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.

Category: Connecting

  • What does your best teaching look like?

    I have a new blog. It’s called Teaching is a Verb and I want to collect stories about actual teaching practice there.

    The long term goal of the blog is to connect teachers to teachers by providing a framework for us to visit each other’s classrooms. We have so much to learn from each other.

    Anyone can register and share stories from their actual teaching practice there, or stories of teaching practice they have seen and admire.

    I’ve started with my own story, and a question. I’m cross-posting it here.

    What does your best teaching look like?

    You know, this blog is called Teaching is a Verb yet when I answer the question I realize that examples of my ‘best’ teaching happen when I am not in the room, during those moments when I am seemingly not doing anything directly related to learning.

    Example.
    I spent much of one day last week, or maybe the week before, meeting with students in crises. Every once in a while we have a day like that (here’s a detailed account of one of those days from last year).

    I walked into my Grade 11 CWI (Contemporary World Issues) class about 20 minutes into the period. They were quiet and had their laptops in front of them (we did a lot of fundraising last year and bought 18 mini laptops!). I figured they were taking advantage of the free time and were checking email, listening to music.

    Get ready for this: they were ALL working on this assignment. I had not yet assigned it.

    They went to our blog, read the new assignment, and began their research. The quiet dissipated as I walked in with, Tracy, I think I need to change my article, and Look at what I’ve found, I think there’s a connection here, can you look?, etc…

    This was a class that only a week earlier had to be stopped numerous times during each period in order to regroup and address issues of silliness, noise, etc. I had taken away their seating privileges because they weren’t making smart choices in that area (sitting with friends who distract…), I spent time each class with one or another student in the den having conversations about their behaviour.

    And then I realized it was about a month into the school year and that this was about the time that teaching and learning really starts.

    So what does my best teaching look like? It ‘looks’ like nothing when it is happening but it is actually made up of at least a month’s worth of and ongoing consistent classroom structure, making connections with individual students, and providing them with work that they can find meaning in for themselves and create meaning from together.

    The best thing about this is it eventually frees me up to work with individual students on either technical issues to do with assignments, personal issues that require some out of class intervention, comprehension issues, etc…

    Here is an example of that kind of work for a course in Contemporary World Issues. It’s what they are working on right now.
    Personal News Story Project

    What does your best teaching look like?

  • ‘Seeking to understand’ in action

    If only humans had it this easy when it comes to understanding each other
    If only humans had it this easy when it comes to understanding each other

    A norm that I aspire to, however difficult it can be at times is this one:

    Seek to understand before being understood.

    I just read a story about an administrator who practices this norm.

    From Karen S. about a Kindergarten student in trouble in Talking Him Off the Ledge at Talkworthy:

    “In a few minutes, he got the idea that I wasn’t there to make his day more miserable but that I was genuinely trying to understand him.”

    She described the encounter between herself and the child as magical. I felt the magic as I read her words. Karen is a true leader. Go read the whole story. It’s a story worth listening to, sharing, and believing.

    “We are responsible not only for the stories we tell and the stories we listen to, but for the stories we choose to believe.” ~Thomas King

  • I demand achievement!

    Yesterday afternoon was gorgeous – a perfect afternoon for a shopping spree in Montreal, which I hadn’t done in a long while. It’s as if I were a tourist in my own city, since I no longer live in Montreal but lived there for so long.

    In the very first store I visited (after stopping in at the Korean grocery on Ste Catherine street for kim bap to eat as I strolled in the sun) I couldn’t help but purchase this bag. I was going to get it even after only seeing this side:

    teacher

    and then I turned it around – priceless! – I ran to the cashier.

    student

    I feel like this is all I write about.

    Sure, I demand achievement from my students. But they are always reminding me to ‘get a grip’. How do we balance high standards for achievement with getting a grip, with staying real?

    When it comes down to it, if I only demanded achievement from my students I wouldn’t get it. Some might try to give it, those ones who are lucky enough to know how to get it through traditional means. But what about those who have other needs that must be met first, before they can even fathom academic achievement?

    The teacher on the bag demands achievement – from who? Her students? Herself? Her school? In order for authentic achievement to happen on any level it ideally needs to happen on all of them. We need to listen to each other’s stories, really listen, to develop a relationship with each other that makes us want to achieve together. In that way we can expect achievement, expect success, happiness, accountability, change, love.

    Really, I feel like this is all I write about. All I talk about. We can’t expect achievement (academic, social, professional development…) if that is all we demand. Real achievement is collaborative, it is relative, it is caring.

    I almost didn’t post this because I feel it is all I write about, that it is the same old story. But then I remembered that there is a reason for stories. The stories we tell and listen to and choose to believe are the ones that tie us together and keep us alive.

