Stress - Don't Avoid It (Teach Students to Embrace It)

This time of year is often one of the most stressful in schools.  

It's usually a time with projects because you have learned enough to do something with your knowledge and far enough from the end of the school year to have time to grade them.  It's a time with yearbook deadlines, tech weeks, post-season games, and college acceptance/rejection letters.  For some reason, there is a week during this time of year when it seems kids are having a test in every one of their classes.  

Our impulse as adults is to alleviate all this stress in the name of mental health, but I would suggest instead that it is a time to teach coping mechanisms.  Removing stress may seems like it is good for them, but removing stress does not build strength. Coping with stress does.  It's focused on their future mental health.

In biology, we have learned that organism that don't experience stress die. Appropriate amounts of stress stimulate growth.  

Consider weight training.  You intentionally subject your muscles to a higher than normal load. The muscle fibers break down. But that causes them to rebuild with more dense connections. That increase in muscle density makes it less stressful the next time it experiences the same load, reducing future stress through response to current stress.  

Temporary life stress also causes us to respond. We develop coping mechanisms that we can employ in the future. We gain strength, knowledge, and skills that keep the same load in the future from being quite as stressful.

It's important to recognize the difference between stress and trauma.  Stress is an increase in load over your normal state.  Trauma is a load increase that is either high enough or comes on fast enough to break the dams of your coping mechanisms. 

Returning to the weight training metaphor - If you are at point where you normally bench press 50 pounds, and you put 60 pounds on the bar, you will likely struggle a bit, lift it with poor form for a while, and be rather sore at the end of your session. That's a stress that leads to growth and may eventually lead to ability to lift 100 pounds if you add to it incrementally as you adapt over time.  If, however, you put 100 pounds on your bar today, you will likely drop the bar on your chest and break your sternum or crush your lungs.  That's trauma - It's not possible for you to handle it with normal responses.

I'm not suggesting we subject kids to chronic stress all year in order to build strength. I'm suggesting that a week here and there of higher than normal stress need not be avoided.  They may look back at the end of it and recognize they are stronger than they thought.  They'll definitely learn to deal with future stress better.

The Antidote for February Fever - Remember Your Impact

Teachers, I have good news for you.  February is almost over!  February Fever used to get to me every year.  It's been a while since Christmas, and spring break is a way off.  There are unexpected interruptions to your routine.  You may have a little Seasonal Affective Disorder, and so do the kids.  

What I always found helpful during these doldrums of the year was to remember my purpose and my impact.  Rather than focus on the day to day grind in front of you, remember the long term. You walk into a classroom every day, expected to equip, challenge, and inspire every student. There are kids who will be able to read because of your work.  There are people who will go into medicine because of your inspiration. You have students who will carry a love of art, theater, or literature because of you.  If are being discussed at dinner tables, and you may continue to be discussed years from now when your students tell their own children about you.  You build up students into people with a broader view of the world than they would have if you hadn’t been their teacher.  It’s an awesome thing to consider.

One of the reasons I know this is true is the memory of my own teachers. You'll find stories of them in this blog because I write Thanksgiving posts about them. I was a nerd who loved school. I never viewed it as utilitarian, a way to get into college, or job training. I did, of course, love some subjects more than others. History was my least favorite.  Yet, I had a middle school history teacher named Mr. Watkins whose passion for the story of Czar Nicholas and Alexandra of Russia was so strong that I couldn't help but be drawn into it.  A decade later, I found myself in a Tulsa art museum with tears streaming down my face as I stood in front of Alexandra’s crown and a desk used by Nicholas.  I don’t normally have emotional responses to furniture and jewelry, but a teacher inspired me in a way that made me care (and had nothing to do with getting a job).

Students don't always tell you the impact you are making, so when they do, hang onto it.  If you get a nice email from a student or parent, keep it in an encouragement folder so you can revisit it when you need to.  Keep a box or drawer for the random little tokens of affection you get (random drawings, silly inside jokes, end of the year notes, etc.).  When someone does tell you how you affected them, hold onto it, and remember that there are likely more of those stories you don't know.

I occasionally run into former students of mine in public.  I have run into them at movie theaters, grocery stores, and even airports.  There is nothing quite like the feeling of hearing "Miss Hawks?!?" from across a room.  Since I began working at the YMCA, there have been a surprising number of encounters with those I once taught. Some are there to get their lifeguard certifications. Others are there to work out in the gym or play basketball.  Some come in to bring their kids to swim lessons. Whether I had them last year or two decades ago, they stop by the desk and remind me that there is impact beyond the year I taught them.

Quite some time ago, I was in a restaurant.  A young man excitedly said my name.  It was a young hot head a taught in a school where I only stayed for one year (a year I often gloss over when thinking about my career). He turned to his friend and said, "This is the teacher who put up with all my crap."  Yep, that's exactly what I was.  I don't know what impact that had on the man he is today, but I hope it had some.

