Identity Crisis

How does a teacher early in her career decide who she’s going to be? My first year I had grand ideas of changing the world, but quickly learned it took all of my time just to keep my head above water. I kept telling myself, “It’s ok. I’m only a first year teacher.” And later, “It’s alright, this is only my second year.” But by the third year, I was really beginning to doubt myself, and definitely by the fourth year I was pretty sure I was irreparably damaging the tiny souls in my care. “What’s wrong with me?” I’d silently scream to myself. “It’s already my fourth year and I still don’t know what I’m doing!”

Fortunately, sometime during that fourth year, an experienced teacher at a county-level meeting reassured me this was completely normal. No one else had bothered to explain that self-doubt comes with the job. Instead, when I looked around me I saw what appeared to be confident, organized, experienced teachers who never doubted their next steps and always had their plans ready for next week. Granted, their plans involved basal texts and grammar worksheets, but at least they left on time on Fridays and could joke around with the principal. “Maybe I should just be the kind of teacher who pulls the same Leprechaun file out for March each year,” I thought. “Just go ahead and buy the polyester pantsuit and a pack of red pens."

After recently talking with young teacher also caught in the 4^th-year slump, I’m beginning to think this is a natural stage creative teachers must go through. Perhaps it’s an identity crisis, a search for your true self, which occurs when you realize that it’s not easy to become the larger-than-life teacher you’d set out to be when you were a wide-eyed undergrad. You wonder: if that remarkable teacher you intended to become hasn’t arrived yet, maybe it won’t ever happen, and instead you should begin to look around to find another model to settle for.

I’m not sure what brought me out of that slump – it’s been too many years ago to remember the details – but I do think it might have had to do with a change of scenery. I moved schools and separated from my more traditional teammate. I also joined some county-level committees that gave me a wider perspective, but more importantly allowed me to see even experienced teachers were still struggling to nail down this profession. And probably most importantly, I found an unofficial mentor, a neighboring teacher who was ten times more creative than me. Sherry gave me someone to emulate and motivated me to become more than who I was. She served as my “mentor text” and reaffirmed my budding beliefs in student choice and active learning that had almost gotten squashed during my earlier years.

Perhaps you’re a new teacher hitting that identity slump, wondering if you’ll ever be the teacher you’d aspired to. Or maybe you have passed that rough patch and feel fully vested in the identity you’ve carved out for yourself in this difficult profession. In either case, reach out to each other. Lord knows we all need support.

Always Learning

A few days ago I returned home after leading a summer teaching workshop to find one of my windows shattered, my jewelry scattered, and our TV missing. We’d been robbed.

After hours of police reports and vacuuming up thousands of shards of glass, it was hard not to feel angry, violated, and worried about repeat burglaries. But then I was reminded of a story told about Ronald Reagan, right after he’d been shot. He was on a hospital gurney being rushed into surgery when the lead doctor bent over him and asked, “Are you allergic to anything?”

Reagan took a deep breath, looked him in the eye, and said, “Bullets”.

It takes a strong person to retain a sense of humor in a situation like that. But it also reminds me that we all have the power to choose how we react to the events that befall us. Reagan chose not to succumb to fear, but instead took charge of the situation and put those around him at ease.

I choose to learn a lesson from that. I choose not to allow these burglars, whoever they are, to make me fearful or to think differently about our little house in the woods. I choose to retain my assumption of goodwill rather than fearing the worst of strangers. Instead, I choose to retain my peace of mind. To do otherwise would be to let them win.

Different Paths

I’ve been reading Georgia Heard’s “A Place for Wonder” about reading and writing nonfiction in the primary grades, and in the latest section she’s had the 1st graders brainstorm things they wonder about and then sort them according to whether they’re “research wonders” or “heart wonders” (meaning it’s more opinion-based, such as “What makes a best friend?”). She recounts her conferences with various children and the few questions they’re not sure how to categorize, or which they categorize differently than an adult might. For instance, one little girl puts the card for “How do oceans get made?” into the heart pile, and when Georgia asks why, it’s because to this little girl the ocean is an enormous place of mystery and she has no concept of the scientific aspects of it. Different than many teachers would, however, Georgia and her co-teacher Jen don’t correct her, realizing there’s time later on for this child to discover the potential of research to re-categorize it on her own.

It didn’t matter whether the distinctions were exact but rather that the children understood that there are various ways to go about exploring questions.

