It’s better to burn out than to fade away- Neil Young
I have always been fond of Neil Young’s quote. I have never had any interest in fading away and by seeking out this blog, you probably feel the same. Burnout is an overused expression in our field and often an excuse for less than stellar work. There is an old saying that speaks truth: It’s hard to burn out if you have never been on fire.
Students deserve our best. In this post, I am going to rant a little about a few peeves I have with people who seem to constantly be burnt out, and I’ll wrap it up with some ideas on how to turn some negative behaviors around.
Recently I went on a cruise. Yes, I had a great time. However, one aspect I noticed was how upbeat and energetic all the crew members were, even though they all were far from home, worked very long days, and most were not highly paid. The crew was professional: well dressed, mannerly, and customer focused. As Laura, my wife, and I left the boat we wondered why some staff in schools are so different. It is not easy to answer, but I believe the answer is found in the culture of the school and what the leader is willing to tolerate.
Have you ever had a staff member come up to you or be in your presence to announce 179 days left after the first day of school?
Or, do you have a staff member who always states how many days until Friday?
What about your perpetually tired staff member whose lack of energy is freely communicated? You know, the person who says, “I’m so tired” when you ask them how their day is going.
Finally, the person who gripes how cold it is during winter and then complains about the heat in late spring.
Here are a few tips you can use to bring passion to those who have rarely been on fire.
Tell them to stop. Yes, this is blunt. But a school will never become a great place for all students if some staff are allowed to wallow in their personal misery. I actually had a staff member years ago who made the 179 days left claim; I told the staff member to stop and never to reference the countdown in front of me. This was an awkward encounter, but my point was heard and it stopped.
Always be positive! The principal sets the tone. It is a mistake to join into T.G.I.F conversations. If you join in, staff assumes permission has been given to speak this way.
Set the tone for your school, model the behaviors you want to see.
Do not let yourself go down the rabbit hole called negativity. It is always present and there are always people in the hole who will be happy to see you there. Misery loves company.
Never hire a person who appears burnt out in an interview. How a person presents himself or herself in an interview is the best you’re gonna get!
Students deserve the best! Join me and take a stand to bring energy and positivity to your school. Do not tolerate negative people. Negative people hurt the culture of your school and negative people harm students. Recognize and support the many positive people on your team. And realize your positive staff has long known who the negative staff members are, most will appreciate you helping those staff find some passion and energy for the work they do!
Let this phrase guide you: What the leader permits communicates to others what the leader will tolerate. Every day people ask me how I am doing, and everyone who asks gets a big smile from me and hears, “I’m doing great!” Students and staff deserve my best. Join me!
New Albany HS Principal, NASSP Digital Principal, co-author, speaker, teacher, learner. Dwight Carter visits The Robb Review!
You would be hard pressed to talk to a teacher, secretary, or school administrator who would say we are not experiencing some disruptive times in education.
Since 2008, public perception of educators, in general, has been less than favorable. Expectations have increased exponentially, yet funding education initiatives have not grown at the same pace. One might say we face one disruption after another, yet we continue to find ways to meet the needs of our students, engage parents, respond to community desires, and do what is best for all stakeholders.
I recently co-authored a book with my mentor and good friend Mark White, titled, Leading Schools in Disruptive Times: How to Survive Hyper Change. As the political and social climate in our nation has changed, the release of this book could not have come at a better time.
We explore seven disruptions educators are facing today; we define what we mean by disruption, disruptive event, and hyper change.
Understanding these working definitions give greater depth to each disruption described:
Disruption- any invention or societal shift that gradually changes how schools operate.
Disruptive Event- an incident based on a disruption that suddenly changes how schools operate.
Hyper change- changes that stacked on top of changes in new areas that might not have existed a decade ago.
With that in mind, we describe seven disruptions school leaders face today:
Student Safety- School safety has taken on a whole new meaning since Columbine. Greater measures are in place to identify students who do not feel a sense of belonging and society continues to grapple with how to reduce and eliminate school shootings. Schools are asked to provide in-depth mental health supports while focusing on the academic progress and achievement of students.
Accelerating Technology –Technology has become cheaper, smaller, faster, and more accessible than ever before and school leaders must find ways to integrate its use in schools.
Reform Efforts – Unfunded and rapidly changing mandates that include new ways of assessing student learning to more complex evaluation systems leaves school leaders scrambling to keep up.
