The Best Teacher in You

How to Accelerate Learning and Change Lives

Robert E. Quinn, Katherine Heynoski, Mike Thomas, Gretchen M. Spreitzer

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781626561809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

What does teaching look like at its very best? How are great teachers able to ignite a love of learning and change students' lives? In this book you'll learn from seven remarkable teachers who stretch beyond the conventional foundations of good teaching to transform their classrooms into exciting, dynamic places where teachers and students cocreate the learning experience. Based on six years of extensive work, the book outlines a framework that identifies four dimensions of effective teaching and learning that are integrated in these highly effective teachers' classrooms—and that all teachers can use to recognize and release the potential in themselves and their students.

CHAPTER 1

Becoming the Best Teacher in You: A Process, Not a Destination

No punishment anyone lays on you could possibly be worse than the punishment you lay on yourself by conspiring in your own diminishment. With that insight comes the ability to open cell doors that were never locked in the first place.

—Parker Palmer
The Courage to Teach

IN OUR INTERVIEW WITH KELLI, A VETERAN TEACHER WITH 24 YEARS of experience, she told us about her goal of “reaching every student.” While this sentiment is laudable, it also sounded unrealistic, so one of our interviewers decided to push back. He took on the persona of a skeptical colleague and argued that it is unreasonable and unrealistic to expect that a teacher can be successful with every child. Kelli quickly got into the role-play, becoming more passionate as she spoke. She confronted the interviewer: “Why do you have such a negative outlook? It is about you and your expectations for them. You have lowered your expectations. You have given up hope in those kids. What did you think your job was in the first place? It is not about teaching math. It is about getting them to want to learn.”

Kelli’s intensity and commitment brought about a transformation in the conversation. We were no longer in a role-play. We were having the kind of conversation that causes people to listen deeply, reflect, and see differently—the kind of conversation Kelli creates on a regular basis with her third-grade students.

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Becoming the Best Teacher in You

In this chapter Kelli shares her story of becoming a highly effective teacher (HET). Her journey produced an expanded view of herself, her students, and what it means to be a teacher. With this expanded view came the capacity to do things she could not do before. Based on Kelli’s story and the stories we have heard from more than 350 other exceptional teachers, we lay out two overarching perspectives of teaching: one we call the directive perspective and the other we call the co-creative perspective. The first is foundational. The second is elusive, but it paves the way for a teacher to accelerate learning and to change lives.

In the exchange above, two things became immediately clear about Kelli. First, she is a person who does not tolerate low expectations. She expects a lot of herself and a lot from others, even interviewers. This also extends to her students. She expects them to do things they do not believe they can do.

Second, while Kelli is a master of her content, she does not believe that her job is only to transfer mathematical information to students. Math is simply a reason to be with her students. She believes that her real job is to create a desire, a hunger, and a love for learning. She expects that her students will leave her with an expanded sense of themselves. They will leave as empowered people, able to learn in any situation.

While Kelli places great emphasis on growth and achievement, she balances it with an equally intense focus on forming and maintaining relationships. Within a few minutes of being with Kelli, we felt like our conversation mattered a great deal and that we also mattered a great deal. We felt both valued and stretched by this woman whom we had just met. She told us that when she was a student, school was a place where you went to “have things done to you.” In contrast, Kelli places greater emphasis on doing things with her students.

The Year from Hell

Kelli believes that her ability to engage her students is a function of her own development. She speaks of a particularly important episode in which her assumptions about teaching were challenged and ultimately transformed. She came away from the episode with a new view of herself, her students, and what it means to teach.

She told us that her first year of teaching was “stellar.” Her second year was “the year from hell.” She had many children who were challenging. One was a “belligerent, mouthy, holy terror.” On a particularly bad day, she saw him crawling on his belly at the door of her classroom. She lost her temper and moved toward him in anger. As he scurried out of her way, she turned away from him, slammed the door shut, and walked to the principal’s office. She told her principal that she could no longer deal with this student, so the student was subsequently removed from her classroom.

This event was deeply troubling to Kelli, so she went to some experienced colleagues for advice. Their advice led to a turning point in Kelli’s career. They said, “You have to realize early on that you are not the key to every door.”

As Kelli recounted that conversation, she became visibly upset. She fought to compose herself and then looked up and said with conviction, “I hated that.” She went on to tell us of a vow she took that day: “I told myself, I’m not taking that. I’m going to figure out how to meet the needs of those kids.”