(p. 69) That’s a very “free-ing” statement, one that I remember feeling quite often as I read books from the various New York teachers connected to Teacher’s College or Denver’s PEBC – things like, you don’t have to complete a picture book all in one sitting, or it’s ok not to have literacy centers, or think of your day as a menu of options rather than a to-do list. Too often, nowadays, it seems teachers don’t hear enough free-ing statements, and instead feel more tied down by regulations and expectations.

Heard’s quote above caused me to think about my work as a coach as well. In the same way that she and Jen didn’t worry about the correctness of their students’ responses right away and instead gave them room to find them on their own, as a coach my concern should not be that teachers correctly implement a teaching strategy right away as much as it should be about giving them room to think about and explore it on their own. Coaching is more about the conversations we have about our teaching, not a search for one correct way of doing it. If these first graders had the freedom to grow their own confidence in their abilities as researchers, then shouldn’t teachers feel that same freedom to explore what works with kids? I did that for years as a teacher in a school without a coach, and the role I’d have liked the coach to serve would not have been as “fount of knowledge” but rather sounding board for successes and failures; a conversation partner about teaching.

There’s never only one way to do something. As coaches we should be able to encourage teachers to take different paths to common outcomes.

Drop-in Discomfort

Of all the things I do as an instructional coach, there’s one that has made me so uncomfortable that I can no longer bring myself to do it. That unpleasant task is making unannounced drop-in visits to teachers’ classrooms. My first two years as a coach I tried it, because for some reason I thought it was part of the job, but each time I felt uncomfortable and unnatural while visiting. I could never put my finger on exactly why it didn’t feel right, but one thing I’ve learned in life is to trust my gut instinct first, and analyze it later. I’m still analyzing this one.

As a classroom teacher myself, I never had an instructional coach just “drop in” to my classroom. If she visited, it was because I’d asked her to read with a child or help me model a book talk or help me analyze a problem with a lesson. My principal, on the other hand, regularly dropped in to squat next to a child and ask what he was learning about (invariably, she’d always ask the one clueless child, who had no idea of the point of the lesson. I quickly learned to seat the highly verbal, attentive children near the doorway). It made sense to me for my principal to drop in - I knew it was her job to check in on students and make sure that I was teaching well. I received my evaluations from her, and she had the responsibility of the entire school resting on her shoulders. From these “check-in” visits by my principal I got the same idea many teachers have – anyone who comes by unannounced just to visit is there for supervisory purposes.

It wasn’t until I began reading Jim Knight’s “Instructional Coaching: A Partnership Approach to Improving Instruction” that I found evidence for why my discomfort with drop-ins might be justified. Jim argues that the coaching-teacher relationship should act as an equal partnership. The coach is a colleague and peer of the classroom teacher – not necessarily the “expert”, and certainly not a supervisor or the “program police”, there to ensure that teachers are correctly using district-bought materials. The coach is a fellow teacher whose job it is to provide time and space for reflection about teaching practice. Together, the coach and teacher act as partners to address whatever issues the teacher identifies. Coaching works best if the classroom teacher is a willing participant and the instigator of the partnership with the coach. Oftentimes coaches are asked by principals to work with teachers, but those situations are rarely as successful because of the sense that the coach as been “assigned” to help. Choice is an important aspect of the coaching-teacher partnership.

And I suppose that’s why I’m uncomfortable with dropping into classrooms – there’s no choice in that act on the part of the teacher. Anytime someone drops into a classroom our prior baggage in the field of education tells us that the person dropping in is evaluating us, however earnestly they may deny it. It’s immediately thought of as a supervisory behavior. And it’s not a behavior that equal partners do to each other. How many of your fellow teachers drop in unannounced to your classroom with no agenda but to just listen to your lesson, talk with your students, and surreptitiously see how your teaching’s going?

Of course, there are times when visits do feel more natural – mostly when they’re announced and agreed upon ahead of time. I feel much more comfortable if, for instance, we’ve been focusing our professional learning for the past few weeks on tying literacy centers to standards and we have come to an agreement as a group on what that should look like in our classrooms. After a period of time I can tell teachers I’ll be visiting to see how our professional learning has impacted procedures in classrooms according to our agreed-upon criteria. If I ask them to email me with specific things they’d like me to look for while I visit, then I’ve reintroduced the element of choice, and it becomes a two-sided conversation about our practice, rather than a one-sided drop-in that hints of supervision.

The coaching partnership should be a dialogue, where both parties have a voice. Voice and choice are perhaps the heart of coaching.