Do you run the risk of becoming successful?

The time from spring break to the end of the school year often seems like a battle between students and teachers to see who is most ready for the summer to begin. One of the teachers I worked with in my first job was fond of saying, "When you look forward to Monday more than Friday, you run the risk of becoming successful." I find this to be true in most anything. Success comes on the heels of both starting well and finishing strongly.

Applied to the teaching profession, I have come to the point where I look forward to the beginning of the school day more than to the end. I look forward to Monday more than to Friday. I look forward to August more than to May. Okay, maybe not entirely. But I do like the possibilities that the fall semester holds. I like that I have nearly unlimited opportunities awaiting me.

During my evenings, I often plan what I am going to accomplish the next day. During my weekends, I often plan what I am going to accomplish in the next week. During vacations, I often plan a large chunk of the semester. During the summer, I plan what I am going to accomplish in the following school year.


Success comes from looking forward. Looking back was the downfall of Lot's wife. Planning ahead also pertains to classroom management, as you can more easily circumvent problems that you foresee coming up. The greater vision you have, the better you will be able to lead people. In the classroom or the boardroom.

Note From Boss To Employees

Here is a great article on Execupundit that every employee should read.

How Not To Waste Spring Break

"I'm bored"
No success will come from squandering time. Time is too precious to waste. The summer months and holiday weekend that we are afforded in the education business should not become an excuse to catch up on all the latest greatest movies and pack away the bon bons. Instead, these times seem to be best spent by analyzing where things stand with your current teaching position. What has worked so far this year? What will work better if I start doing it after the break? If it's summer, how can I start out the school year more prepared than I did last year?

Another good thing to do is catch up on house upkeep. Sell extra CDs you have at home. Throw away old papers. Have a yard sale. Not only will it give you some extra cash, but it will also make the home less cluttered and you will feel better while you are there.

Teaching summer school is an option. Personally, I would prefer to develop other aspects of my life rather than teaching year round. I have work I can be doing at church. I have volunteering that I can be doing. I can go visit my parents. I can read. I used to spend the time playing video games or messing around on MySpace. Now I have come to the point where I see how much valuable time those things have been wasting for me.

So what will I be doing over spring break? For one, I will be starting a business (go to the courthouse to file, open a checking account, do some web design work for it). I also plan to go visit my parents while my sister will be in town to visit them. I'm planning on organizing my office at school, selling around 75 CDs, going to a basketball game with a friend, and playing with my dogs. Valuable things that the typical school year time doesn't really allow me to do all that much.

Six Steps To Motivating

"What are you doing to motivate them?"
I was talking with a friend this afternoon about her class. She is a second year teacher. She taught elementary last year and is teaching seventh grade this year. What a change! In the process of our conversation, I asked her, "what are you doing to motivate them?" She had no clue.

Why motivate?
Without motivation, your class is just another one block of time that the students have to suffer through. With motivation, you hear things like "hi, favorite teacher!" and "I love this class!" As a teacher, those are the kinds of things that we absolutely love to hear. They say that about half of all teachers stop teaching before their sixth year. I am on the home stretch or my fifth now. I would guess that most teachers who quit teaching do so because of the lack of these kinds of comments; they do so because they do not have enough motivated students.

Steps to motivating?
As I have written before, "Motivation comes from ... loving what you do." That is the crux of the issue. If you do not love what you do, then you cannot create blissful followers. So we now see some steps to successfully motivating people

1. Love what you do
2. Emanate passion
3. Have fun
4. Stop being selfish
5. Be prepared
6. Continue learning

Love what you do
I cannot stress enough how essential it is to love what you do. This applies for everything in life. Dave Ramsey talks about it. Steve Jobs talks about it. Po Bronson talks about it. Andrew Wee talks about it. Success in any endeavor demands that you love doing what you are doing. If you don't, and you don't love the idea of doing it, then get out before you regret wasting time and wasting lives of children.

But what if you love the thought of teaching, but don't enjoy teaching? If this is the case, then there is still hope for you. Stick it out. Before I started my first year, I was given the advice by a friend that when I accept my first job, I should make a mental commitment to myself that I will be there are least three years. This allows me to work toward long-range goals and respond to incidents accordingly rather than just reacting in a self-centered kind of way.

Emanate passion
Passion is defined as the trait of being intensely emotional. You must be intensely emotional about children, about teaching, and especially about teaching children. If you are, then they will feed off of that energy.

Have fun
If passion is the key, then having fun is the way to activate that passion. I joke around a lot. I mess with other teachers when they come in. I make fun of myself. I make up lyrics to go along with the music we play. I talk about my puppies. I ask them what they did over the weekend and then make some fun (non-critical) comments on whatever they did. I smile. A lot. I laugh. I say stuff to the kids when I see them in other parts of the school. I have a cool website for my class. I have a blog to keep parents updated on what's going on in our world.

