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This series (part 1, part 2) went on vacation for a few months, but I wanted to pick it back up for a few reasons:

1. The “talking to teachers” part of my life began in the summer of 2011 with the Lake Michigan Writing Project, and LMWP pushed me to consider doing a workshop at the best conference in the world — Fire Up. Fire Up is put together by the teacher ed programs of West Michigan; every fall and spring, hundreds of student teachers attend their very own conference. I first spoke at Fire Up on the topic of grammar, but going around the conference that first time got me into the mindset of “What do these teachers really want to learn about? What questions are they trying to answer?” The answer wasn’t grammar; it was the “Tips for Impact” series of talks I’ve given at every Fire Up ever since. I’ve wanted to put the material from those talks on the blog for a long time, and, since I’m speaking at Fire Up again on Monday, I’ve got the “shove” I need to keep after it.
2. If you’ve been around Teaching the Core for a while, you know that my driving passion extends beyond the Common Core and literacy in general. I know the same is true for many of you.

Let’s move into Part 3 of building a career that ripples: the student level.

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This is the level we’re paid for

It’s worth emphasizing that, while all four parts of this series are a big deal, the student level is what we are most obligated to have in order by the end of the day. It’s wise for us to have long-term vision for our work (part 1), it’s wise to cultivate in ourselves the kinds of hearts and minds from which good teaching can come (part 2), and we’re pretty short-sighted if we don’t figure out how to encourage the adults around us as we go through our days (part 4).

Yet ultimately, we get paid to teach the kids.

The following diagram sums up how I think we can maximize our impact through our work with students. Note that these are intentionally generalized to be applicable as widely as possible. This is what I think being successful in the classroom boils down to, whether you teach K or 12, music or math, in the city or in the country:

 

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In what remains of this post, I’ll break down how we leverage consistency, awesomeness, and relationships to build students’ cognitive (academic) and noncognitive (character) strengths, all of which will positively impact (promote the long-term flourishing of) students. With each element of this diagram, I’ll throw in the first three specific tips that come to mind.

Relationships = money, so start building wealth

As far back as my student teaching days in Ypsilanti, MI, I was short on smarts, strategies, and even theory, but there was one thing I could do: develop working relationships with students. If you had asked me as a first year teacher what my classroom management plan was, I would have told you whatever rule scheme / norms list / consequence sequence I was using at the time (I tried literally dozens of classroom management plans during my first few years), I would have told in that I used “relationships-based classroom management.”

When I had trouble with particular students, I would endeavor to build relationships with them. When I didn’t, it often had less to do with how good of a teacher I was and more to do with how well we got along.

Like I said in my last post, we can’t base our sense of self-worth on how well students like us, but we do, at the end of the day, want strong relationships with them so that they’re more likely to trust our “call to higher ground,” as a former principal of mine once said.

Keep in mind that strong relationships don’t mean knowing their intimate life details or facilitating in-depth counseling sessions with students.

All right, three tips that come first to mind.

1. Positive parent phone calls

This is something I’ll return to in the next post in this series because it’s a great way to build teacher-parent relationships, too, but one of the best ways to get on a good footing with students is by making a simple, short phone call home to introduce yourself to the guardian and share something specific that you’ve noticed and appreciated about their child.

Back when I was a young teacher who didn’t run a blog or have a family, I made a call like this to every child’s guardian within the first two weeks of the school year. Rare was the time that I would call through a classroom roster without having at least one guardian openly crying on the phone.

You can bet that the majority of those calls trickled down to my students. In an average of two minutes per child, I had begun building a positive relationship with parents and legendary status in the eyes of my students.

But let’s move on because writing this is far too convicting (I haven’t finished my calls for the current school year, let’s just say…).

2. Handshakes, fist bumps, and other forms of appropriate physical touch

Physical touch is obviously something we have to be super careful of as teachers in a world rife with sexual misconduct, but this doesn’t mean we should shy away from relationship-building, fully appropriate forms of physical touch like hand shakes, fist bumps, or the occasional pat on the shoulder.

There is a relationship building power in simply shaking someone’s hand when beginning or ending a conversation, or simply in passing in the hallway. It’s a way of getting across that we’re on the same team and we’re going to dominate some life together.

Not only this, the handshake in particular is an important norm in US culture. We need to help our students get good and comfortable with the firm, eye-contact-included, double pump.

3. Make a kid’s day

I was speaking with my student teacher, Mr. Clintonious “Chappie” Chapman, the other day about how to build rapport with a class he had just taken over, and, as is typical for my advice to him, I was vague: “Make a kid’s day, every day.”

