Tag: teaching

Things I Know 229 of 365: I’ve seen Problem-Based Learning from the other side

It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project.

– Napoleon Hill

I just turned in my second statistics assignment. I should note (and I’m sorry Mr. Curry), when I took statistics during undergrad it became a sad march toward intellectual self-destruction. I hesitate to say intellectual, but the professor certainly attempted to steer my thinking that direction.

More often, my thinking was, “How does this count as math? I know calculus. How is this math?”

It wasn’t pretty.

My current statistics professor came with glowing reviews – from everyone. Everyone.

And he’s fantastic.

A lecture hall can be a stuffy space.

A statistics course can be a stuffy space.

The intersection is potentially numbing.

Not with Terry Tivnan.

In a course explicitly designed with the beginner in mind, Professor Tivnan works to set a pace and climate that has yet to have me feeling out of my depth.

Given the laughter and applause that pepper our classes, I’d say my classmates are in a similar situation.

And then the assignment came.

Now, remember, I have been teaching in an inquiry-driven, project-based school for the last for years and another school for two years before that that was doing those things, but didn’t think to say so. Not only is this learning I believe in, it’s learning I’ve assigned as well.

Until recently, it hadn’t been learning I’d experienced. Seems appropriate I dove into the process in a field for which I’ve less natural predilection.

Without going too deeply into details, our assignment gave us two data sets, some information about national trends regarding that data, and asked us to compare the data and write up a report for a fictional school board regarding our findings.

That’s it. No one outlined steps. No one said this is the information you must report.

“How are these two things related, and what does that mean?” we were asked.

It hurt my brain.

A lot.

Unclear as to how to approach the problems and feeling the wait of my mathematical past, I avoided the assignment for as long as I could.

I worked to help classmates make sense of the work, while avoiding my own.

And then I realized what he had done.

He wanted us to own the process. I’ll get nowhere if I have to look to an authority each time I need to decide when and how to use a “z score” or the importance of a weighted mean. I needed to own it.

The process needed to be mine.

Now, these are things I’ve professed for years. I’ve stood in front of audiences and classrooms and argued the importance of this kind of learning.

Here’s the thing – it’s tough.

As incredibly difficult as shaping a lesson or unit plan for problem-based learning may be, learning that way is incredibly difficult.

From several classmates I heard cries of, “Why won’t he just tell us what he wants or what to do?”

I’d heard that before.

“But how do I do it, Mr. Chase?”

As supportive as I’d meant to be, I never truly understood the difficulty involved in adapting new habits of learning.

I expect it’ll get easier – not quickly – as we’re expected to do more on our own with the knowledge and understandings we’re acquiring.

For this go ‘rough, it was tough. I need to remember that.

Things I Know 223 of 365: Everybody has an agenda

Education isn’t part of my agenda. It is my agenda.

– Kenny Guinn

In 1980, Hugh Mehan published a study of children participating in “circle time” in their classroom. Throughout the study, Mehan placed a wireless microphone on the back of students for one hour each morning to document their interactions.

Up to that point, Mehan wrote, classroom community had been studied from the teacher’s perspective. He wanted to se what was going on with everyone else.

Students like teacher, have objectives that they would like to meet during the course of a given classroom event, a school day, a school year. And like teachers, students employ others and their surroundings as contexts for achieving these objectives. The simultaneous presence of students’ and teachers’ agendas suggests that the classroom be viewed as a social activity in which teachers and students mutually influence each other and collaboratively assemble its social order.

In his published findings, Mehan reported interactions between a triad of girls who were talking to one another during circle time while the teacher was attempting to divvy up classroom jobs.

It all happened simultaneously.

Hair combing, securing snacks, discussing play dynamics, they all happened at the same time.

Mehan writes, “All this indicates an ability to monitor and participate in several activities simultaneously, a skill that cognitive scientists have called ‘parallel processing.’”

By teachers in any ordinary classroom, the actions of Carolyn, Leola and Ysidro would be taken as insubordinate. Not telling-the-teacher-off insubordinate, but certainly working-against-the-teacher’s-agenda insubordinate.

They don’t have to be.

Mehan’s point, and the deeper implication of the study is when teachers see “off-task” behavior, it doesn’t necessarily mean the students are off-task. They are on the tasks they deem important. And Mehan claims also on-task with the items on the teacher’s agenda.