    So I’ll keep telling this story. I think it’s a good one to tell.

  • Interdependence

    Sept. 28: After I wrote this post I decided to create a blog for the Contemporary World Issues class. I’ve now re-posted this and my students are commenting over there: cwi.tracyrosen.com

    Our Contemporary World Issues class has been talking about the concept of interdependence for the past week or so. We’ve done some individual exploration on David Suzuki’s website, we’ve had some classroom and small group conversations on the subject as well.

    I’ve taken some of our words and phrases and put them together in the presentation below. When you read them, think about them – what do they really mean?

    I’ve also added someone else’s words on the topic. Do they add to your ideas? Do they make things clearer/more complicated?

    Though this post is directed towards my Grade 11 Contemporary World Issues class, I hope that others will comment as well.

  • It’s basically about shifting from getting people to love you, to you loving them.

    This post is going to be about an excerpt from Stephen Downe’s blog summary of Michael Wesch’s talk at D2L Fusion. Wait, you think that was a bit confusing? Before I get into the meat of this post, let’s take a moment to recognize exactly how I found these words.

    This morning I decided it was time to update a few things. Many of my networks still had me as living in Montreal, QC, which I moved away from about 6 weeks ago. (Facebook won’t let me make the change, it apparently won’t let you list a current city that it doesn’t recognize and, well, Bainsville is not exactly the largest speck on the map.)

    After doing that I decided to update my blogroll (go see the new ‘hot blogs‘, they really are), and then I decided to change up my featured blog posts (those are the ones in the black strip at the top of the blog). So, as I was reading through some of my favourite posts to determine which ones to add to the list, I also read through the comments. I had forgotten about Heidi Pence, and there she was, commenting on ‘Who Are Teachers?’. So I clicked through to her blog, Think, Think, Think and found A New Beginning, a post about what is on a lot of our minds as we get past the middle point of each summer: the year to come, where I came across this sentence, attributed to Dan Meyer:

    It’s basically about shifting from getting people to love you, to you loving them.

    So, I clicked on over to Dan’s blog to see the context and found its attribution to Michael Wesche. And yay, there was a link so, of course, I clicked through it and found where the sentence began – with Stephen Downes. It is embedded in a lengthy blog summary of a talk by Michael Wesche. So, I can only with certain accuracy attribute it to Stephen Downes, awesomely inspired my Michael Wesche. (Yes, I am a bit of a research geek. A bit.)

    This is basically what that all looked like:

    That 23 and sunny business is a lie. I need to find a new weather applet. Haven't found one yet that recognizes Bainsville either...
    That 23 and sunny business is a lie. I need to find a new weather applet. Haven’t found one yet that recognizes Bainsville either…

    Ok. That being recognized, here is the meat, snipped from Whatever by Stephen Downes at Half an Hour:

    …her hairdresser said, “Love your audience and they’ll love you back.” Instead of focusing on self, she focused on the beauty of the audience and the whole event. And I allowed myself to do the same thing.

    I never let that leave me. I would start with that. I would start with loving my students. And it’s striking how much my teaching has changed in five years, as a result of that. It’s basically about shifting form getting people to love you, to you loving them. It has four parts (Fromm, 1956):
    – caring
    – responsibility
    – respect
    – knowledge

    It requires all four. For example, caring without the rest is like patronizing. Respect without the rest is idolizing. The four together are true long. And focusing on that, instead of focusing on your performance, opens you up to your audience. It makes the walls go away.

    Be genuinely interested, caring, kind, and loving to your students. Heidi’s going to be mindful of this come September, I am as well. I can’t imagine teaching any other way. If you don’t do it with love, why at all?

    I appreciate how he framed it – teaching really isn’t about being liked. Some of the teachers I have worked with in the past who have had the most difficulty in terms of classroom management and getting students to perform were overly worried about whether or not their students liked them. Of course it’s nice to be liked. I know I would generally prefer to be a well-liked person than a poorly-liked person. I still find myself at times thinking, ooh – but that won’t be popular, they may not like that (and by extension, me) but teaching is not about that. It is about loving your students and caring for what happens to them both in and out of the classroom. And then it is about making sure all of your decisions are, if not based in, at the very least touched by that love.

    It’s a lifelong learning process, keeping that frame in place.

    Edit —> Added, a few hours later.
    Look what just showed up in my feed reader from Kelly Hines. I had to include it here, it’s so timely. There are no accidents.

    So, no, I don’t teach like my hair is on fire. I don’t really think that Rafe Esquith does either. He teaches like his heart is on fire, and that’s the greatest thing a teacher can offer his/her students. And when you are reading about astounding things that others are doing, don’t get overwhelmed by the how’s. Focus on the why’s. When you do that, you will find inspiration to light the fires of your students.