If
you are a mentor or coach, have you modeled failure lately?
Movies
and popular media are replete with Super-Teachers: Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, Pat
Carroll in Freedom Writers, Edward Olmos in Stand and Deliver. These caricatured teachers present a polished,
uncracked model of teaching and teachers that is not only unachievable but disheartening. It promotes feelings of inadequacy. Failure, however, is part of the real-life of
teaching, and those we mentor and coach deserve to see us working through this
process.
They
deserve to see us model the ambiguity and risk-taking that is part of teaching. They deserve to see that sometimes taking
risks ends in mistakes, in debacles, in failure. And that learning from failure isn’t a quick
and easy process. If we don’t show them
this side of teaching, we create a false ideal.
If we hide our struggles from our mentees, we perpetuate the feelings of
inadequacy these false ideals create.
We
have probably told our students repeatedly that mistakes are a part of
learning. Are we explicitly describing
and modeling this for those we mentor or coach?
Do we model a willingness to take risks and try new things? Do we let our colleagues see the struggle by
inviting them in when we try something new?
By thinking aloud as we reflect on a disaster? By describing some of the reasons the lesson
went awry? When we describe our
analysis, we demonstrate our thoughtful review of the situation. Was it the planning and preparation that was
lacking? Or something about the
execution? As we reflect, we demonstrate
how drawing on our experience helps us revise our instructional plans so that
things go better the next time. We model
the notion that being a good teacher is about being able to adjust.
Teachers
need to see other teachers fail. More
importantly, they need to see how we respond to failure. As we model a cycle of failure, reflection,
and revision, we demonstrate that teaching requires us to be pliable and that challenges
are a part of real-life teaching.
Those
you mentor and coach will likely breathe a sigh of relief as you unveil your
own errors. They will feel a little more
confident in their own ability to rebound, knowing that those kinds of things
happen to other teachers, too. Disasters
are a part of our working life. Every
teacher struggles now and then with instructional design. We all have lessons that flop. Modeling how to learn from them is an
important part of our role as coach.
This
summer, I made a trip to Prince Edward Island, the setting for the novel, Anne of Green Gables. As I reread the book in order to fully
relish the trip, I was struck by this response by the irrepressible Anne: “But have you ever noticed one
encouraging thing about me, Marilla? I never make the same mistake twice.” We may not have Anne’s confidence of “never”
making a mistake again, but it is truly our response to mistakes, not the
mistakes themselves, that determine the teacher we are becoming.
When
failures happen, we don’t just recover, we discover, seeing teaching
as an ongoing learning journey.
Ambiguity is part of learning.
The way we view the things that go wrong is more important than how
often or how badly things go wrong. Teaching
is never perfectable (it will never be perfect!), but it is improvable. Teachers need to see others fail. So let them see you struggle.
This week, you might want to
take a look at:
Improve
teaching by doing a few things well:
Benefits
of teaching expectations:
Pinterest
board with classroom storage ideas:
How to make writer’s notebooks more
authentic:
Teaching
Shakespeare with technology:
That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!
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