This isn’t an argument that children should be allowed to do whatever they want or that their agendas should trump any agenda set forth by the teacher. There’s literature about that, sure, but this isn’t about that.

Instead, it’s about realizing everyone in the classroom has an agenda, and to each individual that agenda is personal and important.

Mehan writes the study’s findings shed light on the fact “that participants to interaction, including socializing interaction, mutually influence each other.”

Yes.

And.

The study serves as a reminder that teachers face the task (perhaps their first agenda item) of persuading each student in a class that the teacher’s agenda is worthy of student attention and perhaps even adoption.

It’s a tough sell all around.

Citation:

Hugh Mehan, “The Competent Student,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Vol. 11 (1980), 131-152.

Things I Know 221 of 365: My brain’s all stormy

He only earns his freedom and his life Who takes them every day by storm.
– JoHann Wolfgang von Goethe

Up until about four weeks ago, I was keeping a sticky note on my laptop with a running list of post topics I wanted to tackle in this yearlong endeavor to document what I know as I know it now.
About two weeks ago, that list started another life in Evernote as I attempted to design a workflow that would sync across my devices.
A few stray thoughts started piling up in the journal I’ve been keeping for the last few years. Crossing a few pages, they’re tangential verbal doodles on this or that topic about which I’d like to firm up my thinking in some sort of public space.
Early last week, I found myself making a bulleted list of four ideas for TIK on a paper towel in a friend’s kitchen.
Yesterday, I wrote an idea on the back of a receipt.
Today, across three chapters or journal articles I’m reading for classes, I’ve jotted down half a dozen post ideas.
This is all to say, my brain is stormy.
It’s frustrating and wonderful.
A few minutes ago, one of my SLA students who’s now in her freshman year of college asked me if it was weird to be a student instead of a teacher.
I told her not really.
Over the last eight years in the classroom, I worked hard to maintain a reflective practice and to build a habit of learning and information grazing that would continue to push me to think about what it was I thought about teaching and learning and how they relate to education.
This space, this next nine months of my life are going to be a whole other kind of heffalump.
What was a piece of my day sandwiched between unit design and grading has become that which consumes my day.
I am a consumer of information on a scale at which life would not allow over the last few years. There wasn’t space in either my brain or my day to eat as many ideas as I have over the last 48 hours.
While I love it, I’m also realizing the requirements of shift this new new environ of intellect brings about.
As the head of a classroom, the ideas with which I was playing spread out over days or weeks. Expounding on project design for my students meant I was able to speak to it over the entirety of the process. “Here’s my idea,” I could say and follow it up with, “here’s the plan,” then, “here’s how it’s going,” and finally, “here’s what happened and what I would do differently.”
For all of the demands inside and outside of the classroom, I was able to ruminate on ideas to a different extent.
Starting now, I need to switch gears.
The ideas are coming at me at light speed now. If I’m not diligent at marking them and my thoughts on them down as they arise, I’ll miss them.
Not yet in this archiving of my mental stance on ideas has it been so key to keep track of what I know (or what I think I know).
Time to cull the paper towels, receipts, Evernotes, journal entries and the like. I’m sitting at the onset of a perfect storm. It would be a shame not to get pictures for later.

Things I Know 197 of 365: There are two kinds of angry in the classroom

To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.

– Steve Prefontaine

Recently, I’ve started reading Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

I don’t know that I like Murakami, but I’m enjoying his book. I’m a social animal and he is not. He speaks highly of his comfort being away from people. While I enjoy my times of solitude, I feed on social interaction like some weird Buffy villain.

Something Murakami writes, with which I agree, is the following:

When I’m criticized unjustly (from my viewpoint at least), or when someone I’m sure will understand me doesn’t, I go running for a little longer than usual. By running longer, it’s like I can physically exhaust that portion of my discontent. It also makes me realize again how weak I am, how limited my abilities are. I become aware, physically, of these low points.

John Spencer has been writing a wonderful series of posts for new teachers – a collection of truths he wish he’d known or someone had told him before he entered the classroom.

He crowd sourced ideas online before embarking on this journey and the question of what I wish I’d known has been ruminating with me since he asked it.

My answer at the time and one of my answers now is embodied in Murakami’s words.

It was a doctrine of my classroom for years before Chris gave it words when we were in a discussion one day.

