Teaching – Page 2 – The Writing-Based Curriculum

Category Archives: Teaching

Episode #3, Segment 1 – Louis Herbst on how he stumbled into teaching, the key to a good interview, why it is so great when a student says “why do we need to learn this?”, and the joys of teaching a student from 4 to 13 years old

Posted on December 17, 2013 by admin • 0 comment

Here at The Craft, I’m interested in the stories behind teaching, learning, and schools. What attracts someone to teaching? What keeps them in the game? How do we design truly meaningful learning environments? Where is schooling going? How can we be a part of helping to guide the evolution? In the first three episodes, I have focused on collecting the stories of teachers, very different teachers, to learn a bit about how they got into teaching in the first place and what keeps them in the craft. In each episode, I also ask the teachers what they want to talk about in terms of teaching, learning, and schools. So far, we’ve hung out with David Sokoloff, a Philly public school history teacher, and talked about the relationship between space and learning. We met with Amy Lafty, an Archdioscese English teacher, and learned about the challenges of being a mom-teacher, her push for project-based learning, and the phenomenon of prom. Now, hot off the USB microphone, we have Louis Herbst, a Swiss Army knife of a teacher, having taught everything from 6^th grade social studies to PreK through 8^th grade PE as well as serving as the athletic director, the afterschool enrichment coordinator, and summer camp director at United Friends School. We caught Louis just days before he jumped in his car with his wife and young son to head out to Scattergood Friends where he now is the Academic Dean at Scattergood Friends.

The truly dynamic teachers tend to be the ones who do not go into teaching through the traditional routes. I’m not talking about getting certified through Teach for America instead of the State. I’m talking about life trajectory. In this episode, you’ll hear a bit about Louis’ turbulent middle and high school experience and how that nudged him into teaching. You’ll also hear a bit about a really interesting non-profit he started in his undergraduate work that further pushed him towards teaching. Dynamic teachers also tend to not perpetuate the status quo. Louis’ rather unorthodox approach to the interview that landed him the job at United Friends is proof of that.

One of the wonderful things about Louis’ job at United Friends was that he had the chance to teach the same kids from 4 years old to 13, so he got to watch them learn how to tie their shoes and learn how to navigate the sometimes turbulent waters of adolescents. Louis shares a bit about how this experience has shaped him.

Because the conversation with Louis was so rich, I am going to divide up the episode into 3 bite-sized segments, each of around 20 minutes or so. Perfect accompaniment to a jog or a drive to work! In the first segment, we get to hear about Louis’ rather turbulent middle and high school experience that pushed him into teaching, his unorthodox interview tactic that involved robots and Henry Box Brown that helped him land his job at United Friends, what it is like to be able to teach a child from 4 to 13 years old, and why it is so great when a student asks “why do we need to learn this?” Enjoy!

Category: Teaching, The Craft | Tags: education, leadership, learning, middle school, Quaker Schools, School, students, The Craft

Writing Fairy Tales with Third Graders

Posted on November 7, 2013 by admin • 0 comment

Fairy Tales. What a cool form to explore with third graders. Magic. Good vs. Evil. A terrible problem that works out in the end. Right up the alley of 8 and 9 year olds who are more than willing to live in secondary worlds. I recently had the chance to open up the idea of writing fairy tales with a third grade class. The class was in the midst of writing various forms of short stories involving a classroom character that they had developed by the name of Kaitlyn Rose Anderson. The teacher wanted to challenge the students to write their own fairy tales involving Kaitlyn Rose, thus transferring what they know about the character into a completely new context – lots of potential for convergent and divergent thinking and writing to happen.

We started our exploration by doing a quick writing warm up: Make a list of names you’d like to be called. Here’s mine:

Frankenleif

The Stitler

Goose

Das Leifster

Foam

Nutty Nut

Longenfreugen

Nipsy

Stinky the Nudge

Partical Man

Pentagon

Limpy

Salty

Nimble Thimble

Of course, some students made a list of a names they don’t want to be called. Always good to break the rules in meaningful ways! Here are a few that made me pause:

Stupid

Unpopular

If that isn’t a window into where the third graders are right now, I don’t know what is!

After we wiggled our elbows for a good three or so minutes, I asked the students to pick their top three names off the list and to share those names with the person next to them. Laughter ensued along with many students saying how much they liked a name that was offered. We were definitely headed in the right direction. Our minds and hands were warmed up, and we had a good laugh. Once students shared their top three names, I mentioned how writers will often make lists of potential names for characters in their stories. I hinted that they may want to use some of these names in the story that we were going to write.

