veteran teachers – R. Tyler Horner

A better way

The best practices of the teaching world are rarely ground-breaking. Usually, I find that the simple things that get overlooked are the most revolutionary in my classroom. The most recent example of this was when the history department was prepping for our state testing review unit.

In general, I’m always looking for the “best way to teach everything”. I think we all are as educators. I was convicted of my hubris when setting my plans for review when my curriculum director asked me why I was reviewing the same way I taught it in the first place. She gently reminded me that if I had met the student’s needs completely the first time, there wouldn’t be any need to spend time reviewing it. I really took time to reflect on that and it has pushed me to drastically think outside the box with the way I’m going to review.

The most important question for me when I began rethinking my history review was, “is there a way my students can touch (or at least see) the concepts that we’ve talked about in class before.” To this end, I’m making it a point to use as many new visuals and ways of looking at things that I can. What I’ve found as I begin to plan this unit out is the more creative I get with my visuals, the more opportunity I have to spiral the materials into other things in history. By allowing for this kinds of discussions during review, I’m hoping to see my kids make more connections than they would have in the past.

An example of this is how I’m trying to visually represent each battle of the American Revolution. I’m trying to not use any words so the students have to process through what battle it might be, and then give them a new perspective on what might have been going on during the war. Regardless of whether they have all the battles memorized, I’m hoping the will walk away with a good general review of the Revolution and be able to make connections with the flow of wars and how the Continental Army used it’s meager advantages to force a surrender of the greatest army and navy in the world at that time.

I haven’t completely planned out every lesson, but this basic reset (that you need to try and teach in a new way if it didn’t work the first time) has radically changed my thinking. It’s almost like even slightly older teachers can still learn new tricks.

Stop and Ask Why

I got the opportunity a couple of years ago to become the department head of the history department of my middle school. I knew this was going to be a challenge from the day I took it over, but I always thought that it couldn’t be too challenging. I guess I never stopped to think about how the people in my department could make me stop and ask why I’m doing things.

Very recently I’ve started to get challenged on some basic things that I took for granted. For instance, this year we opted to not issue every student a history textbook. We did this for a number of reasons, the main one being that we thought that we needed to use the textbook as a resource and not a crutch. My principal and I both thought that history from a textbook is a boring way to be force fed history. Some of my department disagreed, but went along with it. For the most part this school year it hasn’t been an issue, but this week I feel like I’m starting to get more resistance. I’ve gotten challenged in meetings and it has been referenced in our department meetings. Usually, this wouldn’t have bothered me very much, but I was absolutely exhausted on Friday and it seemed to linger with me.

All of today I reflected on the situation and I had to ask myself why I’ve chosen some things that I have. I think my assumption was that my department all thought the same as I did about these topics, but when they didn’t I had to go back to the drawing board. What I settled on was that we’re doing the things we are in the history department because my principal and I think it is what’s best for the kids at my middle school. Period. All I want is for the kids that walk through this school to be taught by the best educators possible. I think some people in my department get scared when they see test scores. My focus is not the test scores, it’s making the teaching in my department to be the best it possibly can be. I have to remind myself that often or I start to waffle on what needs to happen.

Hypothetical vs. Reality

I feel like compared to a lot of classrooms I was presented with during the teacher certification process I have done a really good job of innovating in the classroom and putting into practice a lot of the neat ideas that we are presented with at any number of conventions and seminars we attend as teachers. I wouldn’t call my classroom cutting edge or overly progressive, but I would put myself further on that continuum than the old fashioned, sit and get methodology that we know to be archaic and outdated. Recently though I’ve had a tough time marrying the big, new ideas of the people attempting to revolutionize teaching and the reality of the classroom that I have to teach in.