There is a difference between teacher angry and real angry. Teacher angry is what you let them see. It is the verbal kick in the butt that shows you care. It comes from a place of personal control akin to a parent telling a child they aren’t angry, they are just disappointed.

Real angry comes from the part of your brain the Vulcans work to control and repress. It is the moment when what you want to say is “For the fortieth time, stop interrupting, you little shit!”

These moments are exceedingly rare. They are born of exhaustion, confusion and periodic realizations that you are a last front between an ignorant and an informed citizenry. These are the intermittent terrors of the first through 30th years in the classroom.

The best teachers I have ever known never gave wind of their anger. I have taught alongside those for whom I would make a voracious case for canonization.

The good teachers know the line between teacher angry and real angry. They leave the room when the darker parts of their humanity well up within them in moments of great frustration.

The others see no line. Teacher angry and real angry are interchangeable in their classrooms. I’ve only seen a few of them, but they’ve tarnished the shine of what it means to be a teacher each time I’ve encountered them.

Each time I’ve encountered them, I’ve taken it as a sign that I must pick up the load they gave up carrying.

When I started running in college, I took none of this with me when I went out on the trail. I carried other injustices, other moments that showed me the world was not as beautiful as I imagine it to be. I would run, as Murakami writes, to “exhaust that portion of my discontent.”

Now that I’m entangled in the lives of the children I’ve served, I find myself carrying the injustices inflicted on them. It’s not always teachers. Mostly, though, it is one adult or another from their lives.

I will always do all I can to make up for those who have let them down. Still, when I run, I often find myself pushing myself because of what the world is not and what I would like it to be.

Things I Know 186 of 365: The teaching is ubiquitous

We seek not rest but transformation.
We are dancing through each other as doorways.

– Marge Piercy

I logged in to the dying social network today and found a message from a former student with the subject line “Blogging Advice”:

Hi Mr.Chase hope you are having a great summer. I am going to be blogging from california in a couple of days and was wondering if you could give me any advice. Thanks in advance!

I responded that I’d be happy to help and asked where would be best to have the conversation. I offered Facebook, IM, phone call, and texting.

I expected a quick IM conversation or phone call.

The student opted for texting, explaining she had no computer access at the moment.

I told her that would be great. A few moments later, I received the first text via my Google Voice number in my e-mail inbox.

I responded and archived the message. This continued back and forth, as you can see below, for a total of 25 messages.

All the while, I was working on other projects at my desk.

A question would pop up on my computer and I would reply to her phone.

It looked like this:

Student: Chase!!!!!

Me: What’s up, kid? Ok. Probably, the best place to start is you to come up with specific questions you have about blogging.

Student: Well, I guess my first question would be about the difference between a more journalist approach to blogging versus a more a free write style of blogging.

Me: Great question. Journalism is going to make sure you’ve got the who, what, when where, why and how in there. The goal is to communicate the story or event to people who weren’t there.

Me: For the journaling piece, it functions more as a personal record that is public. Something for you and your memories that is available to others.

Student: Ok, that makes sense. So what is the best way to establish the so what factor for both of blogging? I get that the journaling type of blogging is more personal, but if you are posting don’t you want people to get something out of it?

Me: The something they get out of it are the stories and thoughts you put into words. Sometimes, I’ll write from the perspective of, “I want readers to do X because of this post.” Often, I just want to tell a good story and make people think.

Student: Makes sense. Does that apply to journalist writing style too?

Me: Yes.

Me: When you’re writing to inform, the goal is to make sure you’re offering information people would want to have.

Student: Wait, that confuses me.

Student: What if it’s something they could care less about until you informed them?

Me: Your job as a writer is to make them care.I would imagine it’s the same as your job as a poet.

Student: You’re right. I would think it’s like writing a persuasive essay but i’m pretty sure it’s different. What the difference between essay and the structure of a blog?

Me: Think of a blog as fitting the information of an essay into a more informal storytelling structure.

Student: So there are no set rules?

Me: Nah.

Just tell the story of the piece.

Then, revise.

Then, proofread.

Then, revise.

Then, post.

Me: My best writing comes from reading blogs. See if you can check out some poetry blogs and get a feel for what others are doing. This will help you develop your taste.

