Teaching is hard. It's tough to teach kids, teenagers, or adults for several hours a day, every day, every week. It's no wonder we often turn to the teacher's edition of textbooks for methods and for content. It's difficult to find the another interesting poem to teach or to devise a new project that will get at the heart of our subject area.
For me, keeping my teaching fresh and original is an important way for me to stay excited about working in the field of education. I love playing with new ideas and testing new texts and projects out in the classroom to see what will happen.
Here are my five strategies for keeping my teaching creative and stimulating:
1. Teach to the Unexpected. Education around the world is moving increasingly towards standardization. Teachers are required to teach the same content in the same way. School districts ask students to produce the same results. Thanks in part to No Child Left Behind in the United States, this way of thinking about education is being exported to other countries, particularly here in Mexico. In contrast to standardization, what excites me about education, is the possibility of what is to come. I love to introduce a literacy or arts project, and see how my students will respond differently, each in their unique way; it is precisely that sense of excitement about the future that keeps me engaged in the educational process with my students. The other day in class we read the Langton Hughes's poem "Aunt Sue's Stories." After reading about Aunt Sue's stories, "right out of her own life," I asked my students to think of stories that are from the distant past of their families, stories that have been passed down for generations, stories that seem larger than life, and may or may not be true. We told these fantastic stories from generations ago in Mexico, stories that seemed to leap off the pages of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez, novel. I would love to teach this class again a million times, because the lives of students are never boring, and so, neither should our classrooms be.
2. Read. There are many times throughout the week when I would rather just relax and watch a movie or a television show, but my best ideas for teaching come from reading diverse books. The key for me is reading a bit every day, from different genres: popular magazines, graphic novels, classic texts, or books about education. At the moment I've been jumping from a copy of the magazine Ode someone lent to me (found a good piece about traveling open roads, a unit I teach with my Advanced English students) to Pedagogy of Freedom by Paulo Freire (Paulo Freire is one of my primary authors I turn to to reflect on education) to Moby Dick (I like to revisit books I loved in the past.) For me, this jumping around from book to book exposes me quickly to a wide range of texts and I often think of ways to use them throughout the year.
3. Collect Idea from the Internet. I find the best way to do this isn't just to randomly search via keywords. For instance, if we're exploring Where the Wild Things Are with the kids at our school, typing this into a search engine usually reveals activities that rarely get at the center of the text. The most inspirational sites come from recommendations from friends (and usually the ones that are younger than I am). Here are three of my recent favorites:
Six Word Stories BibliOdyssey Learning to Love you More
4. Collaborate with colleagues. When I teach with an extraordinary teacher, I learn what they do best, and I try to absorb these qualities into my practice. My colleague John Hanlon, early in my career, taught me how to structure daily lessons. Deb Christenson shared with me her passion and knowledge for teaching a subject rigorously. Len Newman taught me the importance of storytelling in the classroom, and artists like Erminio Pinque, Robert Possehl, and Mary Beth Meehan showed me how to create rich artistic processes for students in the visual arts. It's important to find as many opportunities as possible to teach with colleagues, from day-to-day teaching to collaboratively presenting at conferences. By working together, we grow together.
5. Observe. Many years ago, when I studied to be a teacher, we were required to shadow teachers in different schools for a day. It's easy to see how we might learn from a great teacher, but sometimes I would also have to follow a teacher that wasn't so good. In order to make the best of the situation, I always observed with an eye on the positive. Instead of thinking "How much longer am I stuck here" I thought to myself "What is one thing I can learn and take back to my teaching?" In the many years of sitting in classrooms and visiting schools since I've always observed my surrounding with an eye towards learning. It can be the small things that I take back with me. The other day in a classroom I loved the art tables the kids were working on, so I took pictures of the table and I plan to give them to a carpenter to make the same tables for classrooms. In some of my other posts on this site you can see some other ideas of observed while visiting schools in Mexico.
In the lobby of our school a sign on the wall reads "CREATE." This word in our entrance reminds all educators and students, we, as a community, have the power to shape the day's experience, to make it one of inspiration, rather than standardization.