Taking My Medicine

After hitting the submit button on my blog each week, I read it one last time in the same format that you see it. I like to make sure that the layout looks right and check one more time for errors. When I read last week's message about having a hook and making your message interesting, I asked myself how I was practicing what I was preaching. You see, just like you, I complain about things that I sometimes think are beyond my control. I rant about laws and policies that I don't agree with and about parents that I cannot get to see things my way or engage at all. I am really always looking for that second part. I genuinely want our student's parents to support the school, you as teachers and their children's education. Just like you, I run into barriers and I complain.  It's tough when you hold a parent meeting and three to five parents attend. So when I read my words about making my message interesting, I realized that I was not doing that for parents. I needed to take a dose of my own medicine and I needed a hook.

This reflection prompted the insanely silly snow day message that went out to parents through phone calls and through Facebook and Twitter. I spent a morning writing the lyrics and Mr. Hazzard gave me a crash course in Garageband and I was off. I had no idea how well it would work. After over 100,000 views, 1,300 shares and a lot of texts, calls and comments in stores, I realized just how powerful a hook can be. I managed to get parents and the community to pay attention. While I don't intend on sending out every message from the school in the style of old-school rap, we do have plans for more creative messages that promote school events or important information that needs parent involvement. We have their attention, now we need to say something worth hearing.

The end of the semester is the perfect time to reflect on your practice as well. Take a minute and think about some of the great advice that we give to our students and how that can be applied and modeled in what you do. We preach attention and get distracted ourselves. We want creative solutions and problem solving and we give up on things we feel we cannot change. We are all guilty of it. We're human. But sometimes when we take a minute to try to see things in a different light we get a silly little idea that just might work.

Getting Hooked

As educators we spend quite a lot of time focusing our instruction and planning on content standards. We want to teach exactly what will be assessed and we want to maximize our time on those standards. Teachers spend time planning in their departments and over the summers focusing on the small nuances of state standards and how to fit each of those into lessons for the semester. With all of that time on standards, I think that sometimes we miss an essential first piece. We have to focus on the "hook." My clinical teacher always made me start each lesson with a hook. He said that if I didn't grab student attention in the first 5-10 minutes, then the rest of the lesson could be worthless.

Teaching has a lot in common with sales. You have to convince your class to buy into what you are doing. Your lesson is your product and they are your consumers. Every good salesman has a sales pitch and they know just when and how to use it. Teachers are the same. Now that the first semester's lessons are behind us and out content objectives have been taught, focus your second semester revisions on the hook. Grab student attention in the first few minutes to make all of your work on standards planning worth it.

Good Problems

Most of my job involves solving problems. Some are small problems like finding the right class for a student and some are big problems that occasionally involve lawyers or others far above my pay grade. Every now and then I run across a good problem. This week I have been hit with several of those. Good problems involve changing a program or finding funding for something that we would have otherwise not needed without something good happening. 

Our WorkKeys test results presented one of those good problems. Usually when students miss out on getting a silver or better it is because of just one of the three sections. In the past, students have shrugged that off and showed very little care about it. This year, both Mrs. Batchelor and I have been overrun with students wanting to retake the test to prove that they can do better. They don't even seem to mind when we tell them that they have to pay for it and that it doesn't count for the school. They just want to prove that they can do better. I ran into this same problem with several students regarding their Reading Inventory test this week as well. I even had a student come and apologize to me personally with tear-filled eyes for a score in the 1500s because she knew that she could do better. 

Another good problem arose this week as Coach Willis and Ms. Barnett were planning a college trip for juniors. Usually we market these trips to students with a 2.5 GPA or better. When they told me 125 juniors have a GPA of 2.5 or higher I suggested raising it to a 3.0. That didn't help much. 86 Juniors have this GPA. Still far too many for a bus. Even when we went to a GPA of 3.5 we had 52 students in the 11th grade. That's about 25% of that class.

These are good problems to have and more importantly, they show students that do care about their grades and their achievement in school. Students wanting to retest when they do not make it are showing grit. They are not afraid of trying again or trying harder. Students as a whole have a bad reputation for not caring, but it is hard to make that argument for the majority of our students. These "good problems" now present us with an opportunity to capitalize on our students' desire to do better in school and on tests that matter. Now we have to rise to the occasion to solve these good problems for our school.

Thanks for Talking

Mrs. Willis asked me yesterday if I was going to write about communication in my blog for this week. She was right. That topic has consumed much of our jobs in the front office lately. Getting parents, students and teachers to communicate often solves the majority of problems in a school. 99% of the time, both parties can come to realize that we are all here for the same reason and that no one is out "to get" the other party. Without communication, we often assume the worst and become defensive. We build up situations in our heads and make mountains out of mole hills.

