Teachers, like all of us, have a limited bank of time and attention. So, it should come as no surprise if they sometimes lose focus on what matters most for kids: interactions.
Teachers don’t lose focus because they don’t want to have positive interactions with children. I’ve yet to meet a teacher who didn’t want to be a positive force in kids’ lives.
But think about the teachers you know. How do they spend their time? How many different things are they asked to attend to in the classroom? Limited time and an excess of competing demands are real barriers for the teachers you support.
To talk about CLASS, you have to start with kids. Beginning anywhere else just doesn’t capture what’s at the heart of CLASS: interactions that help children grow and improve their outcomes.
That’s why Teachstone’s newest teacher PD series in myTeachstone is organized around teacher’s real experiences with children. Created with the learning experts at Sesame Workshop, the non-profit that brought you Sesame Street, the courses open by asking teachers to think about a specific interaction with a child:
To talk about CLASS, you have to start with kids. Beginning anywhere else just doesn’t capture what’s at the heart of CLASS: interactions that help children grow and improve their outcomes.
If you are responsible for supporting teacher growth, I can make an educated guess about you: you are super busy.
I can also guess that you are invested in helping teachers improve their interactions with children because you know how important these interactions are to the children in their care.
To honor that, you have important work to do and not enough time to do it, so let's get right to the point.
When I was a teacher, improving classroom interactions meant changing my behavior. While this wasn’t always easy, I always felt like I had direct control. I could drive the change.
Long before my time developing online professional development for teachers, in my first year of teaching middle school, I received a gift I would never get again. My principal gave me one day and three rules:
“Show. Don’t tell,” said every writing teacher ever. And just as common was students’ response: “Why?” Whether describing a setting sun or explaining Feedback Loops, I’ve always found it easier to just tell. But I’ve never found it as effective as showing. That’s why I was especially excited to get to spend an hour talking with folks who support teachers’ growth about how to interact with teachers in ways that help show them the kinds of effective interactions we want them to have with kids. We call this kind of showing parallel process. Watch the recording of our webinar to hear more of our conversation.
