Homeostasis...or not?

Hello Reach Participants!

So how are you all doing? Everyone has been in school for almost a month now (or more)-- the excitement of the first day, meeting your students for the first time, discovering that your students are not quiet at all as they were for the first, oh, say 20 minutes-- you are now all "in the thick of it." 

A couple of people have told me they felt as if they were "tossed into the deep end of the pool," and I hope they will not mind me borrowing this metaphor for a moment. They're right-- starting to teach (particularly as an intern) IS like being thrown into the deep end when you don't really know how to swim. Keeping your head above water is a major goal at first, and I'm sure that many of you feel like this is where you are right now. Some of you may feel like you are making small paddling motions and might feel further along than you were 2 weeks ago. If you keep paddling like this, eventually you'll find a passing doggie paddle that will probably move you up and down the pool, and you won't feel like you're drowning any more.

So what do you do with the coach who is encouraging you to try a new stroke from the side of the pool? What do you do with the coach who emphasizes you PLANNING how you will execute this new (and probably more efficient) stroke? Will you stop, take some time to learn a more efficient stroke, or ignore the coach on the side of the pool, telling yourself, "This is working for me just fine right now-- and it's better than it was when I first got in the water!"

Returning to "Mastery," we have the character of the hacker-- doggie paddle is better than drowning, to be sure, and you're getting your feel for the water-- but the true commitment to mastery comes once you have figured out enough basics to "manage." We will all hit plateaus in our teaching and learning, but what will you do to ensure that you do not relax into homeostasis? Your students need an Olympic swimmer, and while you may not be that Olympic swimmer today, is your commitment to developing strong and efficient strokes or is it to just paddle up and down the pool? 

To quote George Leonard, "The questions are: How do you deal with homeostasis? How do you make change for the better? How do you make it last?" (p. 112) Where you are at the moment is a difficult, challenging, overwhelming place. Being able to hold your head above water feels like a major achievement--it is, but how will you make sure that your next step is a change for the better and then again, and again, until continual change and improvement IS the practice? It may seem overwhelming to try to have a long-term view at this moment, but this is a very important place in your career. Beginning practices can become lasting. What will be your commitment to your time in the water?

Connecting With Other Educators

Hello Reach Participants!

I hope this posting finds you working away on your pre-service work (big hint here!) and getting prepared for our retreat. We are looking forward to meeting everyone in person, and getting to continue some of the conversations about teaching and learning we have started here.

As you will notice on the del.icio.us site, more blogs are up! While your specific pre-service instructions are only about posting on your own blog, we want to encourage you (in all of your spare time-- ha!) to start to read and respond to others' blogs as well. Too often in education, people spend time isolated in their own classrooms, unaware of others' experiences and learnings. While the Reach coaches will make every effort to support and challenge every one of you throughout the year, you are all resources for each other. If you have nothing else in common, you are now connected with a group of people who are all going through their early years of teaching. This is a tough time, and trust me-- getting support from others who are going through similar experiences can be really helpful. 

See you in August-- and get that pre-service work done! ;-) 

Critical Thinking vs. Habits of Mind

Chris' reply to my post got me "critically thinking" about the notion of teaching critical thinking. While the intent of his post, that he is interested in teaching students to think critically, is noble and worthy, I'm no longer sure what critical thinking even means. I think it has become one of those terms that is so frequently used without examination that it has become nearly meaningless. I prefer to think in terms of teaching "habits of mind." Among these: use of evidence, supposition, understanding perspective(s), making connections, meta-cognition (thinking about your own thinking and learning), curiosity, and so on. To me, these are more concrete and definable, and therefore more teachable. I tend to incorporate these into my "essential questions" when I am planning units/lessons.

Here's a question: Why does each section of the California State Standards for Social Science start with the "historical and social science analysis skills," which include use of evidence, debates in history, connecting historical events to other events and current events, cause and effect, identifying bias and prejudice, understanding perspective; yet, these analysis skills are rarely included in a history curriculum? (Hint: What's on the STAR test?) But here is the rub, even if you want students to be "information sponges," they need to have a conceptual framework on which to hang all that information.