Greene Central's administrators, counselors, front office staff and so many of you have been helping facilitate conversations lately about student performance in school. We are at that point in the semester when we get the ever-annoying question, "What can I do to pass?" Every educator has that sarcastic answer in the back of their minds ready to go, but what we really end up doing is communicating about the problem. We speak with parents, coaches, family and community members to find what motivates students to finish what we started. The process can be frustrating, but without the communication, no progress takes place.

Thank you to all of you that help facilitate the daily communication for our students and our school. Whether you are the one that found the correct number to call a student's mother, translated for a Spanish-speaking family or counseled a student that only listens to your voice, you made communication work and gave a student a shot at success.

Comfort Zones

The term "comfort zone" came about when the first heating and air conditioning systems began being installed in homes. Rather than have a thermostat that was fixed on one specific temperature, requiring the system to cut on and off regularly, a temperature range of about three degrees was programmed in. This range was called the "comfort zone." Today we use this term more often to describe what we are comfortable with in our lives. Daily transactions with our friends and family, good health and a little money in our bank accounts often leaves us right where we want to be. When something disrupts that we can be as uncomfortable as living in a home with no heat and air.

Our school and our classes all have comfort zones as well. We find patterns for what works and what doesn't and we get used to routine. We like teaching one way that works for us and for most students. Then comes that student or parent that disrupts that. (Ok, maybe that principal disrupts it too.) Sometimes this is good because it makes us think about what we do and why we do it. We learn to refine practice and adjust that comfort zone. Reflection is one of the most important things we can do as educators. We need to think about what we do and do not do and make decisions, often tough ones, about adapting our practice. This is what Standard 5 of the Teacher Evaluation Rubric is all about. Please take some time to reflect on your practice and your comfort zone and determine where you might need some adjusting to maximize your effectiveness. Your adjustment just might make everyone's comfort zone a little bit better.

Cast Down Your Bucket

I always find it funny when we acknowledge simple practices in one aspect of our lives, but cannot apply that same practice to something else. The phrase "meet them where they are" has become a little cliche' in the education world, but the practice is really quite simple. I've been met with this idea is so many different places lately and this seemingly simple concept becomes quite difficult to practice. Think of a water well. It's just a deep hole that meets ground water. When you want water, you send down the bucket, fill it, and bring it back to the top. Simple. Easy. Anyone could see that if you only sent the bucket down halfway and asked the water to meet you in the middle, that you would never be satisfied. The well analogy is an old one. Booker T. Washington popularized the concept at the turn of the 20th century as others made the argument for African Americans to return to Africa in response to discrimination in America. Instead, Washington encouraged African Americans to "cast down your bucket" and pull up the best of African American culture here. They had to start where they were and focus on moving up, not away.

This week I have had several data conversations about EVAAS and conversations with parents about student behavior and performance that fell within this same analogy. As adults and educators, we want and even expect students to be at a certain level of behavior and education. That doesn't always happen. It frustrates us. How can we work on higher order thinking skills when a student reads or does math significantly below grade level? How can parents talk to their children about college and life if all they want to discuss is their friends or music? We have to meet them where they are to start. Otherwise we are just sending our bucket halfway and asking the water to come up. Understanding this analogy requires us to change as the motivator or teacher and that's hard. But refusing to adapt is only as effective as yelling down the well for water to come up.

Mirror Neurons

The story goes like this: In Parma, Italy, researchers in the 1990s were studying the neurons of monkeys. Devices were attached to the monkeys and brain scans showed when individual neurons in their brains activated. The purpose was to determine what neurons activated as the monkey made reactions. While studying a monkey, a scientist walked into the room eating something (the story varies here) and the neurons of the monkey begin to fire as he sees the scientist eat. The strange thing was that the same neurons fired in the monkey watching someone eat as they did in the human actually eating. Who knows if this is how mirror neurons were actually discovered, but the point is that they actually do exist. People (and we think several other species as well) actually have neurons in our brains that are wired for empathy. We can see someone in distress, happy or in fear and we can instantly feel the emotion that they feel. This probably explains why we watch feel-good movies during the holidays or get that creepy feeling when we see someone else with a spider on them.

Knowing this, just think about the impact this knowledge has on education. As the teacher, you have the power to directly impact student attitudes and emotions based on your own. The key is to controlling ours and not letting the student emotions control our neurons first! In our Grit book study this week, I shard a thought that I have long held about teaching. I strongly feel that great teachers are also great actors. They perform for an audience several times a day. The best teachers change the story or the main character's actions based on how the audience reacts. They can recognize what the audience needs and can ad-lib appropriately. By doing this, science says that they are literally controlling their minds.

So just think about this the next time you start that tough class period or have to deal with that difficult student. Both of you are wired for the power of mind control, but only one of you gets to use it first.