Tag Archives: Teach for America
Any landing you can walk away from…
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My first full week was amazing!
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The Uncensored Thoughts of a Student Teacher
- You must have high expectations for all of your students and truly believe that all of them can and will succeed. Yes, this seems self-evident to me. People rise or fall to meet expectations. Give someone a week or a month to do something and that’s how long it will take. Or, more broadly, consider the question of free will. The only reasonable stance to take is that free will exists. If it does, and you’re right, then you will behave appropriately. If it doesn’t, and you’re wrong, you were still holding a belief that coerced your non-free will to act in the most potentially useful way possible. So set big goals, “ambitious yet feasible,” and truly believe that students will achieve them.
- The Academic Impact Model posits that Student Achievement is predicated on Student Actions, which are predicated on Teacher Actions, which are predicated on Teacher Knowledge, Skills, and Mindsets. Again, YES, obviously, how could they not? Clearly there will be external influences, but the most powerful and successful teacher will ensure his influence is the most potent. He will battle against negative influences with the knowledge of what is really at stake, and with a degree of conviction most students will not yet possess. It is the teacher’s job to model that disciplined attitude and effort can achieve whatever it is one desires. And it is the teacher’s burden to realize he is responsible not just for a student’s success but also a student’s failure.
- Once you have a goal in mind, backwards plan to ensure all your efforts will align with and lead to achieving that goal. This insight gets to the heart of TFA’s affinity for data. It is introduced to warn new teachers against the dangers of “activity-based” lessons, where the kids are having a great time but not really mastering the intended objective. For example, we could play blackjack in math class, but if we haven’t sufficiently worked out probabilities the strategy would be lost on students. But backwards planning goes deeper than that, too. It means starting with the goal in mind, knowing how you’ll assess that you’ve met that goal, and then breaking the goal into small chunks, each of which can itself be backwards planned.
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Step 3: Get Placed
On Monday morning my unabashed confidence was finally met with validation. I was offered at job teaching middle school math at a charter school up in the South Bronx. My first contact with the school was a phone interview in the middle of May, followed by an on-site interview and demo lesson in June, and finally a meeting with the principal last week. Each step of the way I felt more confident that I would really fit in at the school and that I had impressed my interviewer. In fact, after the demo lesson I felt so good about my chances that I told three of my friends I would give them $100 each if I didn’t get the job! So you can bet that I brought my A-game for the final meeting with the principal.
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