In the past few weeks, when visiting classrooms to observe student teachers for the local university, I have noticed that some have difficulties in common areas. These student teachers are probably no different from all in their roles. I also have to note that many experienced teachers never looked for some of the items that I'm trying to highlight to my students. I often found myself finding little keys to teaching when I didn't know I needed them. Only when stumbling into something that I didn't know I was missing was I able to raise the bar for myself and feel the professional improvement that I longed for.
So let me put a little more wisdom into your world. I never figured out every secret to mastering this craft, but I did often reflect on these things that are common needs among the student teachers in the world.
So let me put a little more wisdom into your world. I never figured out every secret to mastering this craft, but I did often reflect on these things that are common needs among the student teachers in the world.
- Stop helping students to completion. We are, by nature, people who want the best for children. We want to to help them - even at great expense to our own time and patience. However, there is such a thing as addiction to a teacher's help. Certain students will drain a teacher of these things by constantly shooting their hands in the air to get her attention and ask for help - even before they have even tried to work out a solution for themselves. Shame on us for falling for this! Students should not be allowed to hog a teacher's attention and time at the detriment of others in the classroom. So, stop letting them do it. I don't mean stop helping them; what I mean is this: acknowledge when they have don't part of a problem correctly, get them to the next step, and step away. Help someone else and someone else. Work the room before coming back to them. It's likely that they will actually look at the problem for themselves, this time, and figure out where they need to go to complete it for themselves. Instead of enabling them to rely on you for answers, give them opportunities to work on it independently for while.
- Get out of the text and off the script. Too often teachers stand before a class with a teacher edition in hand, reading someone else's lesson to a class rather than engage students in honest, raw conversation. Students might refer to this as "calling it in". Wouldn't you rather be creative with your lesson, work something out that might just be better than the textbook, and make your class special? The bottom line here is this: your class will never stand out or be better if all you do is the same as the teacher across town. Students will be less likely to thing your class is magical and special if you don't do something to set it apart. I always wanted kids to beg to be in my classroom. The reputation that I had as a classroom teacher was one of structure and serious, interesting, hard-working fun. Oft times, the principal would receive written and verbal requests from parents to place their children in my classroom. That reputation is one that I worked hard to get...but I would have never achieved it if I hadn't gotten away from the textbook and taught the standards and objectives in brand new ways.
- Use callbacks to maintain attention. I hated callbacks. For years, I had only one: I would say, "I'm talking," and students would echo, "I'm listening." They weren't, by the way. I thought callbacks were only used to get attention when students made mental explorations into la la land. A teacher claps a pattern and the students mimic it in return. A teacher shouts, "Class class," and the students come back with, "Yes yes" (That one is a particular pet peeve of mine in that it is only a portion of a teaching method that is much more complicated...but teachers only use this simple section of it, because the rest is too difficult.). However, I discovered late in my career that callbacks can be embedded into lessons to keep attention rather than to get attention. They never worked for me in the latter, but once I discovered the former, magic started to happen. Students listened with sharper ears when they knew they needed to be ready for an energetic, fun, and unique callback. We worked out actions to go along with the words, and suddenly we had embedded brain breaks in our lessons, as well. It takes practice and constant tweaking, but you'll feel it in a big way when it works so smoothly in your class.
Did you miss the first two of these commentaries? Here they are again:
Takeaways from Observing Student Teachers I
Takeaways from Observing Student Teachers II
Takeaways from Observing Student Teachers I
Takeaways from Observing Student Teachers II
