What Did I Miss?
Looking back on my semi-hapless years in the classroom
I was a teacher for six years: four in an alternative school in Atlanta and two in more traditional schools in New York City. I think about those years a lot—what I did well, what I didn’t do well, what I knew, and what I didn’t know.
“What I didn’t know” was the biggest category by far, but at the time, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
Each school was a different kind of gig. In Atlanta, the school day was self-paced and the instruction was individualized. In New York, one of my schools was very traditional: five classes a day, academically tracked, 45 minutes per class, following a textbook. The second school was run on a 90-minute block schedule, and I taught the English/Social Studies blocks for classes of 7th and 8th graders, combined, following…well…my instincts (this was before state standards and mandated state tests before high school).
What each school required of me was a little bit different, and there are things I did well in each and things I did not-so-well.
What I actually knew about teaching, though, was…not much.
In my defense, I came to teaching kind of sideways and without much preparation. I had come home after finishing my MFA program in theater and I needed a job. My mother, a fifth-grade teacher, steered me in the direction of a friend of hers, a man who had just started an alternative school near my college campus.
The headmaster of this school decided that he liked me, and that was enough for him. He loved tearing up people’s resumes (back when there were paper resumes) and using interviews to get answers to the questions he cared about: did the candidate love their subject area, and did the candidate love kids. I guess my answers satisfied him, so he hired me.
He was one of the real gurus in my life, and I wrote about him on my old blog page when he passed in 2015.
Because the structure of the school was informal and self-paced and individualized, I didn’t need to know much about lesson planning, classroom management, or formal assessment. I just had to sit with kids, talk with them about the books they were reading, and help them improve their writing. I was a tutor more than a teacher, a big brother more than an authority figure, and I loved it.
When I moved to New York and decided to continue teaching to support my theater work, things changed. My first school was brand new—only a ninth-grade class to start—but its founder was very traditional. He wanted an old-fashioned structure with academically tracked classes and core textbooks and lesson plans submitted for review. It was his school, his pet project, and he wanted Control. He held assemblies every week so that he could lecture the students and so that they could come up and read poems in praise of him. He refused to let staff have the teacher editions of the new textbooks, because he thought it was a sign of weakness. He had a habit of interrupting classes whenever he saw fit, to bloviate on whatever topic he wanted to and undercut the teacher’s relationship with the class if he thought it was a threat to his cult of personality.
I did the best I could. A lot of it was challenging. I remember being horrified at how little I could accomplish in a 45-minute class period, compared with the open, unstructured time with students that I had gotten used to. It was hard to do anything deep or rigorous or meaningful. Of course, part of the reason why I couldn’t accomplish much was that I had no training in how to run a classroom.
My second school in New York was a little better, but having a 90-minute block carried its own structural and logistical challenges. I was given time each week to plan curriculum with my middle-school partners, but those sessions fell apart midyear when we started disagreeing and no one seemed willing to mediate among us.
If I had stuck with teaching in New York, I would have had to get a Master’s degree (another one) to get my official, non-emergency certification. One assumes I would have learned some of the things I was lacking. As it turned out, though, I only learned those things after I had left the classroom, once I started working in the Ed Biz.
When I look back now, after 25+ years in curriculum development, teacher training, and tech product development, I’m appalled at how little I knew about the job I was doing.
Here are some of the things I wish I had known or understood better when I was in the classroom:
Questioning Techniques. Asking meaningful questions is an art, as I wrote about here. It’s something I’ve paid a lot of attention to over the past 10 years or so, but I had no idea how complex and how important it was when I was at the helm of a classroom. I asked fact-based questions too often. I surfed over the heads of the kids too often, searching for someone who had the right answer—which was the least interesting and least useful bit of data in the room.
But wrong answers are often the most interesting, and pedagogically the most useful data in the room. Why did a student say “five” instead of “three?” Why did they think the event happened in 1861 instead of 1776? Where did that wrong answer come from? Pausing at the wrong answer to learn a little bit about how a student thinks can be hugely useful in helping a teacher guide and shape her instruction to be more effective.
If I could spend the rest of my career helping teachers and curriculum developers ask better questions and drive better discourse in the classroom, I happily would. It’s as important as anything I can think of. Feel free to offer me a job doing that!