Student: You make sound easy Chase. lol

Me: It’s quite difficult at times. I find the easiest recipe is to find something you want to say and commit to saying it. Again, not always easy, but always good.

Student: Well, I think i’m out of questions. Thanks for taking the time to help me. Hope you have a great summer.               Love, Chella

Student: P.S- I know you are going to be amazing at Harvard!

Me: It’s been my pleasure, kid. If any other questions pop up, don’t hesitate to hit me up.

Me: I’m going to try my best to make you proud.

Student: You already have!

The conversation did two things for me.

First, it made me realize I’m still a teacher. I know that sounds odd, but it’s been a huge fear since leaving the classroom. As confident and dedicated as I am to helping people learn, I was still mentally tied to the idea that the classroom or the official title was somehow tied to my powers of pedagogy. This lesson was just in time and just in need for my student and it showed me I am still a teacher.

Second, it made me think about what was necessary for the conversation to take place. Yes, the technology made it happen. I mean, it was a conversation about using technology as a forum for creation. It also could have happened without anything electronic. My understanding is there used to be these things called letters or missives. If my understanding is correct, my student could have sent me a letter with her questions and then I could have replied with my answers and questions. This process could have continued, similar to the one we used, interminably.

So, it wasn’t the technology that led to this learning.

I needed to know her. She needed to know me. Most importantly, she needed to know I cared and would be there if she had a question. I don’t remember making any statements as I was leaving SLA that I’d be willing to help kids with anything they needed. I’d like to think I didn’t have to. I’d like to think they knew.

Today’s conversation helped reinforce that belief.

As I continue to build systems and structures of care in my life, I will focus on and highlight the tools at my disposal for connecting and maintaining connections to people. Always and forever, I will highlight and nurture the caring necessary for community. Even if they’re multi-medium communities of two.

Things I Know 171 of 365: Teaching is no slap in the face

I touch the future. I teach.

– Christa McAuliffe

A lady sat across from me today and told me the story of how she came to be in the classroom this year.

She began the year in a role that had her coaching other teachers in her school. Out of the classroom, her goal was to help her colleagues improve their practice.

Not unlike many school districts across the country, this teacher’s school experienced a workforce reduction due to budget constraints.

In October, she was asked to enter the classroom again.

I listened sympathetically as she explained her growth as a teacher had been put on hold this year as she attempted to create order and structure in a classroom that had already seen two other teachers in as many months of school.

As she explained the difficulties of grappling with unexpectedly teaching two separate disciplines, I understood her frustration.

What I could not abide and what has me seething long after our conversation was the way she described the call to return to the classroom.

“It was like a slap in the face.”

No. It wasn’t.

It was a call to return to the classroom. It was the entrusting of the children of others into your care. It was continued employment in the face of layoffs of colleagues.

It was a chance to make an impossible world possible for a child. It was the call to teach.

And, yes, it was difficult and a divergence from the plan at the beginning of the year. Yes, it required growth and stress and sacrifice.

I have and will continue to spend time and energy working against systems so broken that they produce schools and teachers like this.

Today, though, those systems were not sitting across from me.

It is far too difficult to criticize teachers today and receive the title of champion in return for your efforts.

In a moment in time when so very little is expected of teachers, when a teacher is simultaneously the most important factor in the classroom and the least trusted, the profession could do without maligning from within.

Teachers across the country who want nothing more than to build classrooms of caring, learning and inquiry next year are searching desperately for places to teach.

Meanwhile, children are being packed into larger and larger classes, receiving less and less personal attention.

That is the slap in the face.

The fact that this woman has a place to teach, that is a gift.

Things I Know 167 of 365: ‘I don’t know, but…’ is sexy

It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.

– President Abraham Lincoln

Pay attention, because you won’t hear this next sentence from me again. Abe was wrong.

Peter Senge writes, “School trains us never to admit that we do not know the answer, and most corporations reinforce that lesson by rewarding the people who excel in advocating their views, not inquiring into complex issues.”

If this is the case, Senge’s other supposition that business leaders are trained to ignore systems thinking or see issues more deeply because of similar school training, an amazing opportunity exists for teachers.

I struggled with this all through the school year. On vocabulary quizzes, I asked students to use each word in a meaningful sentence to demonstrate their ability to use a word in context.

“Even if you don’t know,” I would tell them, “write something down.”

