A fun, inviting learning environment
Challenging curriculum
Lots of laughter and talks with friends
Think about your list. Why did you become a teacher? If you are in a different role, why did you choose that role? Why are you a principal? Instructional Coach? Department Chair?
Now the Rub
Darren and I became fast friends and project partners because as we talked more about middle schools today, our personal and familial educational journeys, and K–12 learning environments in general, we developed a theory: educators aren’t remembering their lists.
At the end of this chapter, we’re going to ask you to share your list, so be ready. For now, however, we want to dive deeper into the spirit of the list. What’s the underlying message of an educator’s list? Think of this as your mission in life for working with learners. Try to remember what your thoughts were when you began your commitment to serve learners.
What’s on your list?
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A Look at Now
We’re going to offer two points as challenges for you:
Does your classroom or school look how you want it to? Is it in its ideal form?
Does your classroom or school feature a learner-centered or teacher-centered design?
While we know most educators put a lot of thought into designing their learning environments, many of those same educators overlook powerful and simple modifications that can make these same environments more fun and engaging for learning. Unfortunately, this oversight is often the result of a distrust in our learners that has been handed down in, or even beaten into, our professional schema.
As educators we’ve been conditioned to believe it’s the safer and better practice to assume the worst is just around the corner, especially if we don’t plan for every possible problem in the classroom. Any hint of student flexibility is dangerous, so we’re expected to keep a tight control. And the same goes for the parents of our students, most of whom think a safe, productive classroom is desks in rows and a strong, skillful teacher who demonstrates and lectures. In some schools where I’ve worked, strong and skillful equates to domineering and stern. That is simply not the case. It’s the revolution@ry leader in the room who makes the difference.
Control vs. Trust: Old-School Classroom Management
How many times have you heard a colleague say, “I teach my subject, but it’s up to the students to get it”? If you’ve heard this before, chances are it’s from a teacher who focuses on delivery and content and not on learners or assessing understanding. If protecting how we cover content is the priority, then we will likely see several things:
A heightened protection of whole-group instruction
Lots of teacher talk and a need for quiet
Moving all students to the next topic regardless of what assessments show
A fixation on rigid classroom management
We want to be clear here: these elements are important, but it’s how we implement them and how they support learners and the deep understanding of content that is most important.
So our mission is simple: start a movement wherein we champion a revolution in education!
Many of the things we value and think are the most important in school are things we have inherited through the years and become very accustomed to. As a result, we have associated school with these traditions. We spend a lot of time building up these systems and practices (e.g., the school schedule, covering content, rigid behavioral expectations for learning environments), and our intense focus on these areas has made us beholden to them to the extent that we prioritize them over what matters most in our schools.
But these systems and practices aren’t on our lists. They aren’t what we were passionate about when we decided to become educators or what gave us sleepless nights before our first day of school! These practices and beliefs aren’t the fires in our bellies that have us rushing to school every day looking to be a difference for students, and they definitely aren’t helping us produce more eager learners.
What Do We Do?
Our purpose in writing this book is to get back to what originally fired us up about learning and teaching and working with learners. It’s that simple. We want you to keep your most important reasons in the forefront, always taking time to ask yourself, Why did I want to be an educator? and How did I want to inspire students?
When you think about your day and what you spend the most time doing, how much time do you devote to your list of most important items? Consider the old adage, “What we think, we become.” It certainly applies to teaching. What educators spend their time thinking about directly impacts how they interact with learners and co-workers. If you’re spending the majority of your time thinking about policies and schedules and standards instead of investing in the students themselves, how can you ever hope to instill in them a love of learning?
We didn’t become educators to enforce rules—we wanted to make the best kind of difference.
We didn’t become educators to manage a schedule—we wanted to make sure learners were achieving and growing every day.
Many of us have simply lost sight of our why. Thanks to conventional teacher-prep, mentoring from an old-school mindset, and years of traditional “schooling,” some educators have never had a real grasp on the needs of the learners in their charge. Just like my childhood teachers, they know some facts about their students but not how they learn and think and process information. Our focus has too often been placed on the classroom instead of the people inside it, on classroom management instead of classroom culture, on teaching methods instead of the learners we’re teaching. We’ve all had countless discussions about how students learn in different ways, but have we committed to developing new ways to measure learning?
In the conversations we had leading up to writing this book, our greatest motivator was the work we are both doing in our middle schools. Middle schools don’t get the love typically shown to other schools. Don’t get us wrong—we get some good support, but not at the level of many other schools, and we are the neediest group.
We believe most people are projecting their own fears when they disparage middle school kids as “out-of-control” and “hormonal” and “difficult.” Too often critics want to impose extra rules on these adolescents out of fear of what could go wrong instead of looking at all the potential for good that exists in our middle schools.
This is why we are calling for a revolution and why we will be referring to you—the ones who have made the decision to pump your fists and acknowledge that change has to happen—as revolution@ries. This movement will be fueled by the resources and networking abilities we have in our society today.
Let’s