Last week, I had the chance to watch many educators share their knowledge and thoughts, many of which I saw live as they happened, through Periscope with the #PassTheScopeEdu hashtag. When I learned about this event, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The topic for the day was re-engagement. As I think about my ten year teaching career, I find that even though I feel that “reengage” ties more into engaging the students in learning, my first thought was how I get reengaged. The past two years of teaching have been my hardest years to date – there were many MANY times where I had convinced myself that there was no WAY I was coming back to my school/teaching in general. It was too much, it was overwhelming and draining, and I felt like my heart wasn’t in it because I was just so stressed all of the time. My first seven years of teaching in a different district, I was given a lot of freedom in how I taught. The standards were the same, but we had the chance to make our own lessons, select our own texts, and be really flexible in our classroom management. When I moved to a new district, it felt like everything changed. I was no longer given the same opportunity to be creative like I had been in the past. I had to find some way to reengage so I wouldn’t lose my mind! Here are the revelations that I had that helped me reengage:
- Take the opportunity to be flexible. I spent so much time my first and second year in my new district thinking and feeling like my ideas were not valuable and I was breaking the rules if I stepped outside of the lines. My principal helped me realize that what was important was that I do what was best for my students. I tried to keep the main pieces in place, but threw in my own creativity here and there. I had to utilize the Problem Solving and Expertise-Based Theory from The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity to use my teaching expertise to solve problems in order to make sure my students could actually use the information I was giving them.
- Don’t put your stress on other people. There were many times during my difficult years that I was so stressed out that I felt like venting to others was making THEM stressed for me. I felt so guilty, which or course added on to my stress! I then realized that maybe that stress was being passed on to my students. When watching one of the Periscope videos, one “periscoper,” Jason, talked about starting with discussions of the growth mindset at the beginning of the year. As someone who is a perfectionist, I needed to pass this on to my students. With the pretests and baseline assessments going on at the beginning of the year, I wanted to make sure my students knew that they were not expected to be perfect. We have to find out where we are so we know where we’re going. If they don’t know how to do something, it’s because they haven’t learned it YET.
- BE PATIENT. An educator named Matt did a periscope on The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment – he said he knew it had nothing to do with re-engagement, but he wanted to talk about. When I thought more about it, it felt like a metaphor for patience, especially at the beginning of the year. I may be biased, but I think kindergarten is the grade when students show the most growth from the beginning to the end of the year. Many come in not knowing their letters and come out reading books. The downside is that the end of the school year leaves you feeling great – your students can read, write sentences, be self sufficient, etc. Then a new year starts. They can’t raise their hand, they can’t walk in line, some can barely write their name – it can be frustrating, because you forget what the beginning of kindergarten is like by the end of it. Like the experiment, I want BOTH marshmallows now – I want them to already be independent in reading and writing and math and behavior. I know it’s not logical, but it is what it is! I need to remember to be patient, and realize that we’re only 15 days in with 165 more days to go. If I can be patient and take things step by step, I will end up with more than I started with.
- Learning new things is critical! Every year feels like the same thing over and over – for 180 days, you’re teaching the same stuff in the same ways, often with the same result. I find that I reengage the most when I find a new idea that I am eager to try out. One of the periscopes I watched showed a teacher having her students participate in a process called “SCAMPER,” which has the students coming up with ways to reinvent new things – in this case, an Oreo cookie. How amazing is that? Trying to bring it down to kindergarten would require a lot of re-imagining, but pulling one activity out could help the students get the hands-on experience that drives most of them at this age while giving them the concrete learning that will help the ideas they work with “stick.” (Also, how cool would that be for a staff meeting ice breaker?!)
I realize that reengaging can be easier said than done. I’d be lying if I said there weren’t some days when I’ve thought it was impossible. If I can’t reengage myself, how can I even begin to reengage my students? Most of my students have not been in a school setting before, so it’s less re-engagement in a new school year and more engagement in school itself! I need to make sure that I mix things up for the students just as I need to mix things up for myself so that I can make sure we all make it through the year, because seriously, 165 days is a long time.
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