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Personal perspectives

Who is the most frequent learner in my classroom?

Seven minutes
A TFA Community Member Wednesday, May 4th, 2016

Teachers are learners too.

From the beginning of the Teach For Australia Initial Intensive, this phrase seemed to ingratiate itself into every discussion we engaged in.

It was in every assignment we completed, every small group work activity we participated in and every reflection session we lolled into at 7.30pm.

I heard it so much so that I’m pretty sure it featured heavily in several of my dreams.

As Associates we were cavalier about this phrase at the time, for we believed its meaning was simple — unlike what we may have believed in our formative primary school days, teachers do not know everything, and nor should they feel like they have to.

In fact, the best sort of teachers are the ones who are continually learning with, and from, their students.

Three and a half months after I scribbled ‘Teachers are learners too’ on my final reflection feedback form at the end of Initial Intensive, I stand here humbled at the nuanced truth behind those words.

As I’m sure many of Cohort 2016 can empathise with, over the last term I have felt like my personal ratio of teacher:learner has been skewed in favour of the latter.

Thus, as part of my new commitment to this mantra, I thought I would share three (there were many more!) of the lessons I learnt from my first term of teaching.

1. It’s okay to feel like a fraud.

The first time I stood up in front of a class full of Year 9 students to teach my first lesson, my thought process was as follows:

“What am I doing here. Do I even look like a teacher? Do I just look like a huge oversized student? What if the students think I am just a random off the street? What if they don’t think I’m qualified?”

“Oh no. I should probably just get someone off the street to teach this lesson. They would definitely do a better job than me.”

“Oh whoops. I haven’t said anything for like three minutes. Everyone is staring at me…”

…and so on.

1

It would be nice to say that on day two of teaching, this didn’t happen. That I now exude the confidence and finesse in the classroom befitting a career teacher.

But that would be a lie.

The aforementioned thought process happens to me all the time, except now it’s punctuated with more specific fears.

“Do the kids realise I didn’t know what the word biome meant until yesterday?”

“I am literally finding out the causes of World War I while teaching this lesson. I hope my excitement doesn’t show too much.”

I read an excellent book the other week which contends that if you don’t feel a bit out of depth in your job, you’re actually not being challenged to extend yourself personally and professionally.

In other words, feeling a bit like a fraud is totally okay because it gives you an edge.

This is what ‘teacher talk’ refers to as the Zone of Proximal Development – the sweet spot where optimal learning takes place.

As new teachers, I think that existing in this space is fine as long as you are making the most of it, learning from your mistakes and adapting your approach on the fly.

Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself until I reach the Zone of Perfect Pedagogy.

Stay tuned.

2. Forgiveness is everything.

One of the best things I have learnt from Teach For Australia so far has been the notion of Unconditional Positive Regard (UPR).

The idea behind UPR is essentially that you should see the best intentions in all your students and forgive them for the times they may have upset or offended you.

Give them as much empathy, warmth and care as you can within the context of the teaching profession.

2

I have found UPR to be the single most important aspect to getting through my first term as a teacher.

No matter how shambolic my lessons appeared, how a lesson I spent hours planning got totally derailed by a faulty PowerPoint, or how fraudulent I felt as a teacher (see point 1), approaching my students with warmth, curiosity and an attitude of forgiveness enabled me to begin to make those genuine human connections with these students that form the foundation of teaching.

I have tried really hard to find out what my students are passionate about, what excites them, and what gets them up in the morning.

On those days when they are off task, stubborn or saying things to me that they don’t mean, I can remember those moments when they got excited about the soccer game they played yesterday, or the new movie that just came out, or how they had their friends over for a sleepover that weekend.

Approaching each new day with an attitude of forgiveness definitely isn’t always easy. When you think about it we have the privilege as teachers to possess the power to create a safe space for our students that is filled with genuine interest, love and respect.

Why would you not make the most of the privilege?

Why not provide these students with an environment that might be one of the treasured safe spaces in their lives?

3. Good mentoring sometimes means you don’t feel like a good teacher.

I always used to be of the belief that good mentors made you feel great about yourself, buoyed your self-esteem and told you how bright your future was going to be.

“Bosses are the critical ones. Mentors are like older friends who are also your personal cheerleaders.”

That was essentially how I would have described it.

Being an Associate with Teach For Australia has taught me the value, and benefit, of good mentoring.

It has also taught me how to be a good mentee.

A mentor, by definition, is someone whose role it is to help you become better.

That’s it.

In order to help you become better, it follows that your mentor must believe you can be better than you currently are.

In other words, they must believe in your potential.

The approach a mentor takes to you is no different to the growth mindset approach we are taught to take with our students — the idea that with hard work and perseverance, you have the potential to be more than what you are.

A mentor telling you how great you are might make you feel stoked, but in reality it imposes a plateau on your ability to improve because you feel you are great the way you are.

Do you want a mentor who thinks you are great the way you are?

Or do you want a mentor who not only believes you can be better, but also wants to help you get there?

I believe nearly everyone will say the latter, which means that the best mentors are those who spend 90% of the time telling us the things we can be better at.

Sometimes this can be incredibly disheartening, even overwhelming. Sometimes it feels like your failures are being incrementally analysed and then painstakingly repeated to you.

3

What matters then, as mentees, is the mindset we take out of these interactions.

I recently had one of the best mentoring conversations I have ever experienced. At the end of it I totally felt like I was the worst teacher on the planet.

It was only much later, when I was planning my lessons for the next few days, that I realised everything I had talked about in that session could be tangibly and immediately implemented into my teaching.

Furthermore, as I implemented it over the next few days, I realised those strategies actually worked.

I was beginning to feel a little bit like a better teacher.

Approaching feedback with humility and a willingness to learn is hard. However, in the long run, I would prefer my feedback to be a fancy degustation meal: lots of different parts, some of which you don’t like that much, but when you get to the end of it you feel like you’ve gotten a taste for something new. You want to try more of it to get a more sophisticated palate.

I’d rather that than a cheeseburger — something familiar and safe, doesn’t challenge you at all, and simply makes you feel good.

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