Do One Thing Every day to become a Better Teacher

What happens when we focus on improving 1% to better ourselves as a teacher each day?

Day 1–100% x 1 = 101

Day 2–101% x 1.01 = 102.01

Day 3–102% x 1.01 = 103.03

If you understand compounding interest

Day 100, the answer would be 270.5% of what we started out

Day 365’s answer would be 3700%, meaning we are 37 times better than one year ago.

What happens if the opposite happens, like if we do not practice our craft and become 1% worse than yesterday?

Day 1–99% x 1 = 0.99

Day 2–99% x 0.99 = 0.98

On day 100, the answer would be 0.38, and

Day 365, the answer would be 0.025, which means we are only 2.5% as skilful as we were one year ago.

I saw these calculations from a few books (Atomic Habits and The 1% Rule). Of course, I don’t think we will be 2.5% of what we used to be after one year since we are always reflecting, practising and engaging in various professional learning. But I definitely want to be a 37x better teacher the next year. If not I will always be having the same challenges and same sets of administration work to manage the challenges (like calling parents and counselling students).

But this book, The ONE Thing, is refreshing to read. I can relate to what the author says.

I remember we started teaching, many of us had many challenges. The biggest challenge which most of us face is classroom management. I remember telling myself I just wanted to use my first 3 years of teaching to improve students’ motivation.

So, I told myself to focus on nothing but motivating the students. I have to read at least half an hour on students’ motivations. I would also look at how other teachers motivate the students, ask them what motivates them, and practice something to increase their motivation daily.

The thing that I regret not doing is to keep a journal of everything I have done. Writing journal is a form of retrieval practice. Any form of retrieval practice (discussion, articulating thoughts, practice, writing, etc.) are found to be the best way to put our learning into the long-term memory.

Having one and only one thing to focus on is more productive. Because my priority is to read something about students’ motivation, I ignore the 100 emails that appear in my mailbox every day. Research has shown that the average worker switches between tasks about 37 times per hour.

We need more energy and time to finish tasks whenever we switch between tasks. At the end of the day, we were so busy checking emails, social media, and talking to colleagues, and nothing got done. The last question we want to ask ourselves is, are we becoming more skilful teachers?

When I told myself to prioritise students’ motivation as the skill to improve every day, the work became simpler.

What about the admin work in our form class? I spent form teacher’s period motivating the students. When students become motivated, they are empowered to help in class administration.

Then what about our CCA? When I focus on motivation, students come earlier for training. They do not skip training, and coaches and parents are happy. At the end of the day, that is much less work to do.

Then what about parents meeting session? I spent so much time reading and practising students’ motivation that I began to talk to parents with a passionate tone and encourage them to motivate their children. I have fewer complaints over time because parents know their children are becoming more motivated.

What about school events? Because student motivation is my priority, when I was given a sports day to run, I gathered a group of sports leaders and motivated them every day to run the sports day themselves. End of the day, I did almost no admin work running a whole school event.

The thing is, we have to do something to improve every day. Else, everything we do, we are doing with limited wisdom. If our HOD asked us to do a sharing on EdTech, what would we do? We would rush to go for an “ICT in PE” workshop and quickly copy the PowerPoint and share it with the department, right?

But what happens if we prioritise student’s motivation? Then I put in all the wisdom I know about motivation, look at the tedious part and replace it with EdTech. For example, to set students up for success (which will motivate them), I might want to show them a short video of the skills I will teach them before the lesson. I might also empower the students to do peer assessment using their personal learning device (PLD).

I will know how to explain my rationale for using ICT to make my work more efficient because I have tried many times and understand the challenges and how to overcome them. We will get more buy-in if we speak from experience and wisdom.

And wisdom only comes with the commitment to a skill. Do you believe a coach can give you a new tactic and you can do well in the game? Of course not! We need to practise a lot of times before we can use tactics well in the game.

Then how is it possible for us to give a very good lesson by following a lesson plan from an expert teacher?

By focusing on one and only one thing, we would become better teachers, and the side effect is that we would become less busy.