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Many CMs have already passed their first days, and I’ve been reading some posts and cringing a bit when I read about how new teachers spend a lot of time right away with their ‘setting big goals’ / ‘investment’ speech. You can set big goals and you can work on getting your students ‘invested’ but you shouldn’t do it with a big speech. Here’s an analogy explaining why:

Imagine that you are forced to go to a comedy club. You’ve been to that club before and you didn’t think the comics were very funny, and you’re not very optimistic this time, especially when a nervous first-timer takes the stage. And then, what does he say when he opens his mouth? “Hi everyone. I want you to know that you’re going to laugh one and a half to two times as much as you have for the other comedians. I’m just that funny. I believe that you will laugh a lot with me as your comedian, even if nobody else believes it.” and then goes on for about ten minutes like that.

It’s not going to work. It makes the audience uncomfortable, skeptical, and worst of all, they haven’t laughed yet, which is what they want to do.

No, what you do is you win them over, not by telling them how funny you are, but by proving it by telling some good jokes and making them laugh.

OK, so the not so veiled analogy interpretation: You’re much better off teaching something (like telling jokes) so the students learn something (laugh). As a teacher about to start my thirteenth year (and an occasional stand-up, though not nearly as experienced or as good at it) I’m sure that the big goals speech is counterproductive. Actions speak louder than words.

When it comes to the organization TFA, however, the whole is a lot more humorless than the sum of its parts.

This is part of the reason, I think, that the workshop I used to present from 1995 to 2003 at the institute is no longer offered. I tried to make my points about the importance of classroom management by making fun of the many mistakes I made during my first year. Those mistakes enabled me to learn and to pass on what I learned from them. These optional workshops were very popular, even ‘standing room only.’ But TFA made it difficult for me to volunteer my services, and eventually I gave up trying. But a friend of mine videotaped one workshop, so now it’s up on YouTube and I hope you get a chance to watch it.

Here’s a link to a video of the workshop I presented at the 2003 New York institute. It’s an hour. If you’re in a rush, just watch parts 3, 4, and 5 for the main points.

This is one that particularly applies to new TFA teachers. I was a victim of this myself, back in the day, and the fact that it’s still a prominent issue makes me worry that TFA contributes to building that overconfidence.

You know the famous Western movie cliche “It’s quiet out there — Too quiet.” There are some CMs for whom the summer school experience is easy — too easy.

It might be easy because you’re just that good, but there are other reasons possibly. It’s important that you consider those other possibilities since if you just rely on the ‘fact’ that you are a natural born teacher and that wasn’t the reason for your success, then you will fall flat on your face, not close any achievement gaps, execute ineffectively, etc.

One question to ask is how many students are in your class right now, and how many will you have when you start really teaching? As you add students, the difficulty grows (as we say in the math world) ‘quadratically.’ This means that 20 kids are 4 times as difficult to teach as 10 and that 30 kids are 9 times as difficult as 10. So if you’re a rock star with 10 kids, be careful on what conclusions you draw from that.

I don’t know if TFA makes this point strong enough. I think they would be taking a risk if they reminded people too much about this since then they would open themselves up for criticism, like “Well, then why am I teaching just 10 kids? Why don’t you create a model where I’m able to teach 30 and get real practice in?” I don’t know how they do or don’t address the issue. Maybe someone who is currently training can comment and let me know.

Another thing that you should remember is that the summer school is so short that you barely make it out of ‘The Honeymoon Period’ This is the two or three week time period where kids act relatively good. Whether they’re being nice and giving you a chance or whether they are studying you to find weaknesses to exploit, I don’t know, but there is a honeymoon period. Even in my awful first year (You can read about it in ‘Reluctant Disciplinarian’ — shameful plug) my students we very well behaved for a few weeks.

