Teaching Outside the Box

How to Grab Your Students By Their Brains

LouAnne Johnson

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119089223
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Lehrmethoden

Bring a fresh perspective to your classroom

Teaching Outside the Box: How to Grab Your Students by Their Brain, Third Edition integrates practical strategies and engaging advice for new and experienced teachers. Whether you are preparing for your first year of teaching or have been working in the classroom for decades, this conversational book provides you with answers to the essential questions that you face as an educator—how to engage students, encourage self-directed learning, differentiate instruction, and create dynamic lessons that nurture critical thinking and strategic problem solving. This updated edition includes expanded material that touches on Project-Based Learning, brain-based teaching, creating smooth transitions, integrating Common Core into the classroom, and other key subject areas. Questions for reflection at the end of each chapter help you leverage this resource in book groups, professional development courses, and in both undergraduate and graduate classes.

The art of teaching is one that evolves with changing educational standards and best practices; to be the most effective teacher possible, daily self-reflection is critical, along with a need to see things from a different perspective. This means we must step outside the box—moving our focus from 'fixing' the students when a problem arises to helping a teacher improve his or her practice.

• Improve classroom management, discipline, motivation, and morale
• Explore strategies for arranging your classroom, engaging students, and avoiding the misbehavior cycle
• Create an environment where students learn and teachers teach
• Leverage insight from teachers and students

Teaching Outside the Box: How to Grab Your Students by Their Brain, Third Edition is an essential resource for teachers at any stage in their careers.

Chapter One
Dear Teacher: An Open Letter

Dear Teacher:

Thank you.

Thank you for being a teacher, for choosing to use your time and talents to teach when you had so many other career options, most of which offer better pay, more comfortable working conditions, and much more respect from the general public than the teaching profession does.

Thank you for taking yet another exam to prove your competence, although you have already completed five or more years of college and hundreds of dollars' worth of standardized tests.

Thank you for getting up at 5 or 6 a.m. every day to work in a graceless room bathed in artificial light or a windowless closet or a dilapidated trailer that has been desperately labeled as a learning center—and for continuing to teach higher-level thinking skills and advanced academics, in spite of having test after test after test added to your curriculum requirements, without any additional instruction time.

Thank you for coping so often with ancient, malfunctioning, or nonexistent air conditioning and heating, and for eating your lunch out of a paper bag in a sparsely furnished lounge where a working coffeemaker is a treat and a functioning microwave oven is a luxury.

Thank you for spending your so-called time off grading papers; making lesson plans; and attending professional development conferences, committee meetings, restructuring meetings, parent–teacher conferences, school board meetings, and continuing education classes.

Thank you for working countless hours of unpaid overtime because it is the only way to do your job well and because you cannot do less—and for not reminding people constantly that if you were paid for your overtime you could retire tomorrow and never have to work again.

Thank you.

For spending your own money on pens and pencils, erasers and chalk, paper, tissues, bandages, birthday gifts, treats, clothing, shoes, eyeglasses—and a hundred other things that your students need but don't have.

For accepting the achy back, creaky knees, tired legs, and sore feet that go with the teaching territory.

For consistently giving respect to children who don't know what to do with it and don't realize what a valuable gift you are offering.

For caring about children whose own families don't care—or who never learned how to demonstrate their love.

For spending sleepless nights worrying about a struggling student, wondering what else you might do to help overcome the obstacles that life has placed in his or her path.

For raiding your own children's closets to find a pair of shoes or a jacket for a child who has none.

For putting your own family on hold while you help a struggling student.

For believing in the life-changing power of education.

For maintaining your belief that all students can learn if only we can learn how to teach them.

Thank you.

Thank you for giving hopeless children enough hope to continue struggling against the poverty, prejudice, abuse, alcoholism, hunger, and apathy that are a daily part of so many tender young lives.

For risking your job to give a child a much-needed hug.

For biting your tongue and counting to a million when a parent insists that your incompetence is responsible for the misbehavior of his or her undisciplined, spoiled, obnoxious child.

For taking on one of the most difficult, challenging, frustrating, emotionally exhausting, mentally draining, satisfying, wonderful, important, and precious jobs in the world.

Thank you for being a teacher.

You truly are the unsung American hero.

You have my respect and my gratitude,

LouAnne Johnson

Chapter Two
Are You Teacher Material?

