Teaching Teaching

Send us Fan MailIn this episode, I talk about what it means when kids are totally focused on their grades- where that comes from and what we might do about it.Let’s start with the core problems with grading systems.  Grading systems can make the teacher/student relationship ugly.  As I have shared before, the teacher/student relationship should be about something important- something to be taught and learned that has value for both the teacher and the student.  Grades are not that.  The more time wrestling with grades is time not spent wrestling with good things worth learning.

Send us Fan MailIn this episode, I ask us to consider what is at the heart of our teaching. What is it that you hold onto that you must make happen in your teaching?From this episode:Our primary work is building a relationship with students.  A relationship about something worth learning. What does it mean when the school curriculum asks you to compromise what you believe matters?  Asks you to teach some shallow, some hollow facsimile, of what should be taught genuinely and full-heartedly. And when you teach the expected school curriculum that way you break that promise to your students, to teach what is important in the way you know that it should be taught.

Send us Fan MailFor the moment, this is may be my last take on Differences.  Prior episodes were about Difference as a Problem and Difference as a Challenge.  This episode is about Difference as Opportunity.   EnjoyExcerpt: I have given attention to differences in the context of schools.  Step out of school. We live with our differences every day. We live with the differences of others every day. There is no real world script or requirement that tells us how to respond to difference. Difference makes us human.  What matters, as teachers and as humans, is how we respond to difference.   Holding difference as opportunity allows us to become better teachers and better humans.

Send us Fan MailIn this episode I talk about differences as challenges-  both for student and for us in our teaching.  This is part 2.  In the next episode I will talk about differences as opportunities for our kids and for our teaching.From this episode: Many of us might shy away from making our teaching about something personal, something that matters a lot to us.  Think about the teachers that you admire, what about them makes you remember them long after you were their student?  The ones I remember were fully there with what they were teaching, not as a responsibility, but as a passion, a need to share their deep care for the subject with others.   What we love and care about is particular to us and makes us unique and different.  As much as we should embrace the differences students bring to their learning, we need to embrace and live our differences, our gifts in our teaching.  We teach best when we teach what we love.

Send us Fan MailI take on differences kids bring to with them to our classrooms and how we struggle with them.  Later episodes will turn this on its head and be about what we can learn from giving good attention to kids differences and how learning might flourish for all when giving the right kind of attention to difference.    In this episode, I talk about retention, grouping, and kids who blow up the classroom.  Do share comments and questions.  Thanks for listeningFrom the episode:We have to be honest about what we can do and what we cannot do.  I have had too many conversations with teacher friends about how impossible their work is.  We have to say no to requests that set us up not to be at our best, that does not serve all kids and just as importantly damages us, makes us unsure, makes us feel like we are bad teachers.  This is a challenge because power structures in schools are very real.  But we need to not think of ourselves as workers in schools doing teaching work with principals as bosses, we need to think of ourselves as teachers, the main engine of the work of schools.  Engines that drive good learning, drive the mission of the school, purposefully and intentionally built to do good work.  But you as the engine of the good work of schools needs to be given the right maintenance, the right attention from all who need your good work.  When you are not cared for, when you are put to the wrong tasks, you cannot do what you have created yourself to do well, teach.

Send us Fan MailIn this episode, I challenge us to think about AI, kids learning and authorship.  I set out the challenges that teachers are finding with kids and their use of AI. I also challenge us to rethink how AI might matter to kids' learning.From the episode-  I know a couple very smart people who use AI as a thought-partner.  Instead of simply asking an AI agent for a full and complete dissertation on something that they want to know about, they start with a simple question.  Based on what the AI agent offers, they follow with another question, a question that comes about from what the learner is curious about and from what the AI agent set out.  Back and forth this goes, questions and answers leading to deeper and more meaningful questions and answers.  The learner is building understanding for themselves in concert with what the AI offers.  In this dialog, the person is the author.  As the author, the learner determines the direction of the thinking by taking up or not taking up, or by redirecting, or by ignoring, by choosing.  The learner authors the road to understanding to suit their learning needs and interests.  

Send us Fan MailWe all carry an inner voice that tells us how to learn. In this episode, I reflect on the teacher-self — how it is shaped by school, family, and culture, and how it influences whether we comply, resist, or truly engage. What might change if we began to consciously author our own relationship to learning?Excerpt:Teacher-selves are formed through purposeful attention to learning as we make it. Teacher-selves are made through experience. Think about your parents and those close to you growing up. How much of your approach to learning was shaped by what they said, what they modeled, and the expectations they set? As much as we might think of the teacher-self as individual and personal, it is also a manifestation of cultural, communal, and familial models of teacher-selves.

Send us Fan MailI set out the idea of Teacher-Self.    The teacher- self being the governor of how one approaches the learner.    From the podcast- I want you to consider your students as teachers.  Not in the way we might already- with students teaching each other at times.  I want us, instead, to realize that within every learner there is a teacher-self; this teacher-self as the governor of one’s own approaches to learning.  Think about your own teacher-self, the one that told you what to pay attention to while leaning, the one that chose books from the library not for school but for you, your own interest, the teacher-self who made you make your own notes for something that you wanted to learn, the one that moves you to address questions about something interesting just for yourself, the teacher-self that moves you to learn without the necessary presence or approval of someone else.Enjoy and reach out for a conversation about this or else