacher’s joy derives from student learning. The more students learn, even when learning is difficult, the more teachers should laugh. When your classmates are really working at their learning, someone will say something that is so perfectly correct that a teacher cannot help but laugh. Kids also say strange things, things that just don’t make sense at the moment and this also causes everyone to laugh. There is a difference between laughing with children and laughing at children; good teachers laugh with you. Imagine a classroom without teacher laughter and ask yourself if anyone, the teacher especially, is having fun. That’s not a classroom for you, Kiddo.

I hope for you a teacher who isn’t afraid. “Teachers shouldn’t be afraid,” you say. But, they are. Most are fearful of what children say to their parents at supper. You know how this goes. Mom asks, “What did you do at school today?” And, you say, “You should have seen (or heard) Mrs. Smith. She …”  Teachers worry about what others think about their teaching and what parents are telling the principal. I hope your teacher is fearless and tries ways of teaching that push your limits. Teaching must always be child-safe, but it may sometimes cause you to say “Wow! That was crazy!” It is not strange that those “Wow!” things in class stick with you and begin to make sense later in time. I hope your teacher pushes all the good buttons that make you remember what happens in class every day.

Lastly, I hope your teacher will say more at the end of the school year than “Your grandchild was a good kid.” Of course, you are a good kid. Instead, I want your teacher to talk about how much you learned and how well you learned. I want her to say that you were serious about your learning and that you asked serious questions and lots of questions and sometimes questions that pushed her teaching. She should say that you were a respectful and earnest learner. And, in her own thinking, I want her to consider that you made her a better teacher.

These aren’t too much to hope for, my grandchildren. No, they are what every grandfather should expect.

Educating Is Moving The Needle

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“What am I doing here?” is a good question to ask oneself frequently. The context of this question is your workplace, your career, your job. I surmise that many respond with confidence that “I am doing the work I want to do and have trained for and I am pleased with where I find myself.” Or, “I find my work to be both challenging and rewarding. What I do matters to me and to others.” To these responses, I say “Great! Keep on keeping on.” When considering their work, these folks smile, become energized, and talk with specific examples that illustrate what they do and how their work is a positive contribution to their industry. What they do helps their employer to achieve positive qualitative and quantitative organizational goals. This is “moving the needle” – how you measure performance – toward success.

Others may be both discomforted and disappointed when looking for an answer. This leads them to not ask the question very often. For these folks, I need to rephrase the question. “Is what I am doing here meaningful to me or to others?” “Is what I am doing important?” “Does what I do make a difference?” Already the fear that the answer may be “no” or “not much” may have them rethinking the wisdom in pursuing the question.

When considering these questions, you must come to grips with the “what am I doing and why am I doing it?” As a high school and later college student, I worked summers and vacations in a meatpacking plant. I helped to reduce animals to meat and agri-products. My goal, however, was to earn money. My needle was my bank account and success meant having enough money to pay for the next year of college. As a junior high school teacher, I taught English and social studies. My goal was to cause children to learn our grade level curricula. My needle was a measurement of what they knew, could do and how they solved learning problems on September 1 compared with the same measurements on June 1. Success was achieved when every child was ready for the next year’s curricular instruction. As a wrestling coach, my goal was to cause wrestlers to win and how to think about how they won. Success was measured in wins through a personal commitment to healthy goals. As a high school principal, my work was to cause every teacher to cause every child to learn their grade level curricula – to be a needle moving teacher. Success was measured in finding positive cause and effect relationships – what instruction would cause learning improvements. The scope of these cause and effect challenges increased when I was a district administrator. In each context, the “here” changed, but the “what I am doing” did not. My goal always is to move the needle. Sometime the needle was a direct cause and effect and easy to measure. Hours in the hog kill equals payroll. A wrestler’s hand raised in victory. Some time the needle of cause-effect was less direct and not easy to measure, as in learning and learning performances. Yet, in every situation, “What am I doing” is about moving the needle.

