Staying Engaged

It was 5:00 pm on a Friday afternoon.  We had just completed week 5 of the new school year at Altamira.  As a brand new campus, there is always something that is calling my attention.  I have struggled more and enjoyed more this particular position and school than anything else I have experienced.  There I was however sitting at my desk, eyes closed, exhausted and on the verge of tears,... thinking... decompressing... overwhelmed with the task that I had chosen confront.  This was the latest of many similar experiences I have had over the last few months as I have worked to get our campus up and running.  It wasn't the first nor was it the last time that the thought crept into my mind, "What am I doing here?"  And then I remembered.  I'm here because of the students.  Not because of all the other things that make my job more stressful than it needs to be, but because there are students out there who need people committed to helping them learn to be successful.

See education can be a challenging and difficult career.  I have known many educators, and ready about others, who at the end of the day just couldn't do it anymore.  They couldn't play the political game, balance the demands of state testing while instilling core values in their students, deal with outdated evaluation systems, and just work harder to get paid less than they could doing something else.  It's sad when I see good people leave education.  Is the system perfect?  No, but that is all the more reason why we need good educators to stay engaged and keep working hard for the kids.

Staying engaged is easier said than done.  For me I have tried a few things everyday to keep me going:

1. Have fun!  Everyday I try to do something with the kids that is just fun.  At Altamira Academy, we start everyday with a morning dance party where students get to wait for our morning announcements by doing Just Dance videos (Thank you Seth Boynton for the suggestion).  I love seeing the students smile and laugh as we start each day.
2. Get to know the students.  The better relationship I develop with my students and the more engaged I am in their lives, the easier it is to wake up each morning and know I have to be there for them.  It keeps me focused on what is really important.
3. Set student centered goals.  It is important for me to focus my goals around the students.  This helps me stay energized on what I need to be doing and keeps me focused on my purpose as an educator.  That has changed as I have changed roles, but what is always constant is the focus on the student learning.

We can try to improve education in many different ways, but if our best teachers do not stay engaged in the system, it is going to be difficult to improve.  In what ways do you as educators work to stay engaged as you hit bumps in the road?

Why I let my failures define me

So I have been working on professional development for my teachers for the upcoming school year.  We are opening a brand new campus this year and I am leading the group as the campus principal.  I have felt honored but also a little terrified at what this means.  Here we have a school that has never existed in the past, teachers who barely know each other, and a new set of students and parents coming together for the first time.  I feel a great deal of pressure to make sure that this is a positive educational experience for everyone involved.  As I approached the school year, I was thinking about what I could tell my teachers to prepare them for what lay ahead of them.  The thought that kept coming to my mind what that I should let my failures define me.  Let me explain.

I have heard the phrase do not let your failures define you.  I have heard people say this as a way of motivating me to overcome a set back look for the success ahead of me.  It is not bad advise, but looking back, I feel there is something powerful in looking back on my experiences and my failures or times where I was less than successful.  These experiences have shaped my life, built my character, and taught me to be the person I am today.

I have not always been successful in everything I have done.  Growing up I loved sports, and at times felt that athletic success was the most important thing in my life.  After being cut from the basketball team, repeatedly underperforming in state cross country meets, being benched for the state championship baseball game, and coming in last place in a state track meet, I started to lose confidence in my ability to perform in crucial situations.  I was afraid of failure.  I lacked the mental toughness to keep going I was challenged.  I expected that if I was good, things would be easy.  I saw failure as weakness instead of an opportunity to get improve.

Going to college helped a little but not much.  I started studying civil engineering.  A few c's and d's later, I realized I probably needed to find something different to study.  Again once I was challenged, instead of working hard to find a solution, I simply decided that maybe this wasn't for me.  I ran away instead of facing my failures.

Things started to change when I served my 2 year LDS mission to Honduras.  I was suddenly immersed in a language and culture that was completely foreign to me.  If I was ever going to learn to speak Spanish or understand the culture and people around me, I had to try to speak, fail miserably, and let others teach me.  For the first time in my life, I learned how to learn, to really learn.  I learned how to face a challenge without giving up.  I saw failure as an essential step in my learning and success.  For the first time, I embraced mistakes and failures.  I let this define me and was not afraid of it.  And I was successful.  I learned Spanish very well.  I eventually went on to graduate with a degree in Spanish and have now found something I love.