The vagueness is a little intentional though — there are a million ways to make someone’s day, and the “skill beneath the skill,” if you will, is being present in a given moment to see the opportunity to really speak to someone in a way that changes their day’s trajectory.

Some examples:

• When walking through the hallway to get a coffee refill during passing time, I try to make eye contact with as many students as I can and greet them by name whenever possible.
  • Keep in mind that I’m an introverted guy; crowded hallways aren’t naturally my happy place, but if I’m going to be in one I might as well make the best of it.
• When students are working independently in my room, I pull a few of them per day into the hallway, one-by-one. Keeping one eye on the classroom window, I try to specifically point out something that I see in the kid — some specific gifting or piece of potential. I try to call that out and speak some encouragement into their day to stay committed to what they can be.
• My students quickly start to get nicknames from me (I blame my nickname addiction on my upbringing), and while I honestly do this just because it’s fun, I think having an endearing nickname can also make us feel like we belong to something.
• Positive parent phone calls = making a kid’s day, too.

Before we move on, I’ll be honest: relationships can be exhausting

I’m thirty years old right now, but I feel a lot older to admit that, 8 years into my career, there are days when it’s pretty tiring to build and maintain positive working relationships with the latest crop of 14-year olds.

There are several reasons for the exhaustive nature of this work for me:

• As I mentioned earlier, I’m an introvert. I get charged up by getting alone and reading or writing or thinking or praying. If you feel like the tips I wrote above are exhausting, I’m with you. This isn’t easy work.
• I owe a big chunk of my relational energy each day to my wife and daughters; just because I see my family last doesn’t mean it’s all right to give them the dregs. I’m not willing to let my life go the way of the protagonist in Freedom Writers. If you’ve seen the film, you probably remember that at the end the teacher is like this awesome hero. But what you might not remember is that the teacher’s husband finally leaves her because she basically quits being in life with him.
• A lot of kids simply don’t know how to have healthy, professional relationships. Some tend toward clinginess. Many are desperate for attention. Others relentlessly try being funny with jokes that wore out years ago. I say all this with a wry smile — I love the energy of teens, and at the same time, it means I’ve got to make sure I hit the hay each night at a reasonable hour!

Awesomeness = “there’s something special about us”

Relationships are great, but it’s possible to have a class full of great relationships that is on the slow train to nowhere. This is where the stakes are high for us as educators; we’ve got to continually push ourselves to get better and better and better. I’ll talk about how other adults can exponentiate that growth in next week’s post, but for now, suffice it to say that we need to set the bar high for ourselves and our kids, and, when done right, raising the bar increases rather than decreases student motivation.

Please re-read that bolded sentence above — it’s incredibly important. If you’ve experienced (as I have countless times) that raising the bar in your classes decreases kids’ motivation, that doesn’t mean the bar shouldn’t be raised; rather, it means we need to get better at raising the bar and supporting kids in their efforts to leap over it.

If there’s one book that has shaped me in thinking like this, it’s Rafe Esquith’s There Are No Shortcuts. I can’t recommend Rafe enough — he’s the rare kind of super-teacher who both does incredible things and is unshy to discuss the realities of being a public schoolteacher.

The reason we build this culture of awesomeness or excellence or “we’re special” is not out of a desire to create some Mr. Stuart cult or a bunch of snobbish students who view themselves as better than others. We must be wary of making our students dependent on us; our goal is to empower them to engage with life and all its challenges.

The goal is to start changing our students’ mentality from “I just want to get by” or “I don’t care” to “I’m going somewhere, even right now while I read this article or discuss this question or practice self-control.”

Let’s get into the three tips.

4. “Do hard things”

This is one of our class mantras; it’s literally front and center in the classroom (see image below).

The phrase doesn’t come from the mind of Dave Stuart Jr., however — don’t attribute it to me!

Rather, it comes from the minds of some super-ambitious teenagers from Oregon named Alex and Brett Harris.

These kids founded a movement of “rebelutionaries” — teens rebelling against low expectations (how awesome is that!?) — starting at the age most kids are simply pumped to be getting their driver’s licenses. In their bestselling book Do Hard Things — which, as a full disclaimer, is rife with references to the boys’ Christian faith, they list “five kinds of hard.” I don’t share this list verbatim with my students, but it’s something I use to consider whether I’m actually making a classroom a place in which hard things are done every day.

From Do Hard Things:

If we launch into these [five kinds of hard] opportunities now, we’ll see powerful results–now and in our future. …

1. Things that are outside your comfort zone. …
2. Things that go beyond what is expected or required. …
3. Things that are too big to accomplish alone. …
4. Things that don’t earn an immediate profit. …
5. Things that challenge the cultural norm.