Stop being selfish
Whenever kids don't do what I want them to do, I have come to the realization, that it is usually because I didn't tell them to do exactly what I wanted them to do. I try to avoid getting mad when they do normal kid stuff, especially if it is not a specific violation of what I told them to do. Admit you made a mistake whenever you do. That makes you more real and more relateable. Look at people when they are talking to you. I am trying to do that more. talk to parents. About good stuff and bad stuff. Let the students be nice to you. Let the students be mad at you. Your life is not going to end if a child hates you. At the same time, you don't get too many bragging rights with friends when you tell them you have a fan club made up of people half your age or whatever.

Be prepared
Kids can sense fear and unpreparedness from a mile away. Why do you think subs are so much fun for them? I have come to realize that no matter how good the discipline is when I am in the classroom, anyone else will get different results if I'm not there. After I started to begin figuring out classroom management, that used to really bother me. I would get back from a day off and have a report from the substitute saying that certain students had talked back or argued or whatever. Or I would get reports like, "good class, these six people were talking." Now that I am prepared for those kinds of comments and realize that most people don't expect as much out of the children as I do, I am fine.

I also have found that my least productive teaching days are those where I am not fully prepared for the class. Or when we don't have enough copies of something. I am getting better about these things more and more. I find that as I get better about them, classes run much more efficiently.

Continue learning
Read books about teaching. Read books about your subject. Read books about personal development. Read books about art. Read books about customer service. Read books about productivity. Read books on motivation.

Some great specific books:
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
How to Win Friends and Influence People
The Total Money Makeover
The Millionaire Next Door
Revolution in World Missions

Bus 3: a case study
As a band director, I get to go on out of town trips with the high school band. On those trips, I end up being assigned to be in charge of one of the buses. Last year, it happened to be Bus 3. We had a tire blow out on the way to one of the games in September. I took that opportunity to hype the students up about being on "Bus 3: the bus that cares." If they were too loud, I would say something like, "You're too loud, that kind of noise belongs on Bus 4." If an individual got out of the seat, it'd be something like, "Do I need to make you ride on Bus 1?" When I saw the kids at rehearsal, I would flash the Bus 3 sign and we would nod in understanding.

So what was so special about Bus 3? Absolutely nothing. Despite that, I was able to create a little community. We all had to ride a bus to get to the games. I was either going to have to fight with the kids to get them to behave, or I was going to have to get them to buy in to my system. So I pretended that they were in an elite club; that they had insider information that nobody else had.

The established procedure is for the students to arrive somewhere and all force their way to the front of the bus as quickly as possible. The result is that people get upset, they leave trash everywhere, and they get out of the bus and don't know where to go specifically or when to be back. So I fixed that, Bus 3 style. Whenever we get somewhere, I stand up, ask them to be quiet, and then give them information before they get off the bus. I tell them and have them repeat how much time we have or what time we need to be back on the buses. I go over bus departure procedures. Finally, I ask if there are any questions and then we begin disembarking. It works every time. At the completion of the trip, I make sure they all check for trash before they get off the bus. This saves the time of the driver and parents. It's a win/win situation.

And it worked. It still works. Now they understand my system. The parents and bus drivers love taking my bus. The kids have fun. I am able to relax and have an enjoyable trip even though I am in a school bus. How much better could it be?

Customer Service Approach to The Classroom Experience

In The Beginning
When I was in college, I had an assignment for one of my classes. The assignment was to write up my own philosophy of education. It was somewhat noble ("I teach children to be better people through music" or something like that). It was substantially trite. Most importantly, it lacked any passion behind it.

The Interview
In my very first teaching job interview, the principal interviewing me asked me what my educational philosophy was. I gave some sort of flimsy answer because I wasn't prepared for the interview. He gave me a chance later on to ask me if I had any questions. I asked him what his educational philosophy was. What he said has stuck with me ever since.

He said that he views education as a customer service industry. That caught me off guard because I had never heard of that approach. He went on to say that we as teachers provide a service. We provide the community with educated children. We provide the students with a safe learning environment. We provide the students with useful and relevant education.

Paradigm Shift
This philosophy did not mesh with my paper I had written in college at all. In fact, this was completely foreign to my concept. Customer service? Isn't that the people who answer phones and punch buttons on the cash register at stores? I even worked in the customer service department of Best Buy very briefly. But I didn't serve customers. I served myself. I wanted my $5.50 an hour, so I showed up to work, answered some phones, punched some buttons, scanned some SKUs, and checked credit card signature panels.

As have begun to integrate that principal's philosophy into my own, I have come to understand much more what it means. This past summer, I began to really realize that my classroom model should be based more on that of a small business than of a university or even the classrooms that I had experienced in high school.

Then And Now
As a first year teacher, I never made contact with parents, unless they contacted me first.