Anyway this rant was inspired by a blog I read (people hate when I single out a blog by someone who is just trying to learn, but I really need to give a concrete example) magicschoolbus blog

I’m only a few pages in, but my first impression is that this is an excellent book. What I like about this book is that rather than lofty ideals he focuses on the ‘craft’ of teaching — the seemingly small details that add up to a lot of ‘achievement gap closing.’

A quote from the intro underscores the difference between this book and the other:

When I was a young teacher, people gave me lots of advice. I’d go to trainings and leave with lofty words ringing in my ears. They touched on everything that had made me want to teach. “Hiave high expectations for your students.” “Expect the most from students every day.” “Teach kids, not content.” I’d be inspired, ready to improve – until I got to school the next day. I’d find myself asking, “Well, how do I do that? What’s the action I should take at 8:27 A.M. to demonstrate those raised expectations.”

My sense is that Lemov approached this task of quantifying what techniques the best teachers use like a scientist. It wasn’t about what things he hoped work, or about what things he thinks he should say work because it will result in higher funding for his organizations. Many of his techniques are, by his own admission, not ‘glamorous.’ (Compare ‘Teaching As Leadership’ where one of the techniques is to camp out at the house when a parent is difficult to reach by phone.)

Anyway, aside from skimming the book and reading the intro, I don’t want to yet proclaim my full endorsement of the book, but it does look pretty good so far.

So, to anybody who thinks that I like to bash books to make my own two books look better, here’s a counterexample.

I think that one of the central themes of the book is that effective teachers know how to be efficient with the one resource that nobody ever has enough of – time. There are only so many hours in a day to do all the things teachers need to and no matter how ‘relentless’ you are, that number of hours is a constant defined by physics.

To be an effective new teacher, you have to know how to prioritize your time during the school year. While you are training, this summer, you also have to know how to prioritize your time so that you make the most of the five week institute.

Here is where TFA has been inconsistent. They outline six principles and then they are never that explicit about which ones are the most important so CMs can make sure to dedicate to those a proportionate share of their limited time and energy.

I’m going to present three different viewpoints for how to prioritize the six principles so you can focus your energy appropriately over your summer training. First I’ll give the weighted percents as implied by this book, then I’ll let you know what I think a more useful weighting is, and finally I’ll let you know a bit about how the actual training differs from both of these on one very significant principle and how to compensate for this while you are in training.

First, from the book. Though they don’t explicitly give these numbers, I’ll just assume that the more important principles get the more pages in the book. The meat of the book is from page 15 to 227, or 212 pages. Of those pages we get:
Invest Students and Their Families 25%
Set Big Goals 17%
Plan Purposefully 16%
Work Relentlessly 14%
Execute Effectively 13%
Continuously Increase Effectiveness 10%

If I were to make my own list of what percentages would be an appropriate use of very limited time and energy, I’d say:
Plan Purposefully 35%
Execute Effectively 35%
Continuously Increase Effectiveness 15%
Work Relentlessly 5%
Invest Students and Their Families 5%
Set Big Goals 5%

Those first two, in my opinion, are so obviously linked to student achievement that if you don’t accomplish them, then no amount of ‘investing’ will compensate for it.

The actual 5 week institute has a different breakdown, particularly in what I consider at least tied for the most important principle, ‘Execute Effectively.’ As a teacher, I know that students don’t really internalize my learning goals until they have practiced whatever skill I’ve taught. This isn’t just true for Math, but for everything. A doctor needs hours in surgery, a pilot needs flying time, and a teacher needs to get up in front of a class and teach.

On page 278 in the description of the institute training model it says

Each corps member teaches as part of a three- or four-person collaborative that is supervised and mentored by both a veteran teacher from the school and Teach For America staff memeers. Teachers rotate in and out of the role of lead teacher …

What this means, translated into English, is that the total amount of actual practice teaching time in front of actual kids for each CM is approximately 19 hours, which is equivalent to just 3 actual school days. You see, each collaborative member teachers for an average of 1 hour a day. The institute is 25 weekdays, but the first 5, there are no kids yet and the last one also.

