Five Lessons for the Student Teachers in Your Lives.

If your building is anything like mine, you are JUST about to send a ton of student teachers off to their college graduations — ready to start new careers in the classroom.

Can you remember that time? Full of confidence and enthusiasm, you were ready to take on the world, improving lives one lesson at a time.

What’s harder to remember is all the mistakes that we made! The fact of the matter is that experience really DOES change who we are as teachers. And that’s a good thing.

So in the interest of helping the newest generation of teachers get off to a great start, I figured I’d share five of the most important lessons that I’ve learned over the last 20 years of classroom teaching.

Here they are:

I used to believe that homework was an essential tool for “teaching kids responsibility.”

Now I know that kids learn responsibility in a thousand different ways beyond my classroom. They take care of their siblings. They complete chores. They practice and perfect skills and sports and hobbies and interests, playing and performing two or three nights a week. In the grand scheme of things, my worksheets and study guides and PowerPoint presentations really weren’t as important as I thought they were.

I used to believe that poor grades motivated struggling students to work harder.

Now I know that struggling students have been so beaten down by poor grades that they feel hopeless. Why bother trying harder when you’ve never seen any real evidence that you can be successful in class? That’s heartbreaking. Teachers should leave EVERY kid convinced that they are capable learners — and that can only start when we rethink the way that we “grade” our students.

I used to believe that poor behavior out of kids was an indicator of poor parenting.

Now I know that consistent misbehavior in my classroom is almost always a function of consistently poor teaching. When my lessons are engaging and my kids know that I believe in them, they are ALL on task and well behaved. It’s only when I’m flying by the seat of my pants or when I forget just how important it is to invest in my relationship with EVERY student that my kids leave me frustrated.

I used to think that good behavior was evidence of motivated learners.

Now I know that good behavior is most often evidence of compliance — not motivation. Those aren’t the same thing. I also know that “good behavior” is a REALLY subjective phrase. Just because I learned best by sitting quietly, listening carefully, and always remembering to raise my hand doesn’t mean that the fidgety boy tapping on his desk and blurting out every three minutes in the back of my classroom is a walking distraction.

I used to believe that if I worked hard enough, I could reach every student in my classroom.

Now I know that no matter how great I may be, I’ll never have the knowledge or the skills to reach every kid in my increasingly diverse classroom. Need an example? I don’t know how to modify assignments for students with special needs. Or to create scaffolded tasks for students who speak English as a second language. Or to create lessons that give students genuine ownership over the direction of their learning. But my colleagues do — and if we are willing to put our heads together and collaborate, we’ll ALL be better as individual teachers. Our kids deserve that.

Do any of those lessons make sense to you? Do you have any to add? What do YOU think student teachers need to know before walking into their first classrooms?

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