From there, we moved into exploring fairy tales specifically. I asked them what a fairy tale was, and with very little hesitation, hands raised. Through this conversation, we came up with a pretty sophisticated list of fairy tale characteristics.

I then asked them to come on over to the rug so that I could read them a fairy tale. They all scrambled over and we strategized together how to sit so that everyone could see – a classic challenge for young kids. Once folks were settled, I asked them to listen closely to the story to see if our list of characteristics stood up and to see if we needed to add anything to the list. I picked up Rumpelstiltskin by Paul O. Zelinsky, showed the front cover, read the acknowledgement, and began the story. The students loved it. I got the sense that several of them had never heard Rumpelstiltskin before. They pleaded with their classmates to not give up what happened next. They identified the king as a bad man but then wondered if the beautiful daughter would be able to change him over time. The room was mixed in terms of whether the daughter should marry the king. The students thought Rumpelstiltskin was pretty scary.

With a turn of the final page and a show of the back of the book, I then asked them if there was anything that we wanted to add to our list of fairy tale characteristics. The students identified two: The challenge or problem grows, and there is repetition. One student pointed out, “And the repetition can be things that characters say or do.” Good point. I added those two important qualities to the list.

I could tell that the students were itching to get started. Before we could jump to writing our own fairy tales, though, we needed to spend just a few minutes talking about this great classroom character that they had created. I wanted to make sure that she was in the front of their minds as they took on the challenge of writing their own fairy tale. We put the classroom character up on the smartboard, and I asked them to tell me a bit about Kaitlyn Rose Anderson. The students shared particular character traits that stuck out. They talked a bit about the stories that they had already written. I asked them to tell me the names of some of the other characters in those stories. The students mentioned Kaitlyn’s sister. I suggested that they may want to include these characters in the fairy tale. I also suggested that they may want to take a fairy tale that they know and write Kaitlyn into it. I posed the question: What would happen if Kaitlyn was in Rumpelstiltskin? There was a buzz. One student asked, “Can I write the next chapter of Rumpelstiltskin?” I nodded. Another student clapped her hands together, “Can I mash a bunch of fairy tales together and see what happens?” The class loved that idea. And with that, I sent them back to their writing tables.

Just before we got started, the teacher piped up, “What other fairy tales do we know?” The group came up with a long list. Fairy tales were definitely in their minds. They were ready to write.

I posed the challenge to them: write a fairy tale that involves Kaitlyn Rose Anderson as a main character in the story. Before I sent them off to their writing spaces, I mentioned that one of the great things about fairy tales is that they kind of supply the opening line for us, so we don’t need to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to start. I encouraged them to literally take the first line out of Rumpelstiltskin, Cinderella, or Kate and the Beanstalk, and see where the writing takes them.

Once there was a poor X who had a beautiful X.

Long ago, a girl named X lived with her mother in a X.

In a time not too long ago and in a land much like our own, there lived a X and a X.

Students were already scribbling away, so I stepped aside, got out my own pad of paper, and let them write.

At first there was a bit of chatter. Students were looking at each other’s writing, pointing out how to spell a word, asking a question, flipping through the pages of Rumpelstiltskin for inspiration or just to figure out how to spell the name. After a bit, I coached, “Let’s put all of that talking energy down on the paper. Work to answer your questions through the writing. See if you can fill a page.” The room quieted down, and you could practically feel the focus in the room.

About ten minutes in, I broke the silence, and suggested some ways to keep going: “If you are finding yourself thinking a lot instead of writing, take a look over here at our list of fairy tale characteristics.” I pointed to the list. “They might give you some ideas on where to go next. For example, is your problem growing? Where is the repetition? Do you have a bad character? Another thing to do is to read what you have written. Just by doing that, you will probably find what needs to be written next.” I looked out over the group, “I also like how some of you are going back to your first story and reminding yourself of what you wrote. I can see how that might trigger an idea or two as well.” I clapped my hands, “Alright, back to it. Let’s see if we can write for another five minutes or so.” The students put their heads back down and went back to writing.

Before we knew it, the time was up. I needed to leave, and the kids needed to go to lunch. On the way out, I touched base with the teacher, and the plan is to give them a chance to read what they had written so that they can immediately hear the possibility in the writing. Looking beyond that, the students will get a chance to choose one of three drafts of different stories involving Kaitlyn Rose Anderson that they will get the chance to revise, edit, and publish. Not a bad use of an hour of class time if you ask me!