As a fifth year teacher, I send out emails to parents, post updates on a blog, have a website on the district server, have misbehaving students call home to inform their parents of the problems, and even give parents opportunities to come up and help out at school.

As a first year teacher, I tried to make students to learn what I felt they needed to learn.

As a fifth year, I try to motivate the students to learn what I know they need to learn.

As a first year teacher, I had all the answers, but the kids just didn't listen to me.

As a fifth year teacher, I seem to have less answers than I did then, and I listen to and learn from more experienced teachers. I also share with less experienced teachers or anyone else who is willing to listen to me.

I realize that if I am going to have kids who absolutely love coming to my class, I must give them a reason to want to come back. The same is true for any business that is successful.

Classroom Management

Above all else that you do in education, classroom management skills will pay greater dividends. I cannot tell you how much more teaching I actually get done now that I have learned how to get and keep children quiet. This one skill was the single thing that prevented me from being useful at all during my first two years as a teacher. This one skill was the single thing that allowed me to be supremely useful in my third year of teaching.

No matter what you do, do not underestimate the value of spending time learning and refining classroom management skills. No other educational endeavor will be as fruitful.

Five Keys To Educating People

A Matter of Priorities
During my first two years of teaching, I discovered that I had a whole lot of information, but the students just weren't listening to me or learning from me. It is not, mind you, because I was giving them wrong information. It was, however, because I had placed the priorities in the wrong order. When we have the proper perspective, we will end up teaching far more than we ever imagined we might teach.

When I first got into the business of education, my priority was to educate children. So my philosophy could be summarized as:

1. Educate
   

Not bad, but it didn't work. There was a lot lacking.

"Nobody cares what you know until they know you care"
The reason I wasn't impacting them was because I didn't have a friendship with them. Of course! "Nobody cares what you know until they know you care." Although I knew it and had heard it many times, I misunderstood. My understanding was that this meant I was to primarily focus on building (appropriate) relationships with the students, and then giving them all sorts of information. So my priorities were something like:

1. Relate
2. Educate
   

Now that is good, but there were a lot of things missing from that strategy.

"Why should we listen?"
When children know what they are supposed to do, they will do it most of the time. When they know why they are supposed to do it, they will do it more often. When they buy into it and really want to do it, they will do it every time. So the problem is more than simply getting them to understand why they are supposed to follow directions. However, if you are only able to get to that point and make sure they understand what to do and why to do it, you are way ahead of the game. But if we simply stop there, we are missing out on so much more.

As a side note, I would like to add that most of the time we find ourselves getting mad at people, it is because they are doing something they were not specifically instructed to not do. This is true, especially in the case of kids in a classroom. I still find myself doing that...getting upset at kids for acting like kids when I didn't tell them specifically not to. Before we yell at them for tracking dirt into our room, we better make completely sure we have specifically told them to wipe their feet before they come in here. Or else, we are punishing them for our own stupidity!

Motivation comes from where?
Motivation is the result of the first two keys interacting. The first is absolutely essential. But it only comes after the philosophical foundation is in place. We will look at the five keys to educating people in order and address the top three as one unit, since they actually are all interdependent.

1. Radiate
2. Entertain
3. Motivate
4. Relate
   
5. Educate

Now what does this all mean?
To radiate is simply to give off a warmth. That comes from loving what you do. But, as I hinted before, you cannot truly love what you do until all of the components are in place. Then it will become a self-recharging cycle.

In my first two years of teaching, I would go home at nights and cry. It made me miserable. Oh yes, I loved the fact that I was a teacher, but I didn't love the fact that I was not impacting lives the way I had once envisioned that I might. After my understanding of classroom management changed, I began to see results. I began to see the proverbial light bulbs coming on and learning began to ensue. It was, and still is, a most incredible feeling. To know that they know something now that they did not know before. They have a skill now that they didn't enter the school year with. What an awesome thing!

But why entertain?
Have you ever heard Ben Stein? He is incredibly funny and a wonderful financial writer. But for the uninitiated, his delivery is relatively lacking in energy. "Dynamic Speaker" would not be an appropriate description for him. When you are working with a large group of children, regardless of age (even ten five-year-olds would be a large group), then you must be able to make them enjoy the time they spend with you, or else run the risk of having them blow you and the subject matter off completely. Anecdotal evidence abounds (here, here, here, etc.) as well a scientific research that confirms the positive learning benefits of being in a good mood.

I want to clarify that our role as educators is not to entertain children at the expense of instructing them. Simply that while we are instructing, we can use entertaining methods of delivery. Keep in mind that children running out of your classroom as soon as the bells rings is not a good sign.

So how did you say we motive them?
Motivation comes from a wide variety of sources, but one of the greatest is simply loving what you do. That comes after you are able to get them quiet, which has a lot to do with classroom management techniques. We'll discuss those more later.