geek.teacher

The scene: Hymie’s Delicatessen, 6:00 PM

The realization:

Another Summer has passed by. Once again, much to the jealousy of my non-teaching friends, I did not take a paying job. I always think about it, but generally come out against it for the following reasons:

1. It’s kind of hard to take a job for six weeks and take a week off in the middle to go on a vacation somewhere.
2. Man, I’m tired.

Of course, most commonly view this time off as time wasted. Whether fortunately or unfortunately, this has not been the case for me. In fact, this Summer has shown itself, in my eyes, to be the most jam-packed, career-altering Summer since the break between my first and second years of teaching. In that Summer I charted a course for what my classroom would look like for the following 6 years of teaching.

In other words, it was about time to take a fresh look at everything I’m doing, tear it apart, try and figure out new ways of doing it, and rebuild. I had great incentive to do this given the difficulties I experienced last year. I had the ability to do this thanks to the single greatest resource God ever gave man: the Personal Learning Network. I knew I hadn’t spent the past year and change building up followers, blog feeds, and Diigo links for nothing. It paid off big time this Summer, as i learned about and attended different opportunities for Professional Development:

• I went to NECC for a day and got to spend time with some excellent educators, sharing  our thoughts and ideas. For introverts like myself, the power of knowing people at a conference beforehand cannot be overstated. I’m not so great at the typical social meet new people thing, but hanging out with people I’d already known for months online and meeting some new people in the mix? Perfect.
• I went to a couple of Unconference days organized by Kevin Jarrett in New Jersey, met a bunch of new people, which solidified for me that feeling of hey, I know something that others find valuable.
• Last, and certainly not least, I went to a couple of different training days to learn about Whole Brain Teaching. This will set the stage for the next leg of my teaching career.

Before I get to that, some info about my class this year:

• Nine students
• Disabilities include Autistic Spectrum Disorder, Specific Learning Disability, and Mental Retardation
• One student with a full-time Personal Care Assistant, one student with a part-time wraparound from an outside agency
• One student with a behavior plan
• One student who will be attending some regular education classes, compelling me to fit my schedule around when that student will be out of the room
• Students all over the place for academic levels
• Yep, still 2/3 of my day spent in scripted programming

So, looking at that, I’m going to have to do some group rotations. My assistant will need to be more involved with working with the students than ever before as I try to get stuff done with different groups. I’m going to be doing the scripted programs, but plan to hack them as need be when they’re not jelling with my students. And I’m going to need a management plan that can make those pieces fit together. I’ve already decided I need to loosen up on some things, which, in retrospect, seem like an almost arbitrary control on my part, a holdover from my nervously terrible first year of teaching. This cannot be stated enough: do not be me in my first year of teaching. More on that in another post, perhaps.

Whole Brain Teaching (née Power Teaching) will provide the glue holding together the new elements of my classroom plan. As I’ve learned more about it, my excitement has only increased. First of all, the creators have a rock-solid plan for teaching people about their system: use the system you’re talking about to teach people how to use it. No boring PowerPoints, no lectures, they use their system to teach you the system. It helps you decide rather quickly whether or not the system will be a good fit for you. Second, everything in the program is free. Want something on their website? Download it for free. I went to 9 or 10 hours of training, and all it cost me was time and gas. Third, it’s a system in the loosest sense. They have lots of different parts of the program, but they actively encourage you to only use the parts that interest you or that you’re comfortable with or that will be a good fit for your students. Contrast that with every SRA training I’ve ever been to, where they assure me that if I don’t follow every part of their program with fidelity, no matter how pointless, I am doomed to failure as a teacher and would be best off committing seppuku.

To start off, I’m basically going to throw almost everything WBT offers at my students, then see what sticks. We’re going to do gestures. We’re going to call out our actions. We’re going to have smilies and frownies. We’re going to class-yes and teach-okay. We’re going to SuperSpeed. We’re going to use their rules:

1. Follow directions quickly
2. Raise your hand to talk
3. Raise your hand to get out of your seat
4. Make smart choices
5. Keep your dear Teacher happy

As denoted by the italics, the last rule is the one I had the toughest time with at first. The program explains it as a nuclear option, to be used in all of those situations where the kids try and lawyer their way through the specific statements in your rules. But it still made me uncomfortable in the general sense of “is that really the job of my students?” At the Conference the other week, though, Chris Biffle, one of the co-founders of the program, helped me make sense of the rule.

The only thing that makes me happy is when my students are learning.

in this sense, the rule now doesn’t apply to just the kids, it now applies to me, too. If I think my students aren’t learning, and I can do something about it, now I’m the one breaking the rule. In a very real sense, the rule to me is now about the moral imperative that I have to do everything I can to help my students learn.

Now that’s something I can be comfortable with.

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