Month: December 2015

Teaching in a middle school is tough. All teaching is tough, but the work of a middle school teacher is extremely labor intensive because there is a certain unpredictability with the clientele. This is probably one of the more widely exhausted stereotypes one puts on middle school students, but it is true.  Middle level students experience a number of emotional changes during the three years they are in middle school.  Consequently, a middle school can often feel like an emotional land mine field.  The work is excruciating but doubly rewarding.

Regardless of one’s content area, a middle school teacher is present for all sorts of turns in a student’s life.  You are there for highs and the lows, but mostly the lows.  I can remember working late one night when the basketball coaches posted the final cut list for their teams. My room was located down the hall from the gym and my desk was like a front row seat for the aftermath that followed those decisions.

A rush of five or six young men raced out to the front parking lot of the school to tell their moms and dads they had secured a spot on the team. A slower flow of boys followed.  Some had their heads down in disappointment; others had a confident stroll to their ride home.

I attended middle school at Davis Middle School in Dublin, OH. The large middle school boasted a well known athletic program.  Due to my build and lack of natural athletic talent, it became very clear to me extremely early in my stint at Davis Middle that I was likely not going to be a school athlete. In the summer between my seventh and eighth grade year I tried out for the golf team.  I thought if there was one team I could make as a walk-on it would be the golf team. I finished dead last in the tryouts.  I not only understood adolescent disappointment; I lived it.

Twenty minutes after the parade of initial emotions following the basketball cuts had been announced I heard a quiet knock at my classroom door. It was Mark.  I never had Mark in class, but I knew him well.  He was a likable kid that everyone spoke highly of.

“Can use your phone to call my dad?” He asked.

“Sure, I said.”  Directing him to the classroom phone at the front of the room.  “Dial 9 first to get an outside line.”

“Right.” He said.

Mark was careful to mute his speech when his dad picked up on the other end of the telephone.  I can remember he covered the receiver with his hand as he whispered in to the phone. I felt as though I should leave the room.  As I stood up to walk out Mark hung up the phone.

“You OK?” I asked.

“Yeah.  I think.”  Mark said.  Then he paused.  He made eye contact with me for a moment as if to say, No, I’m not OK.  But I am not going to tell you why.

Mark looked away.  Then he broke down in tears.

I offered him a seat and asked if he wanted to talk.

I don’t remember exactly what Mark said.  It was kind of heard to follow–as you can probably imagine.  But while we waited for his dad to pick him up from basketball tryouts he shared with me the deep frustration and sadness he felt in that moment. He didn’t hold any grudges, but he was mad at himself.  He was convinced that if he could have run just a little faster, jumped just an inch higher, or made just one more free-throw he would have made a spot on the team.

If it was indeed that close for him, if he was essentially one basket away from making the team, then this was a very different variety of disappointment than I had experienced ten years earlier when I was cut from the golf team.

From this conversation I got the impression that Mark would take some time to get passed this funk he was in.  To be so close and walk away with nothing in return would be heart-breaking. A couple of days later while on lunch duty I found Mark in the crowded cafeteria.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

“Great!” he said. “I found out last night that I made a club basketball team.  We travel to Kansas City next month to play a tournament with teams from around the country. It’s going to be awesome!”

With a chuckle I resigned to myself, “Huh… Middle school.”

I once worked for an amazing administrator named John Blazek.  Mr. B. was a passionate school leader who managed his people with respect and dignity.  He wasn’t perfect.  Nobody is.  But he fostered an environment that made it very easy for me to love my job, and that is no small thing.

I have come to understand that while the media is content to report on test scores there are far more important statistics we should be talking about.  Mr. B. once said that the most important statistics we should talk about when comparing schools are the attendance rates for both students and teachers.  Let’s face it, if neither population is showing up on a regular basis, what good is it to talk about test scores?

Teacher attendance is something that came up, among other things, in the now infamous documentary Waiting for Superman.  The premise on this matter in the film is in many cases of “failing schools” teachers are leaving a good percentage of the instruction to substitute or temporary teachers while calling in sick or taking personal leave.  I am not trying to appear critical of teachers who accept teaching positions in high-demand districts.  The work of a classroom teacher is beyond challenging and it is amplified a great deal in the urban districts discussed in Superman.  However, I think a more productive conversation on this matter should be related to how we in the profession address teacher motivation.  What can we do to improve the conditions of our classrooms so that not only students are motivated to attend, but we are too?

