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INTRODUCTION

There’s this myth in teaching. This myth says you will struggle in your first few years but that, by your fourth or fifth year, you’ll be experienced, things will be easy, and you’ll have your act together. The truth is, while some years are better than others, teaching is hard every year, and every year, as teachers, we are asked to do more and more.

We live in a time of what some theorists call “accelerating change”—with exponentially faster technological, cultural, social, and environmental change than any other period in the known history of our planet (Kurzweil, 2001). We feel the effects of this firsthand in our schools and in our profession.

Each year, the group of students that enters our classrooms is vastly different from the group a year before. These students come with strong, evolving influences, from the latest technology to the year’s newest hit television (or internet) show. Primarily, they come already equipped with new ways of thinking and operating in society.

Yet, as teachers, it is still our responsibility to ensure that they learn the academic content that someone else has deemed they learn, along with noncurricular life skills. It is also our responsibility to work with one another to help these students learn, which means we have to master grown-up communication and collaboration skills. Finally, it’s our responsibility to represent our profession—and our schools and districts, and even our nation’s educational system—to the wider community (the public) via all of the ever-changing modes of communication available to us.

Being a teacher is a multiskill, multifaceted, multipurpose role, a role that doesn’t end when the bell rings, rather one we embody in our classrooms, in our schools, and throughout our communities. Thus, the great, challenging, overwhelming, enlightening, and rewarding responsibility it is to be a modern-day teacher.

Let’s own this great challenge and responsibility—this great opportunity to make a difference.

What This Book Is

Whether this is your first year or your thirty-first year, this is a book that any teacher, of any age or subject, can use to address the many challenges we face each day. Every challenge this book addresses is one that I, and the many colleagues I’ve worked with over the years, have faced. Every strategy I list is one that I’ve used, refined, and taught to others.

I mean for this book to help you identify the root causes of many of the challenges we face as educators, give you easy-to-implement strategies for success that work, and ignite the best in yourself and your students. In short, I mean for it to help you be a highly effective teacher who loves what you do.

You may notice a running theme permeates this book’s chapters, and that is the idea that whether we are talking about students, teachers, or members of the community, people are not fixed. We all have enormous capacity to learn and grow. Carol S. Dweck (2006) refers to this capacity as a growth mindset. In this spirit of growth mindsets, if you are a new teacher, then I’m excited for you to try some of these strategies, and I assure you—they are powerful. If you’ve been teaching for a while, some of these strategies will still be new to you, while others may not be. The reason they’re included in this book is because I and other teachers have used them, and they work. Even if you already have experiences with many of them, my goal is to give you a fresh perspective on why you are using them and how they can help you make an even bigger impact with your students and their learning.

This book is a compilation of columns that I originally wrote for the nonprofit organization Reaching At-Promise Students Association (RAPSA, https://rapsa.org). The columns became wildly popular among teachers, and for this book, I have thoroughly reviewed and updated them to go even deeper and reflect new changes and ideas that have come along since I first wrote them. Each column is both an exploration of our many roles as teachers and a quick-reference handbook of strategies you can pull out in many of the situations you are likely to find yourself in daily in your classroom, school, and community.

This is a book that will help teachers feel more prepared for our increasingly multifaceted roles, and a book that will inspire teachers—like you—to remember why you entered this greatest profession and what incredibly important work you do every day.

It’s a book about owning it—stepping up to and embracing our myriad roles as modern teachers and acing each one—for the benefit of our students, our schools, our communities, our profession, and even our nation.

Whether you are a teacher, a coach, or a mentor, my goal is to make this a book you can pick up and leaf through, and find something useful to implement in your work and life immediately, along with some validation about how amazing you are, juggling all of the roles we teachers fill in a fast-changing era.

How This Book Is Structured

Lots of teaching books focus on our role in the classroom, and so does this one. But this book does something else I’ve not found in the many teaching books I read: it focuses on our roles as classroom leaders, as mentors to challenging students and students who are at risk, as colleagues and members of a staff team, and on our roles as public professionals, representing our profession throughout the wider community. To that end, I divided this book into four parts, each one focusing on one of these roles. Excelling in all of these roles is critical in our profession.

Part 1: Owning It in Your Classroom

Part 1 (chapters 1–7) provides easy-to-implement, specific strategies that all teachers can use to connect with, engage, and ensure learning for all students.

