What is it about me that you can't teach?

I went to a wonderful in service this morning that made me want to be a better teacher. Dr. Eleanor Rodriguez spoke to several teachers about teaching all students. Here are some of the highlights (mostly because I want to document this great wealth of information as well as share it with other educators).

Dr. Rodriguez began with two essential questions:

How can we affect the lives of children? and What are your first thoughts as it comes to teaching every one's children?

She argued it's our task to provide an education for the students we have, not the students we had years ago, not the students we were in school, the students that sit inside our classroom.

Her area of expertise is students in the achievement gap and she talked about the difference between empathy and sympathy. Sympathy removes hurdles for students because we as teachers, feel that it's not fair that certain things are more difficult for some of our students. Howerer, sympathy does a disservice to our students. Dr. Rodriguez says, "I can do third grade work all life long if that's what you'll give me." But somewhere along the line this sympathy catches up with our students and we realize we've "moon walked" them to a place they can never catch up.

Another thing she briefly touched on, but as I sat there, I realized this has to be the cornerstone of every teaching professional is NAY. It stands for "not about you." It's not about me in the classroom. It's not about getting students to see things my way, getting my way, or how I feel. It's completely about meeting my students where they are, finding what makes it click for them and then doing whatever it takes to make sure they have those opportunities to make connections.

She showed this great cartoon that we constantly came back to. I searched the web for it but no luck. Anyway, it was a classroom and on the board it says, "Eggs Due Today," with a teacher collecting hard boiled eggs in baskets from her students. One student is off to the side looking confused. He has fried eggs on his plate. The caption reads: "Despite his best efforts, Phil struggled to fit in."

Dr. Rodriguez asked us if Phil had met the standard. She argued that the instruction must not have been explicit enough and therefore a student was confused. She helped us to think about how we can be more explicit in our own instruction by modeling and telling kids what we're learning, why where learning it, and how to use the new concept. "Today I am going to teach you how to use a __________. A ____________ is used for ___________. It is ____________. This is the way to draw the primitive."

Dr. Rodriguez pointed out 5 teaching and learning patterns that are successful with our achievement gap kiddos:

1. ritual

2. rhythm (which was demonstrated with several songs and dances throughout the morning)

3. recitation

4. repetition

5. relationships

She also gave us this acronym to use when thinking about how we learn:

D- doing

O- observing

L- listening

L- laughing

A- assessing

R- reflection

We had to think about how much of each we did last year in our classroom. From there we created a goal to work on for the upcoming school year.

At the beginning of the session Dr. Rodriguez has a slide. I've seen the quote before but it rang true by the end of her presentation. "A mediocre teacher tells. A good teacher explains. A great teacher demonstrates. A superior teacher inspires." Like I said earlier, this in-service made me feel more passion and excitement for the profession, it inspired me to want to be better.