September 2019
“I’M STILL LEARNING.” ~MICHELANGELO
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Learning from Suzanne
A new grandmother’s reflections on learning
Counting Suzanne
But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don’t show him that he counts for something?
Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave
Suzanne’s 100-day celebration took place this past month. This Chinese tradition hails an important milestone in a baby’s life. It represents the family’s wish that the baby will live 100 years.
Now, I think this is a great idea because I’m all about celebrating Suzanne and I’m also all about using mathematical ideas to make sense of life. One hundred is such a nice number. It’s big and round and important. One hundred is lots and lots and lots of individual units, more than a human being can easily conceptualize. So, we clump these individual units into groups of ten (also a nice number), and then we clump ten groups of ten individual units to make a special number that we call 100. A hundred is a group of groups, in this case ten groups of ten days in Suzanne’s life.
Although Suzanne is not yet able to appreciate the significance of 100, I’m already looking forward to talking with her about numbers and what they mean in our lives. I want Suzanne to see numbers as a useful way to think and talk about important things: the number of times she pets her cat, the number of minutes until her dad comes home from work, the number of books she’s reading, the number of women of color in political office, the number of first-generation college graduates in her graduating class, the number of people whose lives are made better in some way as a result of the work Suzanne chooses to do as an adult. The importance of numbers comes from the things they represent. We only spend time counting things we care about. Perhaps a question we should regularly pose to ourselves and each other is: What things are we choosing to count and why?
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How can we teach something we haven’t yet mastered?
Recently, I had a conversation with some math teacher friends about the importance of teachers’ mathematical identities and the impact of a teacher’s identity as a mathematician and a math learner on her expectations for students. As we talked, several individuals shared stories about how, as children, they had come to doubt their ability to understand mathematics because of a thoughtless comment from a teacher, a comment which undoubtedly reflected the teacher’s own beliefs about learning and mathematics. They discussed how they had overcome their limiting mindset and their resulting determination to help each of their students see him or herself as a mathematician. We agreed that teachers should never be allowed to say, “I’m not a math person.”
Then the conversation shifted to professional writing. One colleague had started writing a blog about issues related to equity in math education. She encouraged the others to try blogging as a way of sharing their professional expertise with the education community. The group suddenly became silent. Finally, these fierce advocates for mathematical mindsets began reacting to their friend’s suggestion. Again, and again, around the table their response was, “I couldn’t do that. I’m not a writer.”
Now, I’m not criticizing my friends. I experience my own mindset disequilibrium all the time. I regularly catch myself thinking and acting in ways that are not congruent to my professed belief that human beings have unknown capacity for growth.
I’ve come to accept that an ongoing struggle with our mindsets will always exist, and that our energy is best invested in strengthening our abilities to: 1) notice when we fall into a fixed mindset; and 2) consciously and intentionally step out of the fixed mindset into possibility thinking.
We know that students’ mindsets determine their success in school and in life, and it’s therefore critical that we help our students adopt a growth mindset. But how can we help students think and act from a learning mindset when we haven’t yet mastered this skill ourselves? Can we build our own muscles for mindset awareness and navigation at the same time we’re helping students to do the same? I think so. More and more, teachers are called on to “build the plane while flying it,” to learn new concepts and skills while simultaneously helping students develop these same concepts and skills. New curriculum standards require that we teach critical-thinking and problem-solving skills we didn’t experience when we were in school. We regularly learn to use new technology along with our students, and in some cases from our students. And as the importance of social-emotional learning and cultural proficiency are recognized, we realize the need to attend to our own emotional intelligence and our own cultural awareness in order to cultivate these important understandings and abilities in our students.
I think there are advantages in learning alongside our students. Doing so requires that we move out of the role of knowledge giver and into the role of coach. We support our students in learning how to think, and how to think about their thinking. We help students see and understand themselves as learners. We encourage and assist students in adding to their toolkit of learning strategies. And, all the while, we’re reminded that we are learners too, that we have the opportunity to learn with and from our students every day, that teaching is a true learning profession.
This seems pretty important!
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Resources worth checking out
A Closer Look at Open Educational Resources. A podcast an article about free online resources. Addresses issues related to resource quality, copyright, and cohesiveness and recommends websites worth knowing about.
Dare to Lead. Brené Brown, author and research professor known for her study of authenticity and courage had created a website of free resources for teachers as a companion to her new book Date to Lead.
Becoming an Emotionally Intelligent Teacher by William Powell and Ochan Kusuma-Powell, Skyhorse Publishing, 2013
The content of this book should be cornerstone curriculum in Teacher Preparation 101! Every teacher needs a thorough understanding of the concepts explored in this book and the tools offered for building these skills:
- Reading and interpreting emotions in others.
- Teaching and applying the skills of emotional self-regulation and impulse control.
- Coping with stress, and helping students learn to cope with stress.
- Building resilience in self and others.
- Learned helplessness – how does it develop and how can it be overcome?
- Deconstructing our perceptions; examining our expectations for student learning.
- Remaining motivated; staying in touch with “our why.”
- Building trust.
- Managing relationships and teaching students the skills of relationship management.
These are a few of the essential teaching skills addressed in this very practical and readable book. The ideas promoted by authors Powell and Kusama-Powell have grown out of their extensive experience as teachers, education leaders, and consultants as well as their background in Cognitive Coaching and differentiation of instruction. They make a strong case that teacher emotional intelligence can be directly linked to student learning and that these abilities can be grown.
This book should be on every school leader’s bookshelf as a go-to resource for helping teachers build their own emotional intelligence and equipping them to help students develop social and emotional skills. For schools invested in SEL, this book is an excellent choice for a school-wide book study. It could also be used to design a series of professional learning sessions around SEL.
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