So out of 350 hours (that’s 14 hours a day times 25), 19 hours is a mere 5%.

This is definitely not enough. TFA never really saw this as a crisis the way I do, but that’s the system, and that’s what it’s been since about 1994.

With so little actual teaching, CMs learn some bad habits. With one hour of teaching a day, you should learn to squeeze your planning into about 2 hours per day, but I see people spending all-nighters on that one 1 hour lesson.

Here’s my advice to anyone going to the institute to compensate for this short-coming in the training:
1) Keep my percents in mind when you’re deciding whether to really carefully read that article about ‘malleable intelligence’ or to make a better lesson plan.

2) Create at least two lessons a day, including worksheets and activities, even if you’re not going to get to teach all of them. Get good at planning so you can plan a 1 hour lesson in about an hour and a half. This is a skill you’ll need when you’ll have to plan double the amount you plan in the entire institute in just your first week as a real teacher.

3) Find four other people and create a system where you can practice in front of them and they can practice in front of you. Each night the group can get together for an hour and each person can get about 10 to 15 minutes practicing giving instructions, explaining concepts, disciplining, just simulating the feeling of being in front of a real class.

Well, that ends my 9 part critique of the new TFA book. I’m not really sure what inclined me to do this, but it was pretty fun to think about. I hope that it helps CMs at least think about some of the issues.

Once I got past the first 2 chapters, I agreed with most of the ideas in the book. I didn’t agree with how much certain topics got emphasized over other topics (note the near absence of classroom management and discipline), but most of the points from chapter 3, 4, 5, and 6, were good ones.

I’ll continue blogging about this in response to any questions and comments.

They title the chapter ‘Work Relentlessly’ and then throughout the 26 page chapter warn that ‘Relentlessly’ should not be interpreted too literally. They know that some very ineffective teachers have worked ‘relentlessly,’ (by the dictionary definition) so they define the word several different ways to clarify what they mean.

I think that it’s actually a poor word choice for what they’re trying to convey. An editor would tell them not to be ‘married’ to the word which they seem to like so much. Really a more accurate word would be ‘Strategically.’ I know ‘Work Strategically’ doesn’t sound as awe-inspiring, but at least it wouldn’t be open to so much misinterpretation. (Also, they’d have to rename that book about TFA from a few years ago, ‘Relentless Pursuit’)

One oversimplified piece of advice I didn’t like was in the middle of 203 on how to maintain high expectations when students have been performing poorly

Move faster, not more slowly. Some teachers respond to a classroom of students who are behind by setting a slower learning pace for them. Percisely the opposite approach is needed. Your students will be behind, but they will have the capacity and potential for great growth. The principles of leadership outlined in this book allow teachers of students who are far behind to set and maintain an accelerated pace of learning in their classroom.

This could be the most dangerous piece of mis-advice in the entire book. Going back to the whole ‘there is no such thing as having expectations that are too high’ thing from chapter 1 and 2, they don’t even acknowledge the possibility that a class might not be succeeding because the teacher is going too fast. But that is the main mistake that new teachers make. I’m often guilty of that mistake after almost 20 years of teaching.

A very good section begins on page 212 under the heading ‘Acting with Utmost Respect and Humility to Choose Your Causes Wisely.’ In the past, there have been some CMs who, knowing that they only have two years, start trying to ‘fix’ everything that’s wrong in their school the first year. This book accurately advises that you have to first prove yourself with excellent academic results before you gain the credibility for anyone to really listen to you.

