Working toward greatness
I'm a teacher. I want to do my job well, and I usually do. However, for a teacher to do his best job, he has to always be looking for ways to improve.
To improve, one has to challenge himself
The teaching world is changing. Today's teacher has far more resources available to him than he did five years ago, but all to often, teachers fall into a rut. They do the same thing this year as they did the year before and the year before.
Don't get me wrong, the teaching methods that I used five years ago still work. They still help students learn. I can achieve my goal with techniques that I have used before. However to be the best teacher I can be, I need to take advantage of new resources. New resources are only an advantage if a teacher takes time to use them.
A new opportunity
Recently, I got a set of Chromebooks for my science classroom. I got these in the middle of the year. I'm in a rhythm at this point; I've been teaching all year with the methods I've used in years past. I'm tempted to keep doing that til the end of the year. It seems so much easier to introduce technology and new methods at the beginning of a year. Next year, I'll have time to teach the kids how to use the technology from the beginning of the year, to teach them what I want them to do with the Chromebook and how I want them to give feedback. But if I do that, it will be an opportunity wasted.
I have to challenge myself to use my new resources now. That doesn't mean that I abandon my old methods, but what good is new technology if it isn't used?
Today, was a weird day at school. We have had thunderstorms and tornado warnings in the area all day. Many students did not come to school. So, when I showed up for my first period, I had half a class. The class was supposed to take a test today, but I wasn't going to give the test to half a class today and have to do the same next class. I had to think on my feet to give the students something productive to do. Today was an opportunity.
I have used my Chromebooks in class before, and I'm working to use them more. But they are still new to me and the students. Today gave me the opportunity to adapt on the fly. After seeing that I had half a class this morning, I quickly made an assignment for my students on Google Classroom. It was an educational assignment but a fun assignment. It was a virtual field trip to the San Diego Zoo.
Now, I say I made it. Well, I gave the assignment for the kids, but I got the assignment form a fellow teacher. The new technology gave me an easy way to use the hard work of my fellow teacher. She had made a wonderful webquest assignment for the students. All I had to do was assign it to the students, give them their Chromebooks, supervise them, and ask them questions to get them and keep them interested in the assignment. Getting the students interested was extra important today with half the class missing and motivation low. I had to change my excitement for the assignment with my students.
Share the excitement
It is important for teachers to share their excitement for their subject with the students. Excitement is contagious. It's also important for teachers to share their excitement with each other. As part of my exciting 'tornado warning' day, I got to go visit my old school to supervise some of my students there. While I was there, I saw one of my old colleagues, Jeremiah Veillon - math teacher. Now, Mr. Veillon is a math teacher and I'm a science teacher. Our subjects overlap in some ways, and we worked across the hall from each other for years. I know he is in the process of completing his doctorate degree, so I asked him how it was going.
This is a seemingly normal question to ask someone in school, but he got really excited, and his excitement showed. He started telling me about how he was changing his math class to be much more like a science class, teaching math concepts by application. He was talking about assignments that he was preparing for his students as part of his doctorate work. He wants to have his students investigate things. He wants them to measure which type of insulated cup works best. They will bring their own cups and be vested in the experiment. They will take data using Chromebooks and Vernier probes. They'll use the computer to graph their data and see that the graph flattens out approaching a limit. He can use this to teach the idea of an asymptote. The students can also see that the slope of the graph changes over time, and he can more easily explain to them that the slope is a rate of change. He can explain it more easily because they can see it!
Now, unless you are a math or science teacher, the discussion I had with Mr. Veillon may not be meaningful. What is meaningful though is that he was excited. He was enthusiastic about teaching and about teaching better, and his enthusiasm made me excited about teaching. Just as I shared my excitement for animals with my students, he shared his excitement of teaching methods with me!
