To all of you who will teach my children, thank you! Thank you for choosing to step up to the plate and take on the calling of being an educator. Thank you for agreeing to help my kids experience success every chance they get. Above all else, thank you for not defining my children’s success as just grades on a report card or scores on a standardized test, but as the growth they will achieve over their time spent with you. My daughter starts kindergarten this fall. She will be curious to learn everything you will teach her and will certainly do her best on everything asked of her. She will be looking for someone she can look up to; someone she can trust to help her overcome things she can’t yet understand. You see my daughter has a very special story. English is not her first language. In fact, the beginnings of her story are difficult to fathom. As her father, I would be grateful if you would watch the first 1:35 of the video below. It will help you to understand how her first three years of life were and why her success can’t be defined merely by a grade, standardized test, or any other standard measurement tool. It will help you understand why you, as her teacher, will forever have a special place in her heart and her life. While my son is one year away from kindergarten, that day will be here before I would like to admit it. Like his sister, he is curious to learn everything you will teach him. He will tell you “yes ma’am” or “yes sir” and he will want to reassured that he is doing the right thing. Despite being the younger brother you will see quickly that he plays the role of the older child in many ways. He is the protector of his sister and all of the “underdogs” in life. His heart for others is mature beyond even many young adults in this world. He will look to you to figure out how he can apply what he has learned to help make the world around him a better place.
So, thank you again. Thank you for being more than just a dispenser of knowledge. Thank you for being someone who will challenge my kids to overcome obstacles and adversity. To apply what they learn from you to improve the world around them. To stand up for what is right. To make sure that their success is greater than something any standardized test or report card could ever measure. Thank you.
1 Comment
You can read a lot on the topic of leadership. There are so many choices; books, magazines podcasts and the lists just go on. There’s an unspoken sentiment that underlies much of what you can consume regarding leadership: don’t isolate leadership as a position or title. Start acting on your leadership abilities right now. You see, you already are a leader. You always were and likely always will be. Leadership exists, in some capacity, in everything we do in life, both professionally and individually. The question is not do you want to be a leader, the question is how are you already leading? Are you leading from seat 1A or from seat 52E? It’s a reference to the choices of seats you have when flying a commercial airline. Seat 1A is a first class seat at the front of the plane. The seat lies flat so you can sleep, there’s a window and nobody next to you so you can easily access the isle. It’s got everything you need to be as comfortable as you can at 40,000 feet. Seat 52E has none of that. You’re in the middle section of the plane. There’s people on both sides of you, you have no aisle access, your seat doesn’t recline and you’re all the way at the back. You can hear the noise from the galley and all the opening and closing of the lavatory doors. You can see everything happening in front of you. The analogy is not meant to be a cheap shot at people who fly in first class. It’s supposed to illustrate the qualities of effective leadership. In seat 1A you can be isolated from all that is going on around you. Nobody really knows that you’re a part of the flight at all with the exception of a few individuals. On the opposite end, in seat 52E you likely boarded last, everyone on the plane had a chance to see you and you them as you walked to your seat. In flight, you can see everything in front of you. You know everything that is going on because you can see it and hear it. You’ve got people on both sides of you, often a great chance to strike up a conversation and get to know some really cool people. We often look at leadership the way we view seats on an airplane. Most of us are stuck in coach, looking toward first class and think about how nice it would be to be there, if only a chance would come our way. We want to lead but we feel like the opportunity never comes our way. Each day in life is like a flight, you take off, you journey to a destination and then you land. The truth is, the ride in seat 52E might be the best way to bring out our own leadership abilities and opportunities. Thoughts, reflections, challenges? I'd love to hear what you think. Just comment below.
In 2010, I met Vern Edin, principal of Coppell Middle School West. I was still a very early in my career and I had recently finished my master’s in education administration. I wanted to be an administrator so he made me an offer. It was not a job as an administrator. He wanted me to come to West as a special education co-teacher for social studies. Funny thing, I wasn’t special education certified. It had never crossed my mind. Mr. Edin told me, if you want to be a great administrator this experience will be invaluable to you. To this day, it’s still some of the best advice I have ever received. I’m thankful for getting that certification and that experience.
