Category Archives: Teaching and Learning

Middle School Is Scary

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The thing I remember the most about being in middle school was the constant threat and dread of looking stupid. Not actually doing something stupid, but the fear that I might be perceived as lame. It could have been saying the wrong thing in front of a class, or telling an unfunny joke at lunch, maybe it was striking out in PE or just wearing the wrong shoes or having an unpopular haircut.

Everyday was a battle to be myself and fit in at the same time. And on any given day this tension made me feel powerless and small.

As a middle school teacher, even while I try to be sensitive to the anxiety of many of the students in my care, the need to deliver my curriculum or “get on” with my class overshadows their need for me to take it easy. As teachers, how often do we take for granted the level of risk we are asking kids to take by just answering a question or performing some task we designed.

Work with a partner. Share your ideas. Read your poetry out loud. Present in an assembly.

Of course, I know that kids need safe supportive environments to take risks and sometimes fail, and it is our job to make sure that they have these opportunities, so I am not saying that we need to shelter kids and constantly protect them. My middle school years helped me find the resilience I needed to become confident and become the man I am today.

What I am proposing is that kids at that age need role models and mentors who are willing to make themselves vulnerable. They need teachers who are not afraid to look stupid. They need teachers who can admit that learning can be terrifying and that if you truly want to learn, you must put yourself out there and overcome the fear of judgement. I think it’s important for kids to see that adults still harbour fear and anxiety when it comes to learning publicly.

As adults we have the luxury to do most of our new learning in isolation or in small groups of other adults. We rarely take a chance and learn with or in front of kids.

With the inspiration from my friend and former principal Mike Johnston, who learns something new every year in front if his kids, me and my G8 team changed our culture today. I thought about the scariest most embarrassing thing I could think of and proposed to the team that we take a few assemblies this year to learn how to do a choreographed Salsa dance routine. Did I mentioned that I hate dancing?

One of our teachers is a semi-pro dancer and she has agreed to teach us a routine by year’s end. Today during assembly in front of 198 kids, we learned the first 8-count steps.

I was terrible. It was hard. I was embarrassed and wished I wasn’t doing it. I made a joke of my inability to master even the simplest first steps and wanted to stop and call the whole thing off. I felt like a middle school student and learning was not fun. It was another time that I felt I would be judged and made fun. So it was a success. I had achieved maximum empathy.

In a minute, when I am done writing and sharing this post, I will practice the few steps again, because I have to take the same advice I give my students and my own kids- if you want to learn you have to practice and forego the fear and embarrassment of failure. Little did I know that this actually gets harder the older you get.

I want to end with a big thank you to my amazing team for joining me on this journey.

Schools Are Amazing Places

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“Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.”
Jack Kerouac

School are amazing places. You wanna know why? Because they are filled with kids. And people who love kids and want to give them awe-inspiring experiences. Schools are places where teachers create rock shows and magazine launches. Schools are places where kids can be athletes and scientists. Schools can be places where kids are challenged to question and research and explore and wonder. Schools are places where kids dance and plant trees and hike and run meetings. Schools are places where kids build friendships, identifies and #-D printed design projects. It’s where they write poetry, solve equations and fall in love for teh first time. School is where kids find themselves one year only to lose themselves a few years later. School is where kids find confidence and take risks. It is where they test out their jokes and command a stage for the first time. A school is a place where they can leave the orbit of their parents for a few hours a day and see which other galaxies they might find themselves in. Schools are places where kids skin their knees, break their bones and learn to get back up. It’s the place where kids have to learn to fight back or to resolve conflicts between friends. Schools are where kids learn how to socialise around a meal or how to eat alone. Schools are places where kids shred a guitar solo or forget the lyrics of the third verse. Schools are places where kids roam the halls looking for friends. It’s where they stand up to bullies, learn to talk to adults to demand their rights. Schools teach kids how to be activists, citizens and free-thinkers.

I am here tonight to challenge the narrative that schools are broken. I am tired of constantly starting every conversation about how schools are places in need of drastic change, disruption or re-imagining. Before I continue, I want to acknowledge that I realise that I am blessed to work in a well-resourced school. I work at a top internationals school, where we are wanting for little. I want to be sensitive to people who might be reading this post who work in schools that are structurally damaged and morale vacant buildings. I have worked in such schools and I know it is hard to do your job in such environments. But even in such places, I refuse to continue to start every conversation about school that highlights the conceptual idea of school as a place of deficit. I’ve heard all the complaints. Hell, I have lobbed many of them myself: The curriculum is too intense, too much content, too many skills, too many tests, not student-driven enough, not enough tech, too much tech.

When we spread the narrative that schools are inherently broken we discredit and disrespect the two most important things that make-up schools: Kids and teachers.

I have spent the majority of my life in schools. And for all their faults, I still think they are amazing places. I still remember the rainy day afternoons in Mozambique waiting for the rain to stop so we could carry on because the floor had flooded for lack of windows. The fact that kids didn’t have shoes or books or pencils didn’t bother us none. The fact that I barely knew what I was doing didn’t seem to matter either. We are looking at the lyrics of Africa Unite by Bob Marley as a way to learn English.

All you need to run a school are kids and teachers who love kids and want to create awe-inspiring experiences. You can take all the iPads and 3D printers and everything else and chuck it out the window if you have love in your building.

Tonight I was at Sound Asylum which is or annual MS rock show run by the music department in a constant state of goose-pimpled skin. I watched two hours of talented kids be rock stars. The team had created an opportunity for these kids to stand on stage behind the lights and the smoke and in front of their peers and live out a dream.

