The Times, They Are A’Changin’: Embracing A New Professional Phase and Focus
My daughter’s birthday is on Wednesday. She’s turning 11 years old, and, as she informed me this past weekend, she’s “officially going to be a tween.” This surprised me for two reasons: 1) I can’t possibly be old enough to have a “tween” daughter and 2) I didn’t realize that there was an official age span that qualified someone as a tween. Using my super-sleuth mom skills, I’m guessing it’s a pretty short span (she didn’t tell me she had entered tween-dom last year when she turned ten, and at 13 she’ll be considered a “real” teenager). My response when she told me about her new label was to inform her that while being a tween is all fine and good, I’m about a year away from turning 40. If we’re talkin’ categories, I think that drop-kicks me squarely into “middle age.” I win.
All this birthday talk has got me considering other time-spans or phases that people move through in their lives. Romantic relationships go through stages, I think, from first dates to cohabitation to marriage. When a person picks up a hobby, like running or knitting, they move from being a beginner to being proficient, and finally, maybe, to being advanced.
Teaching, too, I’ve decided, comes with stages. Who can forget that first year as a teacher — the stress and uncertainty, constantly questioning your own skills and knowledge. Those frantic, try-to-beat-the-bell trips to the copier to print the lesson you wrote the night before after finishing that giant pile of grading (you know, those essays you covered with helpful comments and grammatical edits). After a few years, you probably settled in a bit; you knew your curriculum and you started really honing your classroom management style. Maybe you even started finding a bit of work/life balance (or not — some of us will probably never really get there, will we?).
Then, somewhere between years five and seven, you decided you’d become too comfortable. You started looking for ways to challenge yourself and your students. Time was spent rewriting and reworking existing curriculum, tossing out lessons and starting again from scratch. When your administration asked teachers in your building to do some work around the Common Core State Standards, you jumped right in (hell, why not?). You centered your lessons and assignments around skill and standard alignment, started dabbling in formative/summative grading, and started preaching about increasing rigor in your department meetings. Look, you were crushing it — you knew it, your colleagues knew it, and even your students knew it.
Maybe you can relate to this, or maybe your path was completely different. For me, I’ve been hard-living in that rigor-and-standards phase for awhile now (I’ve actually joked to colleagues that I was thinking about getting the English CCSSs tattooed on my body for easy reference). And, honestly, I’m a far better educator for all of that standards and rigor focus. My lessons and assessments are tighter and more effective, and I can speak with real authority on developing original, standards-based curriculum. I’ll say it again: professionally, I’m better off for it.
However, I feel myself starting to move into a whole new phase of my teaching career. After all the increased rigor and standards-based learning I’ve been so keen to incorporate, I’m starting to doubt if my students are really better off.
These past five to ten years, I have fancied myself the academic gatekeeper. I had the knowledge that students needed, and was armed with a checklist of skills that they HAD to master in order for me to deem them worthy to move forward. You want to pass English? Then you’d better show me you can write that compare/contrast essay I assigned, and you’d better follow the exact framework I demoed in class. When we practiced our Speaking and Listening skills, I made sure that all group discussions centered around the specific standards set forth in the Common Core. As time progressed and I placed more and more importance on those standards, I found that I cared less about students authentically engaging with one another and more about whether each speaker was using “evidence and rhetoric, identifying any fallacious reasoning or exaggerated or distorted evidence.” Typing that out, I can see now that I was in way too deep: what does that standard even mean?!
For years I’ve been patting myself on the back for raising rigor in my classroom, pointing to the Common Core State Standards as a way to legitimize and quantify the changes I made in my curriculum and assessment. But these past two years of working with students who “couldn’t hack it” at the traditional high school in town have forced me to examine who the Common Core standards really serve. And it’s not just the Common Core standards, that I find myself questioning. It’s also the mantra that seems to have been quietly adopted and then incessantly shouted at staff meetings that increased rigor is always better. Is it better sometimes, for some students? Sure. But I’d also argue that many of those same students probably already had a fairly firm grip on those skills, and would have done just fine in the long-run, regardless.
To me, this one of the most difficult challenges we face as teachers: by the time they are a few years into high school, students who have been planning on entering a four-year college or university often already know how to be students and do school. Raising the academic expectations on these students feels acceptable because they’re ready for it. But in the same schools, in the same classes, there’s also a sizable group of students who aren’t ready. They’re still figuring out how to navigate the twists and turns of secondary school. Raising rigor on these students makes success feel unattainable, and ultimately discourages struggling students from engaging in academia at all. Students fall further and further behind, and school quickly becomes a place where they are outsiders.
Looking back now, I feel like I’ve spent the last ten years focused on how to make the most successful kids more successful. It wasn’t a waste of time — exploring the Common Core and developing curriculum that would push lots of students to be their academic best isn’t something I’m apologizing for. But now, I feel that proverbial pendulum swinging the other way; maybe it’s time to think about how to slow things down, to pull back out of that drilled-down hole where “writing” has been broken down into a million skill-sized pieces. I’ve been inspecting each individual puzzle piece so closely, I feel like I’ve forgotten to consider what the whole picture might be.
As this year comes to a close, I can feel my professional focus starting to shift. I want to ensure that my curriculum is inclusive, that it serves the needs of the students sitting right in front of me on any given day. I want to make sure that I’m addressing gaps in skills that students will actually need in the future (sorry, compare/contrast essays!). I want to focus on helping students get to where they want to go next, and to set them up to find success now and in whatever they choose to do in the future.
Yes, things are changing in my life, and I’m going to have to embrace the new season in front of me. I have a tween daughter. I’m going to turn 40 soon. And it looks like my teaching career is about to enter a new phase, too.
