To Any and All Teacher Education Students

Imagine this:

You are a college senior just about to finish the teaching program at your university.  You have spent the last four years studying educational psychology, curriculum & instruction, assessment practices, pedagogy in your subject area, and much, much more.  No doubt, you have also completed a couple short-term practica in which you may have been a fly-on-the-wall or even a temporary T.A. in another teacher's classroom.

Perhaps you were even able to teach a lesson or two of your own before you started your official student teaching placement in your Senior year.

What lies before you now is a choice, and--it turns out--an important choice, at that:

Will you try to find a teaching job right after you graduate?

Or, will you go straight into a Master's program?

I can certainly understand the appeal of pursuing a Master's right away--after all, you have been a student for the past 16 years of your life and momentum is on your side!  All of the theory you've accumulated over the past several years of education courses is still fresh in your mind, and wouldn't it be better to have as much preparation as possible before that dreaded first year of teaching?  And anyway, you'll have to get a Master's sooner or later, so you might as well just get it over with, right?

But what if your choice made a big difference to your long-term growth as both a teacher and learner?  What if "sooner" was not the proactive, forward-thinking choice we often believe it to be? What if "getting it over with" was the wrong mentality entirely?

The truth is, the first year of teaching will be painful no matter how much you prepare.  You will forget what you learned in your education classes, and sometimes you'll forget a lot.  You will do things that you know are not best practice in the name of making it through the day.  You will not be able to keep a smile on your face and a spring in your step every minute of every day.  You might not ever snap and lose your temper (Confession: I did), but a time will come when your students will observe that "you're not as nice [or fun, or energetic, or <positive quality>] as you were at the start of the year." You'll have moments where you will feel overwhelmed, exhausted and quite possibly, even questioning your decision to be a teacher....

...and you'll learn more in that one year of struggle than you learned in all of your education courses combined.  Through trial and error, a constant cycle of forgetting and recovering, theories will turn into realities before your eyes.  You will develop your "voice" as a teacher.  Your daily and hourly failures to be the best you can be will drive you ceaselessly back to the drawing board, and each time you will come up with something better, something stronger.

Your second year will feel like a new pair of running shoes and the breeze at your back: you'll be able to run further and jump higher than you could the year before, and things that were challenging to you in your first year will seem like second-nature in year two.

On and on it will go, each year bringing you closer to becoming the teacher you want to be, and then...

...you'll reach a point where you can't improve on your own.  It'll feel like hitting a wall, and it might be painful, or frustrating, or simply perplexing.  You'll encounter an issue in your teaching that you cannot find an obvious solution to, and you will want to learn more about teaching.

No, "want" is too weak a word--you will crave a deeper understanding of teaching.  You will be hungry for growth, eager to dig deep into the theory and philosophy that had so easily escaped you in your first year of teaching, to soak up best practice and make it your practice. 

It will be a desire based not on convenience or momentum, not on "getting it over with", but rather on need.  

That is the right time to pursue your Master's--not sooner, and certainly not later (if you hit a wall and have no desire to find a way over it, teaching is not for you).  

Pursuing your Master's under these conditions will be a richly rewarding experience: you'll have spent enough hours in the classroom to know your own strengths and weaknesses as an educator; you'll be in a better position to ask questions and research what is most important to your situation; you'll have an abundant supply of concrete examples to give real grounding to the philosophies and theories you will study.  If you happen to find a program that allows you to teach and study simultaneously, you'll also have a built-in lab in which you are able to try new things that you are studying, and consequently, you will have real-time experiences to discuss and reflect on in your coursework.  Perhaps of chief importance, you will learn what it means to be a lifelong learner at the time that you need that mindset and skill-set the most.

Poet Wendell Berry wrote, 

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Being baffled is an uncomfortable feeling, as is the helpless feeling of not knowing where to go or what to do.  Yet it is these feelings that ensure that we will be learners for life and not simply learners until our 20s.  

So if you're facing the choice between teaching or marching straight into your Master's, the decision should be simple: teach first.  

Teach long enough to forge an identity as a teacher, and then long enough beyond that to find yourself truly "baffled".  

Then, famished, come and enjoy the feast that further education offers.

As educators who desire for our students to become lifelong learners themselves, what could be better?

Learning Flexibility

For years, I was spoiled: I taught the same students for English 11 and U.S. History in back-to-back class periods.

This enabled me to teach those subjects as a single, blended Humanities block.  The bell would ring at the end of 3rd period, but the students would stay, and we would continue whatever activity we happened to be doing.

Among other things, this arrangement allowed me to design and fine-tune several classroom simulations intended to take up the full 90+ minutes of class-time.

Unfortunately, this arrangement also had significant ramifications for when other subjects could or couldn't be scheduled, and as CAJ has expanded its science and language offerings in recent years, it became necessary this year to break up the Humanities block in order to allow for more scheduling flexibility.

