I was vulnerable. I shared my ACT score from my junior year. Sharing that was unthinkable for me a decade ago. It was a shameful, dark secret I was willing to take to the grave with me. But something happened in the past decade that made me willing to open up and share it.

I realized my true power in working with my students is not pretending I am perfect or that I know it all. That was the type of leadership I grew up. You couldn't show your weaknesses. You had to be this unflappable authority figure. I always think of General Patton when it comes to this.

But Brown argues - and this is something I've come to realize too - people today are more skeptical of that type of leadership than they are willing to follow it. You have to be vulnerable. People want to know their leaders are more like they are (flawed and mistake prone) than they want them to be like General Patton (who was certainly flawed and mistake prone, but leaders in those days never talked about any of that stuff).

As retired Green Beret Scott Mann said in a TED Talk I featured last year, "You have to show people your scars." That is what Brown's book is all about.

Give this book a read, it's in our Media Center (or at least it will be when I return it after MEA break), if for nothing else then it opens with the iconic "The Man in the Arena" speech from Theodore Roosevelt. See I'm vulnerable there. In years past I would have just pretended that I had read that in college and knew exactly what it was!

Week #7 - October 19-23

Teaching Thought #27 - Disrupt the Status Quo, part 1 (in your own classroom)

Research has shown time and again that young teachers struggle mightily (hence why nearly 20% of new teachers quit the field by the four year mark!). What researchers have found is that in order to survive many young teachers - who start out with grand schemes and ideals but are beaten down by the sheer amount of work that teaching is - abandon their new ideas and practices and - gulp - resort to teaching how they were taught.

If this is true, where is the progress?

Disrupt the status quo in your own classroom. Even if you had the most amazing teachers in high school or elementary school, try and improve upon their lessons instead of just mimicking them. Remember, if you are like me (I’m a Gen Xer) I am the first generation of American teachers to try and teach a generation of students who don’t learn like I did!

We can’t improve if we do what we have always done.

Teaching Thought #28 - Disrupt the Status Quo, part 2 (in your school)

One of my favorite quotes reads, “the most dangerous phrase in the language is ‘We’ve always done it that way.’”

Perhaps if your culture is off the charts, this isn’t the worst thing in the world, but I’m willing to wager that if the culture of your school or organization is off the charts, this phrase is never uttered.

All you have to do is look around for the outliers or purple cows to see how they are disrupting business as usual. I’ll give you a couple of examples - 1. How Coach Mumm gives money, car wash cards, and/or Prowler cards to the cooks, cleaners, and bus drivers throughout the year. 2. How Mrs. Shaw took one of her class Kayaking in the spring of 2019. 3. How Mr. Gullingsrud is willing to bring in guest speakers to his leadership class. 4. How Amy Looker and Kali Wanger were so instrumental in start the Prowler Pantry.

That should inspire us all to disrupt our status quo in school.

Take what they do and then build on it or put your own twist on it. That’s disrupting the status quo. In fact, it’s even better. It pushes everyone to get better rather than to sink down to average. And who wins? Students. What’s wrong with that?

Teaching Thought #29 - Think like a Chef

One of the best books I read two years ago was The Classroom Chef by John Stevens and Matt Vandrey. Even though it is about teaching math, any teacher can use the ideas and concepts in their book.

Their chief purpose is to make their curriculum meaningful. To accomplish this, they approach their curriculum from the perspective of a skilled chef at a fine dining restaurant as opposed to a simple waitress at a buffet.

I love these lines – “Boredom is the enemy in math class, and thousands of textbook pages are unwittingly soldiers of the enemy. In fact, much of traditional education lies in the enemy’s camp. To combat the enemy, we must identify which textbook pages are our allies and leave the rest of the pages idly on a bookshelf.” (20)

Stevens and Vandrey carry the whole chef/meal metaphor to another level in their book, but the biggest takeaway for me was the concept of “preparing a lesson” vs. “lesson planning.”

In short, lesson planning is just moving students from one objective to the next. Sure, they meet the standards and probably do just fine on the tests, but it’s lifeless and the students don’t learn a whole lot. They certainly don’t come away with a passion for the subject. Or if they do, it’s often in spite of the lessons.

Now, when it comes to preparing a lesson, well, that’s something entirely different. Here is what the authors say: “Preparing a lesson takes research and new ideas to push the learning toward the objective.” See, preparing a lesson is harder, but it’s worth the extra work.

