OK! It’s Tuesday instead of Monday, but otherwise back to our regularly scheduled programming. First day of school! I mean, it’s only been a few days since the summer session ended, but it feels different. There’s going to be a lot more academic rigor. And I mean a lot. In John Hattie’s “Visible Learning” book where he summarizes education research meta-studies, one of the more potent effects was with something he called “press for learning” which is about what it sounds like. How much the teacher is pushing the children to push themselves, not settling for ho-hum work when the students can do better, if they really try. My mentor is particularly passionate about this, and it shows in her results, where she frequently puts out students who are several grade levels above their peers, when they leave her school. I’m looking forward to learning how that works.
And also really looking forward to seeing her in action, as I did this morning. I feel like the first few days, and even the first day especially, of school with really great teachers, are the most useful for study. Once the teachers have had a few months with the kids, the routines are already laid down, they have already gotten into good habits, the boundaries have been tested and, in the case of really good teachers, shown to be firm. An observer might get the mistaken impression, visiting a class like that, that teaching is easy, or their students are easy. Whereas, when you see the first day, first week, you see the head butting happening, how conflicts are managed, how the teacher establishes her “street cred” and reputation, how she sets up the rules and expectations, and how she implements and enforces them.
It was also surprisingly useful to see my mentor in action at the staff meeting last week. She has said this before, that she is pretty much the same with kids of all ages and adults. She’s not putting on a persona. That’s not to say she is insensitive to context and developmental differences, but, given a clear understanding of them, she adjusts appropriately, while remaining basically the same. Though there is a significant difference how she interacts with a group of people compared to how she interacts one on one. I’ve mostly seen her interact one on one with adults and in a group with children. I’ve seen some interactions where a child has stepped over a line and she’s one on one or small group with them, but that’s pretty similar to when they step over the line and are in a group. I don’t think I’ve seen much of her interacting one on one with children when they aren’t in trouble, but I now assume it’s a bit more like with adult individuals, plus the filter of developmental appropriateness and the specific kind of relationship she has with them. Teacher student vs. peers vs. employer kind of thing.
In any case, it made it a bit more clear, how much of how she interacts is her personality. I don’t want to copy her personality, though in the same way that artists do master copies, I may try copying what she does to see what is required to do that, and understand what thinking and feeling is behind that. But I want to understand the principals behind what she does that makes them work. Seeing her in different situations, with different kinds of people, helps me piece together the mosaic of the underlying patterns.
Well, running out of time again. Things I’m noticing: she is a good orator. She varies it more for children, because that works with them, but my acting teacher would approve of her work. She uses variation in inflection, humor, changing up the sound and pace to keep the audience listening.
She is also choosing her words very carefully. How she explains rules, the why behind them. She’s also good at having good boundaries and high expectations, and catching and calling kids out when they go over any lines, without it feeling angry. She herself has said she is full of love when she’s giving her serious-faced corrections, and I wonder if that feeling perhaps both enhances the potency of the correction while avoiding the feeling of resentment or reactance that often occurs when rules and expectations are enforced.
If this is the case, it’s one of the things that cannot be learned as easily as others, because that love cannot be faked. I doubt you would get a positive effect if it was faked, either for the students or for how you internally would feel. The challenge then is learning to hold those very different qualities: deep unconditional love, and rigorously enforced high expectations for behavior. Especially when giving what you might call a ‘dressing down.’ To someone. Though when analyzing the words used, they are not violent or angry or put-downs. It’s really only the tone that makes it feel like that, the words are serious, but respectful. And I think perhaps having the love underlying that makes the process of what words to use more automatic, rather than something that needs to be thought about and planned out.
Nothing wrong with planning, but if you don’t want canned responses, you need to know the internal state that then organizes the specific words coming out. Kind of like knowing the story, and then saying it in your own words, or describing something you’ve seen, in your own words. You are referring to an internal model, so you don’t need to refer to a memorized script. Also helpful when you are faced with novel situations and would have to go ‘off script.”
It’s easy to fall back into a more passive role, and I notice that tendency. If I want to make best use of my situation though, I need much more action, practice, getting my hands in on things. So I’ll need some plan to counteract that tendency of mine.
OK, it’s Wednesday now, I ran out of time yesterday. Goodbye for now, see you next time.
<3
Isaac
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