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Are you working with a teacher who is frozen in old practices?  Being stationary is never sufficient when it comes to teacher learning.  “Teacher preparation” in universities is merely the beginning of a career-long journey in instructional improvement.  Once in the classroom, our “texts” expand beyond books and articles on a required reading list.  Our students’ responses become texts that we “read” every day, along with other professional resources. When confronted with a teacher who is immobile in the cycle of continuous improvement, we can “turn up the heat” in ways that warm, rather than burn, those with whom we are working.  One way we can warm the teacher to new ideas is by using a strength or a positive observation as a point of departure.  For example, if we find one question the teacher posed that invoked thoughtful responses from her students, we can lift this question from the lesson and hold it up for examination.  Warming in the glow of t...

If you are a mentor or coach, have you modeled failure lately? Movies and popular media are replete with Super-Teachers:  Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, Pat Carroll in Freedom Writers, Edward Olmos in Stand and Deliver.  These caricatured teachers present a polished, uncracked model of teaching and teachers that is not only unachievable but disheartening.  It promotes feelings of inadequacy.  Failure, however, is part of the real-life of teaching, and those we mentor and coach deserve to see us working through this process.  They deserve to see us model the ambiguity and risk-taking that is part of teaching.  They deserve to see that sometimes taking risks ends in mistakes, in debacles, in failure.  And that learning from failure isn’t a quick and easy process.  If we don’t show them this side of teaching, we create a false ideal.  If we hide our struggles from our mentees, we perpetuate the feelings of inadequacy these false ideals cr...

As doors open for another academic year, schools are welcoming not just new students, but also new teachers, into their classrooms.  About 322,000 new teachers were hired this year,* and mentors and instructional coaches play an important role in keeping these new teachers in the profession and in helping them achieve success in their first year and beyond. How do these novice teachers’ needs differ from others you are coaching? As you support early-career teachers, developing empathy is key.  Take a trip down memory lane and revisit your own first years as a teacher.  What were your own struggles and successes?  How did those early experiences lead you to the teacher you are today?  I found that writing a Letter to My First-Year Teacher Self helped me remember and understand what these new teachers may be going through. Teaching is mentally, physically, and emotionally-demanding – even more so in the early years.  Reminding ourselves of our own previous ...