Steven and Vaudrey have a four part method to preparing lessons:

1. Mark the desired outcome - Think backwards design here. What objective do you want kids to learn and walk away knowing? The authors note that our students are going to walk away from our units remembering something. Maybe it was how much it sucked. Maybe it was how much they hate your guts for making them put their phones away. Maybe it was that you got so mad you swore at them. The key though is this – work your ass off to make that one thing they remember meaningful (and hopefully tied it to what they are supposed to learn).

So what is the most meaningful thing you want kids to walk away from your class knowing? Then work hard to give them an experience that drives home your objective (more on that in just a bit)

1. Investigate - This can be accomplished by asking one vital question, “Does the objective show up in something in real life or in something interesting?” The authors state that they rely on “questions students can never answer using math, resources where math appears in the real world, or interesting applications of a mathematical idea or concept.” This is question is the key to developing that meaningful experience that sticks with kids.

The authors give an example that they use in their math classes: “Should people with smaller feet pay less for shoes?”

1. Scout out the day - Here the authors ask, How can I craft a lesson for narrative or flow? In this step, the teacher is looking for a way to make the lesson more unified and coherent as opposed to truncated from moving from one objective to another.

1. Enhance the lesson - The question here is “What part of the lesson is my least favorite?” Then how can you improve this? Here is a great place to ask for help from your colleagues.

These steps aren’t groundbreaking by any means, but they offer us an alternative to improving our lessons. When I read these, I didn’t suddenly try to overhaul every single lesson. Instead, I aimed to take one lesson a week through this process. Now that I’ve been doing that for two years now, it has become second nature. It doesn’t mean every lesson is amazing, but I have a far greater success rate with lessons that are prepared vs. my lessons that are just planned.

For more information check out the Classroom Chef website.

Teaching Thought #30 - Micro focus – Win the moment that you’re in.

You don’t have access to future moments. You don’t have access to past moments. The only moment you can access right now – and this is for everyone one earth – is the present moment we’re in.

Put enough of those moments together, and you’ve got a great class period. They all won’t be great. Trust me. But try not to have two bad ones in a row. Do that, and you’ll see the needle move in all kinds of ways: student engagement, test scores, learning retention, and simple enjoyment.

Teaching Thought #31 - Replace fear with wisdom

One of my favorite bloggers and podcasters is Tim Elmore. This blog post is so vital for us today: Five Destructive Parenting Habits We Must Replace.

I will be the first to acknowledge that there is not only too much on teachers’ plates (just the amount of standards we are supposed to cover), but there is simply too much on a school’s plate (mental health, school safety, funding, professional development, breaking the poverty cycline, healthy meals . . .). Trying to do it all is a never ending quest.

So I Thought I’d focus the next five teaching Thoughts on what we can do when a students parent doesn’t equip them with the skills or mindset they need.

And that’s where Elmore comes in. The first destructive parent habit that we have to dismantle is to replace fear with wisdom.

Elmore offers this to teachers when it comes to motivation: Our generation of parents are riddled with fear. We’re scared our kids won’t make the honor roll; they’ll get pregnant; they’ll get abducted, you name it. Even though research shows that “stranger abduction” only represents one-hundredth of one percent of all missing children, we fret like it happens in our town every day. School shootings scare us into keeping our kids close and in view at all times. Imagine the message this sends to our young: The world is evil! Don’t take any risks. Never trust anyone. It’s enough to produce the most anxious population of American teens to date. So here’s my question: what if we replaced motivating kids with feelings of fear with encouraging them by using words of wisdom. Simply offering logical wisdom for each decision completely reframes their attitude and stifles their inner fear. Let’s be rational, not emotional.

Fear-based Parent: You can’t walk to the mall! The traffic is horrible; you might get hit by a car and killed!

Wisdom-based Parent: You can walk to the mall if you’re with Ben or Collin. Be sure to look both ways before crossing the street. Text me when you get there.

In what ways can we shift from fear-based thinking in our classes to wisdom-based thinking?

The podcast starts off with a bang, thanks to an amazing quote from Tim Kight: "Genetics shape you, circumstances influence you, but your choices define you."

Wow.

One of the choices you can make is to learn to make the 'hard' choices. No one ever grows from taking it easy and being lazy. Well, you do grow, but not in the way you want to.

So think about how you can learn to say 'yes' to the hard things in your life and how to get your students to embrace the hard road.

Yes, hard times make hard people, but when you see the ones you love struggling, it sure doesn't sound the same.