In addition to this list, I also appreciate the book’s various stories and arguments that support the idea that the teenage years haven’t always been characterized by apathy and complacency. (I obviously don’t use the faith-based elements of the arguments with my public school students.)

Every year, “do hard things” captures at least a few students in a lasting, life-changing manner. Kids will come back a few years after having me, and it’s obvious from speaking to them that they’ve bought into the idea that the cultural norm of low expectations for teenagers (You made your bed! You’re a great teen! Here’s a sticker!) is something they now see and defy.

5. We will read more, debate more, and write more…

It’s important to me that my students develop humility.  I do not want them to even think about thinking that because we do hard things and strive to be excellent we have any room to brag or turn our noses up.

I like C. S. Lewis’ definition of humility best: thinking of others more than you think of yourself. It’s not about having a negative view of yourself; it is viewing others as more important than you.

I make those comments on humility because it’s with caution that I tell my students that, each year, I strive to ensure they do more reading, debating, and writing than most students in the country. This is not out of any kind of competitive spirit; rather, it’s because the average expectations for teenagers are far too low.

Toward helping my students to see that we do extra work, I’ll use our district’s standard curricula as examples. Thankfully our district both has a core curriculum for each class and allows some teacher flexibility, and so, for example, in our recent English 9 unit on informational reading, my students read both the 3 required articles and 2 additional articles. In world history class, my students do articles of the week — even though this isn’t part of the WH core curriculum.

Again, please hear me: I’m not trying to give my students an elitist attitude; I don’t teach “honors” or “gifted and talented” classes, and so that kind of attitude isn’t common in my kids to begin with. I am trying to get them to see that there is something unique about having classes with me, and that unique thing is that we work really hard in preparation for our long-term flourishing (in teen terms, that’s long-tem life domination).

6. Bell to bell

Finally (and simply), I don’t give up on the idea that every minute of class time is precious. One minute wasted every day at the start of the hour is three full hours by the end of our school year (ouch). I share this math with students, and then tell them I’m not comfortable with taking three days off as a class. Some joke that they are; I express the lack of humor that I see in wasting time in preparation for success.

At the start of every hour, there’s a warm-up slide on the board. I work every day to get kids acclimated to the idea that the bell is our boss — it tells us when to get to work, and it literally takes about six weeks of reminding them and modeling how to get to work with the bell and teaching them what exactly to do until I start to walk into the classroom 30 seconds after the bell to find the students quietly getting started on the warm-up.

This not only takes one job off my plate for the year (getting the kids to settle into class at the start of the hour); it also builds in their minds this idea that there’s something special about what we do in here; there is something awesome.

Similarly, I want them thinking until class is over. If a lesson goes quicker than planned, I’ll use questioning or writing to have them think until class is through. No free time at the end of the hour. No rewarding on-task behavior with not learning. (This does happen.)

The gist: make something special

We got into teaching because we wanted to create classrooms where important things happen. All I’m saying in this “awesomeness” section is that we should keep striving for that, not ignoring the setbacks that come but in spite of them. This is worthwhile work; building a culture of excellence is fun, exciting, transformative, and insanely challenging.

Sounds like a job for the Teaching the Core community.

Consistency > cute

(That’s a “greater than” symbol for my non-mathy readers.)

Relationships and awesomeness need one more ingredient before you’ve got a lean and mean long-term flourishing producing classroom machine: consistency. In this section, I want to get explicit on three things we need to strive for consistency with: how we use and enforce behavioral expectations/rules/norms (call them what you want!); how we manage our emotions; and how we use our voice.

A note on the best classroom management website in the universe

If you want to know exactly how I manage my classroom, head over to Michael Linsin’s blog Smart Classroom Management. When it comes to blogging for teachers, Linsin is pretty much my hero. Every single week, without fail, he publishes a short (I’m working on it! Kind of!), helpful, and caring post pertaining to classroom management.

If you subscribe to only one teacher blog, subscribe to his!

Linsin essentially says that teachers have three responsibilities: to teach, to inspire, and to hold accountable. He says the things we all know but don’t think we can say or haven’t put words to yet, things like caring too much can actually make you a worse teacher and students shouldn’t necessarily decide the classroom rules and you shouldn’t redirect misbehavior. (Okay, maybe we don’t all know or agree with those statements, but read his posts before you close your mind!)

Whether you decide to adopt his classroom management plan or not (I did three years ago and haven’t turned back — it has made my classroom a much more enjoyable, powerful place for everyone in it), here’s the key: your students need 1) a consistent set of behavioral expectations, and 2) a consistent consequence for not meeting those expectations.