The only reason I had an influence on any student is because my teachers influenced me.  It's a chain reaction, and you are part of that chain.  

Formative Assessment - Part 3 - Secondary Effects

All educational practices, both effective ones and ineffective, have side effects.  

Some side effects are undesirable: 

• lost instructional time from over-adherence to inquiry
• lack of development of organizational skills because Google Drive is searchable and doesn't require organization
• lost focus from attempted "multi-tasking"
• anxiety from large amounts of high-stakes testing

Some side effects (even from the same practice) are great:

• increased relationship development during an inquiry experience
• students with ADHD not losing all of their work because Google Drive is searchable and doesn't require organization
• recognition of how important focus is after an attempt at "multi-tasking"
• recognition that you are stronger than you think you are when you persevere through a time of high-stakes testing.

I have noticed some side effects of implementing intentional formative assessment in my classroom.  I have yet to find an undesirable effect, but there are three strong upsides that I have particularly noticed.

1.  Keeping them on their toes

It is possible for apathetic students to go entire days without paying attention to the teacher.  If teachers are merely calling on those with their hands up, the uninterested student can simply not raise his hand. If she knows she has tutoring later, the uninterested student might check out and do some online shopping, knowing she can learn it later. 

Without checking for understanding, a student can get all the way to test day without a teacher ever knowing he is lost. 

I like it when educational principles show up in my life outside of school, and this is one of those times.  I mentioned a few weeks ago on this blog that I have been attending a liturgical church for about a year.  Liturgy often involves a fair amount of call-and-response style participation from the congregation.  A couple of weeks into my attendance at this church, I said to a friend, "There is no way to let your mind wander there." She asked what I meant, and I showed her the bulletin.  "Everything in bold print is something I'm supposed to say.  So, I can't let my mind wander because I've got a line coming soon."

Ongoing formative assessment that requires participation from all students is just like that.  They have a line coming soon.  It keeps them engaged because they know they will be asked a question about what they are doing now about three minutes from now. No one wants to hold up their mini-whiteboard to show a ridiculous answer, so after a few questions, when they realize you really are going to keep doing this, they usually pay better attention.

2. It is motivating to know what your progress is

Have you ever suffered from the illusion of competence?  You know what I mean, you studied for a test, and you were sure you were going to ace it until you actually had the test in front of you and realized you didn't know much.  

Students who are engaged in regular formative assessment have much less of that experience.  Not only do you have frequent check-ins with their understanding, so do they.  Is it a bummer to get a question wrong? Yes.  But that is not a reason to abandon a good practice.  When they get it right the next time, call out how far they have come. "Remember when y'all couldn't do that?  Look at you now, doing it well. Thanks for putting in the work." 

There is not much that encourages people to grow like actually seeing their growth. It's why people in weight loss programs weigh themselves. It's why coaches show their teams game footage.  I'll give you another example from my outside-of-school life.  A few months after I started taking cycle classes at the Y, I began setting goals about distance, tension level, and power on the bike.  At first, I only knew how to check these statistics at the end of a class. I was often surprised to get to the end of a workout and find that I hadn’t achieved as much distance as I had thought.  Because I wasn’t tracking that information at all during the class, I didn’t have the ability to make adjustments that would help me reach my goals.  I could do better on a different day, but I didn’t know how to do better at the moment.  Then, an instructor showed me how to use the bike’s computer to see real time information during class by changing the display screen.

Checking the number on that screen was motivating because I knew if I needed to speed up or turn up the tension. I could adjust my course of action based on what I was seeing.

But be careful, you can have too much of a good thing. I found it was tempting to stay on that screen.  After all, feedback is good, right?  We like having constant access to information, but I quickly learned that was unwise.  It made me so focused on the number that I couldn’t pay attention to instructions.  Worse, I was so focused on the number that I couldn’t enjoy doing the things that would improve the number, and I was in a state of panic if the average didn’t move as quickly as I thought it should.  Worst of all, I wasn’t building any internal sense of how to improve because I was relying too much on the bike itself rather than how my legs felt or my perceived level of exertion.  Eventually, I disciplined myself to only visit that screen once every four minutes.  That gave me enough information to figure out what I need to do to make progress for the next four minute check, but it didn’t do my thinking for me.

The same is true in formative assessment. Stop and check at the crucial moments and the hinge information, but don't make them sick of hearing "Take out you whiteboard."

3. The joy of more classroom interaction

I mentioned earlier that it is possible for a student to go through a day without paying attention. It is also possible a for an introverted student to go through a day without having anyone interact with them. One of the best ways to do formative assessment is to require everyone to give an answer. My favorite way of doing this in the past few years was to have each student answer questions on mini-whiteboards. In a quick glance, I can see 24 answers and know if there are several of them with the same misconception. I can see who is taking longer to write their answer and who is copying off of their neighbor. It's great. What I didn't expect was to get so much joy out of their idiosyncrasies.

