MyPATHS Engaged Learning Activities: Why Do We Teach?

WHY DO WE TEACH?
As our summer draws to an end, sometimes teachers need to draw other teachers' motivation to get ready for the upcoming school year. At the beginning of each school year I like to ask, "Why do we teach?"

We are nothing without our students. They are the reason we teach and have any success. Our motivation for dealing with the bureaucratic business that teaching is turning into is simple…the smiles we see, the tears we wipe, the laughter we hear and the relationships we build with each of our students. Being a teacher is peering into the eyes of each student that walks through our door and searching for what strengths and insecurities they have inside. We will connect with every child, their family, and their experiences that they bring, and in doing so, help them make connections to standards and skills that we need to make relevant to their lives.

Teaching is a recycling business. Teachers have a diverse group of students, some of whom feel unwanted, inadequate, ugly, fearful, and helpless. In contrast, there are also those students who have supportive homes and feel validated, hopeful, beautiful, and courageous. Our mission is to validate every student and build them up, so each feels valued, capable, and protected. Together, we fight to help students see that they can recycle their weakness into a driving force that helps them relish success. We believe that it is our job to reach them wherever they are and take them as far as they can go. We never look for perfection of a standard or skill…but growth.

The single biggest quality of being an outstanding teacher is having a group of exceptional students who are not just students, but fellow colleagues in the classroom. To truly understand what makes an excellent teacher, we have to seek the council of our fellow student colleagues. When we sit and listens to the hearts of our students, we can grasp the very essence of what students desire in us as teachers. Many of their voices echo:

“I like how the community service projects make me feel good on the inside!”

“You make learning fun and exciting.”

“The activities that we do allows me to not just learn the content but experience the content.”

“I always feel successful! Even when I wanted to give up, you never let me."

"You stayed with me until I was successful!”

“You are willing to do anything to get us to be our best even if it means dressing up as a woman, rap star, country singer, or sumo wrestler."

"I also liked when our class met learning goals, and you let us vote to shave your head into a “Mr. T” haircut. This helped to motivate me to do my best.”

Our favorite personal responses come from one of our most struggling students when they say, “I learned without knowing I was learning. It was not until I was asked to perform what I had learned that I realized how much I had grown.”

Looking back at the responses that resonate from our fellow student colleagues, we surmise that an excellent teacher knows their students well enough to discern what instructional techniques and activities best engage them. Routinely, we sit with our student colleagues and analyze the final performance, and through backward design, devise different approaches to progress towards that product. Put simply, students have a say in what instructional techniques and activities would best engage them and help them grow towards a specific skill or standard. The results are highly engaging, differentiated, and rigorous approaches toward difficult concepts where students want to learn because it was a collaborative design. We also understand from their responses that an excellent teacher wants every student to successfully develop towards meeting standards and skills. They are the teachers that help students break through the obstacle of impossibility and open their eyes to possibility. Those teachers make differences in the lives of students. That is the teacher that we strive to become.

Our beliefs are the pulse that drives our unconventional teaching style. We greet our students each day and ask them about their life outside of school. The connections that we share go beyond the concrete walls of the school. We invest in the lives of our students, so they understand that education is more than just schooling, but how we learn to interact with one another. Students collaborate in groups to work, reflect, and synthesize new ideas into a deeper understanding. We pose challenging questions to one another and search for meaningful answers to those questions. According to Andrew Carnegie, “There is little success where there is little laughter.” Therefore, humor and laughter are a common place inside our classroom. We remember that we are in that classroom for a greater purpose than Language Arts...to experience life together. Validation of students’ thinking is written across every wall and ceiling tile. Their greatest learning, reflections, goals, and attempts are murals that serve as purposeful reminders of the testimonies that we share as a classroom family. We strive to guide our students to collaborate with one another to find exciting, inventive, and creative ways to approach a standard so they can learn and experience their content with deep reflection and purpose. Sometimes that means we dress up as a beauty queen, a rap star or shave our hair like “Mr. T” because they meet their individualized goals.

Monetary rewards, nor awards hung on a wall, cannot measure up to the rewards that we get living out each day with our students. Some of our greatest accolades come in the form of smiles, laughter; those “ah-ha” thought stricken faces when they have a deeper understanding, and thought-provoking questions that begin with, “What if…?” We find affirmation when students invite us to eat lunch with them at their table, ask us to attend their sporting events, and write “Thank-You” notes sharing a success that they recently experienced in class. We teach because of the emotional high we get when a struggling student walks away a few inches taller because they feel confident in their understanding of a difficult concept, or when our students work together to accomplish a huge task they never thought possible.

Teach like never before, Josh and Mike