And if you say, “Well, that’s unreasonable; every situation is different,” just keep in mind while standardizing some things is foolhardy, standardizing how we manage our own classrooms is pretty smart.

Here are a few tips for reaping the fruits of consistency:

7. When it comes to classroom rules or norms or procedures, become a robot

So this is one I fail at just about every day, but the better I am at it, the better my classes go. Whether you have your class come up with rules collaboratively or you provide them with a list of rules, you need to enforce them like a robot.

I don’t mean become a lifeless, uncaring machine. Ask any of my students (especially the ones I teach after the first cup of coffee kicks in), and they won’t describe me as lifeless or uncaring.

The idea here is that we need to take the “case by case basis” thing out of the way we enforce rules. Toward that end, it’s smart to come up with rules that are clearly described and explicitly taught; also, make sure you understand your rules and really believe in them.

But on a day-to-day basis, it’s my job to enforce my rules impersonally — if Raul-who-is-pretty-energetic breaks one, he should get the same consequence as Suzelle-who-is-a-paragon-of-studenthood when she breaks it. When we view robotic consistency this way, we see that the alternative is being capricious at best or a favoritist at worst.

If it helps, think of it this way:

8. Remain “emotionally constant”

I’ve mentioned Doug Lemov’s work before, but there’s one phrase in his Teach Like a Champion that grabbed me ever since I first inherited it as a textbook for a class I used to teach at Aquinas College. The phrase is “emotional constancy.”

From Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion:

Emotional constancy does not mean withholding all emotions. It means you express emotions as a way of consistently promoting student learning and achievement. Emotionally constant teachers

• Control their own emotions rather than let students experiment in controlling them
• Use their outward show of emotions to keep the learning moving forward
• Tie their language to achievement and positive behavioral expectations
• Earn students’ trust that the teacher is always in control of self and of the room, and will sue that control respectfully o help students cope with emotional trials that interfere with learning.

The reason this is so powerful for me personally is that I learned it the hard way. During my early years in Baltimore, I frequently lost control of my temper. It’s embarrassing to admit that, but I am sure many teachers can relate. The solution to this problem was manifold. Part of it came from detaching my identity from my job performance; part of it came from growing in my own self-control; and part came from developing what Lemov calls “strong voice.”

9. Have a consistently “strong voice”

Again from Teach Like a Champion:

Any teacher can use five concrete and easily applied rules to capture… authority and confidence…, especially at critical moments:

• Use economical language. When you need control, fewer words are better. Additional words merely distract students from the most important thing they need to attend to. Show that you are calm and know clearly what you want by dropping every unnecessary word.
• Do not talk over. Show that your words matter by not talking if students are talking or making noise.
• Do not engage. When you’ve asked for compliance on a given topic, don’t allow the subject to be changed until the issue is resolved.
• Square up; stand still. Face difficulty with both shoulders. Stand stock-still to show there’s nothing else on your mind.
• Exude quiet power. Quieter and slower: when you’re under pressure, these signal that you’re calm, composed, and in control.

These are helpful because sometimes managing a classroom is like being Pi on a boat with a tiger.

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Putting consistency, awesomeness, and relationships to work

With those three foundational elements in place — consistency, awesomeness, and relationships (CAR) — you’ve got a lot of potential for greatness. The key, though, is to create a thriving classroom not just for now, but for the promotion of your students’ long-term flourishing.

To do this, I think the research overwhelming suggests we ought to aim at two kinds of growth, day in and day out. To put it technically, we need to help our students develop both their cognitive and noncognitive abilities. Colloquially, however, I refer to them as character and academics.

(If you teach a “non-core” subject, I include you and your content — physical education, music, art, computer science, home ec, life skills, etc — in that “academic” category.)

If character is a fad, then so is human civilization

I’ve written elsewhere that neglecting noncognitive skill development, with all that research suggests about the importance of noncognitive skills, basically amounts to negligence. I think all teachers value “what’s not on the test” or “the hidden curriculum” or “character strengths” (the idea has been called many things), but now more than ever we know, specifically, which skills are most predictive of positive life outcomes.

And for those who call this stuff faddish, keep in mind that Peterson & Seligman’s tome-ish Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification, a seminal work in the character strengths discussion, intentionally lists strengths that have endured the test of time and culture. Though the buzzwordy nature of some of the strengths may fade (that would be good), their value won’t.

Toward developing character, here are three tips.

10. Select a manageable amount of strengths and use explicit indicators to teach them

Ever since coming across Paul Tough’s NYT article over two years ago, my colleagues and I have been experimenting with how to grow KIPP’s list of strengths in our students.

