19 Mar Finding Joy in Remote Teaching

I love teaching. Like with my entire being I love teaching.  But, my kind of teaching is student-centered.  It revolves around students generating ideas and the class building understanding based on what students generate.  My kind of teaching isn’t direct instruction, where I tell students what to do and how to do it, followed by endless workbook pages.

My kind of teaching includes human connection, where I read children’s body language, cheerlead, and develop deep connections over literature, history, and mathematics.

Yet, here we are.   Thrown into a rapidly changing world in which many of the things we love most about teaching feel as though they’ve been stripped away from us.  But do they have to be?

Here is one way to help us feel like we haven’t lost what we love most about teaching one week at a time.

Keep one part of instruction this week that you love the most about teaching.

I’m not asking you to figure out how to make everything the same as it was in your classroom all at once.  We are doing what we have to do to make it.  I’m asking you to get better at one thing at a time and start with the part of your instruction that brings you the MOST JOY.  We are going to have to keep this remote teaching thing going for a while.  If we want to generate positive emotions and not get defeated, we have to start by bringing back the joy.

Maybe for you, it is your read-aloud time after recess.  Maybe it’s the number talk you start your class with.  Or perhaps it is peer conferencing with students.

We don’t have to have our virtual teaching mimic our classrooms—the learning curve is high as we figure out online platforms, educational websites, grading, submitting and accepting assignments, and transforming our beloved daily lessons into at homework.

So can I give you permission today to keep one component of teaching that you love?  Maybe everything else right now needs to be assigning videos to watch, packets to complete, books to read, but what if to bring back your JOY you work on making one part of the virtual instruction this week something that you LOVE.

For your next week of virtual teaching, figure out how to keep one thing you love the most.  Maybe you have your students join you on google meet for a read-aloud time. As Marie Forleo says, Everything is Figureoutable.  Like for real, you CAN do this.  WE can do hard things.  Don’t say, “I don’t know how.”

Einstein didn’t know how.

Thomas Edison didn’t know how.

Mark Zuckerberg didn’t know how.

Our parents didn’t know how.

But they all figured it out.  They just started.

When we start ANYTHING new, we don’t know how. We just start.  It’s frustrating until it’s not.   It’s imperfect until it’s not.  It doesn’t work until it does.  We try it, we make adjustments, we try again.   THIS IS OUR TIME.  This is our time to show our students that we are learners just like them.  We don’t give up when we don’t know.  We figure it out.  It will take us maybe a few days to come out of the panic fog.  But, as we steady our breaths and think rationally about the job ahead of us, we know in the depths of our being, WE CAN DO THIS.

Never before, in history, have we had so many free resources to learn whatever we want to learn at our fingertips.

Choose the part of the instructional day you miss the most and FIGURE IT OUT.  How can you reconnect with your students and make it work???

Maybe you use FlipGrid, google classroom, zoom, or another platform to post a number talk, splat, which one doesn’t belong, estimation 180, or notice and wonder activity (like a graph you have to teach, a word problem, etc.) and have each student post his/her thinking.

Maybe you teach one live lesson on your favorite subject.  You can check out my series on recording videos online – The playlist has just begun, I will be adding to it often, so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the new ones.

What happens next week?  You take out another worksheet and replace it with an activity you love.  This is exactly what I tell teachers around the nation.  Choose one subject to focus on and get really good at.  We can’t be good at everything right away and trying will burn us out.  So, do what you can based on what you know, but work on improving one part for now.

We can do this.  We were made for this job—it just looks different now than it has.

What is the one thing you are bringing to your remote classroom this week that brings you JOY?

Will you do me a favor and comment below, or post online using the hashtag #spreadjoyempowerlearngrow.  Let’s inspire each other to keep the joy in spite of the circumstances.