As teachers evaluate all of the new “stuff” continuously coming at us, it is part of our make up to reflect upon how this affects what we do individually. When teachers have our own “aha moments” it is as exciting as when we see it in students. The difference is that when we come to such a new understanding, we realize that it can change how we think, which might mean that changing how we act is right around the corner and that’s scary at first.
This week I watched this glorious, scary realization unfold from a group of teachers; some speaking it, some nodding in hesitant acceptance, some staring from an unidentified stage in their own journeys of thinking. As a group we had just reviewed a new tool for teaching spelling, a brief 20-minute section of their teaching day. Through this group exploration, we began to realize how this once separate activity of word work might better inform our understanding of students’ needs as readers. This, in turn, led to the scary discussion of how to re-shape the familiar into a new necessity. One colleague stated, “This is a new thought to me, but if we really want to teach each student where they are, I can no longer think of the 30 kids in my classroom. I have to think about the 450 kids in my building as my students.”
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When we arrive at “aha moments” like this together, we realize that if we approach traditionally micro-level teaching with a philosophy of macro-level success, we cannot help but teach differently and organize differently. It expects that we cannot evaluate or be evaluated on what we do in our classroom as individuals if our expectation is to grow our students as a community of learners.