Remember the Novice
This year, more than any other in my teaching career, I am swimming in newness. New teacher evaluation systems based on new frameworks outlining what it means to be an effective teacher. New requirements for establishing specific objectives for student growth. New expectations for rigor in the standards driving instruction. That’s a lot of newness to process: terminology to learn, skills to develop, assignments to complete. Even for an old-timer like me, with a pretty broad foundation to attach new knowledge to, at times this year it has seemed like the number of things I am being asked to master exceeds the amount of time I have in a day to do it.
Lately, I have realized that with all of this stuff coming at me this this year, I am in the same situation that my students are in throughout their school lives. With new learning coming at me from several directions, I have been forced into the role of the novice where the newness is concerned, as opposed to the expert, and it is a role that comes, sometimes, with a bit of discomfort (along with the joy of learning, of course).
When I first started this teacher-blogging enterprise -- before life sent me into blogging hiatus for a while -- I wrote a post called “The Expert Novice.”
The gist of that post is that in order to become a master teacher, you have to develop considerable expertise in your field, and yet retain the ability to see it through the eyes of a novice so that you can remember what your first encounters with your subject matter were like.
Being able to recall the novice mind allows you to access memories of elements that were especially challenging, ways of organizing information for learning that were most effective, upcoming traps that seemed impossible to climb out of until you figured out how to climb out of them.
Every day that I drive to school clarifying in my head the common language of the Marzano Framework; every day that I sit down to plan a summative assessment before I plan the daily details of a unit of instruction; every time I revisit the Common Core standards just to make sure I am on the right track, I am reminded of two things.
First, that just considering these things more intentionally than I have in a while helps me be a better teacher.
Second, I am reminded of what it means to be a novice, which I have not been in the classroom in a long time. I am reminded of the AP English student-novices that will be sitting before me in that classroom and how their heads may be swimming in poetic forms and rhetorical devices and literary theory.
Together we will move toward mastery of our respective studies. Some days the mastery will come easily, while others will be more of a struggle. But revisiting the novice experience and the struggles that come with new learning has helped me remember that a response to a student inquiry that sounds anything like, “We went over that yesterday,” or “I already told you that,” is generally not beneficial to student learning.
Instead I should pause, find my inner novice again, and come up with a better way to help that student learn something new.
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