Category: General Writing Ideas, Teaching, Writing-Based Curriculum | Tags: elementary, English, fairy tales, Language Arts, literacy, School, students, teaching, writing, writing-based curriculum

Twenty Signs of a Real World Classroom or How to Avoid Schoolification

Posted on October 16, 2013 by admin • 0 comment

One thing I love about teaching – good teaching – is that it is inherently subversive. Good teaching challenges the status quo because deep learning is subversive as well. Developing enduring understandings never happens by the book. It happens in times of real world engagement, when what we think we know is challenged, and we need to adapt and modify in order to make something significant happen in that real world. Too often we lose sight of this in schools. Instead, we spend all of our mental and physical energy designing teaching and learning to be the exact opposite of subversive. We work, against our better judgement, to sanitize the learning, to make it predictable and safe. And we have many forces at work encouraging us, even supporting us, to do this: scripted curricula, overuse of standardized tests to measure learning, large class sizes, etc. In this kind of environment, it is easy to schoolify learning. Schoolification is when we take a real-world practice (e.g. writing, geometry, physics), and we remove any of the real-worldness out of it to manage it as a subject instead of treating it as a way of being in the world. Ironically, what we need to be doing in schools is designing learning to not look, sound, or feel anything like what students and teachers commonly define school as and instead create learning opportunities that more closely reflect how we develop understandings and make things happen in the world. We need to do this not only because it is the way we truly learn but also because schoolification has a tendency to encourage several nasty habits: a fixed-mindset and co-dependent behavior when it comes to learning, and lack of resiliency when it comes to challenges. So, in an effort to support learning environments that foster creative, risk-taking, and persistent teachers and students, here is a list of 20 signs that you are designing a real world classroom.

1. The culmination of schoolwork is designed to be put back out in the world in a meaningful way through performance, publication, community engagement, etc.
2. Textbooks are viewed as one of many resources students can use to develop purposeful understandings
3. Teachers use the word “uncover” when talking about teaching and learning
4. The majority of the work is appropriative, meaning students are being “specialists” in the field – scientists, mathematicians, writers, historians, artists, linguists – rather than students of subjects
5. Teachers are positioned as these specialists too, living the life of a scientist, for example
6. Lessons and/or units are contiguous. They are connected and build on one another. Students are expected to be able to bridge skills and concepts from one unit to another
7. Students want to keep their work from past units because it is useful in the present
8. Teachers and students find multiple uses for work
9. The teacher finds him or herself grading different pieces of work from all of his or her students in a given unit, making it a learning opportunity for the teacher
10. Difficulty, challenge, and obstacles are purposefully constructed and celebrated because teachers and students know that life is a series of difficulties, challenges, and obstacles
11. These difficulties, challenges, and obstacles are solved collaboratively
12. Teachers and students work together. The teacher is doing the same work as the students because the project is genuinely interesting to him/her as well
13. The teacher is a learner and the students are teachers
14. The teacher is often heard saying things like “I’m not sure. What do you think?” or “How could we figure that out?” or “What kind of work could you do that would help you figure out how to answer that?”
15. Questions are celebrated and answered by the group
16. Teacher provides scaffolding for projects, coaching students along the way, creating avenues for students to share progress, ask questions, discuss models, and collaboratively solve problems
17. Evaluation is constructive and focuses on quality criteria – what does strong work look like in this vein?
18. Teachers and students see real world performances as a source for evaluative feedback and create opportunities for purposeful reflection on these events
19. Teachers and students are constantly looking at models of the kind of work that they want to do
20. The germ for the idea for a unit comes from a challenge or a project that the class wants to take on. It is borne out of the heads of the teacher and/or students

Category: Teaching | Tags: 21 century skills, challenges, high school, high school students, learning, middle school, School, students, teaching

What does it mean to be a writer? Ask a fourth grader

Posted on June 1, 2013 by admin • 0 comment

What does it look like, sound like, and feel like to be a writer, reader, and thinker in the world? This is the overarching question that fuels teachers who design writing-based curriculum. They are constantly scheming and planning how they can design learning environments where students and teachers become many different kinds of writers over the course of the year. One of the rituals of the writing-based classroom is to think critically about the writing work that has been done over the year as a way to process the work, deepen the learning, and set future writing goals. The questions that teachers ask their students are pretty simple:

What have you learned about being a writer?

What is your favorite piece and why?

What do you like about writing?

Bonus question: What do you want to get better at as a writer?