A Vow to Learn

This vow represents a pivotal moment in Kelli’s professional life. She could have taken the words of her colleagues to heart and become disenchanted, but she did not. Instead this painful event became an opportunity. It was the beginning of a lifelong journey of learning. In choosing to take this journey, Kelli has developed the ability to work more effectively with difficult students. “I’ve had other kids like that, but I never had another one of those moments.” She described the work she had to do along the way:

I needed to pay more attention to [struggling students]. I had to figure out what works for them, how to have respect for them, how to use humor to diffuse explosive situations. I learned how to make those kinds of kids feel safe in my room, and I learned how to teach them social skills so the other students would feel safe in the room with such a child. And then I learned that I have to be very parent-savvy. I have to sit down and get the parents on my side very early on. So I learned those techniques, and I’ve never had another year like that. Those seem to be the kids that I’m most drawn to …. I always get those kids now, the most unruly kid, the most disruptive kid, the bully.

Kelli told us that when a difficult child shows up in the school, her administrator says, “Let’s put him in Kelli’s room because Kelli will know what to do with him.”

TEACHER’S TIP

Kelli: Do not be afraid to engage in new learning. Transformative learning begins to take shape when you engage in your own learning.

Read qualified authors, observe exemplary teachers, view videos, and meet with other teachers who seem to have mastered what you are struggling with.

Be willing to forgive yourself for your shortcomings and failures. Vow to make a change and stick with it.

Seek a partnership with colleagues who will give you encouragement and guidance.

Deep Change

As she pursued her vow, Kelli learned to feel, think, and behave in new ways. She gained new capacity. She went through a learning process that transformed her understanding and aptitude. Robert Quinn, in his work with organizational leaders around the world, has identified two kinds of change that individuals experience: incremental change and deep change.¹ In our lives and in our work, we frequently make incremental changes: We make adjustments, we elaborate on a practice, we try harder, and we exert a greater degree of control. In other words, we attempt to solve the problem using the assumptions we currently hold.

Deep change is more demanding because it requires the surrender of control. It tends to be larger in scope, discontinuous with the past, and irreversible. It involves embracing a purpose and then moving forward by trial and error while attending to real-time feedback. Quinn often refers to the process of deep change as building the bridge as you walk on it.

Kelli knew she wanted to go to another level of performance. She wanted to flourish even with difficult students in the room. To acquire this capacity, she had to first reach for a higher standard and not compromise on that standard as her colleagues advised. Then she had to make a vow to engage in deep change. She moved forward in real-time, experiential learning.

When people move forward in this way, old assumptions are challenged and new ones are constructed. When the new assumptions lead to success, learning often becomes exhilarating. People feel empowered by their success and believe that they can do what Parker Palmer refers to in the epigraph as the ability to “open cell doors that were never locked in the first place.”²

Slow Death

We often avoid deep change because it can be difficult and unsettling. Ultimately, this avoidance can lead to disengagement, or what Quinn calls “slow death.” When Kelli’s colleagues told her that she could not expect to be the key to every door, they were unwittingly inviting her to “conspire” in her “own diminishment.” They were inviting her to become an active participant in her own slow death.

What these well-meaning colleagues were doing was understandable. They were trying to comfort Kelli in a time of distress. This pattern is a common dynamic among friends and in organizations of all kinds. When people like Kelli aspire to excellence, they often meet adversity and become frustrated. To relieve her distress, Kelli’s peers advised her to lower her aspirations. In education, as in all the other industries, this response is a phenomenon that can turn armies of idealistic young professionals into disenchanted victims of the system.

As you think about this dynamic, it is also worthwhile to consider your students’ aspirations. Many of them may already travel the path to slow death. Sometimes an entire community of students can be locked into assumptions that prevent them from empowering themselves. What they believe about their ability to learn greatly hinders their own development. Their experiences and the assumptions that result from them can become “cell doors.” They may “know,” for example, that the act of trying will result in embarrassment and failure. Students who make such assumptions may show little interest in learning. In every industry and in every organization, there are personal and cultural assumptions that lead people away from deep change and toward slow death. Daily conversations that reflect a victim mentality regularly invite us all to the path of slow death.

The Best Teacher in You

Kelli’s story illustrates an important point about deep change. Because she engaged in transformative learning, she grew in self-efficacy, or the belief that she could succeed in a demanding situation or activity.³ More specifically, she is now confident that she can learn to teach any child in any situation. Addressing an imaginary problem child, Kelli told us, “If you are defiant, I will get you. I will figure out what makes you work. I might not get tremendous growth and I might not get engagement every day, but I’m going to get something out of you. I’m going to be your new best friend.”

While the statement suggests that Kelli is an empowered person, it also suggests that she is an empowering person. She subjects her students to high expectations, and she also partners with them to help them grow into more-effective versions of themselves. Because she has experienced the realization of her own potential, Kelli sees potential in all of her students and feels compelled to help them change the limiting assumptions that they make about themselves.

When a teacher is with students in a way that is empowering to them, the students can transform. When this begins to happen, the transformation in the students loops back to the...