My Epic Teaching Journey

A MiddleWeb Guest Article

Marsha Ratzel is a National Board-certified teacher in the Blue Valley School District in Kansas, where she teaches 6th & 7th grade science, math and sometimes social studies. She blogs at Reflections of a Techie and tweets with the handle @ratzelster.

Marsha’s first book, describing her journey to more student-centered, inquiry teaching and learning, will be published in early 2013 by Powerful Learning Press. This is an excerpt. You can read more about Marsha’s classroom adventures in several posts at the Powerful Learning Practice group blog Voices from the Learning Revolution, including: “Teaching by Getting Out of the Way” and “Helping Students Own the Learning Environment.”

by Marsha Ratzel

This year’s action research — getting myself to the place where I can routinely carry out student-centered, question-centered instruction — has been (to use a word from my mountain biking comrades) EPIC! To a rider this means that I started on a journey that I thought would take a month or two, but has extended well beyond anything I could have dreamed. Remember how Gilligan’s Island always started off with the idea that they were going on (hum along) a “three-hour tour”? Short trips can turn out to be much longer undertakings. This has not been three hours or three months…it’s extended to the entire school year. And I’m sure the trip’s not over yet.

Marsha’s classroom

Knowing where I started helps me reconnect to my core beliefs and the essential questions that I always try to ask myself about my teaching practice. It helps me mark how far I’ve come. I started off on my epic trek in granny gears, where all mountain biking beginners find their groove. It’s the easiest gear to pedal and designed to help you scale even the toughest grades.

As I climbed the steep hill, I had to really lean on other colleagues to help me figure out the questions to ask myself and the things I should do. I had to rely on students telling me what they needed. They kept me from face-planting (which is never a good thing) and got me back on my bike if things faltered a bit. While I had loads of expertise in teaching, I was far from expert in approaching this new learning. I had to learn different ways of thinking and doing with my students.

My Personal Learning Network definitely helped me find my “mo” (momentum) — to take the small successes that I was experiencing with students and build those into some bigger feats. Remember when I wasn’t sure if students could withstand not knowing exactly how to proceed, and then I changed things so that they invented the lab procedures? Not only were they able to survive the ambiguity, but they are thriving on it. They are building their independence and I’m now witnessing their “5-year-old” level of curiosity re-emerging. They are full of questions now and feel capable of answering them.

I hadn’t expected to find a community of practice (a CoP—other teachers who are working on this kind of professional development). In fact, I didn’t really even know what a CoP was before I started on this journey. It was exciting to read more deeply about the idea of a virtual community of co-learners and to be living it at the same time.

“We are the people who do hard stuff”

As I stop and look back, the whole landscape has changed for me. My students are stronger and more self-confident. They are willing to take on hard tasks and don’t always want the easy way out. I just told one of my kids the other day: we are the kind of people who do the hard stuff now, and if we wanted it easy we would have looked it up in a book. Instead we have developed confidence in each other, and we want to discover the answers for ourselves. My students “get” that learning is a process. And while they may encounter moments where something doesn’t turn out the way they expected, they know how to change that into something positive. If students have a better idea than the one I present, they ask me to change things up. We co-create and co-learn with each other.

I feel that I’m a totally different teacher. This style of coaching learners allows me to find the Zone. You know — that place where you just “do” teaching. It’s probably not something I can explain very well if you haven’t experienced it. But maybe it’s happened to you in some situation where you took on a challenge — a sport, a hobby, even having a child. When you start out, just like in mountain biking, it’s all a technical undertaking. Small problems are magnified. Now, instead of being confounded by a narrow trail, rocks and too much sand, I have developed a natural sense of just how to take those trails. More importantly, my students know how to avoid spinouts as well. They’ve learned along with me.

Once you’ve tasted this kind of teaching — seen students learn so much more in your classes than they ever have learned before — then the fun of it, the reward of it, is so great that you strive to get back into this kind of flow every time you walk into the classroom. It changes the way you do lesson design. You look for the same content, but you’re imagining different approaches that make it student centered. Now it’s less about the teacher talking or showing how and more of the kiddos doing.

The end is just the beginning

The funny thing about all this is that I thought there would be an ending place. Now I realize that the end is just the beginning. I will finish the year with these students and I’ll have to restart with a new batch of kids in the fall. The current batch will leave Gilligan’s Island, but I won’t! Luckily, not everything will have to be built up from scratch.

Certainly the relational pieces — the trust, the common understanding of each other, students knowing when they can push me and me knowing when I can push them — will all have to be done anew. But all the rest stays and will improve with each additional use. If my previous experience tells me anything, I think I can count on getting us all in the Zone faster each successive year because I’ll be better at the instructional part. I will have to customize it each round so it’s responsive to the needs of each particular community of students. But those are all little tweaks.

The big part I’ll need to do (this) summer is to sit back, reflect, read through my student feedback, figure out the destination of the next epic adventure and how to get there. It’s like mountain biking…as soon as you get to the peak of one hill, you see another hill that calls you. So you go through the journey again and again, to get to the top and see the next vista.