This idea becomes particularly important (and frequently problematic) in math education where an over emphasis on "procedural fluency" (i.e. practicing problems) trumps "conceptual understanding" (i.e. understanding how it works). There is some, debatable, thinking that this better prepares students for the next high stakes tests. However, there is substantial evidence that this undermines students ability to do more complex mathematics down the road (see, for example, How To Teach Mathematics by the National Research Council).

So, Chris, this is a long winded way of saying that I absolutely agree with you about teaching students to process and evaluate information. I also believe that serious information retention REQUIRES understanding. While there is plenty of tension in teaching between depth vs. coverage, there is not conflict between understanding and retention.

...and the final coach weighs in!

Well...Page and Victoria set a pretty high bar, but I'm going to give this blogging thing a shot. :) I, Peggy Dove, am the third piece in the coaching puzzle at Reach. Two years ago, I was part of the design team along with Victoria and several other Bay Area teachers (as was previously mentioned) that helped to pilot practices and advise the creation of Reach. I had no intention at that time to leave the classroom and coach teachers full-time, but here I am!


Okay...let me back up tell you a little about how I got into teaching in the first place. I graduated with a B.S. in mechanical engineering and realized that the last thing I wanted to do was spend my life working on redesigning an engine block for 25 years. So...I went to graduate school in bioengineering thinking that I would find more purpose there....but instead I found even bigger egos and corporate schmoozing. After becoming more aware of the "-isms" and social injustice (both in society in general and in my life personally), I knew that I had to be a part of fighting for social change...however small...in one way or another (bye, bye engineering!). I spent the next year and a half working in after-school programs and doing Americorps, and then became a classroom teacher through Teach For America (I could write a novel with my thoughts on TFA, by the way).


I'm currently closing out my fifth and last year (for now, at least) as a classroom teacher at an unbelieveable elementary school that I am proud to be a part of (This past year I was a half-time teacher at L.U.C.H.A. Elementary and a half-time coach with Reach). I'm revising unit plans and long-term plans for the teachers to use next year, avoiding the inevitable cleaning of my classroom, thinking about all the students and families I have known, and reflecting on my successes and failures over the years as a teacher and leader. Teaching really is an art (Page, I liked your painting reference), a craft that is never perfected or "figured out"...and that is both what makes teaching incredibly beautiful and incredibly frustrating for me. I agree with Page that the overall ideas of teaching are rather simple, my emotional, mental, and physical state at the end of a school year won't let me forget that the act of teaching is ridiculously HARD. Even so (and perhaps as a result), the learnings and rewards of being a classroom teacher are immeasureable for me.


While I don't necessarily feel like I'm "ready" to leave the classroom, I do believe very strongly in our mission at Reach and couldn't pass up the opportunity to be a part of a program creating real change in teacher education. Spending last year as a half-time coach was SUCH a learning experience (I felt like a first year teacher again!), and I'm excited to approach this next year with even more focus and energy. I'm looking forward to getting to know you all and being connected to YOUR journeys in the classroom!

Another Coach's View...

Well, I'm not going to recap everything that Page so eloquently said about the general Reach philosophy of teaching, but I AM going to give you a little background on me and how I ended up in this program. 

I ended up teaching by accident--I did Americorps as a stop-gap between college and graduate school. I ran a peer conflict management program and an after school tutorial program. This experience taught me a ton, but I walked out with two major insights that prompted me to sign up for a credential program. I became really interested in the process of reading, and what made kids become readers or avoid reading like the plague. I also realized that I loved working with middle schoolers. (I don't know what this says about my general state of sanity, but we'll overlook that...)

I then spent the next seven years working at a middle school in San Rafael, teaching Core (language arts/history), French and AVID- a college-bound program for students would would be first in their family to go to college. For the last three years I taught there, I also mentored beginning teachers. While I loved working with my students, the more I mentored beginning teachers, the more frustrated I became with credential programs. Teaching is an extremely difficult job and yet I did not feel like the credential programs I had seen (including my own) were doing what was really necessary to help create the kind of teachers Page talked about above. When the opportunity to join Reach's Design team presented itself, I jumped at it. 