The way in which students reflect on these questions depends on their developmental level. Pre-K students talk about the questions as a group with the teacher writing down what she hears. 4th graders write down their own answers to the questions. Teachers collect the responses and use them to reflect themselves on the year and to plan for next.

As this school year quickly comes to a close, teachers and students are in the throes of this ritual, and I wanted to share a particular class of fourth grader’s responses to the questions. For me it shows what can happen when we design learning environments where students and teachers are living a writing life together, where they are writing reflectively, creatively, and analytically out in the real world. Specifically, what I love about these responses is both the sophisticated writerly-sense that the 4th graders have developed over the year and the sense of play that they connect to the act of writing. The responses are also a guide for how we should be designing writing environments if we want students to truly be engaged and to feel that writing is a part of who they are.

1. What do you like about writing?

exciting stories from my imagination
making up fun awesome stories and characters
I like the part where you are kind of just thinking what you’re going to do.
I like when I try to put my own self in the story
I like when I’m about ready to go to the next chapter but before that I may leave a little “Cliffhanger!”
I like to have a sharp pencil.
I like when the teacher gives us topics.
I like to write stories about fairies.
My favorite part of writing is the editing because I get to go back and reread my stories and make sure everything is the way I want it.
A fun activity you can do pretty much everywhere.
Writing gives you the chance to write down what you’re thinking or about what happened today.
Sometimes I like to think about a book that I want to read but hasn’t been written yet, and then write it myself.
I love writing fiction stories.
What I like about writing is that I can just be free. I can just express how I feel while I am writing.
I love that you can pick your characters and their personalities.
You can use your imagination to create someone else’s reality.
Writing is a new way to let out your emotions on paper

2. What have you learned about being a writer?

have fun
use your imagination
get creative and write about what YOU want to write about
you need correct punctuation and uppercase letter
write about what you think you will like
all stories don’t have to be true – it can have talking bugs or whatever
you can always add people in it if you don’t have the people you want
Plan your story before you start writing
Don’t ever pick something you don’t like. Don’t pick it just because your friend is doing it.
Write a story that fits your personality.
An author should remember the Steps of Writing: Peer conferencing, editing, revision
Don’t get frustrated if writing a story takes a long time. Writing takes a long time.
Start with a good beginning.
Your book has to make at least a little sense.
Choose to write about something that you know a good amount about.
Be proud of what your wrote even if someone else does not like it.

3. What is your favorite piece and why?

Persuasive letter to Channel 10 – I had fun writing about it and used my imagination from my Robotics team
Friendship story – I worked hard on it and at the end it has this thing where it’s like a fable. Some parts were funny and some were sad.
My Dress story because this is the first time I actually wanted to keep writing all day long.
I liked my Time Travel and Special Place stories. I like them because they are very different than any other story I wrote.
I like my story about my dad because I feel like I got all the details from when he was 10 to when he is 50.
My favorite was my time travel story because I put a lot of detail in it and big adventures. I felt that I had a really good connection with the story and the characters.
My animal story because it’s different than anything else I’ve written. This story did not have a happy ending which is different for me.
I am proud of Chloe’s Dress Visit because when I wrote this I felt like I was a professional author.

Category: Being a writer, General Writing Ideas, Teaching, Writing-Based Curriculum | Tags: critical reflection, elementary, teaching, writing

Improvisation, Teaching, and Learning, Part 3 – The Significance of the “And” in “Yes…And”

Posted on May 23, 2013 by admin

Over the last few weeks, I have been exploring the usefulness of an improvisational mindset, specifically the power of “Yes…and” and the dangers of “No…but” in teaching and learning. In this post, I want to focus on the importance of the “and” in “Yes…and.” Seems kind of trivial, but in actuality, the “and” is the key to this improvisational rule. Without the “and” you have a surface, and sometimes mindless, acceptance of what has been offered. With the “and,” you have the potential to transform the original offer and in the process deepen relationships, solve problems, improve outcomes, and change your status.

“Yes” without the “and” places the sayer in a spectator role as opposed to an actor role. By only saying “Yes,” the person is passively receiving what is being given to him/her. As a result, the original offer becomes stagnant. It does not expand. Taken to the extreme, only saying “Yes” can have dangerous outcomes. There is a passivity in simply saying “Yes.” The ownership and the power rests with the person who made the original offer, and the receiver of the offer is merely approving it. On the other hand, there is a thoughtfulness to the “and” in “Yes…and.” It requires the receiver to not only accept the original offer but to add something to it, to take it to the next level, to put a little of him or herself in the “game,” and to share the responsibility of the success of the original idea. Patricia Ryan Madsen writes, “With the rule of yes[…and], we call upon our capacity to envision, to create new and positive images. This yes{…and] invites us to find out what is right about the situation, what is good about the offer, what is worthy in the proposal.”

