Teaching for Hope

Hope is a buffer. School environments are increasingly places of stress, anxiety, and burnout for both teachers and students. Bullet-proof glass and intruder drills may instill fear rather than confidence. Memories of school closures may take our psyches to distress and isolation. The antidote is hope.
 
In last week’s post, I offered a framework for coaching to build teachers’ hope. This week, I’ll show how that framework applies to students, and how teachers can use it in the classroom.
 
Goal
 
Setting meaningful, achievable goals and making progress toward them fosters hope. To establish a goal-setting habit, teachers can start with class goals and transition to individual goals as students get traction with the practice.
 
 For example, we recently shared with teachers a detailed learning progression for middle-school writing. Teachers determined where the majority of the students landed on that progression, and the next step up was the first class goal. After achieving a couple of class goals, moving incrementally to more challenging writing objectives, teachers shared the learning progression with students and conferred with them about their next individual goal. Students let their teachers know when they had enough evidence of achievement to choose a new goal. A process like this could be applied in any subject.
 
Pathway
 
In the example above, the learning progression provided a pathway forward. To offer hope, students have to be able to see a clear path. They need manageable steps along the way. Whole group instruction coupled with intentional small groups and regular teacher conferring supports progress and generates pathways thinking.
 
Teachers can guide students in brainstorming pathways to overcome learning obstacles and modeling how to navigate uncertainty. They can offer opportunities for collaboration that foster peer support, developing hope through shared experiences and encouragement.
 
Teaching strategies helps students persevere in the face of challenges. Metacognitive strategies like planning, checking for understanding, and reviewing keep students moving forward and should be explicitly taught. Thinking strategies like predicting, inferring, visualizing, and making connections are important in all academic areas (and in life!). In addition to teaching content, teachers instill hope by teaching how to learn the content.
 
Agency
 
Research suggests that agency builds hope. Agency is more than choice; it is choice with say-so. It is the right to decide, the power to make a difference. Teachers, as the designated authority figure in the classroom, are in the position to offer agency. They can make students agents of their own learning. At the beginning of the year (or semester), teachers offer agency by giving students voice in class norms rather than laying them down themselves.
 
Agency means offering meaningful choices that align with students’ current abilities, needs, and interests. For kindergartners, deciding which manipulatives will best help them solve the math problem is meaningful agency. For high schoolers, agency might mean offering choice about the format (video, audio, graphic, written) and the specific topic for their final project on the American Revolution.
 
Efficacy
 
Celebrating small successes builds resilience and self-efficacy. Regularly acknowledging students’ efforts sustains motivation. Teachers can offer opportunities for students to reflect on progress through conversation and through written reflective journals. When students write about their goals, their successes, and the strategies they are using to overcome challenges, they see themselves as capable. Of course, they will need models of optimism and nudges to take this stance.
 
Hope Is a Ladder
Hope creates solutions mindsets. It helps us persevere through difficulties. It fuels curiosity and the belief that, through our individual actions, the future can be better. Hope counters helplessness. Fostering mental health not only improves students’ academic outcomes, it improves their lives.
 
Hope is the ladder that helps us climb out of dark holes dug by the mind. It fosters resilience, motivation, and a sense of possibility. Please pass along this much-needed message of hope.
 
This week, you might want to take a look at:

Ways to infuse hope into the curriculum (scroll down):
 
https://www.edutopia.org/article/7-ways-infuse-your-curriculum-hope/
 
 
Little pieces of classroom joy:
 
https://ccira.blog/2019/01/15/little-pieces-of-classroom-joy/
 
 
Prepare for World Read Aloud Day on February 5:
 
https://www.litworld.org/worldreadaloudday
 
 
Benefits of reading aloud:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c95MRI5MeqU
 
 
27 closing activities:
 
https://www.edutopia.org/article/engaging-closure-activities/
 
 
That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!
 
Want more coaching tips? Check out my book, Differentiated Mentoring & Coaching in Education: From Preservice Teacher to Expert Practitioner, available from Teachers College Press!  I’m so excited to share it with you! You can use the code: JAN2025 for 20% off. Click  here  and I’ll email you the free Book Group Study Guide that includes questions, prompts, and activities you can use as you share the book with colleagues.  I hope you’ll love this book as much as I loved making it for you!