I loved what we did on the Design Team and I am extremely proud to be a part of Reach. It matters to me that we create opportunities for teachers to become great so they in turn help students reach their full potential. I learned a lot last year about helping teachers become the teachers and leaders they want to be--and I think I became a better teacher and leader myself in the process. I am looking forward to this year and seeing what kind of amazing teaching and learning moments we will create together...

I will leave you with a favorite quote of mine that sums up what I loved about teaching and what I have loved this year about coaching: "Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one ought to preserve it." (Anais Nin) 

Philosophy of Teaching

This is going to be kind of a cool experiment in creating online community... While all Reach Participants will be blogging about their expanding thinking about their own teaching and learning, this blog will be for the Reach Coaches (Peggy, Victoria, and I) to have our own running conversation about teaching and learning...

I'll start:

As coaches, we have been reflecting on our first year of Reach and what we have learned... And it has been an incredible year full of so much learning... One of the things we have been talking about is that even though the teaching is unbelievably challenging, personally and professionally, in many ways it boils down to some simple ideas, to wit:

Teaching comes back to the same essential questions:

• "How do I want my students thinking and being? How do they want to be thinking and being?"
• "What do I want them to know and be able to do? What do they want to know or be able to do?"
•"How will I/they know?"
• "What can I do to help EACH of them get there? What do they need to do individually and together?"

Teaching Habits:
• The Habit of Mind of teaching is to return, again and again, to these questions. Always from different perspectives and with different students in mind.
• The Habit of the Heart of teaching is to deeply, genuinely care about your students and how your effort to address these questions will affect them...
• The Habit of the Hand of teaching is all of the strategies and techniques that supports this (which we can teach you).

9 attitudes and skills that typify teachers who help all learners (Tomilinson & McTighe, 2006):
1. Establish clarity about curricular essentials
2. Accept responsibility for learner success
3. Develop communities of respect
4. Build awareness of what works for each student
5. Develop classroom management routines that contribute to success
6. Help students become effective partners in their own success
7. Develop flexible classroom teaching routines
8. Expand a repertoire of instructional strategies
9. Reflect on individual progress with an eye toward curricular goals and personal growth

So simple... yet, teaching and learning is one of the most complex tasks I can imagine. It requires skill and technique as well as creativity and intuition. Teachers have to be able to plan carefully AND be willing to throw out their plans at any moment. YIKES!

But then again, you could describe painting a masterpiece the same way...

For me, thinking about teaching in this way came by the scenic route... I started as an Outward Bound instructor more than 15 years ago. Working overseas with an amazing group of instructors from all over the world, we thought a lot about the big ideas we wanted students to grapple with, and we thought incessantly about the skills and knowledge we wanted them to have. But we were most definitely teaching habits of the hand as opposed to habits of the mind. Years later, after many stops in between, I became the founding director and a humanities teacher for the Bay Area School of Enterprise, a high school that was designed to make learning more experiential. For the first time I began to think deeply about what I wanted students to know and be able to do. Real and dramatic experience started to become, in my mind, necessary but no longer sufficient for the kind of learning I wanted students to be doing. I started to recognize that my attraction towards the big ideas and enduring understandings I wanted for students was coming at the expense of the skills and knowledge students needed to be able to fully accesses those ideas. Together with 20 amazing educators, both staff and volunteers (including Victoria and Peggy) we started Reach with the idea that we might be able to help teachers become the educators and leaders they want be. In the process, all of these questions came back to me in new ways.

Now, after 15 years of watching so many inspiring teachers of all descriptions and experience levels in action, I bring these questions to my teaching... What do I want the teachers I work with (including you) to know and be able to do? What do you want to know and be able to do? How do I want you thinking about your practice? How do you think about it? How can I help EACH of you to be the teacher you want to be? How can you help each other? These are the questions I bring to my work with you... and the questions I put to you...