On page 219 to 221, they have some good quotes about how teachers make sure to enjoy some time for their own social lives and hobbies – how depriving yourself of that kind of time will, in the long run, be bad for your students who will have a burned out cranky teacher. Unfortunately this great sentiment is undermined by probably the craziest quote in the entire book on the top of page 218 in the section ‘Sustaining This Work Over Time’ we get this quote from a New Orleans first grade teacher:

I realized early on that if I wanted to be able to sustain the physically and emotionally draining lifestyle of a teacher, I was going to need to renew my energy and passion on a regular basis. I do this in a variety of ways, among them: running slideshows of ridiculously adorable pictures of my students on my computer screen during late-night planning sessions, self-enforcing a strict “no work on Friday nights” rule, volunteering for extra morning duty so that I can have non-school-related, relationship-building conversations with each of my students, indulging in my favorite TV dramas with my roommates, volunteering as the leader of a Girl Scout Daisies troop to which many of my students belong, playing on an indoor soccer team with other teachers, and enjoying the many incredible food and music festivals for which this city is well known.

I’ll admit that I had a ‘no work on Friday nights, Saturday days, and Saturday nights’ which I strictly self-enforced too. As far as the slideshow on her computer, well, that’s a bit creepy. I have a two year old daughter, and I really hope that none of her teachers go home and do that. This teacher is reinforcing the hero thing which goes in contrast to the message of this entire chapter (though it fits with the portrayal in chapters 1 and 2). Why TFA put this quote in, I’m not sure. It’s like they’re saying ‘You don’t have to be a hero – but it’s an option.’

Anyway, aside from those pretty small details, I was very satisfied with the general message of this chapter which was that you want to be efficient with your time, you want to know your place as a newcomer and to prove yourself before you start lobbying to have the school renamed in your honor. This is a message that some of my TFA peers from back in the day could have really benefited from.

I think there will be one or two more parts to this critique. I’ve got to look over the 60 pages of end material first. I invite any comments …

When things don’t go well, some teachers absolve themselves by blaming the kids. Good teachers, however, look inward to what they could have done differently to have prevented the mistake so they will be able to avoid it next time.

By the very nature of this chapter, it has the humility that I think a guide book for new teachers should have. I’m glad to see that the last three chapters have been pretty solid and balanced.

If you have been reading through the book along with me, you might now have a better understanding of why I objected so much about what was said in the first two chapters. Teaching is a very difficult job. There’s only so many hours in a day, and you have to learn to prioritize. If you spend two hours every day walking kids home and waiting for their parents to come home because they didn’t answer the phone when you called, how could you ever have time to do the vital work described in this chapter? This chapter and the last chapter should be expanded while chapter 1 and 2 could have been cut to about 10 pages each.

For the last 7 pages of the chapter, they address classroom management / discipline one more time. I think this is the last mention of it in the book, meaning that this topic will comprise only 9 out 300 pages, or a mere 3%.

There are a few things I’d like to say about classroom management, based on what was said in this chapter: Near the bottom of 164 it says

Many new teachers initially struggle, for example, with classroom management and student behavior. In our experience, these problems are mostly symptoms of the teacher’s failure to assert authority by consistently following through with behavioral expectations.

I don’t really agree with that. Though it’s true that not following through doesn’t help matters, in my opinion students misbehave because the teacher has failed to convince them that he/she is competent and capable of helping them learn. Since they don’t think they can learn from this teacher anyway, they might as well have fun while they’re not learning. This is why it’s so important to not teach something over their heads, early on, that students fail to achieve and then feel like there’s no reason to try at future lessons.

Finally, I have a real problem with the final quote on page 167. Throughout this 7 page section on management, it is stressed that teachers need to be consistent with following through on behavioral expectations. Then, the ‘last word’ from Ross Jensen says

After a disastrous first semester, I resolved to adopt a positive paradigm for my classroom. Instead of scolding off-task students, I would praise on-task students. Instead of telling those students who were misbehaving that I was disappointed in them, I would tell those students who were behaving appropriately that I was proud of them. … The results were dramatic and immediate.

Positive reinforcement is a good tool, but when he says that he used it instead of, rather than, in addition to correcting misbehavior, I don’t believe him. Couldn’t they have found someone who said “Rather than just correct misbehavior, I found it effective to also praise those students who behaved appropriately.” The quote from the book undermines the earlier good advice that assertive teachers are not afraid to address misbehaviors.