The other day, I was writing with three classes of first graders. They had been exploring African animals and one of the ways that the teachers wanted the students to share their understandings of the African animals was through writing acrostic poems. To prime the pump, I first wanted the first graders to find their partner in the other class who was studying the same African animal, and sit down and have a conversation about what they had learned about the animal, using the notes that they had taken. Instead of organizing all of this for them, I challenged them to find their partner on their own – a true ill-structured problem. When I said “go,” the students started milling around, looking for their partner from another class. After about 15 or so seconds, a small group of students came up to me and said that there was a problem. One of the girls said, “you want us to be in pairs, but there are five of us who have the same animal.” Faced with this dilemma, I could have gone down a few different paths. The “No…but” path would have looked like this: in the essence of time, I would have solved the problem for them. I would have pointed to the first two girls and told them they were partners, the next-two girls and told them they were partners, and told the last three girls that they were a threesome and that it was ok. This path would have blocked the proposal that the girls were making – there was a problem that needed to be solved – and instead put me in the position of solving the problem for them. The “Yes…and” path looks quite different. Instead of solving the problem for the students, I said yes to their conundrum and I built on it by asking them to solve it. Now, what is interesting is that the students pretty much came up with the same solution that I would have on my own, but the important thing is that they came up with it. They put their brains in gear to figure it out and then were able to witness the affect of their problem solving strategy. The “and” in this case was putting the responsibility of solving the problem back in the laps of the students.

Employing the “and” in “Yes…and” can dramatically influence the power dynamics within a colleague to colleague or a faculty to principal interaction as well. In improvisation, power dynamics are often referred to as situations of status. Every interaction that we have with others involves the delicate interplay of status. Who has high status? Who has low? Does the status change because of the conversation? The interplay between teachers and between teachers and principals is fraught with status. In order to understand status a bit better, let’s take a look at the situation I described above.

When the students came to me with the problem, they were giving me high status. They wanted me to solve the problem. In this case, having high status was not the ideal position to be in in order for that moment to be a true opportunity for learning. I needed to change the status. I changed the status by employing the “and” in “Yes…and.” By accepting the students’ offer that there was a problem, and then building on that offer by suggesting that they find a way to solve it, I moved myself from high to low status in that situation and gave high status to the students so that they could have the power to solve the problem. Within school situations, it is important to remember that status is not static. It constantly changes, and we can make choices as students, teachers, and administrators in terms of the kind of status that we have in different situations. In Keith Johnstone’s words, status is “understood as something one does (his italics).” It is also important to remember that having low status is not a “bad” thing and that having high status is not an inherently “good” thing. Instead, if we are truly embodying an improvisational ethic, we are constantly in tune to the situation and what it demands in terms of status for there to be a positive outcome. Too often, I find teachers desperately trying to maintain high status in classroom situations when it would be better for them to move to low status. I can say the same thing for principals as well. High status is often falsely connected with control and power when really the power and control is associated with the kind of status that you choose to have in a given moment. Our power and our success as teachers rests in our ability to read a situation and determine the kind of status that is needed to move the situation in a positive and meaningful direction.

In this current teaching climate, it can be tantalizingly easy to keep our heads down and spend our energy just trying to get through the day, employing “No…but” strategies like keeping our classroom doors closed, not eating with our colleagues at lunch, avoiding the principal on the way out the door, and spending inordinate amounts of time talking about things with little to no action. What’s interesting is that keeping our heads down actually doesn’t make teaching, and our lives, any easier. Instead, it has the potential of keeping us in a static status state which impedes relationship building, creative problem-solving, and ultimately joy in our work. We need to constantly fight these blocking urges, and employing the “and” in “Yes…and” can help us do that. What is particularly liberating about emphasizing the importance of the “and” in “Yes…and” in teaching is that it reframes our work. The profession of teaching can often feel like only “Yes” work. We have a curriculum we need to teach. We have standardized tests we need to give. We have demands from parents to meet. We have committees we need to serve on. We have expectations and demands on us that we did not have a hand in making. By employing the “and” we take some of the power and the control rightfully back. The “and” creates a space in all of these demands to put our own stamp on them, to decide how we want them to go, to have a stake in the outcome. In this case, the “and” provides us as teachers a chance to have high status in an environment that attempts to put us in low status. Ultimately, the “and” in “Yes…and” is the impetus for positive change personally, professionally, and even societally.