I see a lot of educational bloggers and authors talking about how we should do away with learning standards and how we should end the push for a common core. I would tend to agree with the idea that we for sure have too many standards and that standards tend to make us teach to the lowest common denominator, not push our students to achieve more. I would love to be able to throw out all standards and just teach what is best for kids. There’s only one problem with that, I would probably lose my job. The administration at my school and even my district is among the most progressive group in the wonderful state of Texas. On top of that, we are among the highest performing districts in the state as well. With all that being said, if I didn’t teach the state standards to every kid in my class, my administration would find a way to get me out of teaching…and they would have a good reason to. We can all debate the points of state standards, standardized testing, and how they should be reformed, but until that day happens I will be teaching the standards that are put in front of me by the state I teach in. Knowing the content that you are expected to teach well enough to relate it to kids in ways they with receive it and have it change the way we look at the world is the essence of teaching. I’m not in the business of making kids read a history textbook, take endless notes about the reading they did, and test them over it in by having them regurgitate exactly what I told them the previous few days. I am in the business of teaching kids the big ideas of history, the cause and effect relationships in history, the amazing stories of epic people in history, and having the kids internalize history to make it real to them in modern times. All this is done keeping the state standards in mind so that I can be above reproach with my administration and teach the kids the topics and ideas the state wants them to learn in my classroom.

As my brain wandered through these ideas, I started to imagine a school where the teachers all taught what they thought would be best for kids and completely disregarded the state standards. I imagine the super-artistic teachers completely going off on tangents that have little or nothing to do with anything the kids need to cover during their tenure at our middle school. I see the overly political teachers standing on their soap boxes going off on their political tangents that make them look like talk show host. I see people that cover only a chapters worth of material in a school year because their belief is that the state got it all wrong. Call my cynical if you like, but without some sort of standards we are doomed to the whims of people who have taken up the mantle to teach. People tend to be fickle and that is exactly why we need some standards. Not to mention if everyone taught their particular passion in life, the kids across the country would get vastly different educations which would be very difficult to measure in any quantifiable way.

The problem with the modern day idea of state standards is that we have seen them as the bar for teaching. Our outdated attitude is “all kids need to know are the standards” and once they have those committed to memory our job is done. Speaking as someone who has only been teaching for four years, the standards gave me legs to stand on my first years of teaching. I luckily teach in a district that does not prescribe exactly what I need to teach and at what pace, I am given the ability to teach things how I see fit and how it would best make sense to my kids in my classroom. We walk a fine line calling for teachers to forget the standards and completely teach with passion alone. While I’m sure there would be wild creativity and imagination there will also be far less new teachers with much stamina in the teaching field.

Leadership and Beyond

This week was a typical last week of school. Two days of finals, a half day to end it all with the kids, and a day of checking out of school. I am not the biggest fan of the last week of school, for the most part. I hate killing time with kids because we have to be there because the kids get bored with that so quickly. I feel like I always have run out of energy and get short with my students more quickly during the last week. By the time the kids leave on the last day my mind is clouded by my frustrations of the last week of school and not the wonderful memories of the past school year. The kids are interesting though because even the ones that have hated school all year long reflect on the “good times” and don’t want to leave. That’s one thing my school does really well, we create an atmosphere of family that the kids can recognize. They are excited to leave for the next step of their educational journey, but they always look back with fond memories of their junior high days. I’m so grateful to work at the school I do with the people I do.

Yesterday we met as a leadership team to discuss changes for the upcoming school year. It is basically all the grade level leaders, department heads, administrators, and a few selected teachers meeting for a day to review policies and set new ones for the upcoming school year. Usually it’s in the middle of the summer, but this year we decided to have it really close to the end of the school year. This year we decided to change our schedule just a bit and talked a lot about welcoming new teachers onto our campus. I think this a bigger problem in teaching than most veteran teachers actually realize. I lucked out being closely linked with a couple of other coaches and had them looking out for me my first couple of years, but rookie teachers don’t always have people looking out for them. We decided to take it upon ourselves to train up the new teachers to our campus as well as reminded each other of some of the difficulties of transitioning to a new campus so we can all be aware of where the rookies may need some more support. Hopefully we’ll do a better job of welcoming these new people to our team.

I’m pretty sure we’ll be welcoming a new member to the history department this year, so I really want to make sure they feel supported and integrated well into our department. Maybe it’s just my perception, but I feel like I have a very fragmented department overall. This year I really want to try and get everyone on the same page and move forward as a department. We have some challenging personalities in the history department so it won’t be easy, but I would really like to see movement toward a cohesive group. We’ll see how this goes in the upcoming school year.