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This is the sixth written response to the TFA pre-institute work (responses 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). This reflection is on “continuously improving effectiveness.”
I can only imagine that getting filmed on your first day in the classroom is incredibly valuable. Not simply because reviewing that tape can help you make important short-term improvements in your techniques, but because you have that visual record of your baseline for an entire career. I can imagine that as time goes on, I’ll feel from time to time like I’m not making progress, like I’m not improving as an instructor. But then I can go right back to that tape and say, “There’s where I used to be. Of course I’ve gotten better.”
The first of the two videos for this exercise features Colin Seale doing just that, of his first day in front of a 9th grade algebra class. He’s good about explaining the rationale behind his rules and the uneven treatment of students he wants to avoid. But he freely admits that he was too chummy, and a student corroborates. He learned the hard way that students will continue to push as the year goes on, looking for any chink in your authority. And when class got out of hand, derailing his lessons, Mr. Seale had to try and veer hard in the other direction.
“It seemed very unnatural to put forth all this effort to make order,” he said. The worst consequences of trying to teach without order, however, aren’t about you personally. They’re about the unfulfilled academic potential of your students. Mr. Seale obviously realized this; being able to joke and laugh with his students of course seemed natural, but wasn’t as important as focusing and motivating his them.
Which leads to the more complicated problem that he identifies: explaining to students the importance of achieving, but making clear the amount of effort required to do well. Setting clear rules and classroom structure early is important, but he also says that showing students the big picture about the value of learning and the effort required to earn good grades is another crucial component of motivating students early in the year.
Mr. Seale obviously realized that these problems are connected: he could be more effective in the classroom if he found ways of investing students in their work and making clear the effort that it required. And that worked for the student interviewed who admitted to coming in early for help on her homework.
The personal anecdotes from corps members in Teaching As Leadership and the supplemental reading on this issue are fascinating, because they illustrate people committing to getting better at their work by reforming routines and building self-reflection into their everyday work. “Over and other we hear from highly effective teachers that data analysis, reflection, and self-improvement are not do-when-you-can tasks but are built into their routine alongside planning, grading, and teaching,” writes Farr. The corps members in the texts describe taping audio snippets of their class to listen to on the drive home, writing daily about their experiences, reaching out to anyone who could help them improve, and realizing that they will never actually reach perfection as an instructor. “I’m getting there,” they tell Farr.
One interesting aspect of having just left my job as an editor and writer is that a large record of how I improved in each of those roles on scienceprogress.org.
In order to get better as a writer, I read lots of journalism that I wanted to imitate (though I wouldn’t say that my role at SP was that of a journalist). That meant combing through dozens of email newsletters and tables of contents every week to read science reporting in influential publications, particularly Science and Nature. It meant making sure that I understood the foundations of what I was writing about, often slogging through technical research articles—sometimes many times over. And it meant doing extra homework, including reading my sister’s used biology textbook and handbooks of bioethics research, so that I understood the fields I was responsible for.
So let’s look back. Here’s my first analytical post on Science Progress from October 2007:
Basically, this is me applying my cultural studies training to a complicated area of energy policy and research. Ultimately, this kind of pop analysis wasn’t the most useful thing for me to spend my time on. Frankly it was silly and embarrassing. Just read the comments. Learned from watching the web traffic and email clicks that it was better for me to synthesize and present information from other experts—either with my own writing or editing and producing content from experts with far more knowledge than myself. On the topic of biofuels, take the . After it appeared, someone passed along an email praising the usefulness of the interview for policy professionals, and knew I was on the right track.
Contrast that first post with one of the recent short features I penned on a federal court ruling in a gene patent case:
This piece didn’t represent any original reporting (all the major outlets were covering it, so what could I add?). But it did weave together the key legal and scientific information with the policy questions, linking along the way to SP content that experts had written on the issue of intellectual property rights for DNA. I’m proud, not embarrassed, to read this piece over, and I know it was effective because a legal expert in the field went out of his way to write and say so.
Reading that old post may be like watching a video of myself on the first day of school, but I know from my experience at SP that I can continuously improve. I was light years away from being where I wanted to be at that job, but I was always getting better, and that was satisfying.