My favorite example of this was a boy named Jonah. He put on a front of being a cynic and too cool for school. Yet, he was a gifted mathematician and wrote excellent explanations of complex topics. He also had a wry sense of humor, but he never wanted to appear engaged in class, so he didn't use it there. However, he was required to write answers on his whiteboard, leading to some fun moments.

I don't know if this story is going to translate into writing, but I want to give it a shot. One of the things I do early in the year with 8th graders is teach them the names and functions of lab equipment. I explain that on tv, every piece of glassware is called a beaker, but in actual labs, it is important to be precise with your language so you get what you need for the purpose. We then play a game I call, "Beaker - Not a Beaker." The kids spend the rest of the year giving me a hard time by calling beakers flasks and vice versa. So, the first time we used whiteboards for retrieval, Jonah wrote "Beaker" as his answer a couple of times. I finally said, "That's great. You can do that, but you also have to write a real answer." For the rest of the year, he wrote two answers for every question, Beaker and whatever the real answer was. Then, during an exam review, there came a magical moment. I asked a question where the answer actually was "Beaker." He held up his board with, you guessed it, two answers: Beaker and Beaker. I laughed, and he responded with the slightest of smiles. It was a sweet and joyful interaction that I couldn't have planned and that wouldn't have happened if I wasn't regularly engaging in formative assessment with all students.

I hope in these three posts that I have convinced you that there is value in implementing a structured program of formative assessment and given you some practical ways of doing it. If you have a favorite tool for formative assessment, please post them in the comments so everyone can add to their toolbox.

Formative Assessment - Part 2 - How to Know and What to Do When You Know

"How will I know?  Don't trust your feelings.  

How will I know?  They can be deceiving." - Whitney Houston

Two weeks ago, I told you the story of why we need formative assessment, but if I had included what it is and how to implement it, the post would have been far too long.  So, I made you wait a while for the practical part.

Let's start by defining formative assessment.  If you look online, you will only find about 48 definitions, and if you Google it, you will get a different answer from the Google AI every time (I've gotten six so far). So, let's look to some credible sources.  Kevin Washburn calls formative assessment “a teacher’s assessment activities while a student is learning.”  Dylan William describes it as “any activity that provides information about student learning and enables teachers to adapt teaching to meet student needs.” If you put these together, you have a pretty good definition, focused on timing and purpose.

There are many ways to collect data in the classroom, both informally and formally. 

Informal: 

I'll discuss the informal first as it what you will do with most of your day.  I mentioned last week that there are pitfalls to trusting the vibe in the room, but what I really mean is don't trust it alone.  While you need objective data to confirm or contradict it, the vibe is still valuable. As Douglas Fisher and Nacy Frey say In their book Checking for Understanding, “Talented educators know that the opportunities for fine-grained analysis of student learning are all around us.  Each time we host a discussion with students, examine a child’s writing, or listen closely to a question, there’s a chance to assess formatively.”And the more experience you have, the more accurate you will be at interpreting those hundreds of pieces of data.

So what are you looking for?

• Changes in Body Language - If the kid that is usually leaning in is suddenly fidgety, leaning back, or puts his head on the desk, chances are you've lost him.
• Changes in Facial Expression - The girl who is usually sparkling with interest goes a little glassy eyed or stares into the middle distance?  She's likely confused.
• Aimless Searching - If you ask a question and the student flips through his book or notes with no evident destination, it is likely because he doesn't know what he's looking for.
• Disconnected Answers - When you ask a question like, "What number would I change to balance this equation?" and the student answers with the name of an element. Or you ask, "Which character in the novel exhibits hubris?" and the student answers "Motif." These students are lost.
• Explicitly Telling You They Are Lost - Students DO NOT like to admit they are lost, and much of the time, they don't know they are.  If you have a student actually say it out loud, you have found golden treasure, my friend. Do not make the mistake of brushing it aside.  Take the time to figure out where they went wrong.
• Nodding: God bless the nodders and those that make sounds of recognition.  I had one that kept me going through the hybrid year of the pandemic. He may never know how crucial it was

Formal:

Most of your formative assessment should be planned, involve the entire class (or you will only hear from those who are confident), and you should have some idea of what their wrong answers could be, what misconception they reflect, and how you will respond.  This is what Dylan William calls "Working Plan B into Plan A."  

I know, it's a lot.  That's why you want to think it through while lesson planning rather than on the fly.