It is not fair to kids if their teachers are constantly focused on looking a the problems of their school. We owe them more. Take a look at your school and ask yourself how you can create opportunities born of your love and passion- opportunities for your students to be inspired. If your curriculum has you down, or if you are buried under mandates of which you have no control, find other ways to build a culture of wonder in your school. A poetry reading, a jacket ball league, a hands on science club, a coding club, a rock show, a magazine launch, a place to knit, plant a garden.

We don’t always need to look to new ways to re-build our schools. Let’s change the conversations and focus on the fact that schools are places to help kids become loving, kind, creative educated citizens. You can do it.

Resist Teaching

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I’m sitting near a smouldering fire leftover from the night before. Behind me the Mae Teng River unwinds like a dropped spool of yarn, slowly passing Pok Koh Lam- a small Karen hill tribe village in northern Thailand. I’m talking to Jen about crippled butterflies, teaching and learning, the power of letting go and trusting kids. We are waiting for the group of students that we have both been teaching for the last few days, to show us that they have indeed learned the lessons we’ve been teaching them all week.

“You’ve never heard the story of the cripple butterfly?” She asks as I poke the ashes with my foot, hoping the red ember might catch alight and stop smoking. The morning is brisk and I am ready for the day of rafting that lays ahead. I shake my head no and look forward to listen to what she is about to tell me. I am hoping the tale will match the philosophy we both share when it comes to teaching kids how to be independent.

Well, there was this young boy who really loved being outside and alone. He would playing in the creek and the woods and gather the flora and fauna and keep meticulous track of it in his home. He was a young scientist of sorts. One day this boy found a cocoon of a butterfly, and the next day a small opening appeared. He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could, and it could go no further.

So the boy decided to help the butterfly. He took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon.The butterfly then emerged easily. But it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings.

The boy continued to watch the butterfly because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time. Neither happened! In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly.

The boy asked his dad what had gone wrong and the father told him in his kindness and haste, the boy did not understand was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening were a way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon.

Jen finishes her story and the kids start to make their way down to the rafts and soon we are on our way down the rapids, but this story which I have upon some research learned is a Muslim fable, stayed with me.

It has had me thinking, not only about outdoor and adventure experiences, but it also about parent my own kids and how I teach the students in my classes everyday.

How often do we let our students make their own way from their cocoons?

How often do we give-in to the urge to cut them free?

Let me share another story from the last week I spent in Chiang Mai on our school’s annual grade 8 advent trip to Chiang Mai Thailand, where our kids among other things: trek, cave, river raft, set up their own shelters and cook their own food. They start the week as helpless children and with some coaching, teaching and scaffolding, the idea is that by week’s end they are self-sufficient.

Pok Koh Lam is a test of sorts. It’s the night where the students are left to their own devices to set up camp, cook food, clean up and go to sleep. Only to wake up the next day, with a letter of instructions telling them to be down at camp ready to go the next morning.

My story began, with Jen and I, waiting to see if our butterflies would make down to camp without us cutting the cocoon, because we both share the philosophy that for kids to learn teachers must resist the urge to constantly step in.

In outdoor this urge to fix and help is pretty obvious. You observe a group of students arguing about how to scramble eggs, you being an adult and knowing how to scramble eggs, walk over and show them how to do it. It feels good. You are a teacher and this is teaching. Right?

But what if you had already shown them how to scramble eggs a few days ago, and now you just wait to see how they might resolve the issue on their own? This is what it means to resist teaching, when what you really want is for kids to learn.

Sure the eggs might turn out badly, and yes a terrible fight might break out, the list of things that could go wrong are limitless, but what if you weren’t there at all and left the kids to sort it out on their own?

Time and time again on these trips, under Jen’s tutelage I have learned that letting go and trusting that the kids will work it out,  through the process of being left alone, is when they they will do their best learning. Three years running on this trip and working with Jen, and I am amazed at the growth of my kids show at the end of the week. When we set the challenge and give enough support and scaffolding when they need it most, usually at the start, the kids step up to the challenge and break free of their own cocoons and are able to fly in the end.

Where else can we apply this philosophy?

I’m going to mix my metaphors , so please stay with me. Sometimes, usually, there is a bit more nuance between helicopter teaching and a no-hands on approach, especially with middle school learners. Kids between the ages of eleven and fourteen need a sort of manual clutch system of teaching and learning.

Think about driving a manual transmission car- there is a sweet spot between pushing the gas and lifting the clutch. A moment when the car is engaged and ready to move forward and the gas allows it to accelerate.

Middle school learners need this level of support and teaching. If left on their own too many times when success is not possible, they will lose motivation and will not be able to free themselves from the cocoon. If, however, they are given too much teaching, hovered over and not allowed to fail they will expect a teacher to always be there and never be able to fly on their own. They will not learn.

The secret is knowing how and when to administer just the right amount of teaching and when to lay-off and allow them to accelerate. (Fly? now I am getting confused)

In the jungle, I wanted to jump-in every chance I had, but Jen would remind me to trust the kids and our own teaching and to leave them alone. “Let me go see how the cooking is going, let me give them some advice on the bivy, let me, let me….” What I wanted to say was- let me do it for them to make sure it is done right. But doing it for them is not teaching.

Now that I am back from the trip, I am left asking myself how often am I over teaching and getting in the way of the learning? How well am I driving this car?

I am grateful that the workshop model meshes well with the cocoon philosophy- teach the kids early and a lot. Then later confer and see how they are doing and customize your teaching to their specific needs. But even in conferences, so many times when a student is silent or thinking or unsure, I just want to jump in and teach them rather than let them take their time to learn by doing it themselves.

Not sure if this post had a point, but it has been on my mind since the trip and I would love to hear your thoughts? What have been your successes with letting go and trusting kids? What have been the disasters from this method? Or have you had success proactively teaching and guiding students to success?

Please share your your thoughts and stories in the comments below.