Whether you like KIPP’s list or not, here is the critical, “you seriously need to not miss this” point if you’re going to help kids grow character: explicit indicators are crucial.

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I’ve been hearing more and more lately the true fact that grit is becoming a buzzword. However, just like with close reading, this is only because the term is being used lightly, or without understanding what it means, or without an idea of what, exactly, grit is and looks like.

Just like with close reading, you can’t just say a word a ton and expect it’s meaning won’t fade. Grit is a technical term for a specific set of noncognitive skills.

I digress — the point is, you need explicit indicators if you’re going to teach kids a strength.

11. Emphasize that the strengths are learnable skills, and skills can be developed

I’ve written about growth mindset elsewhere, so I won’t belabor the point: grit and self-control and social intelligence and zest and all the rest are learnable, developable skills — they’re not fixed traits.

12. Aim at ownership

Like I discussed last post, we need to accept that students live their lives, students manage their time, and therefore we need to think about how we can get students to own their own educations. My cousin Shelley gave some great thinking on how we might build our students’ ownership of their learning in the comments section of that last post (click here to head straight to her comment).

Just keep in mind that its the kids who have to live with whatever character they do or don’t develop — we need to be honest with them about that. I frequently tell my students, “Guys, you’re the ones who have to live your lives — not me! I’m living mine!” I say this to emphasize that me seeking to facilitate their character growth isn’t something I’m doing for my benefit; it’s for theirs.

Academics are important; your course does matter

It’s critical for us to not give in to the idea that there is something wrong with our disciplines, that they are “out of touch” with today’s students, that simply because we have Google our citizenry doesn’t need to know a lot of stuff without looking it up on the Internet.

13. Don’t apologize for your content or the work you ask students to do

Once again, Lemov’s book has a great term for this tip — he calls it “Without Apology.”

Part of the key is fighting the assumption that certain students simply won’t “get” your work or content.

From Teach Like a Champion:

Assuming something is too hard or technical for some students is a dangerous trap. … [Be careful] not to assume there’s a ‘they’ who won’t really ‘get’ something, say sonnets or other traditional forms of poetry, and that it’s therefore better to teach them poetry through hip-hop lyrics instead. What happens when they take Introduction to Literature in their freshman year in college and have never read a poem written before 1900? Kids respond to challenges; they require pandering only if people pander to them.

The other part is not giving them an excuse to tune out (which is exactly what we give them when we say things like, “All right, I know this is a little boring,” or “This is part of the curriculum, so we have to do it.”

Lemov gives alternatives to apologizing for our content in Teach Like a Champion:

• “This material is great because it’s really challenging.”
• “Lots of people don’t understand this until they get to college, but you’ll know it now. [Baller status.]”
• “This gets more and more exciting as you come to understand it better.”
• “A lot of people are afraid of this stuff, so after you’ve mastered it, you’ll know more than most adults.”

14. Get good at answering “why”

Why do we have to do this?

Why does this matter for my life?

When am I ever going to use this?

Too often, we get to a point in our careers where we dismiss these kinds of student questions, finding them irreverent or annoying. Yet I would argue that these are some of the most important questions our kids ask; every day that we teach is a change to be creative and come up with better answers, or to be scholarly and research how our course content benefits actual adults in the real world.

15. Become the C. S. Lewis of school

C. S. Lewis is considered by pretty much everyone as one of the great English writers of the 20th century, but his Narnia series isn’t what most fascinates me — it’s his books on apologetics. I know it seems contradictory for me to say in Tip 1 of this section that you shouldn’t apologize, and then in Tip 3 I say I recommend that you become an apologist, but stay with me.

Apologists are folks who create reasoned arguments in justification of something, typically a theory or religious doctrine. But here’s the thing: to many of my students, the notion that school is worth the effort and will pay off someday is just as religious as believing in an unseen god or an afterlife.

And so I think that, just as C. S. Lewis was a master at explaining the logic behind his belief system in terms that the everyday person of the time could wrap their head around, so too must we become experts at explaining the logic and beauty and sensibility of the value of owning one’s education.

I don’t have anything more specific than that; all I’m recommending is that you decide to become an apologist for school — if your students are like mine, many of them are big time skeptics of education.

Keep the goal in sight

Remember: every moment of every class period should have one ultimate goal in mind: long-term student flourishing. Start with this and build backwards; when you start beating up on yourself in an unhealthy manner, go back to Part 2 of this series and get your heart right. Then get back at trying hard Image may be NSFW.
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Thank you Teaching the Core family. Take care.

-Dave

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