Brain Breaks and Perspective

This fall, my district is offering the Studying Skillful Teaching course through Research for Better Teaching and I have been lucky enough to attend.  It has offered an opportunity to meet many pre-K through 12th grade teachers in my district, and "talk shop" with a group of math teachers on a fairly regular basis.  For the most part, the course has reemphasized many important ideas in sound professional practice, such as backwards planning, using wait time, and cultural sensitivity.  Although it took some time, it, like most courses of this nature, has left me feeling inadequate.  This post by Tom Rademacher sums up my experience pretty well.

"The struggle isn’t just inevitable, it’s important. It shows us where to get better, where to adapt, where to throw out the old answers and come up with some new ones. There’s no better sign that things are going poorly in a room than a teacher who always thinks everything is going just fine."

I refer to this post from time to time to remind myself that when things go wrong, reflection and adaptation are my course of action and it's all part of the struggle.  It's just that sometimes, it all feels like too much.

Jim, the instructor of the RBT course, has been wonderful about emphasizing the idea of matching, that is to say finding strategies that work for the particular students in front of us and for our respective styles as educators.  He rejects the notion of "best practices" as one-size-fits-all solutions for classroom success.  This is all helpful and reassuring, but I still cannot escape the nagging feeling that I should be doing more.  And it's not just RBT that makes me feel that way.

Twitter is home to a fantastic community of math educators (Math Twitterblogosphere), where I can turn to help process challenging situations in the classrooms, get answers to pedagogical questions, and just generally geek out about teaching math.  It is through this network that I learned about Notice and Wonder, 101qs, and engaged in an amazing discussion about whether 2 X 7 should have really been written as 7 X 2 when considering the number of lenses in 7 pairs of glasses.

But here's the thing: as much as I love engaging with this community (and learning new things in RBT, or in general), I sometimes need to take a break because it magnifies the feelings of inadequacy.  You see, I arrive to work early, stay a little late, bring a bunch home, and spend a great deal of time communicating with students and families, correcting, planning, and generally working to make my classroom an amazing, positive, and inspiring place for my students.  I engage with online learning communities, read math teaching books for fun, and absolutely love what I am doing.  And it leaves me wondering how any one teacher can employ all of the engaging strategies and improve learning outcomes so effectively and efficiently.

How come a handful of my 87 students are failing, despite many attempts at differentiation and remediation?  How can I better include more strategies from my RETELL course to reach my English Language Learners?  Why are some students still not finding a common denominator to add or subtract fractions?  Why are some students using the handy foldable to help them add and subtract decimals (for the love of all that is holy, line up those decimal points!)?  Where is the balance between conceptual understanding and skill development?  How do I move on when some students are exceeding the standards, and other are not working at grade level?  Now that we've noticed and wondered, when will we have the time to do more with our "wonders"?

Sometimes, I need to step away from Twitter, put down the math book, and remind myself that I'm doing the very best that I can in this moment for the learners I have been given the opportunity to educate this year.  The day I stop learning from my mistakes, adjusting my practice, and growing professionally, is the day I should hang it up.  Thankfully, that day is no where on the horizon.  Hopefully, I will learn to be more inspired by those educators who are able to answer most of the questions posed above and remember that none of us really feels like we have it all together.