Tag Archives: master teachers

Teachers of Bygone and New Eras

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There is a cadre of career teachers in our local school who are on the brink of retirement. Each are nearing their 40-year anniversaries in teaching, several with careers in our local school only. Those in the lower grades are teaching the grandchildren of their first students. Experienced? Measured in decades. Talented? Unbelievable teaching skills. Dedicated? Consistently trying to be better. Passionate about teaching? They put a capital “T” in Teacher! They also are part of a dwindling breed of teachers – those who were called to be teachers not just employed as teachers.

It is a fact that schools say good-bye to veteran teachers every year. In our school we have watched this natural cycle; distinguished teachers retire, and new teachers assume their classrooms However, in past years there was still a remnant of the cadre of the passionate left to carry on. Next year that may not be true.

Differences Matter.

When interviewing candidates for employment, I often asked, “Is teaching your calling or your vocation?”  Some candidates stumbled. They did not understand the question nor the concept of “calling.” Some tried for middle ground saying “both.”  A few either smiled or frowned, either was an appropriate face, saying, “calling.” From an early age, they knew they wanted to be teachers. In school, they selectively considered their teachers as role models. In college, they declared their education majors early and their course work developed necessary academic background. Intuitively, they knew they were meant to be teachers; it was their calling. Not surprisingly, these few formed the cadre of dedicated, talented, veteran teachers who constantly exude their passion for teaching children. They are the backbone of their faculty.

There is no set-in-stone, boilerplate descriptor for a passionate teacher. They exist female and male, of all ethnicities and languages, and teaching all disciplines. Often labeled toward the middle and latter years of their careers as master teachers, they know pedagogy and the content and skills of their subjects. They know how to adjust their teaching to meet their students’ learning challenges. More than anything else, they know how to relate to children and cause all children to learn.

Therein lies a significant difference between those who are called and those who are just employed. The passionate do not teach for teaching’s sake; they teach for learning’s sake.

Walking into a classroom while a teacher works causes a variety of responses from both teacher and students. In some classrooms, the air takes on a new tension because someone is watching. The tension increases when that someone is a principal or superintendent. Teaching and learning become business-like. The visitor is treated as a visitor. In contrast, when entering the classroom of one of the passionate, a visitor is welcomed with a “Hey, look at what we are doing today!” The teacher smiles but does not stop or adjust teaching because someone is watching. Children do not hesitate to explain what they are learning and often ask quiz the visitor showing how smart they are.

There is a difference in classrooms that celebrate learning and those who conduct learning.

Locating a teacher in their classroom also is tell-tale difference. When welcoming and starting a class and providing and modeling initial instruction, the teacher often is front and center before students. Location changes and matters when children are engaged in dependent and independent work and individual and small group work. The passionate are kneeling beside student desks and chairs, sitting, and huddling with a child or small group to help children to clarify or correct their understanding or skills. They listen more than they talk. They suggest more than they tell. They personalize the reality that when a child learns learning a very individual development. The employed teachers retreat to their desks to watch and monitor students and do teacher things. They wait for children to come to them rather than intuitively moving among children to aid, confirm, and clarify their learning.

There is a difference in teaching a classroom of children and teaching for each child in a classroom.

Burning the midnight oil is not just a student’s plight, but also a teacher’s. It refers to doing what needs to be done in preparation for what comes next no matter of the hour. When the school day begins, all teachers are in their classrooms awaiting the first bell. For the employed, a class day begins and ends with contractual bells. For the passionate, the teaching day begins and ends with readiness for what the children need next. As a rule, the first cars in the parking lot in the morning and the last to leave after school are the passionate’s. They also are seen at school on weekends and vacation days. No one asks a teacher to be a slave to their job, but what is slavery to some is being professional to others.

The commitment to teaching is greater than the teaching contract.

When a passionate teacher retires, there is a loss of talent in the school. Their talent is the aggregate of their experience and their professional knowledge and abilities. All teachers begin based upon their baccalaureate and teaching preparation. I have known some to make a career based solely on those credentials; they do only what is necessary to sustain their contract and license. I also have celebrated the awarding of advanced degrees and training for teachers who know that teaching requires lifelong learning and continuous new training. When I clipped and shared professional articles and books with the faculty, some squandered the opportunity while the cadre were eager to talk about what they read and learned.