“How can I tell if I'm really teacher material?” a teacher candidate asked me by e-mail. “Can I learn to be a good teacher? Or is it something you have to be born with?” She went on to explain that she had recently abandoned a well-paid position in advertising to pursue her dream of becoming a teacher.

“I know I will make a lot less money as a teacher,” she wrote, “and I have accepted that reality, but now I'm wondering what will happen if I get my degree and get a job, and then I hate teaching. What if I find out that I just can't do it? I have a feeling that teaching is going to be very different from being a student teacher or observing experienced teachers. I guess what I'm asking is: Do you have any advice that might help me make the right decision about becoming a teacher?”

To teach or not to teach? is a question that stumps many people. Far too many of us know bright, energetic people who spent five or more years earning a bachelor's degree and teaching credential only to quit after one or two years in the classroom. New teachers give up for a long laundry list of reasons, but the most common complaints include disrespectful and disruptive students, apathetic administrators, overwhelming stacks of paperwork, lunchroom politics, parental pressure and pestering, and mental or emotional exhaustion.

Those complaints are valid. I have to say that I have worked with some excellent administrators, and their support enabled me to be a better teacher. But even with good support, teaching is very demanding and difficult work. Children today suffer from a host of emotional, mental, and physical challenges that affect their behavior and ability to learn. And unfortunately many of their role models encourage them to treat themselves and others with disrespect. Dealing with children requires abundant reserves of patience and tact. An indestructible sense of humor also helps. Government regulations have created a testing and accountability monster that consumes mountains of money, paperwork, time, and energy—and teachers have the task of feeding the monster. The monster is fickle, too, so if last-minute changes upset you, teaching will tax you to the limits of your flexibility. If you don't bend, you will definitely break. Of course, you already know that the pay is atrocious, primarily because people outside of education view teaching as babysitting with books. Thus, if wealth and prestige are important to you, teaching will be a disappointment. And teaching can be physically painful: hours of standing on your feet, bending over to read small print on small desks, and lugging boxes of books and papers to and fro can send you home with tired feet, an aching back, and a heavy heart.

And then there are the students. It might seem facetious to say that you should like children if you plan to teach school, but apparently many people overlook this obvious fact. Every staff lunchroom has at least a few (and most have a large handful of) complainers and groaners who spend their breaks and lunch hours plotting against the enemy, sharing their strategies for revenge, nursing their wounds, and displaying their battle scars. These are not necessarily bad people, but they are people who grew up and immediately forgot their own childhoods. Like people who fall in love with the idea of owning a dog, dreaming of the unconditional love a dog will offer and forgetting that puppies pee on the carpet, vomit on the bath mat, chew your slippers, and poop on the lawn, some would-be teachers envision themselves standing in front of a quiet, orderly classroom, facing a sea of silent, adoring, obedient, angelic little faces. When those angelic faces turn out to belong to noisy, messy, ill-mannered, selfish, and obstinate little stinkers, those teachers go into shock. Some fail to recover. They become bitter, humorless, and overly strict, and they spend the rest of their years in the classroom making themselves and their students miserable by trying to make reality fit their impossible fantasies.

All right, that's the downside of teaching. If you're still reading, still thinking you might like to be a teacher, then you are persistent and optimistic—two very helpful attributes for would-be teachers. And you are right to be hopeful because the upside of teaching is so much bigger and so much more important than the downside.

Teaching is the most wonderful profession in the world. As a teacher, you make a direct, tangible contribution to the future of our country and the world by helping young people acquire knowledge and skills. You know that you are spending your life in an honorable pursuit and that your life has a purpose. Teaching provides endless challenges and opportunities for growth. Every day, teaching tests your interpersonal communications skills, your academic knowledge, or your leadership ability. On a good day, you'll be tested in all three areas, and you'll pass all three tests. You have the opportunity as a teacher to share your passion for learning with young people. If you are a good teacher, you will also inspire, motivate, and challenge those youngsters to develop their individual strengths and talents, and you will feel the incomparable joy when one of them (usually far more than one) realizes how much you have given and makes his or her way back to your classroom to give you a hug and a teary thank-you. And you will cry your own tears. And when you go home, you will share that student's thank-you with your family and friends, and they will all cry a few tears. When you go to bed that night, the last thing you will think before you go to sleep is, I did a fine thing. I helped a child become a successful adult. And that night, you will dream the sweetest dreams.

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