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If Only You Could Go Back… Chris Gleason, Sun Prairie
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If you had access to a time-turner (ask a Harry Potter fan if you don’t know what that is) and could go back in time to visit yourself during your first year of teaching, what advice would you give yourself? This is the intriguing question the 2010 Na- tional Teacher of the Year, Sarah Brown Wessling, asks her guests on the Teaching Channel podcast “Sarah and Friends.” I can vividly remember my first year of teaching middle school band at East Troy Middle School. I struggled with motivat- ing and engaging my students. My focus was solely on the notes and getting ready for the next performance. I was in such a frenzy to push kids through the lesson book, do theory worksheets and collect practice charts. Like many of you, I felt the constant pressure of the next concert.
I also knew that my FTE was based on the scheduling decisions of 11 and 12 year-olds. It seemed as if music publish- ers only exacerbated my fear by writing sale’s pitches such as “Your audience will surely love this” or “You will be a star” or “Students will flock to your room.”
I felt like I was training kids rather than educating them. My strategies and techniques centered around a “doing to” approach rather than a “working with” approach. I used the strategies and tech- niques I experienced as a student – mostly fear and intimidation – with little success. I turned to rewards and bribes, basically manipulating students into compliance. This just resulted in students who focused on the reward but didn’t make connections
and thought only superficially about the topics, eventually losing interest. All of these strategies left me concerned about how students find their passion, cultivate their curiosity and engage in learning. I had finished my first year of teaching and felt defeated, frustrated, burned out, tired and scared.
Things I Would Have Told Myself If only I could go back in time to tell my- self that there was more to my class than the performance; that there was more to a musician than a skill set; that the most important thing my students would learn in my class would be difficult to measure and impossible to represent with a single letter or number grade. I would have told myself to stop focusing on the performance and to start focusing on the kids and the music. I would have told myself to read Drive by Dan Pink and that it was impossible to make students do anything. The secret to motivation is mastery, purpose and autonomy, not carrots and sticks. I would have challenged myself to create lessons and opportunities to increase my students’ curiosity each and every day. Finally, I would have asked myself to consider these questions:
1. What do these students need?
2. What music is best for these students at this time?
3. How will my choices impact my student’s love of learning?”
Most importantly, I would have told myself to face my insecurities about the affective domain. As a young teacher I just defined affect as “that touchy feely stuff.” My viewpoint was narrow and I considered it to be an unnecessary waste of time in class. Then my world got rocked. I decided to attend my first CMP workshop that summer and my life changed forever. Among the many things I learned at that workshop, considering the affect was the most influential.
30 April 2017
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