Michael Pershan kicked my butt recently with a post about why teachers tend to plateau in skill after their third year, connecting it to Cal Newport’s ideas such as “hard practice” (and, I would argue, “deep work“).

Michael distinguishes between practice and hard practice, and wonders whether blogging belongs on his priority list:

“Hard practice makes you better quickly. Practice lets you, essentially, plateau. …

Put it like this: do you feel like you’re a 1st year teacher when you blog? Does your brain hurt? Do you feel as if you’re lost, unsure how to proceed, confused?

If not, you’re not engaged in hard practice.”

Ooof.  On one hand, it made me face my desire to avoid hard practice; I feel like I’ve spent the last 8 months trying to decrease how much I feel like that.  I’ve tried to create classroom procedures that are more reuseable and systematic, especially for labs, whiteboarding sessions, class discussions, and model presentations.

It’s a good idea to periodically take a hard look at that avoidance, and decide whether I’m happy with where I stand.  In this case, I am.  I don’t think the goal is to “feel like a first year teacher” 100% of the time; it’s not sustainable and not generative.  But it reminds me that I want to know which activities make me feel like that, and consciously choose some to seek out.

Michael makes this promise to himself:

It’s time to redouble my efforts. I’m half way through my third year, and this would be a great time for me to ease into a comfortable routine of expanding my repertoire without improving my skills.

I’m going to commit to finding things that are intellectually taxing that are central to my teaching.

It made me think about what my promises are to myself.

Be a Beginner

Do something every summer that I don’t know anything about and document the process.  Pay special attention to how I treat others when I am insecure, what I say to myself about my skills and abilities, and what exactly I do to fight back against the fixed-mindset that threatens to overwhelm me.  Use this to develop some insight into what exactly I am asking from my students, and to expand the techniques I can share with them for dealing with it.

Last summer I floored my downstairs.  The summer before that I learned to swim — you know, with an actual recognizable stroke.  In both cases, I am proud of what I accomplished.  In the process, I was amazed to notice how much concentration it took not to be a jerk to myself and others.

Learn More About Causal Thinking

I find myself being really sad about the ways my students think about causality.  On one hand, I think my recent dissections of the topic are a prime example of “misconceptions listening” — looking for the deficit.  I’m pretty sure my students have knowledge and intuition about cause that I can’t see, because I’m so focused on noticing what’s going wrong.  In other words, my way of noticing students’ misconceptions is itself a misconception.  I’d rather be listening to their ideas fully, doing a better job of figuring out what’s generative in their thinking.

What to do about this? If I believe that my students need to engage with their misconceptions and work through them, then that’s probably what I need too. There’s no point in my students squashing their misconceptions in favour of “right answers”; similarly, there’s no point in me squashing my sadness and replacing it with some half-hearted “correct pedagogy.”

Maybe I’m supposed to be whole-heartedly happy to “meet my students where they are,” but if I said I was, I’d be lying. (That phrase has been used so often to dismiss my anger at the educational malpractice my students have endured that I can’t even hear it without bristling).  I need to midwife myself through this narrow way of thinking by engaging with it.  Like my students, I expect to hold myself accountable to my observations, to good-quality reasoning, to the ontology of learning and thinking, and to whatever data and peer feedback I can get my hands on.

My students’ struggle with causality is the puzzle from which my desire for explanation emerged; it is the source of the perplexity that makes me unwilling to give up. I hope that pursuing it honestly will help me think better about what it’s like when I ask my students to do the same.

Interact with New Teachers

Talking with beginning teachers is better than almost anything else I’ve tried for forcing me to get honest about what I think and what I do.  There’s a new teacher in our program, and talking things through with him has been a big help in crystallizing my thoughts (mutually useful, I think).  I will continue doing this and documenting it.  I also put on a seminar on peer assessment for first-year teachers last summer; it was one of the more challenging lesson plans I’ve ever written.  If I have another chance to do this, I will.

Work for Systemic Change

I’m not interested in strictly personal solutions to systemic problems.  I won’t have fun, or meet my potential as a teacher, if I limit myself to improving me.  I want to help my institution and my community improve, and that means creating conditions and communities that foster change in collective ways.  For two years, I tried to do a bit of this via my campus PD committee; for various reasons, that avenue turned out not to lead in the directions I’m interested in going.  I’ve had more success pressing for awareness and implementation of the Workplace Violence Prevention regulations that are part of my local jurisdiction’s Occupational Health and Safety Act.

I’m not sure what the next project will be, but I attended an interesting seminar a few months ago about our organization’s plans for change.  I was intrigued by the conversations happening about improving our internal communication.  I’ve also had some interesting conversations recently with others who want to push past the “corporate diversity” model toward a less ahistorical model of social justice or cultural competence.  I’ll continue to explore those to find out which ones have some potential for constructive change.

I’m also planning to go on deferred leave for four months starting next January.  After that, I’ve made it a priority to find a way to work half-time.   The kind of “intellectually taxing” enrichment that I need, in order for teaching to be satisfying, takes more time than is reasonable on top of a full-time job.  I’m not willing to permanently sacrifice my ability to do community volunteer work, spend time with my loved ones, and get regular exercise. That’s more of a medium-term goal, but I’m working a few leads already.

Anyone have any suggestions about what I should do with 4 months of unscheduled time starting January 2014?