Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Author: Tracy Rosen

  • Turning motivation inside out

    Thought it was about time to jot down some notes on a few things popping throughout my brain on the subject of education.

    Motivation. Biggy. How is it that I can walk into one classroom, sit down, and say ‘write about the weather’ and the response is ‘Really? We love the weather! Oh wow, can we go outside to really see what it’s like out so we can add some realistic detail?’ and in another classroom I am racking (or is it wracking? In either case, lately my brain is raquée) my brain to get them to lift their chins off the desks to get writing? Reading, talking? I feel like a different teacher in each of those classes. Now that I reflect, I am more motivated to teach the first class because I know that the response will be positive. So maybe it isn’t so much about motivating them as it is about motivating myself. Because in that 2nd class I feel like THE. MOST. BORING. TEACHER. EVER. And so I probably am.

    I’m thinking this is why I facebooked this quote from Michael. Here it is again for those of you who read it a few minutes ago in my status update:

    “Here’s my plea to anyone of us arrogant enough to presume we have something to offer to the young. Try something new.

    Try to master something you suck at but like to do anyway.

    Now imagine trying to master something you suck at and don’t really care for.

    Welcome to high school.”

    There are some fundamental differences between the two classes:

    • 1st class is middle school, 2nd class is high school
    • 1st class happens to be all girls, 2nd class happens to be all boys.
    • They are both split grade classes but the first class has a good mix of both grades and the second has 1 student of one grade and the rest of another.
    • 1st class I see in the mornings, 2nd class at the end of the day.

    So now that I have written all of this I’m going to try to stop worrying about how to motivate them and focus on motivating myself in that classroom. As we were talking about speech writing we looked at the different steps to writing a ‘good’ (don’t like that word, but this tired brain (after all of that wracking/racking) isn’t feeling too thesaurical) speech. And as I was droning on about how important it was to talk about something that interests you, that you know, that you are motivated about because otherwise the audience will sense that you don’t care about what you are telling them and will tune out I thought, Holy moly, I am NOT walking my talk right now. This needs to change.

    —
    By the way, I’m getting really annoyed with these spammy comments that pretend they are ME posting all over this site. I have changed my password a gajillion times and they STILL show up. So if you see a bunch of nonsense in the comments no, I did not write them, just haven’t gotten around to sending them to the depths of my trash yet.

    Now that I got that out of my system…
    Good night.

    —

  • “Planned school board cuts anger Quebec teachers”…why?

    When I first heard the news – that Line Beauchamp, Quebec’s Education Minister, is presenting a proposal during this weekend’s Liberal party caucus to cut school board funding in half – I literally high-fived my rear-view mirror. Maybe not the best thing to do while driving through the slippery roadways skirting the construction of highway 30 as you approach the island of Montreal from the west in the dark and rain at 6am… but I was happy to hear it.

    We’ve been moving in this direction. Decision-making power has been slowly shifting to the schools over the past little while as it is. School-based success plans are one example. The Quebec Education Program, with its student-centered, competency based approach, is in itself a template for a school-centered education system.

    Where will the money that is being cut from the school boards go? Last night on CBC news Mrs. Beauchamp said it herself – it will go directly to the schools. And it will be the schools who will decide where the money will go.

    So why are teachers (and here I am probably referring more to teacher unions rather than individual teachers) angered?

    There is a lot to do in order to make the transition from the model where school board makes the decisions that principals and, in turn, teachers have to carry out to a model that has principals and teachers carrying out their own decisions. But this model can only benefit our bottom line, our students. Individuals in the schools know what is best for the students in them. As well as for the adults that care for the students.

    I think this is great news. What do you think?

    ps – the title to this blog post is taken directly from this Oct. 21/2011 CBC news article:
    Planned school board cuts anger Quebec teachers

  • Teaching in the dark

    Lately I have been teaching in the dark.

    Our school has no Internet access. The students have none at home, either.

    What do we do? We read. We have conversations, live conversations, about what we read. We look for solutions together and they are made from the stuff of our brains.

    Did I mention that we read? My students in Grades 7 through 11 love to read. All of them. And they can have and do have conversations about the books they read. They can even make connections between them. They jump up and down with pure joy about some of the books they are reading. I actually have to tell students to stop reading.

    I see the Science teacher outside, collecting insects with the students, examining them under microscopes and in their terrariums. I see evidence of writing in French when they students laboriously and lovingly work on their scrapbooks by hand and write letters describing why they included what they did.

    At lunch time students play with each other. Yes. Even the boys in Grade 11.

    Lately I have been teaching in the dark and I’m surprised to say it has been illuminating.

  • How has your teaching practice changed?

    Mine is constantly changing, developing, evolving. I think if my teaching stayed the same for too long, I’d have to question what I was doing: stasis would undermine my determination to create meaningful learning situations. My students are always changing so how could I stay the same? Also, it would be really boring to do the same thing over and over again.

    Don't be afraid of change
    Image found at HumberPr Ning. Click to view source.


    When I started teaching, I was focused on reading. On helping every single student in my care to learn to read. Of course reading is still important but my focus has deepened to accept reading as a function of critical thinking. My practice has also changed in the deepening awareness I have in the importance of relationship to teaching – relationship with students, parents, colleagues. I think amazing things can happen if we are truly in relationship around what we do – be that teaching, firefighting, bookkeeping, farming.

    How has your teaching practice changed?

  • Making sense of teaching by starting with why

    I haven’t read the book so this isn’t a review or commentary on the book but rather a reflection on the idea of starting with why, which just so happens to be the title of a book as well.

    When people ask what do you do, you teach.
    When people ask what do you teach, you teach elementary or high school, English or French, or Math, or History.

    But it’s not often that I’m asked why I teach. Maybe if we went with the why more often we’d make more sense out of teaching.

    Why do you teach?

    To create mathematicians? Why?
    To help kids raise their test scores? Why?
    To get kids to write? Read? Why?
    To get kids to sit in a row, quietly taking notes? Why?
    To get kids to question? Why?
    To learn about human relationship? Why?

    Why do you teach? And when did you figure that out?