The Two Tensions in Teaching
Teachers are pulled in many directions, but these two tensions are key
Teaching is an ever growing and endless list of activities. No matter what school you are at, there are always old traditions to carry on and new initiatives to implement. The best schools clearly communicate how to prioritize everything that goes into building meaningful experiences for students. The list can be overwhelming to both new and veteran teachers. Here is a sample list of daily activities from my second year of teaching:
Prep for classes (Earth Science, AP Physics, Introduction to Engineering Design, Principles of Engineering)
Organize science classroom for Earth Science and AP Physics
Organize engineering lab for engineering classes
Successfully teach four preps in two different buildings with over 200 students while tracking the needs of every student
Grade student work and adjust upcoming lesson plans as necessary to support as many students as possible
Setup data gathering for BTSA
Finish classwork to finalize my credential
Manage FIRST Robotics team activities
Map classes to new NGSS and Common Core Standards
Work with science department to create new pathways based on NGSS
Work with math department to implement new mastery-based grading and teaching through CMAST
Transition to coaching football as special team’s coordinator, defensive backs, and wide receiver’s coach
Leadership meeting to prepare for WASC visit
This list doesn’t include the many small things that come up with students throughout the learning process. It is really amazing that teachers can handle so many threads at once and continue to give students great learning experiences. Getting pulled in so many directions isn’t healthy for anyone and reduces the quality of the work. An interesting feature of my second year of teaching was that it was during the transition to Common Core and NGSS, which meant our students didn’t take the state exams and there wasn’t much data to let us know how our students were doing. Very similar to the last couple of years of minimal data stemming from Covid.
It is so easy to get lost in all of the doing that happens in education. In all of my work during the first decade of teaching I thought it was helpful to solve problems by creating more work for teachers. Convincing colleagues to try new grading frameworks, new pedagogy, or even a new learning system that I concocted felt like the most helpful thing I could do. I have realized that adding anything onto a teacher’s plate has a low probability of implementation. We have to take something off the massive to-do list if we want to influence the student experience.
During our work at the Da Vinci Institute we have tried to solve problems and take actions off teacher’s plate. Through this process of identifying challenges teachers are facing or where they need help, we have identified an interesting trend. There are two tensions that are at the root cause of just about every teaching challenge.
The tension between humility and expertise
The tension between teaching the nitty-gritty and instilling a love for learning the subject
Every teacher experiences these tensions differently. After reflecting on my own teaching practice, I realize that my failures came when I allowed these tensions to pull too far in either direction. My successes came when I had these two tensions in balance.
When I walk into a class for the first time, I know that I have to come off knowledgeable enough that I can add value to every student’s learning experience. At the same time, I have to be humble enough to recognize that I don’t know anywhere near everything about what I am teaching to the class. I have to be confident that I am teaching my students the right material at the right time, but I have to be humble enough to say, “I am not sure” and ask for help from the right people. Tim Urban captures this sentiment elegantly.
When teachers stray too far off the humility sweet spot, we face challenges that negatively impact our student’s experience.
If we stray into the arrogant zone, we have trouble teaching the material that is most relevant to our students. We focus on our own knowledge instead of what our students need based on where they are, or instead of the content that will help them succeed outside of our classroom. When we are in that arrogant zone, we often minimize professional partnerships to guest speakers for a day or project support from the outside in instead of thought partners who can push our own thinking and skills forward in ways that can improve our curriculum and our students’ learning.
Falling in the insecure zone can cause us to focus on what we can control in our class. Maybe we stick to a regimented schedule or create a rigid structure that our students have to follow. Or maybe we put limits on our students, saying that they just don’t have the skills to take on more complex projects. In reality we don’t have the confidence to push our students beyond what we are confident in.
The challenge of the humility sweet spot is directly related to the second tension, but enough teachers have told us this is the bigger challenge that we wanted to call it out separately. Every great teacher hopes to inspire their students to love the material they are teaching. In reality a great year is when 10% of our students fall in love with our material. That doesn’t stop us from working to add that extra 0. The challenge with inspiring our students to fall in love with our material, is that we stray away from the nitty gritty. Spending time in the weeds often bores students and does the opposite of inspiring love.
As if spending time in the weeds was hard enough, spending time in the right weeds is even harder. There are an infinite number of variations of the nitty gritty in any subject that a teacher can spend time on. Maybe it is getting our students to memorize a list of SAT words that they will never use again. Or perhaps its teaching students about every integral variation they need to do well on an AP Calc test. The nitty gritty often seems important in our minds at the time, but our students and our older selves look back and wonder why the heck we spent so much time in that particular nitty gritty. Teachers need a second or even third opinion on what the right nitty gritty is. Unfortunately, that collaboration is missing from a majority of classrooms.
The humility sweet spot is hard to find. Consistently inspiring love for a topic while teaching the nitty gritty might be even harder. We have found one common trait of teachers who have remained in the humility sweet spot for an extended period of time while also finding ways to teach the nitty gritty and inspire love. Every great teacher we have observed doing this has developed a deep relationship with a professional in their field. This professional partner not only helps in every aspect of the curriculum, projects, and student experience, but the professional also challenges the teacher’s assumptions and levels up the teacher’s skills, focus, and connection to industry.
Take my experience in building a new innovation program at a private school called SEED (Social Entrepreneurship, Engineering, and Design). I partnered with two other teachers who taught Social Entrepreneurship and Design, and with my experience teaching Engineering we thought that we could build a program that culminated with seniors building their own startups. We spent a year designing the curriculum and even had the chance to design a new innovation center that allowed us divide into breakout rooms to teach workshops to the students interested in our sub-specialties, and then come together in one large space to have students work in teams to solve problems by working through an entire design cycle with various perspectives. On paper, and in our heads, we built an IDEO inspired experience that would develop the next generation of innovators. In year one we realized that our lack of experience building our own startups left many holes that we couldn’t even imagine. During that year we were a little too high on the conviction axis (we were too full of shit).
The next fall I just happened to be invited to the new Sagamore whiskey distillery tour with a group of innovators in Baltimore. While I was impressed by the Maryland rye whiskey process, it just so happened that I was on the tour with an alumnus from the school I was teaching at, who just so happened to be an entrepreneur with multiple companies and angel investments under his belt. I told this entrepreneur, Roger, who also happened to have a granddaughter in our program, about what we were doing with SEED, and he asked if he could help. I was elated to find an expert and invited him to all of our planning meetings and to judge our student projects.
Roger was a true level up for our teaching and our program. He helped us get back into the humility sweet. His experience filled in the gaps that we had, and he showed us what it took to guide students to build their own startups. Roger identified what nitty gritty we had to focus on and what it truly means to love the world of entrepreneurship. It was difficult to hear where we fell short and that we had to make changes after all the work we put in. The process was so challenging that one of the founding teachers of the SEED program decided to leave the program all together. This partnership helped me launch my own entrepreneurial endeavors and continues to guide my thinking in coaching students to build projects to launch their careers. As impactful as this was to me, developing deep relationships with professionals is very difficult and teachers have no support system to do it.
Project Leo is going to become the support system that teachers need in developing deep relationships with professionals. We are going to use the hard-fought lessons about developing career connected learning programs at Da Vinci to guide our development process. Our hope is that any teacher who wants to find a professional partner to enhance their students’ experience, stay in the humility sweet spot, and balance the tension of the nitty gritty with the love of professions, will be able to do it through Project Leo.