When I returned from my missionary service, I approached school and life with a new sense of confidence and willingness to put myself out there and embrace my shortcomings.  I was not always successful in everything I did.  I had job interviews that did not go well.  I have faced rejection many times.  The difference was, I no longer felt afraid.  I knew I would have success in the end.  I simply took those opportunities and reflected on ways I could have done better.

As a "Superhero Teacher" it is important that your students fail and see you fail, daily.  They can't be afraid of making a mistake.  The mistakes and failures in class are the ways that we learn.  As teachers, we cannot be afraid of making a mistake.  If we are, we are unlikely to try that new approach to teaching we see in trainings, or invest too much in that student who probably isn't going to get it in the end.  It's too risky.  What if it doesn't work?  What if they don't let them help me?  Then am I wasting my time?  Or are you taking that chance and understanding that while it might not work today, I will get better and eventually find my own way to be the teacher that literally can change lives.

So please, let your failures define you.  Use them, daily, to learn and be better.  If not, you will ultimately just fail.

Collaborating or arguing?

I know it has been a while since I have put anything new out so trying to find time to put my thinking down. This year at UT Elementary, we have been working on continuing to implement our Innovation Challenge and finding solutions to the problems we face on a day to day basis.  One of our focus points this year is to work on becoming better collaborators as educators.  In order to do this though, we needed to define collaboration.

Many times when we think of collaboration, especially in schools and in elementary schools, we think about coming together, sharing ideas, everybody is smiling and happy, and I have the best team ever approach.  In reality, successful collaboration rarely works that way.  In order for us to effectively work together, we need to be able to disagree.  This can be a challenge to find ways and people that are going to challenge our thinking and push us into looking for solutions that are not easily accessible.

So how do we make this happen?  We have to push our egos to the side.  It doesn't matter who's idea it is or who gets the credit.  What matters is that we find solutions to our problems.  We are often caught in echo chambers where we surround ourselves with people only agree with us or praise us for our ideas, or in other words, feed our ego.  Look at the Dallas Cowboys for example.  Jerry Jones runs everything in this organization.  It is not ok for people to disagree with him.  As a result, there is very little growth in the organization.

At UT Elementary, we are working on creating time and culture for teachers to share ideas and give them the skills to be able collaborate, disagree and find answers so that we can help our students.

Passion

I have been thinking a lot this past year about what makes a good teacher.  For the first time in my career, I have been in the position where I am evaluating a teacher based on a year's worth of work.  It is something that I think is still very difficult to define.  Sure you can set rubrics of dos and don'ts and see if the teacher is implementing best practices.  I have seen teachers though who do everything right and yet their students still do not learn.  I have also seen teachers who approach instruction differently and they are very successful.  When I walk into a classroom, within minutes, I can tell whether a teacher does their job well or not.  It is hard to describe.  How do you measure engagement, excitement, energy, passion?  How do you truly measure learning?  These are all things I have been grappling with this year. 

I think the thing I took away from all this is that there is not a magic recipe to making a great teacher.  Sure there are basic principles that most good teachers follow.  There is not a prescription however.  Good teachers are constantly doing things differently.  What does make a good teacher however is how passionately they approach their work.  Kids are smart and extremely perceptive.  They know when their teacher cares about them.  They can tell when teaching is more than just a job to that teacher.  They can also tell when a teacher has given up or is just trying to make it through the end of the school day.  When the teacher gives up, many times the students do as well. 

I guess the point I am trying to make is to be a Superhero teacher, you have to teach with passion.  I was watching a show about the band Imagine Dragons and a quote from the lead singer Dan Reynolds stuck with me.  He said a piece of advice he was given at one point was that if he was to do music, he couldn't do it just because he wanted to do music.  He had to do it because he had to do music.  There is power in that.  To him music had to be his calling in life.  It couldn't be just hobby or a fun job that he wanted to do.  He needed to approach his music with passion.  I feel the same way about teaching.  There are very few professions where you make a lifelong impact everyday you go to work.  There is a huge responsibility in that and if you are not invested in it, it will show in your work.  The kids will know.  One of the things I am constantly thinking is that as a teacher, you will be remembered forever.  What do you want the students to remember about you? 

What is a teacher?