Be kind and have compassion.

I need to do more of that.

This is a great tool for creating mind maps or interlocking systems of connecting ideas and concepts. I'm not a huge fan of brainstorming, but this website makes it work. I like how they allow for the user to not just connect ideas but then to branch out from their connections and even break off some of those connections into their own stand alone topics.

This reminds me some of what I'll talk about in a later newsletter: hexagonal thinking.

That is so true and this article does a great job of looking at the challenges (and some benefits) of the hybrid system.

It is harder than ever to engage kids when you just see a dozen blank boxes staring at you via Zoom because they don't have their cameras on. We have been encouraged not to demand kids have them on because maybe they're embarrassed by their homes or rooms. I get that. But is is much easier to engage with kids when you can actually see them and what they're doing.

It's even hard to engage them when they are in your room and have their masks on. It's hard to read their expressions. Who is laughing at my stories? Who is frowning? Who is all in and can't wait for what comes next?

Then there is the fact that our teaching isn't limited to just our classrooms anymore. I had a parent stop by for P/T conferences. She remarked how she liked seeing her son at the kitchen table doing his school work. I'm not sure if this was during our Zooms or if he was watching one of my tutorial video lessons I push out at least twice a week.

The parent said, "I can overhear you teaching. You're really funny. I don't know how my son doesn't keep from laughing all the time?"

I never thought of that before!

This new 'normal' is certainly anything but. That's the truth!

I had almost forgotten about this classic. Thanks to Coach Mumm posting it on Facebook again, I was reminded of one of the most powerful videos I've ever seen.

I also didn't realize one of the most amazing teachers I've ever had - Dr. Diane Drake, who was one of my amazing English professors at NCTC - is an alum of Middlebury college where this tradition occurs.

Enjoy it. You'll never forget it. If I were an administrator, I'd be trying to start traditions like this every single year. Think of the impact!

I am married to the most amazing person in the world, Kristie. It was love at first sight. At least for me. And it still is.

We have four wonderful children, Casey, Koko, Kenzie, and Cash. And now we have been blessed with five grandchildren!

I also happen to have the greatest job in the world: teaching English to high school students.

I am in my 23rd year of teaching at Lincoln High School. I graduated from Lafayette High School in Red Lake Falls in 1992. I decided to enter the field of education because of two amazing teachers, Mr. Mueller, my fourth and sixth grade elementary school teacher and assistant baseball coach, and Mrs. Christianson, my 9th grade English teacher.

I attended Northland Community College, and had my life changed by the amazing Dr. Diane Drake. Then I transferred to Bemidji State University in 1995. There I had amazing professors who further inspired me to teach English (Dr. Helen Bonner, Dr. Mark Christensen, Susan Hauser, and Gerry Schnabel). I graduated with my BS in English Education in 1997.

I student taught with the wonderful Lisa Semanko and then began teaching full-time at LHS in 1998.

I took a year's leave of absence in 2001-02 to return to BSU for my MA in English. There I had the privilege to teach and work closely with my greatest mentor, Dr. Mark Christensen. I earned my MA in English in 2006 and was honored with "Thesis of the Year" for my creative non-fiction, braided, multi-genre memoir, "Meeting Myrtle: A Biography."

In 2013, thanks to my dear friend and mentor, Dr. Jodi Holen, I was offered an adjunct teaching position fall semester at the University of North Dakota. Tuesday nights I teach Intro to Education: Teaching and Learning 250 from 5-8. Those three hours fly by in about ten minutes.

Then in 2016 I was blessed to win a WEM award (thanks to a nomination from a former student (and now an elementary school teacher), Ciera Mooney).

In 2017 I became part of the #pineconepd podcast club along with Brian Loe, Jeff Mumm, Kelsey Johnson, Kelly Weets, Josh Watne, Tevia Strand, Megan Vigen, Mariah Hruby, Laura Brickson, Loren Leake, Katie Hahn, Melora Burgee, and new members all the time. This has been one of the best forms of PD I've ever been a part of. They make me a better teacher every time we meet. Please think about joining us in the summer at the Pine Cone Pub from 6:30 - until we've solved all the world's problems. For that evening anyway.

Thanks to the inspiration of Shane Zutz (our former principal) I devised this as a way to distribute my Teaching Thoughts and add more content to, hopefully, help out and inspire others.

Email: kurt.reynolds@myprowler.org
Website: http://teacherscribe.blogspot.com
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