You can't do it alone
To do it alone is difficult. Teaching is enormously complex, involving multiple decisions about students, curriculum, colleagues and yourself. Your school, a private world, separate from society, a fiefdom within its castle walls. The schedule dictates, the bell rings, students perambulate in hallways, the bell rings again…the halls go silent…You teach…the bell again…You anticipate the next group, and the next, and the next…it’s lunch…afterwards you again spur into action…the final bell rings. You collapse in your chair and wonder what’s happened—and it’s only been one day.
Whatever has been your first day––or will be––you will most likely be alone. You practice taught for six weeks, perhaps with guidance, perhaps not. You have your certificate. You’ve signed a contract. You’ve been through induction and maybe have a mentor. You close the door to your classroom. You’re on your own.
Listening is Learning: Conversations Between 20th and 21st Century Teachers invites you to step outside what may feel like an imposed cocoon. Seek the knowledge and advice of former teachers, retired educators, and respected veterans. Search for their best ideas, methods, materials, insights. Ask them to share moments of success, epiphanies, struggles, methodologies. Let them into your life. You’ll become a better teacher.
Find and keep procedures that work to facilitate your purposes. Seek the advice of the greats before you. Everyone knows who they are. Look for them. Contact them. As I’ve said, you’ll become a better teacher. As a young teacher, in seeking the advice of educators who came before you, you stand on their shoulders, as I did on the shoulders of those before me. Soon it will be your turn to offer your shoulders to a younger colleague.
In Listening is Learning you will listen in on conversations pairing exemplary veterans with new teachers. These conversations provide support and reassurance––not only from reading about them but will also encourage you to seek out your own conversations to grow as a teacher. Those who came before you, who exemplify best practices from another era, can become the foundation of your success.
You can’t do it alone.