I know I haven't posted in a while so there are a lot of different things that I have been thinking about over the last few months.  Since I last posted, I have graduated with my Master's degree, finished the school year, started summer work on curriculum and other administrative items, presented at TEPSA about 21st Century Learning and Social and Emotional Learning among other things.  All this change has given time to reflect on what I am doing and why I am doing it.  It has given me the opportunity to reset and recalibrate my educational expectations.

About a month ago I was having a conversation with my wife (or complaining to her would be more accurate) about how as an administrator, I sometimes am not seen as a teacher anymore.  Her response was something like, "well you aren't a teacher anymore."  I got rather defensive when she said this.  Of course I am a teacher.  I may not have my own classroom and students, but that doesn't mean I stopped being a teacher.  My response to her was, "The day I stop being a teacher, is the day I should stop being an administrator."  I mean that too.  One of the problems I feel a lot of school have is that the leadership, whether it is campus leadership or central office, at some point along the way stop being teachers.  They start to view their role as something else, something loosely connected to education.  My first and most important responsibility is ensure that students learn.  That is the job of a teacher.  If I am not doing that as an administrator, then I don't believe I am doing my job.

So I am interested in other people's thoughts.  What is a teacher?  How should we define that?  Where do campus leaders fit in that discussion?

Campus Innovation

As part of my work for my graduate program at the University of Texas, I was tasked to do a Participatory Action Research project.  My project this year was to try and create an environment for ongoing professional learning on campus.  To do this, my principal Kelly Mullin and I created an Innovation Challenge to pose to our teachers.  This last week, our teachers had the opportunity to share which each other what they had learned throughout the school year.

To give you some context, what we sought out to do was to intentionally give the teachers time for self directed professional learning throughout the school year.  Once a week, we asked our teachers to put their planning on hold spend 45 minutes of their planning time on professional learning.  The teachers could pick a topic in an area that interested them, and on a topic that would help them become more effective teachers.  We also challenged the teachers to be innovative and connect their learning to the 6 C's of 21st Century Learning: Collaboration, Communication, Critical Thinking, Creativity, Cooperation, and Caring.  Teachers were also asked to complete two peer observations a month where they observed another teacher on campus to get new ideas. 

Last Friday was so exciting because we were able to see how the Innovation Challenge impacted the instruction on campus.  It was fun to see our teachers gathered around tables in our University Classroom on campus sharing their ideas from using Pinterest to supplement literacy interventions to Project Based Learning in Math.  Teachers started posting to their blogs like this one. http://blogs.utexas.edu/utes_socialstudies/

As we started this project, I was afraid that the teachers were not going to catch the vision and make the Innovation Challenge meaningful.  It is hard to find time as a teacher to dedicate to your own professional learning.  I saw that challenge.  Our teachers have many demands on their time.  I could see though the difference it made in the ones that put the effort to finding new ways to improve their instruction.  There was a different feel in their classrooms toward the end of the year than there was in the beginning.  I was very pleased and excited to hear how they began to crave time to collaborate with their colleagues.  This process has helped me become a believer in the power of self directed professional learning.  Thank you UT Elementary teachers and staff for making this such a humbling experience for me.

What does the Dad say?

A couple of days ago, my 4 year old son was coming up with a song (like he is known to do).  This day the tune was a spin off of What does the Fox Say.  He decided to substitute the word fox for the different members of the family.  He started with the baby and said "waaa", then himself saying "I love Star Wars", then to his mother who apparently says, "clean up you toys".  When he got to what does the dad say it was, "I'm too busy."  When I heard this I felt crushed.  I feel like I work hard to make him and my family a priority in my life.  I can see though where I get caught up in my own world at times. 

One of our professors in the UT Principalship Program, Dr. Nelson Coulter, started his class with us by having us write out the 4 most important things that we want people to remember from our lives.  He then told us to make sure those were front and center in everything we do.  (For more of this teaching, see Dr. Coulter's blog post http://www.nelsonwcoulter.com/2014/04/cluttered.html?spref=fb)  As I have worked throughout my first year as an Assistant Principal and in my final year of my Master's program, I think I have let that get away from me at times.  I am grateful to my 4 year old son for the subtle yet powerful reminder that no other success in life can compensate for failure in the home.

Teachers, as you look to teach like a superhero, make a list of the things that matter most, those things for which you would like to be remembered as a teacher.  If your students were making a song about you, how would they finish the sentence, What does my teacher say?