• Identify your crucial content - While all your content is gold, you know there are some points on which future understanding depends.  Ask yourself what the points are in your lesson that students MUST get before you move on? Plan some high quality questions about those.
• Ask questions in such a way that they can't get them right by accident. - The point of this is to reveal their thinking and identify their misconceptions, so if your question is vague, there is no point in doing it.
• Plan and communicate your means of participation - Do you want to use multiple choice questions and socrative (or Kahoot or clickers or the many other methods of answering multiple choice questions)?  Do you want free responses on mini-whiteboards? Do you want open ended written responses in GoFormative? Do you want students to answer out loud in unison? Do you want to cold call?  The answer to any of these questions can be yes or no, but you want to decide ahead of time and communicate it to the students. Otherwise, you will revert back to the easiest but least informative method - calling on a kid with his hand up.
• Think about likely wrong answers. - If you have been teaching for longer than one year, the chances are high that you have gotten the same wrong answers multiple times.  If you teaching middle and high school, you may have gotten the same wrong answers multiple times in the same day. Start anticipating those while planning. Why might a student answer that way? Is there a misconception they are likely expressing through that answer?
• Plan how to address those misconceptions - Is this a minor thing that can be quickly addressed by saying, "I can see why you might think that, but . . ." Or will it require some time to reteach and practice? If there is a likely misconception that will take time to deal with, make sure you have enough room in your plan to do that.

Teaching is exhausting, y'all.  And it is so easy to fall into the trap of saying, "Does everyone understand?" and moving on if no one says no.  And, unless you have me in your class, it is highly unlikely anyone is going to say no.  The same goes for "Any questions?" and my go easy go to "Does that make sense?"  Students don't know what they don't know, so we have to draw it out of them by asking them to summarize or explain their understanding.

I've found a few other delightful secondary effects of using formative assessment, so I'll talk about those next week.  

For now, go find out what your students know.  You might be surprised.

We Interrupt This Program - Teachers Protect ALL Kids

I intended to continue the series on Formative Assessment this week.  I really don't like when I have to turn my education blog into political meddling.  But every once in a while, there is a story where the two worlds overlap, and feel compelled to weigh in.  That has happened this week.

I am, of course, talking about the new presidential administration's change in orders about ICE agents going into places that had traditionally been considered off limits, namely hospitals, churches, and schools.  While that was not codified until 2011, it had been traditional practice for much longer as these places are widely recognized as places that should be welcoming, safe, and open to all.

The new regime doesn't often recognize what is codified, and they care even less about tradition.  So, we now have armed ICE agents with full authority to enter a school and demand that an undocumented 9 year old be handed over in the name of national security. There is also a strange proposal to turn IRS employees into ICE agents as though all government employees are equally qualified to serve in multiple roles. (Actually I don't know if that is true.  It's just something I read on Twitter.  It's hard to know right now because reality is more bizarre than fiction.)

I want to start with the fact that I believe in the rule of law.  Like a lot.  I don't even speed.  I believe in doing things the right way.  Once, in high school, I accidentally saw an answer to a test in my peripheral vision and intentionally put the wrong answer on my test so I would know for certain I wasn't cheating.  I'm saying all of that so you know that I am not a person with a sense of relative morality.

But I also know we are talking about something more complicated than a speeding ticket.  We are talking about families who have made the difficult decision to leave their homes to come to America seeking a better life.  Some of them attempt to enter legally, through claims of asylum, only to have the chief executive of the US mock them and call them liars in his speeches.  They are told to use an app that is difficult to access and to remain in poorly maintained camps in Mexico.  So, some of them do cross illegally because the cost of trying to do it the right way is just too steep.  If you expect people to follow the rules, you can't make them nearly impossible to follow.  But . . .

Rather than address the problem by making legal immigration easier, this administration has chosen to address the issue down river.  They eliminated the app that, while poor, did at least provide some with the right way to do things.  One of Trump's first executive orders was to end birthright citizenship.  While that one will likely be struck down by the courts because he can't change the 14th amendment with an EO, it is causing confusion and damage in the meantime.  And, one day 2 of his administration, the promised "mass deportations" started.  ICE agents are going into communities with a high latino population and rounding people up.  They are being treated inhumanely - it's one thing to put them on a plane to send them back; it's another to put them in chains while doing so - and the border czar brazenly says that all undocumented people should be frightened and just go ahead deport themselves if they want to avoid being treated this way.  

Thanks pro-life party.  Apparently, the sanctity of human life only exists until you are born.

I know I haven't gotten to the school part of this yet, but there is so much involved with this rapid change that it is all muddled up in my brain and needs to be worked out a little.

Okay, for the school part.  When I taught in public school, we did not know the immigration status of any student.  It wasn't our job to know.  The only thing required by a school for enrollment was proof of address, which most people presented using a water bill or something similar.  After that, it was the job of the school to provide the best education we could for every child sitting in front of us.  I had children of every color, race, and creed.  I had refugee sisters from Zaire who spoke little English (and we later learned one of them was deaf because of the bombs that exploded near their home).  I had kids who had spent the weekend in jail for theft sitting in my class on Monday morning.