The cadre is not just passionate about their students’ learning but also about their own continuous development as professional teachers.

It is a new era.

Each year in Wisconsin the number of licenses for baccalaureate-prepared teachers is equal to the number of emergency licenses issued to people who are fully prepared but will achieve their license through on-the-job training. Several years ago, new teachers with emergency licenses only were rare but soon they will be the majority of new hires. Most of the emergency-licensed are second career teachers who come to teaching for a variety of reasons. Few, if any, are called. The shortage of people who want to be classroom teachers is real and many students are taught by not-yet-licensed or prepared teachers. Teaching is a job and there will be no cadre.

The profession of teaching has entered a new era. Most new teachers will be as professional as the business of teaching requires them to be. They will work their contracts. Life for them sets aside the eight hours each day and nine months needed for their teaching job so that they can live their non-job lives.

Years ago, a child seeing a teacher in the grocery store was bewildered because the child only thought of the teacher in a classroom. That was the teacher’s entity. No more. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. To repeat, no one should be a slave to their employment. On the other hand, to swipe a phrase, a presence or absence of a teacher’s “fire in the belly” is clearly discernible. “Fire in the belly” is a critical attribute for master teaching and makes me wonder if we are saying our final farewell to our local Mr./Ms. Chips.

Your Personal Pantheon of Teachers

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Miss Blaine knew.  She knew I liked stories and histories and language.  If I could read about it and begin to imagine it, I could know it and the more I read and imagined the more I wanted to learn.  And, she knew I was a quiet student seldom raising my hand but could give illustrated answers when called upon.  Miss Blaine knew me.  She was my teacher for two years – 4th and 5th grade, back-to-back with Miss Blaine – in the late 1950s.

Miss Blaine knew Carol and Richard and Mike W and Bruce.  They topped all the weekly charts for the 32 students in our classroom; those were early Boomer years when all classrooms were bulging.  Spelling, arithmetic quizzes, science check tests and annual ITBS assessments – these were our straight A’s champs week in and week out.   She fed them more assignments than the rest of us, and more comments on their projects, and more difficult books to read.  The more she gave, the better they did.  Miss Blaine knew Dick and Donnie and Steve Y struggled to read and do their math and she gave them more of her one-on-one time.  She knew when a child needed the boost of leading the class from her room to Miss Snyder’s art room, the little self-esteem boost of being picked by Miss Blaine to lead.

Miss Blaine knew how to hook each child in her classroom to cause each of us to learn.  She never looked at us sitting in our rows of desks with a solitary gaze but flitted her eyes from child to child as she spoke so that we knew she was talking to each of us intentionally.  She was short in stature and did not need to kneel or bend very far when she stood by my desk to comment on my work or ask a guiding question to keep me on track.  With eyes shut I can still summon her presence and my want to be a better student, to get more problems right on my nemesis math assignments, because she thought I could.

I would like to think that every student in every school experiences their own Miss Blaine.  Across the fourteen years of 4K-12 education, a random draw of Miss Blaine’s in elementary, middle, and high school, in grade level classes and in subject classes, is enough to make school and learning meaningful.  It is enough hooking by master teachers to keep children self-invested in their learning.

Consider your own history as a student.  Can you name your Miss Blaines?  Can you remember how specific teachers made a difference in your school life?  In your heart of hearts you know them as they knew you.

Miss Blaine, Mrs. Wendlent, Mr. Marshall, Mrs. McArthur, Mr. Cummings, Mr. Chute, Mr. Mixdorf, Mr. Hubacek – I am eternally grateful that you taught me. 

My listing these names does not mean I did not learn from each of the 80+ teachers who were mine in my kindergarten through senior year experience.  I indeed learned from all.  But, there really is a difference in a child’s connections with their teachers.  Some connections are as routine and pedestrian as the spending of common time and the management of 180 days’ of school work.  Other connections mark you for your lifetime.

