Clearly Outstanding Making Each Day Count in Your Classroom

Clearly Outstanding Making Each Day Count in Your Classroom GARY D. BORICH The University of Texas at Austin ALLYN AND BACON Boston London Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore Copyright © 1993 by Allyn and Bacon A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 160 Gould Street Needham Heights, Massachusetts 02194 All rights reserved. No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Borich, Gary D. Clearly outstanding : making each day count in your classroom : a self-development guide for the classroom teacher / Gary D. Borich. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-205-13332-0 1. Teaching. 2. First year teachers-United States. 3. Career development-United States. I. Title. LB 1025.3. B66 1992 371.1'02 - dc20 92- 9640 CIP Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 96 95 94 93 92 Contents Preface ix About the Author xv Chapter One • The Magic Child 1 A glimpse of a young child at play before the first day of school, driven by emotions and feelings only a child could provide. What makes young children at play a success, without aid from the outside world, against the odds, becomes a guide for your own success in the chapters ahead. Chapter Two • Where We Are Today 9 The status of education in America today-or what some say about it. A realistic picture of the rapid cycles of value change that have given us the heterogeneous and culturally diverse classroom of today. What the beginning teacher must cope with, adapt to, and eventually grow with. Chapter Three • Stages of Growth 25 How your professional growth can become a mechanism for living and prospering in today's classrooms, with their rapid cycles of value change. The ability to change, use learned competencies in new and unfamiliar ways, and adapt to conditions that cannot be foreseen. vi Contents Chapter Four • Three Teacher Portraits 41 The first of four chapters in which three teachers-Angela, Kurt, and Sheila-describe themselves at different stages of professional growth as they struggle to cope, adapt, and change the conditions around them. Chapter Five • The Power of Purpose 53 Professional growth begins with purpose-those deepest convic- tions you have had since your earliest childhood years, without always being conscious of what they were. In this chapter your personal statements of purpose become guides in the journey toward growth. Chapter Six • Finding the Person Inside 61 The essence of what practical experience and volumes of academic work tell us about professional growth, and how you can attain it. Learning to break the bonds of your self-imposed limitations by learning to be yourself, concentrating on your values, establishing flow activities, and using vision and feeling to guide the ap- propriateness of your decisions. Chapter Seven • Teacher Portraits. One Year Later 81 A revisit with Angela, Kurt, and Sheila through their own words and deeds as they grapple with issues of professional and personal growth in the next stages of their professional careers. Chapter Eight • Effective Teachers 97 How teachers move from a concern for self and their own survival in their initial years of teaching to a focus on the mechanics of teaching and later to a focus on their impact on students. How teachers who have reached the highest level of professional growth and commitment-a concern for their impact on students-"play" at teaching in unconventional ways and become observers of their own behavior. Contents vii Chapter Nine • Changing Classrooms 125 Techniques for teaching in today's heterogeneous and culturally diverse classrooms by using alternatives to the traditional lesson plan. How to set the tone, establish the need, demonstrate capability, and obtain commitment in the culturally diverse classrooms of today and tomorrow. Chapter Ten • Teacher Portraits. Three Years Later 149 Personal narratives on the professional and personal lives of Angela, Kurt, and Sheila as they move into crisis and opportunity associated with mid-career challenges, placing in perspective the contents of previous chapters. Chapter Eleven • Leaders, Mentors, and Partners 167 How effective teachers shift the focus from "me" to "we." The im- portance of colleague relationships through mentoring, partnering, and personal leadership in achieving purpose and inspiration in the practice of teaching-and giving it to others. Chapter Twelve • Teacher Portraits: Five Years Later 193 A final visit to Angela, Kurt, and Sheila, in which they reflect on the past and offer their agendas for the future. How each has grown professionally and personally and has reacquired a sense of direction and enthusiasm with which to continue to adapt to and increasingly change the environment around them. Chapter Thirteen • Rebirth 207 The secret of growth revisited through those who have been there. How to exchange crisis for opportunity-not just to survive in your first years of teaching, but to grow and prosper with the changing landscape of your school and classroom. A visit into the inner world of feelings-the language of the heart-from which innovation and all things new must come. References 219 Index 221 Preface If you are a teacher in our elementary and secondary schools, you know that your job is one of the most difficult and complex that exists today. It is sometimes more technical than the work of an aerospace engineer, more immediate than that of a trauma physician, and more frustrating than a bus driver's rush-hour shift. Teaching today requires emotions and skills at peak perfection. Among the emotions and skills needed by today's teachers is one factor that must be present to make all the others work. That factor is your ability to grow-to use learned competencies in new and unfamiliar ways and to change in response to the conditions around you. As the experienced teacher knows, the gulf between the university classroom in which teachers are prepared to teach and the reality of a first teaching assignment can be wide and perilous. Some survive the journey, and some don't. Those who do survive to become committed and effective teachers learn in those very first years of teaching how to grow-to change and adapt to conditions they could not foresee and for which no amount of training could prepare them. During those first years in the classroom they learn how to survive new and often difficult circumstances and to adapt themselves to their environment, as well as to adapt their environment to who they are. In other words, their mental or psychological perspective is as important as their formal training in the content and methods of teaching. How to grow professionally and personally in the context of your classroom is the focus of this book. There is no profession I am aware of that provides the conditions for growth-both professional and personalas well as teaching does. Growth can only come from challenge, unrest, disharmony, and change. Classrooms have more than their share of these factors, which place the teacher in the position of do or die-learn how to manage and change the environment around you or be swallowed up by it. This book aims to provide direction -a mental framework or psychological perspective-whereby you can harmoniously participate in the challenge, opportunity, and change occurring all around you. To this end, the book has four simple prescriptions. Simply stated, whether or not you become effective will depend on: x Preface • How you choose to see things • What you focus on • How aware you are of yourself • What you value As you journey through this book, we will touch on each of these steps and provide examples of how you can attain the mental framework for teaching that each step requires. Our journey will be through what will be unfamiliar terrain for most readers. We do not cover methods or techniques, say much about lesson plans and objectives, or talk about testing, grading, or recordkeeping. This is a book about effective teaching that says little or nothing about those traditional topics, because, although all these are necessary, they rarely make the difference between effective and ineffective teaching, in my opinion. Effective teaching requires much more. That is the reason for this book: to provide a perspective or component of teaching that is not often provided for in the preparation to teach and that requires familiarity with a real classroom to truly appreciate. Therefore, although this book will be of interest to preservice teachers, especially those who are beginning to sample the real classroom through observation and practice teaching, it is also intended for the inservice teacher- primarily the beginning teacher. It is in those crucial years that teachers first come to realize that something has been missing from all the training they may have received. The need for it often becomes apparent only in those first years in the classroom. The missing component that so forcefully comes to us through experience is a mental framework for professional and personal growth that lets us constructively use the forces of change, challenge, and opportunity that may be operating all around us. It requires of you the development of feelings that can guide you through the thick and thin of teaching. It is the recognition of your feeling self-the affective, as opposed to cognitive, side of you that will become the basis for developing a mental framework for growth in which you can adapt and use to advantage the forces of change, challenge, and opportunity that every classroom presents.

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