Teaching

Last spring was probably the strangest semester of my 20+ year teaching career. Second on that list is this fall semester, which just ended.

This week felt like the end of the term. Stress could be felt everywhere: from students in classes, colleagues in meetings, administrators in emails. It’s always a mad dash at the end of the term, but every struggle is amplified now.

I always try to structure my courses so students don’t have much work due during the final week. I know other teachers are piling it on to make deadlines and cover curriculum, so a normal week in at least one class can be a relief. That seemed especially important this year. An unusual number of students came late to class during finals week, and there were a few extra cameras turned off. I hope it’s the kind of temporary stress that fades quickly.

One of the best parts of the job of teaching is the constant renewal. New years and new semesters mean new starts for everyone. And looking forward to a new start is an appropriate theme for this week, both inside and outside of school.

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To accommodate the different logistical consequences of potential in-person, hybrid, and fully-remote instruction, our school adopted a radically new schedule this year: Classes that meet every other day for periods that are 40% longer, but with an overall reduction of total class time.

The decision made sense from a organizational standpoint, but it made a mess of existing course maps and lessons plans. Trying to reorganize and redistribute content has been an ongoing challenge. It’s no simple thing to break up an existing course and reassemble it in different-sized chunks: You can’t just teach 40% more content because a class is 40% longer. Ideas needs to flow in a sensible way, and some in particular need time to set. Judging how to accomplish this was especially difficult at the start of the year, when it wasn’t even clear how much could be accomplished in a fully remote 55-minute class.

With three months behind me and a much better sense of what I’m doing, I’m feeling more comfortable putting the pieces together. Last week I was struggling to plan a 2-hour block in my trigonometry unit. But after some experimenting, I ended up pulling together material I side-stepped in October (special trigonometric limits), the core material I intended to cover (trigonometric integrals), and wrapped it up by laying the groundwork for some future extensions (Fourier series).

I would never have thought of putting these things together in a normal year. Nor would I have thought of this in September as I mapped out the semester. Back then I wasn’t even sure what would come of special trig limits as I side-stepped them, because it was impossible for me to look ahead.

But with nearly a semester under my belt, it made sense, and it worked. Three months on a steep learning curve can be painful, but it does make a difference.

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The holiday break brought some much needed time off. I felt refreshed as I returned to work, but my first day back was a bit disorienting.

I underestimated how much I could forget about how to teach remotely after eleven consecutive days off.

— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) January 4, 2021

I opened my agenda and my SMART Notebook, but forgot to open my lesson plan. I forgot to assign my Geogebra classroom activities ahead of time. I forgot to print out my rosters. I forgot to share my screen. I forgot to check if I was muted.

The muscle memory of teaching I had worked so hard to rebuild had faded after 11 days of vacation. I suppose that’s what vacation’s for, but it’s been many years since I’ve been caught off guard like that after a break.

By the end of the week things it felt like we were back to normal again. In school, at least.

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I’ve attended and facilitated a lot of professional learning in my career as a teacher and instructional coach. Without question, the most consistently effective professional learning has come from collegial intervisitation.

There’s an undeniable relevance to being in another teacher’s classroom. Every teacher teaches differently: Some teachers do big things differently, like teaching trigonometry before polynomials, or never collecting or reviewing homework. Some teachers do small things differently, like always correcting the statement “A triangle has 180 degrees”, or using a random number generator to call on students.

However they manifest in a classroom, experiencing those differences has an immediate impact on an observing teacher. Maybe you’ll see technique or strategy you’ll want to try. Or maybe something you see will make you think more deeply about your own approach. Intervisitation is so effective because every observation of another teacher is really an observation of yourself. You can’t help but reflect on your practice.

I’ve found intervisitation especially useful during remote learning. Simply experiencing remote teaching from the other side has been invaluable: What’s it like to try to do math virtually? How does it feel to sit in a breakout room? And it’s been very helpful seeing how different teachers try to solve the same problems, like how to properly present mathematics, how to get students engaged, and how to gain access to their thinking.

After a round of intervisitations, our geometry course team had conversations that were both enlightening and heartening. We saw the different ways in which we were each finding success, and the similar ways in which we were all struggling. Teaching is an isolating job, but those common struggles unite us. And we have a better chance of overcoming them together than on our own.

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