My 2015-16 Humanities class meets 3rd period and 5th period.  The bell rings at the end of 3rd period and the students go away to their 4th period classes.  They return 50 minutes later for 5th period, and we resume our Humanities lesson.

In some ways, this has helped me think through how I use my two periods of class-time more consciously.  Being able to march straight through the bell was nice, but I'd be the first to admit I'm not great at holding to an organized schedule, and sometimes often-times, time would get away from me, the result being that I would have to scrap or push back some other activity I'd planned for the day.

I've actually found a fairly nice equilibrium this year in which 3rd period tends to be more structured and guided, often involving the whole class together examining or discussing some topic, and 5th period tends to be independent work-time for a bigger class assignment.

The greatest challenge has been making my simulations work with this new schedule.

I watched two simulations that I had spent hours designing start strong during 3rd period, but then fizzle when students came back for 5th period.  I'd designed these simulations with an uninterrupted 90 minutes in mind and all of the momentum the students had built up 3rd period would have completely evaporated when they came back 5th period.

It was frustrating and disappointing to see activities that I'd spent so much time and care creating falling flat due to circumstances beyond my control....

...until I realized that circumstances were not beyond my control.

For our final simulation of the school-year, on the decision to drop the atomic bomb, I decided to tweak the format to fit a split-period model.

The original simulation had called for 55 minutes of research and about 40 minutes of discussion, with the actual vote happening on the next day of class.

This year, I shortened the research time to one class period--roughly 45 minutes, factoring in my short introduction to the simulation.  The discussion would start after students came back for 5th period, and would last only 30 minutes.  10 minutes would be set aside for closing arguments and the vote would happen in the last 5 minutes of class.

While this meant shortening each component of the simulation more than I would have liked, I decided that it would be best to leave the students wanting more, rather than less.

The adjustments worked.  Students researched and collaborated diligently in their teams during 3rd period.  It was not a lot of time, but they used it well to put together the arguments and evidence they would need during the 5th period discussions.  The teams met in separate locations outside of the classroom so that they would not be tempted to start the debate too early or talk to any of their indeterminate classmates before they were supposed to.

Then, when the students came back 5th period, they were able to build fresh momentum in the discussion portion of the simulation.  It wasn't as though they needed to try and get back into character, or find their place, as they had in the previous two simulations that had not gone so well--it was a new phase of the simulation entirely, so the students merely needed to apply their research.  Plus, with only 30 minutes, the students could not afford to waste a moment: they launched right in, and the entire half-hour was filled with heated conversations, the indeterminates asking probing, thoughtful questions and the teams trying to provide the best possible answers.  The closing statements felt poignant, and voting on the same day actually gave the whole simulation a better sense of urgency.

The lesson I've learned in all of this is the importance of flexibility.  It is tempting to blame external factors such as scheduling when an activity does not work the way I had hoped it would, but the most constructive response is to ask what I can change to make the activity work.

This is a lesson I will not soon forget!

Representatives from the "Drop" and "Don't Drop" teams try
to convince indeterminate classmates to vote their way.

Mid-semester conferences

This week, something happened that has not happened since my first years of teaching: I wound up with extra class-time.

Our mega-unit on worldview is drawing to an end, and when I'd sat down to set the calendar back in January, I had anticipated needing every spare minute all the way up to Spring Break.  However, due to my usage of lecture videos instead of in-class lecture, and a mid-unit decision to not dive as deeply into the progressive movement (which was somewhat tangential to our unit goals), I wound up with two weeks of open time; no small amount in Humanities class, which meets two periods a day.

Having this amount of extra time would've freaked me out in my earliest years of teaching, and very likely I would have responded by putting together busy-work--empty calories to chew up the class-time.

Now, however, I see it as a rare privilege and have treated it as such.  The kids have had the whole week to work in class on a poetry assignment and on the teacher draft of their unit essays, free to come to me for guidance or assistance at any time.

The flexible timing allowed me to do something I have never tried before: substantive one-on-one conferences with the students.  I put together a schedule with ten-minute long blocks and asked each of the students to sign up for a time to come and talk to me.

My Humanities class tend to be a quiet bunch.  They never complain, nor do they get overly worked up about things, for better or for worse.  They are dutiful, conscientious students, but it can be difficult to read how they are doing, and how they are responding to the lessons I'm teaching, strategies I'm using, and assessments I'm giving.

The conferences have been enormously helpful to me as a teacher.