Category: and Learning, Improvisation, Teaching | Tags: Improvisation, learning, teaching

Improvisation, Teaching, and Learning, Part 2: The Dangers of “No…but”

Posted on April 25, 2013 by admin

Last week, I started a series on Improvisation, Teaching, and Learning. You can read my first post here. Today, I want to dig a bit deeper into the idea of “Yes…and” by focusing specifically on the dangers of it’s opposite: the “No…but.”

In our current educational climate, it can be pretty difficult to practice the ethic of “Yes…and.” Regulations, hyper standardization, furloughs, ahistorical attacks on teacher quality, and the transitory nature of school leadership create a frigid atmosphere for accepting and building on other people’s offers. Instead, it becomes easier and easier to say “No…but.” This blocking move of “No…but” as a teacher often involves moves like keeping our heads down, closing our classroom doors, not volunteering for committees, adhering strictly to union protocols, not having our eyes and ears open for times to make connections, and giving way to stale curricula that we know doesn’t serve us or our students. These moves are understandable when considering the current circumstances mentioned above that many teachers face, but I would argue that it is precisely within these kinds of constraining circumstances that we need to employ an improvisational ethic.

Madsen says that blocking “is a way of trying to control the situation instead of accepting it…the critic in us wakes up and runs the show.” On the surface, this makes complete sense! The situation within a school is not good, not supportive, difficult, and our answer, as teachers, is to wake up the inner critic and defend against the sometimes dire situation in some way. Madsen writes, “We block when we say no, when we have a better idea, when we change the subject, when we correct the speaker, when we fail to listen, or when we simply ignore the situation.” Ironically, these moves, the ones that may even feel right in the moment, don’t move the situation forward. They don’t serve to fix the problem. They don’t make us feel better. Instead, they entrench the difficulty.

And it is so frustratingly easy to say “No…but!” Isn’t it? I am shocked by how often I find myself saying “no…but” in my personal life, let alone my professional one. I can’t tell you how many times I say “no…but” to my kids when I really could say yes. My kids ask if we can go for a bike ride in the park. My answer, “No, not now,” when we really could go. My kids make a suggestion for dinner. My response, “No…but how about this?” when we really could have gone with their suggestion. There are other more subtle blocks that I catch myself doing as well. I may not return a phone call or an email because of the challenging nature of it, for example. Or I may not take my students up on an idea they have for what we should do in class. In these situations, my eyes and ears aren’t open for the opportunity that is presenting itself. I am focused inward on myself, not outward to the collective. So what would happen if I said “Yes…and” to these things?

When I think about how I block my kids, the first thing I realize is how much less angst and frustration and just plain whining there would be if I said “Yes…and.” I also think about how me saying no is basically communicating to the kids that I am in control of the situation, that I know better than them, and that I will make the decisions for them. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are times when I do know better and no is the right response, but I have found that I can say no a lot less and in doing so, I honor self-determinacy. The “No…but” response sets up the potential for my kids to keep coming back to me for permission for things because they are afraid that if they don’t ask and do it on their own, I might get upset or punish them. Or, the exact opposite will happen where they will never consult me for anything, and just go off and do it on their own, because of the fear that I will say no and block the idea in the first place. I don’t want either of these scenarios. I want kids who feel in control of their lives and who see me as someone that they want to come to and consult.

I want to support my students in this way too. When they come to me and suggest an alternative to an assignment, more often than not, I need to accept that offer and build on it. When they don’t seem to be following through on homework, I can’t block that with my inner-critic. I need to accept it and build on it. When I don’t seem to have the best work relationship with a student, I need to open up, say “Yes…and” to the challenge and see what is possible. When I have a particularly challenging relationship with a colleague, I need to look and listen for those opportunities when I can share control with him or her. Ultimately, that move will bring me far closer to a positive end result.

Tomorrow, when you go into work, challenge yourself to say “Yes…and” to as many situations as possible. Work to accept the offers that are being made to you by your students, colleagues, and administrators and build on them in a positive, open way. This will feel funny at first, and it will be hard work. That’s ok. Keep doing it. Saying “Yes…and” will become more natural over time, and you will reap the benefits of it.

Next week, I’ll explore the often over-looked importance of the “and” in “Yes…and.”

Category: and Learning, Improvisation, Teaching, Uncategorized | Tags: "No...but", "Yes...and", Improvisation, learning, teaching