Building Communities That Thrive.
The rise of the phrase ‘best practices’ ushered in an era of a common language around certain techniques, which has undoubtedly been extremely useful for many teachers and schools. But the way the phrase is used today promotes a way of thinking about education that does more to limit our teachers and students growth than liberate them to reach their full potential.
“Sometimes the most important conversations are those that leave teachers feeling unsettled. These types of conversations can be scary for coaches because we know that they bring the risk of damaging our relationship with the teacher. Often this fear leads us to focus the conversation on some minor technique we want the teacher to change, and as the year goes on we become increasingly dismayed that there is no significant improvement in the classroom.”
There is a very dangerous idea in this country that teachers are only ‘working’ when they are directly engaging with students. The idea is so deeply pervasive that many teachers have come to believe it themselves.
There is a famous study called the marshmallow test about how impulse control and delayed gratification can predict success later in life… the research around the marshmallow study treated this impulse control as an innate trait. More recently, the study was revisited at the University of Rochester to see if the context mattered. If impulse control can be learned, how is it done?
When you work at the program level for any length of time you feel a great joy, but you also get tired. You get tired because your work is essentially swimming against a much larger current, and no matter how hard you swim against a current, or how many people you get swimming with you, the current is not going to change. The river will flow the way it flows, and in American education, the direction of the current is a dangerous one.
Everyone knows that critical thinking is important. But what is it exactly? If you ask 10 teachers what critical thinking is you will most likely get ten different answers, most of them hopelessly vague.
The main goal of the conversation should be to establish a solid relationship…. but the first conversation shouldn’t just be an informal get-to-know-you gab session. You also want to communicate that the professional side of your relationship is the core of your relationship and that you care deeply about helping them be the best teacher they can be for their students.
Barefoot is a living testament to the wisdom and capacity of poor people. It’s a statement against those who think solutions need to be imported to places like these. I asked the Barefoot architect how he learned to design buildings if he never studied. “From each other,” he said.