For starters, it's been largely an affirmation that things are going well.  Every student has been able to identify particular lessons or assignments that they really enjoyed and articulate specific reasons for why they enjoyed it.  I learned that many students enjoyed reading The Great Gatsby and putting together a scrapbook of the major symbols (my big assessment on Gatsby--that's a topic for a future post).  I learned that many students are really relishing the chance to think about and wrestle with the topic of worldview in this unit.  I learned that many students appreciate the flexibility of my prompt for this unit essay.

I also asked students what they had found frustrating or uninteresting.  While it may be that a number of students were too polite to offer me feedback, I did appreciate the few suggestions I received.  I learned that students wished I would sing more, and wished that I would play characters more (I did more of this in the first two units of the year).  I learned that a number of students were not happy with the last in-class simulation (it had been kind of flat, with a majority of the class not really getting into it).

Several students blamed themselves for struggles in Humanities class, and I was able to have constructive conversations with a few students about time-management and work-habits.

I also learned that many students have found my use of lecture videos helpful.  I did receive some useful suggestions, such as doing more to follow-up on specific videos in class, or possibly offering more of a platform for students to discuss or ask questions about the videos, but overall the reactions were much better than I expected, given how quiet the students have been.  In particular, students thanked me for including transcripts of all my videos in the description boxes on YouTube, saying that this had been helpful as they went back and re-watched or re-read.

This feedback fit nicely, timing-wise, as I have been separately interviewing a sample of students in my Humanities class in greater depth about the use of flipped classroom strategies for my Master's project throughout the week.  It gave me a clearer sense of what my findings and my research will mean for my classroom moving forward.

Perhaps more than anything else, it was good to have a conversation with each of my students.  I felt like I was able to come away with a deeper understanding of how each student is doing, and what I can do to serve them more effectively.  Because so many of the students tend to be shy, and I tend to be shy, conversations such as these do not always happen naturally and it was a valuable opportunity.

The question is, how can I make sure that I'm intentionally carving out time for conversations like these on a more regular basis in the future?

Leaving the 20s Behind

It was the best birthday present I could have asked for at the time--in the middle of a 10-day choir tour from Iowa to California and back, my parents, brother and sister flew down from Washington to catch the Dordt Choir's Mar. 15 concert in San Jose.

As luck would have it, the better part of the day leading up to the concert was a free-day.

So, I spent a brief but wonderful couple of hours with my family in and around San Francisco--it was tough to say goodbye after the concert.

That was how I started my 20s--on a journey, far from home.  I had no idea at the time just how much further my 20s would carry me from the town I grew up in and from the family I grew up with.

Two years later, I celebrated my 22nd birthday on another Spring choir tour, somewhere between Iowa and New York City.

My 23rd birthday, I celebrated in Tokyo, having arrived only a couple months earlier.

I celebrated my 24th birthday in Thailand, accompanying the CAJ Senior class of 2010 on their service trip as a chaperon.

The rest, I've celebrated at home in Japan.

Yes--at home in Japan.  No matter where my 30s may take me, Japan has been the home of my 20s.
I sometimes tell friends that I have no idea what it means to be an adult in the U.S.--I'm not kidding!  I would have to learn so much that I'm sure my stateside friends and family take for granted.

On the flip side, I cannot think of a better place to have spent my 20s, growing from a just-out-of-college kid to an adult.
There were moments of doubt, to be sure, but there were even more moments that affirmed I was in the right place, following the right calling.
There were lonely evenings, to be sure, but there were also plenty of adventures with friends.
There was heartbreak, to be sure, but there was also the moment I exchanged vows with my wife and started a new Gibson family.

My 20s were wonderful and I am grateful for God's faithfulness.  As I leave behind my 20s and enter my 30s (the decade from which I will emerge "at the top of the hill"), I cannot wait to see what God has in store for me!

Why teach with a Biblical perspective?

This past week was Spiritual Life Emphasis Week (SLEW for short) at the Christian Academy in Japan, a week in which time is set aside for chapel each day of the week.  This year, we had two guests from the Ravi Zacharias Foundation.  On our final day of chapel yesterday, students were able to submit anonymous questions using their phones or computers (moderated, of course, by our chapel coordinator), and up-vote questions they wanted to see the speakers answer in a Q&A panel.  The questions were projected onto the screens at the front of the auditorium for all to see.

Near the end, one of the most popular trending questions, with well over 100 votes was the following:
Why does CAJ force Christianity onto non-Christian students?

Our chapel coordinator fielded this emotionally charged question.  He handled it with patience and dignity, gently asking the students to look at their teachers, sitting around them in the auditorium, and to try and think of one time that their teachers ever tried to force Christianity on them.  He said that he could, with near certainty, say that no teacher would ever force Christianity onto their students and apologized on behalf of the teachers if any students had that perception.

My own observation has been that students sometimes interpret the requirement of Bible classes and the usage of a Biblical perspective in the rest of their classes to be forced Christianity, and this is what I want to address in this post.