Still, a very nice chapter. It actually made me think about my own teaching and some of the things I can improve on.

So I’m on page 171, now. We’ve seen 100 pretty unimportant pages followed by 71 pretty good ones. I wonder if these percents are indicative of how they utilize the short time training over the summer. There’s just not enough time to spend on the non-essentials. If you haven’t read this book yet, I’d recommend starting by carefully reading chapter 3 and 4 and then skimming 1 and 2.

Chapters one and two seem to say, “Here are some practices we’ve found in highly effective teachers. You should try them too.” Though some of the practices are pretty risky (like telling your class that they’re going to have two years of gains or having your students call you every night to talk about homework and share stories about your lives), the potential problems with some of these practices is ignored. There are a few times where the practices of the highly effective teachers are compared to those of ineffective teachers (like where the ineffective teachers give up and complain when they can’t get through to parents on the phone while the highly effective ones walk home with the kids and wait until the parents show up), there is little ‘middle ground’ offered. You can either be ineffective or you can be a highly effective hero.

My main complaint of the first two chapters is that TFA fails to give the new teacher an option, one that could make the teacher a ‘moderately effective’ teacher, for instance maybe some other options for how to contact parents without going through the extreme measure of walking your students home. TFA seems to be saying, “You have a choice: you can be highly effective or ineffective. Choose one.” As a result, the first two chapters are not very useful in guiding a beginning teacher. My concern is that the beginning teacher, by trying to emulate the ‘highly effective’ teachers will spread themselves too thin and become ineffective by trying to do too much. Chapters one and two present oversimplified ideas with few warnings about some of the pitfalls associated with some of the strategies of setting big goals and of investing students and their families.

Chapter 3, ‘Plan Purposefully’ (is ‘purposefully’ a real adverb?) began the way I figured it would with an inspirational vignette about a creative activity for teaching natural selection from a TFA alum and Arizona teacher of the year. Then, a few pages later, I was pleasantly surprised. I got the sense that this chapter was based on a completely different premise than the first two. Suddenly I see suggestions that are not unique to ‘highly effective’ teachers, but are just what ‘moderately effective’ teachers do. A perfect example is their suggested lesson cycle, the five step lesson, made popular in the 1980s by Madeline Hunter. Now, I’m a big fan of the Hunter method for a beginning teacher, but I find it ‘incongruous’ in this book since it is not a lesson cycle for someone who is trying to get 2 or 3 years of gains in one year. I’d expect to see instead a lot about cooperative learning and about discovery learning – techniques that when used by a master can create more gains than the standard lesson structure described here.

What this chapter had that the first two lacked was thoughtful ‘counterpoints.’ For instance, on page 131, Jerry Hauser talks about how he ‘overrelied’ on cooperative learning. “too often working in groups means individual students don’t get as much practice as they need if they’re ultimately going to be able to do the work on their own.” This is the kind of thing new teachers need to hear. Some ideas sound good when they are described in a sentence or two, but unless new teachers know that there are some difficulties associated with a particular strategy, they will not know what traps to watch out for.

Where was this kind of thing in the first two chapters? Why not have a quote from someone in chapter 1 that says “I was too ambitious with my goals at first and it intimidated my students. When I realized this and made my goals more realistic, I had a lot more success.” A sentiment shared by a lot of teachers who make the mistake of having goals that are too big. Why not have in chapter 2 a quote like “One of the toughest thing about maintaining a friendly environment is making sure students know that I was their teacher and not their friend. When I realized that, I backed off a bit and became more professional.”

Chapter 3 is practical and balanced. I just can’t understand how it can be in the same book as the first two chapters. Once they decided that it would be OK to present practical advice that wasn’t necessarily unique to ‘highly effective’ teachers, they could have gone back and added some realism to the first two chapters. They really missed an opportunity to do that. It wouldn’t have been too hard — maybe it would have required adding another 5 or 10 pages.