My mom always said, “If you don’t ask, then the answer is always ‘no,’” and I was attempting to apply the same logic to the quiz.

No matter how emphatically, personally and repeatedly I urged, students left blanks on their papers.

Later, I’d inquire as to why.

“I didn’t know it.”

“You realize, writing anything down gave you more of a chance than leaving it blank?”

“Uh-huh.”

I went out of my mind.

Senge sums up the problem nicely.

My students weren’t showing me they didn’t know the answer. They would have to write something down to do that. Instead, they were showing me they could choose not to write an answer.

Setting aside all I could have done to improve their learning of the vocabulary, let’s focus on what I could have done – what all teachers can do – to improve the rate of response when students feel they are in the dark.

The best answer for my money is giving classroom credence to some variation of “I don’t know, but here’s my best guess.”

“Even if we feel uncertain or ignorant, we learn to protect ourselves from the pain of appearing uncertain of ignorant,” Senge writes.

Certainly, by the time I met them in high school, my students have learned the survival techniques.

Creating a classroom culture that honors “I don’t know” is a difficult proposition. It works against the majority of what students have been taught and what led most teachers to the classroom. We are there because we knew and kept right on knowing until we were charged helping others know.

If our students sense even a fragment of that path on us as we walk in the door, imagine the intimidation they could feel.

A student once admitted to me the reason she hadn’t turned in a single assignment for the first month of class was that she worried nothing would be good enough.

I failed.

Yes, some of this rests in the foibles of the students, but a chunk of it belongs to me. My job was to make “I don’t know,” cool and to set a tone that helped students see value in whatever they created.

Eventually, the student began submitting work, but it pains me to think of what I missed in that month.

The four most powerful words in any classroom should be, “I don’t know, but…”

Things I Know 160 of 365: This is what it’s all about

I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day.

– Smokey Robinson and Ronald White

Watch this.

It was how the last class I’ll be teaching for the foreseeable future began.

I cannot think of any better way to wrap up my teaching career at SLA.

I knew I wanted to write about it. In fact, as I started to plan this writing in my head, I began with something like, “I know this isn’t what it’s all about, but…”

I mulled and I mulled and I mulled. There are ciders and wines that have seen less mulling.

My conclusion – this is what it’s all about.

If it weren’t me who walked into that classroom and the video depicted some other unsuspecting teacher being serenaded by his class, I would venture to guess that that teacher had done well. I would watch that poor sot get surprised by his students, turn to you, and tell you he’d done something right. Because all I want in this world is for anyone who hears about them or meets them to realize how wonderful my students are, my instinct was to downplay any role I may have had in inspiring the song.

I frequently reprimand other teachers who denigrate or allow others to denigrate the impact and importance they hold in the classroom. I suppose this means I need to own these things myself as well.

So, I say proudly, moments like these are exactly what public education is all about.

If it’s about creating community, done.

If it’s about being a positive force in the lives of my students, check.

If it’s about building a safe space for children to be silly, yes.

If it’s about nurturing creativity, sure.

If it’s about developing strength and confidence of student voice, roger.

If it’s about helping students see the value of creating authentic moments of support and compassion in the lives of other, alright.

If it’s about staking out a claim within the teaching profession that means seeing every student as completely as possible every day, got it.

If it’s about establishing caring relations with each person in my charge in a way that inspires reciprocity, mission accomplished.

In the last class of my last day, my students gave me something I will always cherish – a reminder that I am loved.

Things I Know 152 of 365: Kirstie graduates today

The race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself.

– Mary Schmich

At 8 pm tonight, my sister Kirstie graduates from high school. I’m back home in Illinois at my dad’s house for the occasion.

Kirstie is 12 years younger than I am.

She will forever be the same age as the last class of my students I will see graduate. I realized this on the plane ride last night and almost turned to the stranger next to me to share the news.

My other sister, Rachel, is another keystone of my teaching career. The first time I stepped into my own classroom in Florida, my eighth graders were starting the same year of instruction as Rachel was back up in Illinois.

Though the ages of my students have fluctuated as I’ve taught different grades, I know that those from that first class who went to college just finished their third year.

Next year, as Kirstie begins her first year at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, I’ll think of this graduating class of SLA students who will be starting their full-time college careers all over the country.