At no point did any of us say, "We can't teach him because he's a criminal." or "We can't teach her because her English skills are nonexistent." or even "I can't teach the redneck in my class because he's a bigot."  We taught the kids in front of us to the best of our ability.  That was our job.  

Teachers help kids with everything from the heartache of a breakup or divorce of their parents to treatment of injury and cleanup up vomit to the de-escalation of a conflict between two kids competing for alpha status. We kept them as safe as we could during Covid and have dealt with their high levels of anxiety.  Any teacher that has been in the business for more than a couple of years has probably had to prepare themselves with a threat of violence at some level.  We are trained in lockdown procedures and what to do if a gunman enters our classroom.  During my 2nd year, a threat letter was found at my school, and I told every one of my classes, "No one is getting to you without going through me first." 

Do you know how many hours of class time are taken each year to do fire drills, tornado, drills, and lockdown drills. We do this in spite of the fact that school fires are rare and few tornados take place in the middle of the day because we are told that our primary job, even before educating them, is keeping them safe from harm.

Now, teachers are being asked to stand aside while armed ICE agents come in and take away undocumented kids.  Kids don't make the choice to illegally cross a border, but they are being taken from schools without due process.  And, it doesn't just affect them.  The rest of the class has to sit there and watch as armed men take one of their friends away. (Republican lawmakers, here's a note for you.  You're going to need to allocate some more money for mental health services for this generation of kids because you are going to cause large scale PTSD in a number of communities.) 

Even though they turned out to be incorrect, I was proud of the school in Chicago who turned away men they believed to be ICE agents.  (It turned out to be secret service people investigating a threat on a politician, but I'm going to say that, in the current climate, it's on them for not calling the 90% Latino school to explain who they were before they showed up.). They followed their training, later issuing this statement in their correction to the original story.

"Our security and clerk team followed the protocols that we've been trained and practiced and have discussed, and due to that we were able to ensure the safety of our school and all of our students," Ortega said. "We will not open our doors for ICE, and we are here to protect our children and make sure they have access to an excellent education."

Schools everywhere are having to send out communications like the one below, posted by my friend who is a school social worker.  

To those who have been screaming for the last decade that schools should stop trying to "indoctrinate kids" and just teach them reading and math, please know that you are making it harder to do that.  Teachers now have to focus even more of their mental resources on student anxiety, standing up to bullies of all types, and think through what it will take to keep them safe from a new threat.  

If you want teachers to be able to teach, stay out of their classrooms.

I'll get back to the education part of this blog next week.

Formative Assessment - Part 1 - A Story on Why it Matters

Let me tell you a story from almost 22 years ago. I had been teaching science for a few years when I got hired in a small private school. A week before school started, I got my schedule (this was pre-checking on the internet when you got a printout during teacher week), and it said I was teaching Algebra IB. Since I am a science teacher and not a math teacher, I went to the principal to show her the mistake in my schedule. Her response surprised me.  "If you can teach physics, you can teach Algebra I.  To this day, I don't know if that is true, but it was a small school with a need, and I was game for most things. So I gave it ago.

I looked at the curriculum, and it was mostly things that had steps, graphing quadratic functions, factoring binomial expressions, exponential growth problems, FOIL, and the like.  I decided the best way to go about this was to teach them to follow the steps in the same way one might follow a recipe, and since there were only 9 students in the class, it seemed like a good way to keep them engaged was to do the problems together as a class. "Thanks for doing step 1, Liz. Now, who wants to tell me what to do next."

Math teachers out there, I can feel you cringing.  I know that you are thinking, "This is not how you teach math! They will never learn mathematical thinking that way!"  

Rest assured that I know that.

Now.

I didn't know it then, but remember you are on my side in this story. I didn't know how to teach math and was just doing the best I could.

Anyway, during class, things seemed like they were going well. 

Then, I gave them a test. 

Things were NOT going well. 

One student could do the first step of a problem before getting lost while others didn’t even know how to begin.  I was confused by the differences in their approaches because it seemed like they should be getting stuck in similar places. 

I had been relying on a classroom vibe as measure of how things were going and didn’t have enough math experience to recognize that the scaffolds I provided weren’t leading them to independence. I started analyzing my classroom practice and found the problem.  When we solved problems together in class, we were solving them together as a group.  What had seemed like the best way to engage every student was masking individual deficiencies in understanding. I had fallen into the pitfall of the using the classroom vibe.

Just because a group can solve a problem doesn't mean all of the individuals in the group can.

They could only solve problems together.  It was like an assembly line.  Liz knew how to do step one, which gave Eric just enough momentum to do step two.  Drew could do step three. 

So we all suffered from the Illusion of Competence until they had to do problems on their own without help.