Each year in the classroom, I have students in my class who, despite living in dire poverty, perform at the top of the chart on state tests. Sitting next to them are students who could not read, tell time, or speak English. Yet my school and community expect me to teach them all and do so at a level that is challenging to each of them. That’s why I devote the first part of this book to the role we play, not as teachers of a specific subject or level, but as teachers of students and as classroom leaders who are responsible for every kind of everyday learning, who are accountable to test scores and parents, and who are accountable to every student who crosses our doorway.

I share what I’ve learned on the ground in my classroom about such topics as how to increase our powerful presence in the classroom, how to use the first five minutes of class to set the tone, how to engage and encourage all students, and how to manage such realities of classroom teaching as standardized tests and data.

This part represents a valuable quick-reference guide for any teacher looking for a little burst of fresh air in his or her day-to-day teaching or for ways to handle the many challenging classroom situations all teachers face.

Part 2: Owning It With Your Most Challenging Students

Part 2 (chapters 8–14) focuses on those few students who seem to demand more attention and discipline than the rest of the class combined. Known widely as the Pareto Principle, 20 percent of our collective students often seem to provide 80 percent of our classroom challenges (“Guru: Joseph Juran,” 2009). They are the students who are most challenging to connect with, to keep on task, and to help perform academically. They are the students who frustrate us, often to the point of exasperation.

They are also the students who need us the most. They are the students whose parents may not seem deeply committed to their education or were, themselves, unsuccessful in school. They are the students who fall into the so-called “achievement gap,” and often are lost in there (Auguste, Hancock, & Laboissiere, 2009).

That’s why I devote these chapters specifically to the ever-important role we play as teachers of students who are struggling or are at risk of dropping out of school. In this part, I offer strategies on topics such as connecting with students at risk, negotiating with them, honoring their cultural backgrounds, involving their parents, and empowering them to have a stake in their own education.

Part 3: Owning It at Your School and District

I devote part 3 (chapters 15–19) to the role we play as colleagues—both in our schools and within our districts or organizations. The days of the one-room schoolhouse are long gone, and working with a group of colleagues is an essential part of being a teacher. Just as we teach a group of students with a wide range of abilities and experiences, the teachers and administrators we work with are vastly different in their experiences, knowledge, and philosophies.

We’re not all teachers for the same reason, yet we’re all expected to do the same job. With over 17 percent of our colleagues leaving this job within the first five years (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2015), it’s time for all of us to own the fact that, as educators, we are truly dependent on each other. That’s why the chapters in part 3 provide practical and real strategies you can use to incorporate, not eliminate our differences, and draw upon each other’s strengths.

It may seem, at times, that the issues and challenges I call out in these chapters have traditionally been the responsibility of principals and district administrators to address. However, owning it as teachers means stepping forward and utilizing creative, collaborative solutions that are practical and effective for the work that we do each day.

Offering strategies ranging from coming up with creative ideas for staff meetings, to addressing the generation gaps (yes, gaps!) between teachers, to strategizing for how to approach a colleague to have a difficult conversation, I based this part on the belief that the number-one factor in the success or failure of a school is the relationships of the adults in the building.

Part 4: Owning It in Your Community

I devote part 4 (chapters 20–24) to the role that we play as public professionals, representing our schools, our students, and the whole convoluted concept of education. Teaching is not just what we do. Teaching is what we are. It doesn’t end when the last bell rings or when vacation starts. The time has come to own this role too.

As a profession, we often feel under attack from lawmakers, parent groups, and the general public, so many of whom buy into the idea that our education system is failing and that the solution is to simply “fire all the bad teachers.” The strategies I offer in this part include how to positively represent our schools and our profession in the public eye, how to utilize various media to do so, and how to step up and become a teacher leader by sharing what you know, not just with colleagues at your school, but also at regional, state, and national conferences. When teachers lead, we elevate our profession, and everyone wins.

How to Use This Book

This book is like the friend that you go to when you just need some straightforward answers. I mean for you to read it easily and efficiently, and I designed every strategy to be immediately implementable with little to no cost to you.

You don’t need to read this book from cover to cover (though I hope you will!). You can leave this book near your desk or nightstand and pull it out to read just one section on an issue you’re dealing with at the moment or to get a little jolt of motivation on a hard day. I also hope you will consider reading it as a group with your school or district staff teams and work on the strategies together. In fact, that’s precisely why I included a section for reflection questions at the end of each chapter. Use these to reflect on your own teaching practices and stir the pot for discussion with your colleagues.

In the end, use this book however it works for you, to inspire yourself to own it by owning your complex and expanding role in the most important profession during one of the most rapidly changing times in history.

Let’s own it together and show the world that the future of education is brighter than some may think, with teachers like us taking the lead in our classrooms, our schools, and our communities.