My Miss Blaine is long gone, as are almost all my teachers.  So are many of my classmates.  We know that the effects of a person’s lifetime are short-lived, but while we live and remember the effects of the teachers who knew us and hooked us as learning children, the glory of their good teaching prevails.

The Tension of High Expectations

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Tension.  Anxiety.  Investment.  These are tangibles most of us want to diminish in our daily lives.  Tension, anxiety, and pressure can be aggravants and we see them as undesirable for our general well-being.  Yet, without degrees of tension, anxiety, and an investment to move forward, it is hard to cause learning.  Highly effective teachers know how to use positive attributes of external tension, anxiety, and investment to raise a child’s internal motivation to learn and keep learning. 

Primary schooling for most children begins with excitement.  School is new and exciting for a 4K or K student.  It is a new place with lots of children who will become friends and new things to do.  The blaze of early social excitement wears off with time.  While some children rise every morning with a “I can’t wait to get to school”, most need our assistance in answering the school bell every day.  Motivational theory helps us to keep children from sinking into the drudgery of compulsory education, the grind of getting through school.

Madeline Hunter taught us how components of tension assists motivation that leads to successful student learning.  (Hunter’s name and teaching reverberate in many discussions of teaching and learning.)  Motivation starts with a teacher setting a positive yet challenging feeling tone about learning.  A feeling tone has a friendly edge to it; an edge like a tool that is constantly pushed into new information and skills to be learned and the tension of that pushing causes learning.  That edge is a tension that the teacher sets and controls over time.  It is a friendly edge because effective teachers coat it with more Hunterisms – personal interest, challenge, the rewards of success, and how what is learned is useful in a child’s future.

Motivation is jump started by a teacher’s understanding of each child’s readiness to learn and beginning point for learning and adjusting initial instruction for early, meaningful success.  Motivational tension is enhanced when the challenge of what comes next is “just beyond the current reach” of student knowledge and skills yet within a student’s grasp with guided work.  There is a tension in that distance between what a child knows and can do now and what she needs to know and do next.  Effective teachers make this a positive tension because it results in success.

Bill Spady taught us that “successful learning begets more successful learning”.  When he laid out the outcomes to be taught and learned, he relied upon sound instructional practices to cause learning.  Students become invested when the outcomes set by the teacher are important and meaningful.  The drive to achieve important outcomes carries an element of anxiety to succeed.  Teachers monitor each student’s sense of internal anxiety knowing that too much causes a student to shut down or make poor decisions.  Just the right amount of anxiety keeps a student properly and positively pointed toward learning success.

All children need to see that what they learn is beneficial to them personally.  They need to see and feel personal gain or improvement in order to invest themselves in school assignments.  If a child does not feel personal interest and connection to a curriculum, it is easy to see school assignments as just a long line of work assigned by teachers and required to pass to the next grade.  Drudgery.  When this is a child’s mindset, any distraction or other thing to do moves a child’s interest from learning to something more immediately rewarding or fun to do.  Gaming and other Internet links are perfect and available for distracted and disillusioned students who have no personal investment in their school education.  A child may not see herself in every assignment, but there has to be enough and frequent enough personal interest to keep her invested.

Effective teachers purposefully tell students that “what comes next” holds special interests for aspiring artists and musicians, or is very hands-on for students needing tactile learning, or is necessary for students who see themselves in a medical profession.  Good teaching tells them then shows them.  Investment in the future is a wonderful subliminal tag for any new subject or skill set.

Teaching and learning carry many caveats, some more meaningful than others.  One of the most potent is “low expectations are connected to low achievements and higher expectations to higher achievements.”  Raising expectations is more than just declaring them or sending them in an e-mail.  Higher expectations are built by teachers with rigorous instruction of knowledge, skills, and dispositions AND by students who elevate their work, their commitment, and their performance.  There is a lot of “doing” in teaching and learning to higher expectations.  Higher achievements are a continuous push-pull between teachers and students.

Tension, anxiety, and investment are used by effective teachers in setting the right tone and providing rigorous teaching toward the knowledge and skills learning children need to learn.  Expectations won’t rise on their own – they are constructed on sound principles of motivation and instruction.  Constructive use of tension is a necessary component for teachers and students to achieve successful teaching and learning.