21stcenturyed.com

June, July and August.

If those are three of the reasons you got into education, you may have chosen the wrong profession. Like social workers, doctors and other professions, educators have a serious charge: to help others.

So – sorry. It’s not really about you – it’s about them. The sooner you accept and embrace this truth – and live it out through your professional life – the sooner you’ll make real change in students’ lives.

Online educators, especially, must come to recognize that:

• …learning will not necessarily occur between 8:30 am and 3:30 pm.
• Students won’t always want to learn a topic the way you were trained to teach it – nor do they have to since they now have choices in education.
• What make school easier for you is not necessarily what is best for students. Like bell schedules, synchronous instruction or quiet classrooms.

So get over yourself. It’s not about you. Make the time to call your students and their parents. Stop reinventing the wheel just so you can say you wrote a great lesson. That’s time you could have spent explaining a difficult student to a student who needs you.

I challenge you to take 30 minutes to examine what and how you do things related to your teaching and to identify at least one thing that you could be doing to better meet the student needs.

“Are you okay?”

These three little words can make the difference between closing the door on a child and opening up a dialogue. When I train teachers how to help disengaged students, I train teachers (in both online and face-to-face environments) to begin each conversation with this simple query.

But such a small thing can have such a huge impact. I’ve recently begun an interview process with teachers I trained a year ago in this technique. These teachers were chosen because there is objective evidence that students in their classes have higher levels of engagement and academic activity than students in other teachers’ classes instructing the exact same course and content. I’ve only gotten through the first four interviews so far. However three of the four teachers indicated that they used this technique when talking to disengaged students and the effect was very positive.
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