Very early in my career a former teacher told me that he left the profession because he could do little about the outside influences that finally made his job unbearable.  He cited low participation, lax application of discipline building-wide on the part of the administration, and limited parental involvement as the conditions that ultimately led to his burnout and departure from the classroom.  As this former teacher shared his experience with me I didn’t hear relief in his voice, as if to say, “And I so happy I no longer have to deal with any of that anymore…”  Instead all I heard was bitterness and regret. And I wondered at that point in my career how much control we truly have over our own motivation.  Do we simply will ourselves to keep going?  Or, can our work be self-motivating?

In a recent publication of Voices from the Middle Daniels and Pirayoff discuss how middle school teachers develop their own motivational working conditions in their article “Relationships Matter: Fostering Motivation through Interactions”.  The article dresses directly this idea of self-motivation and inspires readers to build relationships in their teaching practices.  As it turns out, Daniels and Pirayoff uncover something I think I have known all along: teaching is about people.  The work we do to establish relationships will ultimately improve our working conditions and advance our teaching, yet this is the one thing that I was never taught as a pre-service teacher.

During my undergraduate years when I was learning how to be a English teacher content area knowledge was privileged over all other domains in my professional training.  I attended a small, private college in central Kansas and I am certain the college was concerned about producing competent content-area experts. I am quite thankful that my college spent so much time steeping me and my classmates in literature, composition and the language arts. The content of an English class is often deeply inspirational and can be quite motivating.  I am reminded of each time I have read chapter 6 in Call of the Wild aloud to a classroom of seventh graders and the moments throughout the year when a student volunteers to read his or her latest poem.  These, and experiences just like them, are watershed moments that inspire the teacher and the students to keep going, to give more to the class. But the content plays just a small part in our work.  It is the relationships we build make the work of classroom teachers valuable, unique and memorable.  And it is relationships that ultimately connect us to our work and profession.

In their conclusion, Daniels and Pirayoff say, “Motivating learning environments develop through daily attention to our interactions with students, collaboration with colleagues, and focus on a productive class climate.” The authors will tell you that these are not groundbreaking revelations. However, these are the foundations we can establish to create a more motivating classroom.  Even when the conditions are not so motivational around us, we do have a great deal of control in how we purposefully connect with our students, collaborate with our colleagues and set the expectations of our classrooms.

One area I have tried to develop in my practice now as a teacher-educator is helping pre-service teachers understand how to develop these important connections with their students and their students’ parents.  There are, in fact, a number of valuable ways teachers can interact with the students under their care in order to improve the working conditions of the classroom.  Over the years I have relied heavily on the work of Jim and Charles Fay and the Love and Logic approach.  Their strategies are easy to communicate to pre-service teachers and they can make an observable impact.

Some of the things we talk about when discussing Love and Logic are:

• Students want to be noticed.  Noticing positive behaviors will certainly benefit the productivity of the classroom.  However, teachers often only notice bad behaviors.  So, is it any wonder that students will act out when they want our attention?
• Parents need 10 pieces of good news before they hear one piece of bad news.  Through a proactive communications plan teachers can share a number of success stories, small and large, with parents.  When a problem arises the teacher knows he or she has a partner in the student’s parents.  The same can be said about administrators too.  If a teacher can routinely share the positive work that is happening in his/her classroom with the administration then he or she will also have an important partner, or ally, when it matters most.
• Arguments lead to power struggles; it is best to avoid power struggles.  When attending a Love and Logic conference each speaker challenges attendees to reprogram how we think about those moments when a power struggle is about to break out.  After attending a week-long L&L workshop one can easily avoid a power struggle like a jin jitsu master.

Finding your own path to motivation is important; it is by walking this path that we find a genuine connection to our work and forge our own connectedness.  Daniels and Pirayoff, along with Fay and Fay, provide some insight on how we can find that path, but it is a path that we might ultimately need to cut for ourselves in the wilderness of our practice.  Yes, there will be tall grass, vines, burrs and thorny hedges along the way, but with the right tools we find our way.