Formative Assessment. I knew nothing about the art of assessment. I didn’t understand the difference between formative (a coaching exercise used to assess knowledge or skills in order to provide immediate and focused corrective feedback) and summative (an evaluative exercise used to validate achievement). There’s a difference between layup drills and a team scrimmage—between practicing your scales for your piano teacher and playing “Fur Elise” at a recital—and I didn’t understand the difference at all.
I didn’t have an arsenal of techniques at my disposal, either, like “fist to five” or “traffic lights” or any of these examples.
More importantly, I didn’t realize that it’s pointless to engage in formative assessment if you don’t have the intention of changing your approach (or the time to do so) (or a plan in place for doing so) in response to what you learn from your kids. Too many teachers give quizzes and then plow on with their pacing guide whether or not the students have demonstrated understanding and competence—because they treat the assessment as summative (judge them and move on) rather than formative (pause to fix things).
Backwards Design. When I moved from an open, unstructured school day to a very formal and tightly controlled classroom, I knew nothing about designing lessons or creating a curriculum, so I just…winged it. Mostly, I followed the literature textbook that had been given to me. We read stuff and we talked about stuff, then we moved on to the next bit because it was the next bit.
When I started working in curriculum development, I learned a ton. I learned about the idea of a gradual release of responsibility and techniques like think-alouds. That certainly changed my lesson structure.
What changed everything, though, was reading Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design, and learning about the idea of backwards design—starting with the end in mind—the big ideas or concepts you want students to end up understanding, and then working backwards, design an assessment of some kind that would demonstrate understanding of those big ideas, then stepping back to think about what students will need to learn and do in order to be able to complete that assessment, and then, only then, identifying resources and lessons to get at those concepts and skills. It’s so much more strategic and focused and…editorial…than simply marching through a textbook and covering Chapter 11 because it comes after Chapter 10. Maybe you don’t need Chapter 11 right now. Maybe you only need half of it. First you have to decide what you’re trying to accomplish.
Huge. Should have been obvious. Wasn’t.
Differentiating Instruction. I started out differentiating my instruction simply because the structure of the school was personal and individual. Everything we did, we did to to meet the needs and interests of individual students. When I moved from that to a structured classroom, I started planning for the group rather than the individual. I didn’t know how to incorporate any of what I had done previously into what I was doing now. I didn’t even think about it, to be honest.
As I learned more about Carol Tomlinson’s work in Differentiated Instruction, it became a topic of interest to me, and it eventually became the focus of my doctoral research.
Even before then, there were things I instinctively tried to do while I was teaching, especially when I had 90 minutes at my disposal. I tried to incorporate student choice in the curriculum where I could, to replicate some of the structure of the Ben Franklin Academy curriculum. But once again, I didn’t have any real processes or tools at my disposal, and I hadn’t ever seen it done in a normal classroom (which Tomlinson identifies as one of the major challenges her ideas still face). So, whatever I did was probably clunky and not as effective as it could have been.
So, that’s my Top Three “had I but known” list.
And listen, not everything about teaching is copyright-able techniques and evidence-based approaches and cutesy names like “fist to five.” Given how long we’ve been at this game, it’s probably safe to say that most of teaching has nothing to do with those things. Socrates didn’t seem to have anything at his disposal except an annoying habit of asking questions, and he did all right.
You could argue, as my old headmaster did, that the only thing that truly matters is having an adult who knows and cares about their subject and who likes talking to kids. And as long as the teaching is one-to-one or one-to-few, that’s probably enough. Gather your little group at the sacred grove and have at it.
But if we’re going to create systems and structures to process children through a formal education, forcing dozens of kids to sit still in a room for a long period of time, focused on topics not of their choosing for reasons rarely made clear to them, we probably need bookshelves full of techniques and approaches to make it all work.
I had moments at each of my schools—I know that. I had moments of connection and learning, moments where the lights came on and the mouths hung agape and you could feel new synaptic connections forming. There is nothing more exciting than watching those “Aha Moments” happen, and they did happen in each of my teaching gigs. I remember them.
But there could have been more of them, and they could have been distributed more evenly and consistently. I’m sorry I wasn’t better, or readier. Sometimes, I wish I could do it all again.