When you add the “here” to “what am I doing,” you give the question personalized immediacy. For educators, “here” requires you to be introspective concerning your current assignment and the educational objectives that are attached to the assignment. “Here” is all about you and your ability to move the needle of learning for the children you teach, coach or direct.

Too often we consider only one needle in education – academic performances. Make no mistake, academic performances are extremely important, yet there are other needles of importance beyond test scores. And, these needles also move as a result of a teacher’s work efforts.

  • Daily school attendance
  • Child behavior
  • Willingness to engage in learning
  • Persistence
  • Self-esteem
  • Collegiality
  • Problem solving
  • Creativity
  • Career preparation
  • Artistic and aesthetic appreciation
  • More

Identifying needles to be moved does not rest with you alone. If it did, any needle movement would do. Identifying needles to move relates to the goals of the school and its community, the realities of learning challenges each student and all students present, the current status of measured needles, and the skill sets of each and all teachers. Picking priority needles leads to the determination of targets for how far and how fast the needle must move in the macro sense of whole school or classroom and in the micro sense of each child. Moving needles is hard work and it begins with selecting appropriate needles and targets of needle movement.

The rest is easier. Needle movement is doing the work needed to move the needle. In a meatpacking plant, you do the bloody work of earning a paycheck so that your bank account will let you do what comes next in life. In teaching, it is causing all children to become proficient learners and to demonstrate their knowledge, skills and problem solving at a quality level. In educational leadership, it is focusing school resources to cause all children to achieve high quality outcomes in academic, activity, arts and athletic programs, and to be proactive and healthy problem solvers.

Educating is moving the needle.

Teaching Is Causing Learning; Get Rid Of Other Agendas

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Tis a time for simplicity.

Amongst the piles of edu-data, reform proposals, governmental mandates, and clutchings for new ways to improve student learning outcomes, one simple explanation remains. Learning is a transaction between the learner and what is to be learned. This is an application of Occam’s Razor which tells us “Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

Strip away the nouveau and extraneous. Technology. Assessments. Instructional delivery. Parental choice and politics. Educational financing. After the onion is peeled, the remainder is a student confronting what is to be learned. Or, is it what is learned confronting a student? Yes, these are Occam’s two remaining variables. And, this is how we always should approach the proposition of improving educational outcomes. How can we magnetize that confrontation? How can we make the learner’s interest in the learning compelling? How can we make what is to be learned compelling for the learner? This is the first and most important place where “we”, the educational enterprise, enters the learning interaction.

The educator’s constant quandary is “How to illuminate, amplify, and activate, and perpetuate” the learner’s interaction with what is to be learned. It is eyes-on, hands-on, and minds-on work. It is personal and persistent. It begins every morning and expands across the day. Learner – teacher – learning. This is the most basic of educational propositions. How can I help you to learn?

Education actually is this simple. Sadly, the enterprise makes it much more difficult. Within our educational enterprise, there are propositions that Occam would say “strip it away.” And, there are propositions that Occam would tell us to selectively utilize.

Teachers are inundated with data, recordkeeping, and time-consuming chores related to data management. This has little to do with our basic proposition. Strip it away. The enterprise should be clear about what is to be learned and how it will be assessed. This is all a learner and teacher need to know.

The conversation about and implementation of new academic standards and new state assessments are exceptionally heavy in controversy. The emotionality of these issues distract both learners and teachers. Strip it away.

The politics of parent choice of school options is loud and irrelevant to daily learning. Strip it away from the schoolhouse.

Teachers are expected to be tech-users and social media communicators. Very 21st century and very chic. Considering the dynamic of the learning interaction – how to make it compelling – the use of technology and social media are very assistive. Technology can be the flashlight that illuminates what is to be learned and social media the conduit for teacher/learner talking. Great! Optimize it.

The more that we can do to clarify and personalize each student’s relationship with what is to be learned and the more we can strip away the impediments that obscure the teacher’s organization and management of teaching, the more likely we will be in causing student learning.