When we talk about innovating school and education it almost sounds utopian at first. Let’s build the city on the hill for the world to see, almost as if it’s a dream that we aren’t really prepared to make reality because frankly, we’re just not sure how or what we would do to begin. If you find yourself in that mold, inspired to innovate and not sure where to begin, I would offer you this suggestion: check out the work of special education. From lower ratios to individualized education program (IEP’s) that fit the specific needs of students, special education programs everywhere have numerous components that we could use to revolutionize our industry. Talk to a diagnostician, therapist or special education contact teacher about a specific child and prepare to be amazed at how much they really know about that student. They’re in frequent contact with the parents, they check their grades, update and measure IEP’s and have an annual meeting at minimum with the parents. The ratios in some of the more intensive classes are often less than 10:1. Think of the possibilities if each child had their own IEP and a learning environment of 12-15 students working with them. Each working toward a mastery of the learning, each taking a very different path to get there. I am aware that special education is designed as an intervention, to fill the gaps that exist for specific students. I’m not proposing we copy everything from special education framework and implement it as is, I’m suggesting that we use the overarching philosophy as a guidance to rethink the way we approach certain things. Perhaps the easiest thing would be to simply start by asking yourself, if each child in my classroom could have an IEP, what would it look like? Do I know them well enough to create it? If not, what more do I need to know about this student? If you don’t know much about special education, I challenge you to learn more. Buddy up with a teacher at your campus and pick their brains about how some of these plans come to fruition. If you leave with one great idea on how to improve your classroom that’s great. Just don’t keep it to yourself. Share it. Blog about it. Great ideas are worth sharing. If we all share one great idea we won’t have to wait on the world to change. It will already be happening. Do you remember being a student in school? Do you remember how shocked you were when you found out that your teacher was a real human? Maybe you bumped into her/him at the grocery store, church or many of the other places you frequented in your community and it made you do a double take. I remember the “shock ‘n awe” of the first time I saw one of my teachers outside the four walls. While I don’t remember where I was or even how old I was, I remember thinking it strange that my teacher would leave the school. Yes, I know it’s something that many (if not all) kids think early on in life, but ask yourself this, what do your students really know about you after the final bell rings? Maybe an even more important question, what pieces of the “after the final bell” you are you leaving outside of school that ought to be incorporated into your role at school?
I love to laugh. It’s not just the best medicine, Mayo Clinic has a great article on all the stress relief benefits your body can get from laughing. It’s also the first thing I wanted every student I ever taught to know about me. It’s what made me “me” and prevented that stereotype of the teacher who sleeps under his desk. But laughter is one the biggest elements that I see growing more and more absent in our work as educators today. We spend too much time fretting about standards, standardized tests, getting grades in the gradebook and making sure we’ve got that teacher input sheet turned in for the ARD on Wednesday. Yes, each of those things plays a role, but if you love to laugh the way I do, students need to know that about you. The best way to do that, bring the laughter to your classroom or campus. In my never ending quest for laughter I came across an Instagram posting for a restaurant in Austin, TX named El Arroyo. I’ve never eaten there so if you’re looking for a recommendation that’s going to be on a different blog. While many of the signs are more adult in nature, quite a few of the school appropriate ones would have found their way into my classroom, particularly as pieces of a warm-up or as my hook for starting a new unit. If I were a science teacher, the picture below about the rotation of earth or the atom would become a warm-up question for me. I simply ask kids to write a paragraph about what makes that sign humorous. It’s science disguised in a funny sign, and it’s critical thinking. Kids are explaining the “why.” Do you teach social studies? Check out both the Caesar and German kids signs below. Discussing homophones in an ELA or ESL class? See the vegan sign below. Apply the same thing I described above to any of these pictures and bring the laughter and learning together. Not having a classroom now, you can rest assured that these will find there way into a staff meeting, professional development session or any other way I can think of to work them in. Why? Because I know the staff and students at my school love laughter. When we share a laugh, not only is a bond formed, we see each other equal partners working toward the same cause, not as the king and his royal subjects. Enjoy the signs below, and in the words of that great philosopher Han Solo: “Laugh it up, Fuzzball!” I love cheesy songs. I grew up on New Kids On The Block, Milli Vanilli, MC Hammer and many other artists that are known today for songs that make us laugh. In fact, one of my favorite things is when my car gets it’s once or twice annual free preview of SiriusXM radio. I love the decade specific channels, particularly the 80’s on 8 and the 90’s on 9. I was listening to the 90’s on 9 on my way home the other day and reflecting upon all that had happened.
I began to get frustrated, as I sometimes do, with all of ridiculousness such as standardized tests, bureaucracy etc. that people in the education industry work within on a daily basis. With the radio playing and my reflection of the day's events quickly deteriorating into a pity party for one, I realized “The Sign” by Ace of Base was playing. The song was huge when it was released in 1993. If you wanted to be cool, and goodness knows I did, you knew this song, the words, the tempo, everything about it. It’s amazing (and quite embarrassing) how those things never leave you. I stopped my reflection turned pity party for a moment just to listen to the song and maybe do a little singing along when a line in the chorus struck me: “No one’s going to drag you up to get into the light where you belong.” It’s amazing how you can find something so profound lying within a song that definitely captures the cheese factor of the early to mid 90’s. It instantly made me think about my work as an educator and the pity party I was throwing myself. I’m one of the one’s being called to the task at hand, to revolutionize the education world but nobody is going to make me start that work. I will have take my own initiative. As educators, we must revolutionize the education world. It’s been said that we’re preparing kids today for careers that don’t yet exist. But education is about more than preparing someone for a job that they’ll have. Education is about creating a passion for a life full of learning that is not just fun, but necessary in a world where every 12-18 months computers double their capabilities. Nobody is going to do this for us but when we get the ball rolling, you can guarantee that we will be in the light where we belong. We have to empower ourselves to bring about the changes we seek. The best news is that we’re in the business of empowerment. We couldn’t be more qualified for the job. |
AuthorJeff Lahey Archives
January 2020
Categories
All
|