As I begin preparing for what may be my last year of teaching (certainly my penultimate) and my social media feeds fill with pleas for advice from new(ish) teachers or experienced educators struggling to answer their own challenges, I want to focus this blog post on what matters to me when considering these concerns. This is, in fact, the core of my advice — decide what matters the most and make that your first and last gut check when planning, reflecting, or reacting on the fly. For several years my advice to new teachers and the answer to many other classroom challenges has been to focus on building community because I have learned that my gut check question is always focused on the humans in my classroom. The onset of the pandemic and the political division preceding it has all but destroyed so many of the loose ties that bound us together as humans. These ties are important to our well being but also to our ability to live, work, and learn together. While this focus on our community and the humans at its center is always top of mind, I have some additional guidelines to help me when teaching gets tricksy.
Make Your Content A Force For Good
Every teacher has content standards and expectations that must be met and every teacher more than a few years into their career has beloved lessons and topics, but we are definitely at a point in the broader education cycle where there is no room for extra (see: Survival tip #5: Only do work that matters.). There is not enough time, energy, or patience for the way things were or any activity that serves only a single purpose. Every new planning cycle must include a ruthless Marie Kondo session. I started practicing my less is more philosophy before the bottom fell out of education and have long strived to make every lesson or class activity a twofer (serving more than one purpose) and now one of those purposes includes sparking joy. I’m not advocating for fun or silliness or games just for themselves or even all the time, but every content area can be taught or explored through play. Playful (joy filled) exploration can work with reflection to uncover previous knowledge, make connections, and introduce questions that lead to and support the hard work of learning. And that playful exploration and reflection can be another great way to bond as a learning community so you are always supporting your community. Love what you teach and share that love even when the audience is skeptical. I convert first year college students in a required class every semester. Making believers out of skeptics is the power of joyful teaching with the additional benefit of giving you joy in your work.
Reflect On The Journey
Learning is always a journey. I’ve written at great length about why I think using metaphors like “process” are a real problem in education in general and writing in specific. I model this journey for my students by explaining my goals, the lessons I have learned along the way, and the role that reflection plays in shifting my praxis as I move forward. We regularly set goals and reflect on our journeys throughout both class meetings and the arc of each unit and semester. We share these goals and reflections with our community because the power to set their own growth goals is often a new experience for many students and the sharing of struggles and dreams is another bonding and learning experience. We learn from the mistakes that others make or their different response to a shared struggle or the impact of varied choices. Most important of all we learn that others make mistakes and bad choices and that there is no perfect human, learner, or writer so maybe we can give ourselves a bit of grace on our own individual journeys. Sharing a journey is a bonding experience for humans as well as good pedagogy. Reflecting as a community helps us grow as humans and writers, but it also sparks lessons we might have never learned as individuals.
Be Authentically Human
From our first week together I am clear about who I am with my students as I explain my love of writing marathons and poetry and my loathing for grades, but as we write and reflect together over the course of the semester we will all learn about each other because our narratives will spark memories and insights in each other that would not have happened in another writing community made up of different humans. Leaning into our individual humanity and focusing on authentic writing are the most powerful tools available to us as teachers in the age of AI. I love learning about the individuals in my classroom and watching their voices and narratives grow in power, but the real magic happens when they become intrigued by the voices and narratives of their fellow travelers. Threading the needle of authenticity within your specific pedagogical context is why boxed curriculum and bots will never engage human learners as skilled human teachers can with zero or minimal technology.
I come from a long line of handcrafters who worked in the kitchen, the workshop, the garden, and beyond, and my students come from a similar heritage. That individual creativity is the ethic I cultivate in my classroom. We play, experiment, and sometimes fall flat on our faces, but always celebrate and center our humanity because that is the only point of this thing we call life.
Image by Abel Escobar from Pixabay