This was my first real life lesson in the need for formative assessment. I realized that I needed to check in with them individually and frequently.  I started giving a problem every day as an exit ticket that they had to solve on their own. I didn't expect them all to do it perfectly, but it let me know where they were.  And we started having a 3 question, low stakes quiz every Friday over what we had done on Monday through Thursday.  

Once I started doing those things, I had a better sense of where each student was with competence in each skill.  Their test grades improved (to be fair they had nowhere to go but up), and we all learned more.

What I did then helped a lot, but I would handle it differently now to get more information during the teaching so I could adapt in real time.

For the next couple of weeks, I will write about how to collect good data in both formal and informal ways so you can be responsive to the students in front of you and avoid being surprised by upsetting tests scores.

Credibility First - Part 2 - Take Your Work Seriously

Imagine this scenario.  

You go to a gym and hire a personal trainer, excited to meet your fitness goals and willing to pay for it. When you arrive, the trainer:

• gives you snacks.
• chats with you about movies and music for 10 minutes. 
• jokes with you throughout the session.
• asks you about your hobbies. 
• About halfway into the session, she hands you a relatively small weight and asks you to do bicep curls but doesn't show you how to do it properly.  
• You do a few with very poor form because you don't know the right way to do it. The poor form is okay with her because "the point is that you do it, not how you do it." 
• She praises you for your effort and says, "Look how strong you are." 

When you leave that session, you may like your new trainer on a personal level, but you will leave feeling that your time and money has been wasted.  You won't be sore the next day, indicating that you didn't challenge any muscles. You won't know any more about fitness when you leave than you did when you entered. And, I'm going to guess that, while you may like your new trainer, you won't respect her work.

You won't achieve your goals, and you won't return to this gym.

Yet, there are people who think this is what classroom teachers should do. Give snacks, make it fun, and build relationships first.  And the result with students is the same as it was in the above scenario. They like the fun and relationship-y teacher, but they don't achieve their goals, and they don't respect the teacher's work.

As a teacher of 25 years, I do understand that relationships matter, but I also understand that they cannot come first.  In fact, adolescents find it kind of creepy when you try to establish a relationship too early. They can sense a scam a mile away, so they know if you are forming a relationship in a manipulative way. After one first day of school, my nephew (who was then in middle school) said, "She's weird. She smiled way too much." For him, her relationships first approach came off as false.

So, please allow me to propose a different model - credibility first.  If you give students confidence that you know what you are doing and will help them achieve, they are more likely to be open to the teacher-student relationship you hope to establish.

Let's revisit the gym. You show up for your personal training session and you:

• notice the trainer has her certifications posted on the wall. This helps you feel confident that she is trained.
• see that she has weights already laid out in a circuit. You know your time won't be wasted and she isn't depending on your to tell her what you should do.
• hear explanations of proper form, explanations of what you should feel as you lift, and feedback on what you are doing in an encouraging and jovial way. This helps you feel confident you could do it later on your own.
• feel challenged throughout the session even though she has a lighthearted manner. You know she is getting the best out of you, and you'll be the good kind of sore tomorrow.
• have a nice chat after the session. You like that she wants to get to know you a little and may feel inclined to share a little more after next week's session.

Do you see the difference? Knowing the trainer takes her work seriously makes you more comfortable with her, not less.

Let me divert to yet another context.  I have been attending a liturgical church for about a year.  For those who don't know, liturgical churches involve a lot of scripted time that is repeated regularly. Every week, we say the creed and the Lords' prayer. Every week, we sing the doxology. There is some call and response (e.g. Officiant: "This is the Word of the Lord" Congregation: "Thanks be to God.") 

Having had little prior experience with that kind of service, I assumed before my first visit that it might be kind of dry. In fact, it has been quite the opposite. Not having to generate my own response to everything has allowed me to notice certain parts of the creed differently in different weeks. 

• Some weeks, it may be "Creator of heaven and earth, all that is, seen and unseen" that sticks with me.  
• Other Sundays, it might be the fact that Jesus "suffered under Pontius Pilate" that my mind dwells on. 
• Replying to an officiant's "Peace be with you" with "and also with you" encourages empathy throughout my week.  
• After communion, we say a post communion prayer.  It includes the line, "And now, send us out to do the work You have given us to do."  Because we say it so often, I look forward to that line and think about it throughout the week.  

This is is so far from a dry recitation; it buries words deep within me in a way that only repetition can. And it happens because the clergy take their work very seriously.  This is never more obvious to me than when they prepare and administer communion.  During the offering, one of the ministers lays out the wafer plates and pours the wine and water into several goblets. They each do it a bit differently, but they all do it with care.  It's clear that it is a responsibility they don't undertake lightly.  Lest you think this means they are stone faced about it, let me assure you that watching them administer communion is one of the highlights of my week because they do it with such joy. They look the congregant directly in the eye as they hand them the wafer, saying, "Take this in remembrance that Christ died for you." They know my name, so I get a very personal, "Beth, take this in remembrance that Christ died for you." They pray for and fist bump small children who are not yet taking communion, and those kids walk away knowing someone cares for their spiritual health and also enjoys their presence in the church.  As I described watching my pastor during communion to a friend, "I love watching his joy during communion.  It's like he just can't believe this is part of his job."