My students will be taking all sorts of paths once they leave our halls and classrooms. My connections to past students on Facebook have taught me this. Still, Kirstie will be my bellwether of where they are in their lives. For every milestone in Kirstie’s life over the next few years, I’ll wonder about the same milestone in the lives of any number of students.

This is a change.

For the past 8 years, my students have unknowingly filled in for my siblings.

For each teen drama, every end-of-quarter stress out, all the proms and formals – I watched my students feel their way through the chasm of adolescence, thinking of my siblings stumbling along their own paths hundreds of miles away.

My students have helped me come to terms with choosing to move away from my family after college. The pieces of their lives they brought with them to school and allowed me to counsel them on helped me to be at peace with not helping my siblings work through those same experiences back home.

While always my students, in moments, they let me care for them as a big brother.

In the same way I hope Rachel, Kirstie and my brother Taylor will choose their own paths in life and go where their passions take them, I have done the same.

At mile 10 of my first marathon, my friend Julie, with whom I had run almost all of my long training runs, turned to me.

“Ok, Zac, go.”

“What?”

Julie had a slower pace than I did. She was telling me to leave her behind.

My gut resisted the idea.

“No. I’m fine running with you.”

“Zac,” she said with a sternness that was impressive 10 miles into a marathon, “run your own race.”

I did.

We both finished the race. Had I stayed with Julie, I would have felt the frustration and pain of running someone else’s race. Had she run at my pace, Julie would have felt the same pain and frustration.

We each needed to run our own races.

This is what I want for Kirstie. It is the same thing my students have afforded me as a long-distance big brother. It will be the thing my sisters and brother afford me as I leave the classroom.

At 8 pm tonight, my sister Kirstie graduates from high school and passes another mile marker.

Run your own race, Kirstie.

Things I Know 144 of 365: I learn by teaching

When someone reflects-in-action, he becomes a researcher in the practice context. He is not dependent on the categories of established theory and technique, but constructs a new theory of the unique case.

– Donald Schön

As of tomorrow, SLA will have been host for two weeks to 5 pre-service teachers from Millersville University. They’re part of a larger cohort taking part in an urban seminar built around the idea of providing experience in urban classrooms to pre-service teachers who would otherwise not have such exposure.

I’ve been happy to have them.

No part of that has come from any excitement over providing these students with a taste of the urban teaching experience. Sadly, SLA isn’t the average urban school.

Instead, my excitement has come from the thoughtfulness in my own practice inspired by, in some small way, being responsible for helping future teachers learn their craft.

I gave Spencer, the student assigned to my classes, room to teach a lesson to my G11 classes today.

He did well.

As we were processing the lesson, I talked to him about having students share their thinking with the person sitting next to them and then sharing out what they heard with the whole class.

I explained it helps encourage active listening, takes off the pressure of having to say something original on the spot and builds their summarization skills.

As I was talking, it occurred to me that I had done the exact opposite during the first period when I randomly called on students to answer questions or offer their thinking on a text.

“Let me explain why I didn’t do any of what I just suggested with the earlier class today.”

In an average day with just my students and I in the classroom, I probably would have taken the advice I’d just given Spencer when working with the G11 classes and employed the random calling method with the senior class, thinking nothing of the disparity of the two approaches.

Held up to the mirror of attempting to explain my pedagogy and practice to someone I was attempting to help prepare for a teaching career, understanding my rationale became suddenly important.

The concepts with which we were dealing in the senior classes have been the topic of our learning and inquiry for the past month or so. By this point, any question should be met with a confident and thorough response. What I was doing was meant as a quick formative assessment to help me decide if they were ready for the next step.

The ideas with which Spencer was asking the G11 students to play were newer, fresher and unanticipated. Giving the students time to think about their understandings and perceptions around the issues would have insured a deeper and more thoughtful conversation.

It didn’t take me long to realize my reasoning. I wasn’t even making excuses. Those were truly the reasons I’d suggested approaching the classes differently.

Because Spencer was there and because I very earnestly want to help him and the others of his cohort meet with as much success as possible when they enter their student teaching experiences and eventual classrooms, it was incumbent for me to pull my thinking apart and explain it.

And aside from all the teaching of pedagogy, being mindful of someone observing my classroom and teaching from a place of curiosity has made me a sharper teacher over these past two weeks.

I’m going to miss Spencer and the others next week. They’ve helped me be a better version of Mr. Chase.