I was impressed by the ‘backwards design’ explanation for planning units and also liked the idea of making the assessments first so teachers know what they’re trying to accomplish.

I have some issues with the last five pages of the chapter that I want to discuss here, though. I didn’t like the section where ‘Activity-Driven Lessons’ are discouraged. Often after I think of a topic, a good activity comes to mind, and this can precede my examining the learning standards. The problem with the ‘dodge ball’ activity about the American Revolution wasn’t that she made the activity before thinking about the standards. The problem was that it wasn’t much of an activity. You can, after making an activity, analyze if the activity is just a fun thing or if it accomplishes something. If it doesn’t, you have to tweak it or ditch it. Still, it’s not a bad idea to think of an activity right after you think of your topic. Compare to the activity that was described about natural selection in the beginning of the chapter. That was a great activity, and not because the standards were considered first (so she says).

Finally, at the end of the chapter from pages 136 to 137 we see the first mention of the incredibly important topic of classroom management. I skipped ahead to see if there were more mentions of this, and I think there are about 7 more pages in the next chapter, starting on page 161. Now, if I had 100 minutes to tell new teachers the essentials about teaching, 30 minutes would be about classroom management. Without it, it doesn’t matter how big your goals are or how many investment strategies you have or how purposefully you plan. You’ll get nowhere. On 137 they give two bulleted lists. Of the three items on the ‘rules should be’ list, I think the first two contradict each other. For some rules, You can’t phrase them in the positive, as the first bullet says, and also have them clearly stated, as the second bullet says. “No talking during independent work” is a lot more clear than “Be respectful of others.” Your rules can be phrased in the negative if that makes them more clear.

The second bullet on ‘Consequences should be’ encourages teachers to make one of the worst mistakes in all of teaching , “verbal warning.” You’ll have to read some of my older blog entries to see the problem with ‘warnings,’ since it’s something I’ve written about extensively. The short explanation is that when you make ‘verbal warning’ your first consequence (and you promise the students that this will be your first consequence) every student can take advantage of this free pass. Also, I’m not that into the idea that “Every student needs to know where he or she stands in that system at any given moment.” I like things to be a little mysterious when it comes to classroom management.

I build strong relationships with my students, and they called my home nightly to talk through homework problems or share stories about our lives.

The fact that this ‘boundary issue’ didn’t work against him is fine, I guess, for him, but new teachers should not feel obligated to talk to their students on the phone every night. To me, that’s not a great use of the limited ‘recharging’ time all teachers need.

Then on page 65, the hero teacher with the ‘strong internal locus of control’ (I always worry when I hear that expression.) says that because it was hard to contact parents over the phone,

we would just start taking kids home, and we would wait at home until the parent came home.

A new teacher reading this passage who would also like to have a ‘strong internal locus of control’ might think that this is a practical thing to do when in reality, this is not a very efficient or effective use of time. Also, it really crosses the teacher-student boundary. You’d have to already have established a very unique relationship with a student to take them home and wait (for who knows how long, don’t they have to plan for tomorrow?) for the parents. It’s just not a good idea. I think I’d really need more details about these visits to determine what other factors were in play that made them successful.

I know these stories are meant to inspire new teachers to be ‘relentless’ in their work to emulate these heroes, but another message inadvertently emerges. They spend the first chapter proving the obvious fact that low-income minority students are as capable as their rich white peers, but then they help fuel the opposite argument by making us believe that the only way to help them is to have their teachers be super heroes.

Maybe my expectations are too high, but I don’t think that the achievement gap can only be closed by superhuman teachers who don’t require sleep or Saturdays off. I think it can be closed by competent teachers who know how to intelligently prioritize and efficiently utilize their limited energy.

Another thing I want to mention is that these heroic teachers probably aren’t as incredible as they seem. All teachers do a lot of extra stuff to try to get their students to work hard.

I generally write about the problems I had and the mistakes I made during my first year. What I don’t write about so much is that I had a lot of motivation to succeed after my first very tough year, and, I could easily write a short blurb that would make me seem like a martyr, when in reality, it wasn’t that much extra work.