I said all of that to say this.  Credibility first isn't sour and joyless.  You can show your care, your passion, and your knowledge of content simultaneously. And this will attract students to your work. You will still end up with relationships if you don't make them first.  You may never establish credibility if you do.

What does this look like in the classroom?  I imagine there are a number of ways it could look, depending on your context, but I'll tell you what I did in mine:

• I started the first day by telling students why I went into education, what degree I had (diploma posted on the wall next to my teaching certificate), and my years of experience. I said, "I'm not bragging; I just want you to know you are in good hands.")
• I gave them an outline of the year, so they knew I had a plan from the start.
• I assigned seats in rows. I know that is a controversial one, and I'm not saying you have to do it. For me, it communicated from the start that there was someone in charge and that I was the person to whom they should pay attention.
• I promised that, while not everything would be fun, everything would be worthwhile.  I made it fun where I could, of course, and I had an amiable classroom demeanor, but I made it clear that fun wasn't the goal; learning was.
• We established some procedures and routines that I assured them would make things run more smoothly.
• I meant what I said. There were never false promises or empty threats.
• I explained my reasons for what I was doing whenever possible.
• I laughed at myself when I made mistakes. Taking your work seriously doesn't have to mean taking yourself too seriously.
• When I screwed up, I did everything I could to make it right for my kids.
• If I got through all of the planned things with a few minutes left, it was only then that I chatted with them about hobbies or pets. I also used lunch duty, morning door duty, and after school interactions for those kinds of conversations.  I attended sporting events and concerts and plays to show that I cared about their extracurricular interests. 

I assure you, most of my students felt we had a friendly relationship. I just didn't start there.  

When I left at the end of last year, I got a lot of lovely notes and emails from colleagues and parents and students, but the one that touched me the most was an email that came from a former student. I can't make a better point about credibility first than she did, so I'll end this post with the opening line of her email. 

"I want to thank you for quite literally changing my life. You were the first teacher to take my grades seriously and helped me when I needed it." 

Credibility First - Part 1 - Why it Matters

Warning: This post ended up a little angrier in tone than I intended.  So let me start with this.  I know that those who believe in "Relationships First" are well intended and loving.  This post is meant to address the outcome of the belief, not the heart that causes you to believe it.  Second, I had great relationships with thousands of students.  I'm not saying that they don't matter.  I'm making the case for why they are not first and cannot be built in isolation from doing your job of content teaching.  With that out of the way, my rant:

Stay part of EduTwitter for longer than a few minutes, particularly at the start of a new semester, and you will eventually find the "relationships first" people.   

• Kids bouncing off the walls? The answer certainly isn't to implement your school's discipline policy. Clearly, you didn't spend proper time building relationships. 
• Student playing on their phone rather than paying attention? It isn't because billions of dollars have been spent making their phones addictive. It's because you would be more engaging for students if you took less time teaching at the beginning of the semester and more time building realationships.
• A student isn't making a good grade. That's obviously not from lack of study time or ineffective study techniques (or even improper teaching techniques). They aren't learning because you didn't spend the first two weeks of the semester building relationships and "kids only learn from people they like." 

There's never any practical advice about how to build a relationship or evidence offered for the notion that they can't learn from you if they don't like you (despite centuries of experience to the contrary). They sell the idea that relationships are the golden key that unlocks all doors, and you should spend all of your class time doing that before you do anything else.  I actually read a tweet suggesting that you should teach no content for the first two weeks and spend all of that time on relationships.

This leads to weeks of time spent on games.  Icebreakers, getting to know you activities, team building exercises, and lots of chatting - all in the assumption that the time spent doing this is an investment that will pay off later because they will learn better and behave better once they "know how much you care." When you visit their classrooms later in the year, it turns out that it just isn't true.  There is a lot of relationshipping going on, but there is little learning and lots of poor behavior. There was a teacher across the hall from me years ago that playing hackysack with his students for 20 minutes 3-4 days a week well into the year.  It was so loud that I had a hard time teaching.  I asked him one day when he taught his content, and he said, "I usually get in 15 minutes, but I want to make sure they know I love them."

I'll talk next week about what I think the right way is, but I wanted to set up the problem with this approach first.  The problem is that it does not actually communicate that you love them; it communicates that you don't value their time or learning.  I know because:

• They come to my room and talk smack about you behind your back, using phrases like "thinks he's cool" and "tries too hard to be like us."
• They tell me about their lack of appreciation for you as a teacher and the non-academic atmosphere you have created because they call your class "a waste of time."  
• If I need a student to make up a test, yours is the class they know it's okay to leave.  They say, "Yeah, we never learn anything in there.  We can do whatever we want." 