First, to repeat some of what my colleague said in chapel, we are, after all, a Christian school and it should come as no surprise that Bible courses are a key part of the curriculum, and that the teachers will teach from a Christian point of view.  It's in our name, it's all over our website and promotional materials.  It's no secret.  It's not as though we, as teachers, are trying to pull a fast one on non-Christian students--every family knows what they are signing up for when they enroll.

I cannot claim to speak for my colleagues, but I know that for me, personally, to teach from a Biblical perspective is an integral part of best practice.  I've written before about the incredible inconsistency of U.S. public education, which claims absolute neutrality, but as a whole is rooted in the worldview of its founder John Dewey, who was unabashedly humanistic and vehemently anti-religion.

We all start from some cornerstone or another--some platform upon which we build our understanding of the world.  Just as a building cannot stand without a foundation, we cannot teach or learn apart from our underpinning worldview.

Moreover, that worldview cannot be neutral--inevitably, something is assigned absolute importance in order to make sense of the world.  A worldview claiming to be perfectly objective often assigns absolute importance to the powers of observation and reason, and always to the expense of something else.  No, neutrality is a myth.

That in mind, it would be irresponsible and dishonest for me to try and teach from any perspective other than a Biblical one.  I can no more neutralize my worldview for my students who do not share my beliefs than can a skyscraper neutralize the foundations upon which it was built.

Why, then, a Biblical perspective?  A fair question.
I'll grant that there are matters that the Bible does not set out to explain.  The beginnings of the universe and the end of the world, for instance, are both treated with no shortage of figurative language--enough so that there is ongoing debate as to whether Scripture is to be taken literally on these issues, or metaphorically.

Yet for the truly pressing questions of human existence dealt with all throughout the history and literature I teach--humanity's quest for meaning, the existence of suffering and oppression, the need to become people of justice--only Scripture can provide an absolute foundation.

If one were to chase any of those threads through any other belief system asking "why" after "why", one would eventually reach a dead-end of "I don't know."

I teach from a Biblical perspective not simply because it's my job at a Christian school but because in my estimation, it's the only perspective that makes sense of the subject I teach and the overarching themes I ask my students to consider.

I do not ask my students to agree or disagree--I simply ask them to examine the world through this lens.

I want my students to leave CAJ with a deeper perspective on oppression than "bad things happen" and a deeper perspective on justice than "it just seems right".  I want my students to be able to think through and articulate the rich network of roots that lies beneath their beliefs.  If they are non-Christian and find that they cannot do so with their own beliefs, I hope and pray that their hearts will be opened to the Christian perspective they learned in my class and my colleagues' classes.

This is why I teach from a Biblical perspective.  And while I would never force my students to pretend that this is their perspective, too, I can and will continue to pray for those students.  God has a way of softening even the hardest of hearts.

A Change of Scenery

This week, we looked at Transcendentalism in Humanities class.  This comes as part of our broader examination of how worldview shifts over time, and impacts the decisions people make (and the art people produce, and the poems people write, and...).

The students watched a short lecture video that I made containing background information on the Transcendental movement in preparation for a discussion of an excerpt from Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay, "Nature" during class on Wednesday.

Then, on Thursday, we read a couple of poems by Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman.  The weather forecast for that day was sunny, and if not warm, then at least not terribly cold.

So, I told the students to get their coats from their lockers and we headed down to the plaza, where the students read and discussed the poems in small groups.  The discussions were thoughtful and fun to listen to, and there was something so refreshing about enjoying poetry about the outdoors, outdoors.

Sometimes, it's nice to have a change of scenery!

Photo credit, Ushio Sawada

Taking a Step Back

One lesson I've learned well as a teacher is the importance of knowing what my goals are.

One lesson I'm continuing to learn is the importance of articulating those goals clearly to the class.

I sometimes forget that as the architect of my curriculum, I know it as intimately as an author knows his own novel, an artist, her own painting, or a composer, his own sonata.

My students do not have this relationship to my curriculum.  They can only see what I allow them to see (although some bright students are able to connect the dots with little difficulty).

The bottom-line is this: the fact that I know how everything fits together in my class is no guarantee that my students know how everything fits together.  I need to remember to pause every so often and take a step back, along with the students, to help them see how what we are doing connects to where we are going.

I had occasion to do this last week in my English class and drew a flow-chart on the board that students seemed to find helpful.  Unfortunately, I erased it without taking a picture of it, so I re-drew an example from my Humanities class for the purposes of this blog-post:

I took this example from my 3rd unit in Humanities, showing how an in-class essay
fit into the scheme of the entire unit, and on an ever bigger scale, the entire course.

Everything should be purposeful.  No major assessment should be originating--everything ought to be traceable back to manageable formative building blocks.

We know this, of course... but do our students?