When Gary Rubinstein learned that some of his math students didn’t speak English, he started conducting extra help sessions after school which he taught in Spanish. Within a few weeks, there would be a full class of students, including many students who were not in his class. He also started an SAT course which ran on Saturdays and which had food donated by a local restaurant. At the school football games, he even played trumpet with the marching band. When thirty-four seniors needed to pass the math section of the Texas State Test to graduate, Rubinstein volunteered to teach the class to the students who had already failed this test four times. At the end of the year, thirty-two of the thirty-four passed.

I’m not writing this to imply that I’m one of those heroes. In a sense, every teacher who does a little extra work is. I still took plenty of time for my own selfish needs, trust me.

Here are some more details about my heroic accomplishments: That Spanish after school class lasted about 2 months before it kind of fizzled out. The SAT course was 6 Saturdays total. The trumpet thing happened once. The state-test with the seniors, well that one I’m pretty proud of. And all this extra stuff really was probably just because I had a lot of free time because I couldn’t find a girlfriend.

Next topic:
On page 78 to 79, they describe an issue that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and writing about – how to ‘act’ with your students. They give a sample of how an effective teacher greets his class in ‘fostering an inclusive and positive atmosphere’ with banter like: “Robert – where’s the smile I like so much? I need it today. Wait, wait, wait – there it is!”

In the middle of page 79 there’s a bulleted list of six things they observe about highly effective teachers. Of these six items, I very much agree with five of them and vigorously oppose the other one. The offending item is the fifth one on the list, (take out your highlighter again, but this time your BLACK highlighter)

Remain authentic by speaking and teaching as one’s self, not in an affected or adopted persona.

It’s a shame that they slipped this line into a very solid list of good advice. This oversimplified line can really make things tough for a new teacher. “Be yourself” sounds good, but in my experience it is not true. Teaching, in part, is acting. “Yourself” isn’t used to leading a class of 34 fourth graders. To be successful as an inexperienced young teacher you pretty much have to adopt a persona. Now the persona will have some elements of yourself, but still it will be somewhat ‘affected’ and ‘adopted.’

TFA does a much better job of explaining the nuances of this dynamic in the training manual. See page 11 of the “Classroom Management and Culture” booklet found on the teaching as leadership website where after making the same point, they follow with this extremely important caveat:

Certainly, all of us make adjustments to our natural persona when we are in front of a class teaching. However, your teaching will be most effective if you assert authority in a way that is compatible with your style and personality.

Still they encourage you to be yourself as much as possible. I think it’s fine to completely change your persona if that’s what works best for you in front of a classroom. The ‘truth’ is probably somewhere between the two extremes, closer to my end.

The last thing I’d like to mention briefly is the two page section about something called ‘malleable intelligence.’ The idea is that when students believe that intelligence isn’t just something you have or don’t have, but something that you can grow with hard work, they will be more willing to work for it. I know that TFA does some readings about this topic. I’m not sure if this is supposed to be another thing to convince teachers that all students are capable of high achievement, or if it’s supposed to be something that teachers get their students to accept so the students are more motivated. I think it’s unnecessary to get into this with your students. On page 61, they encourage teachers to be mindful of the messages they send when they praise a kid by saying they are “naturally good” at something since it reinforces the idea that people can be naturally good (and implying, therefore, that people can also be naturally bad) at things, thus making it a waste of time to try when you’re not. This is really overthinking things. I know from my own experiences of learning that there are some things I’m naturally good at and others that I’m not. I know I have to work hard to be successful at the things I’m not so good at, and that I’ve got to work hard to be great at the things that I am naturally good at. It’s really pretty simple. I once saw a blog by a new TFA teacher who spent an entire lesson in his first week of teaching, going over this theory and doing a controversial class discussion about it. If you want to learn some brain theory research to be more informed about how people think and learn, fine, but don’t bore your students with it.