Another problem:  Substitute teachers don't have relationships with the students in front of them, and you have sent the message to your students that they don't have to behave properly with anyone they haven't bonded with.  

The biggest problem.  You have students who genuinely want to learn, and you spend a lot of time not teaching them.  There are nerds like me, but there are also kids from low income backgrounds who know that education is their only way up.  The students who can afford tutors usually end up okay because they pay someone to do the teaching you aren't doing while you build relationships, but the ones who can't afford that are left to fend for themselves. And the relationship you have with them does nothing but widen the opportunity gap.

I know your intent is loving when you say "Relationships First," but in reality, it just isn't helpful.  For kids, it comes off a little creepy when they don't know you at all, and you are digging into their personal lives on day 1 of the school year.  Next week, I'm going to suggest an alternative.  

Credibility First

Establishing your credibility will give kids a reason to want a relationship with you, help them know you value their time and take your job seriously, and ultimately result in better behavior and more learning.  I'll give you practical examples of how to build credibility from day 1.  See you next week.

Learning From Defeat

This week, my friend and I went to see an exhibit about the works of Charles Schultz, the creator of the Peanuts comic strips.  There were many quotes from Schultz himself to explain his vision behind each character or his method, and one right at the beginning stood out to me. He thought failure was funnier than success, so he made the characters lose at everything they did.  He said,

"The Peanuts is a chronicle of defeat.  All the loves in the strip are unrequited; all the baseball games are lost; all the test scores are D-minuses; the Great Pumpkin never comes; the football is always pulled away."

My first thoughts when I read this were that:

• We love the Peanuts characters and their stories because we can all identify with failure.  
• Current children's media is just the opposite. We try to make kids believe they will always be victorious with enough trying.

Then, I remembered an interview I once heard with Lemony Snicket, author of the Series of Unfortunate Events, a hilarious series of books in which orphaned children are sent from horrible relative to horrible relative while their evil uncle is out to kill them for their inheritance, and the one time they find a good caretaker, he is killed by the bite of a snake.  (I promise the books are funny and not at all scary for children in spite of this plot line - such is the genius of Lemony Snicket.). In the interview, he referenced that the popularity of his first few books rose in the months after September 11th.  Children were asked why they liked the stories, and they said, "Adults keep telling us everything is going to be fine, but we know that's not true.  We like that he tells the truth."

And here's the truth.

• Life is hard (but there are joyful times in it).
• Some people are more talented than you are at some things (which is okay because you are more talented than they are something else).
• You will have bad hair days (and sometimes they are on school picture day).
• You will fail a test (which is why your grade is an average and not based on only one thing).
• Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, the other team wins (or the other guy gets the job you want or the man you love loves someone else or you don't get into your first choice college).

Yesterday, I overheard a conversation between two coaches.  They were having trouble with the parents of two of their athletes (not the athletes themselves).  These parents were insistent that their sons must compete in a competition for which they had not qualified because, without it, they would not make the special elite team.  The coaches were also talking about their own past, when they didn't make the team they wanted and how much they learned from it.  They wished they could communicate that to the athletes, but their parents were preventing them from having that conversation.  As I overheard this, I was reminded of a student's parent I once dealt with who worked herself into all kinds of anxiety, the kind that makes you email a teacher at 3AM, because her daughter couldn't get into honors biology at her new school of her grade in my class dropped by one point.  Both sets of well meaning parents were hanging all of their hopes for their children on ONE event.  That's a lot of pressure for a fourteen year old, the belief that God's plan for them will be derailed by one sporting event or high school class.  

But here's another truth:

• You learn more from failure than you do from success.
• Character is built from learning to be gracious when you win AND when you lose.
• Your life will take a lot of turns that you cannot foresee in middle school.
• It is only in exceedingly rare cases that failure results in death.  (Most of the time, you just feel sad for a few days while you figure out where to go from here.)

Parents and teachers, I know it is hard to see kids hurting.  It's natural to want to fix it for them. But tears dry and hearts heal with time and perspective.  The lessons they learn are far more lasting.  How many times have you looked back and been grateful that you didn't get what you thought you wanted?  How many times have you looked back on a lost job and been glad you have a different job?  

I know this seems counterintuitive, but kids will actually have less anxiety if we let them fail sometimes.  It will teach them resilience - that they don't have to be afraid of failure because they lived through it last time.  It will teach them to show class - another way to be successful.  It will teach them not to find winning mundane - and savor the times they do win.

This leads me to a quote from another artist whose work I've recently seen exhibited, the great Bob Ross.

"You can't see the light without the dark."