Generational Challenges- Millennials are entering the teaching ranks that are led by Gen X’ers and Boomers. Without an adaptive mindset, this could negatively impact overall student achievement if not handled properly.
Global Readiness – Skill development is far more important than content absorption, so school leaders have to work with stakeholders to define what success looks like in their schools and identify the key skills they want to students to develop.
Complex Diversity Issues- Race, gender, immigration, and sexual identity are topics that create more diversity challenges for today’s school leaders.
Demand for Transparency- Information is accessible 24/7 and stakeholders demand that school leaders find ways to keep them informed about student performance, provide report card data, and immediately provide safety updates at a moments notice. It’s become a societal expectation.
This may seem overwhelming, and it is. However, we introduce a framework school leaders can use when confronted with a disruption that we call CAT Framework: Cope, Adjust, Transform. We share stories from 21st school leaders and educators who have faced one or more of these disruptions, what they learned, and what they would do differently in the future. Through their stories, the reader can reflect on their daily work using the guided questions and CAT Framework activities at the end of each chapter.
In such a time as this, “It’s often the administrator’s voice that must resonate. In dark times, it must be a ray of light that others may follow. Now more than ever, administrators must be visible and plugged in with their students and staff.”
“I didn’t guess!” Sofia tells me. I got it [says the word.]– incredible.”
“Tell me what you did,“ I reply.
“I looked through [the word]. And then I saw I could say in and ible and the e was short—cred. I put it all together.“
“You used the strategy of looking through a long word to find parts like prefixes and suffixes that you could say! Well done. All the practicing you did really helped!”
“Yeah!.”
Sofia, a fifth grader, has difficulty decoding multi-syllable words. Her recall of text details is good, even when she misreads several words or when she listens to her teacher read aloud. The above conversation reveals progress, but never feel discouraged if students return to the old guessing habit. Progress is never neatly linear. It’s a messy back and forth.
Sofia entered fifth grade reading at a mid-first grade instructional level. She could not distinguish short from long vowels, nor could she say the vowel sound when confronted with a word she couldn’t pronounce. She had little knowledge of consonant blends and digraphs. Her decoding skills were tentative, and Sofia’s main strategy was guessing. Sofia isn’t alone. Large numbers of students throughout our country live in the shadows, always on the periphery of learning in their classes.
Perhaps, students like Sofia fall through cracks in a school system because teachers, feeling the pressure of high stakes tests, focus their attention and interventions on students who, with support, can pass the state test in reading. In the shadows they lose confidence, don’t know how to choose books they can read. Sadly, they continue to slide backwards because they don’t read enough to improve nor do they receive appropriate interventions. Researchers agree that low reading volume combined with weak word knowledge results in minimal annual progress. Often, the small voice in these students’ heads is, I can’t do this, and gradually, as years pass, the drive to work hard to succeed diminishes, self-efficacy vanishes, and students mark time until they can drop out.
What Sofia Can Teach Us
Sofia’s decoding tank of tools was almost on empty. What frustrated her was the huge gap between her ability to think with text and her ability to read text. To build her knowledge of how our language works, she completed word sorts from Words Their Way letter-name book. Working first with short vowels and moving to long-vowel patterns, I discovered that each sort made sense to Sofia, and she was able to complete a sort with automaticity by the end of the week. However, two things became apparent:
recalling different word patterns in text remained difficult because Sofia would forget the patterns and short and long vowel sounds still confused her; and
applying word knowledge to continuous text wasn’t happening during the first three months of learning with her and others in the group, as there was no transfer from word sorts to text.
Sofia and others like her have had diverse phonics experiences in elementary school. However, they never absorbed the presented information to a level enabling them to apply it automatically to continuous text. The mantra of, “Well, they were taught it last year and they should know it,” is unproductive and blames the students.
When students don’t get a lesson, it’s teachers’ responsibility to find ways to re-teach and build lasting understanding. That’s what being a teacher means. Marie Clay so wisely explained that students receive and understand lessons differently. Knowing this, interventions should be an integral part of every core curriculum class. Undoing poor habits and building students’ self-confidence is more difficult the longer they stay in the shadows.
Solving Decoding Challenges
Sofia and others in her group continue to grapple with developing analogous thinking—the ability to transfer knowledge of a word pattern to an unfamiliar word with the same pattern. Students often complete sorts that I create based on what I observe when they read aloud to me. Hearing students read aloud one-on-one is an opportunity to learn about their process and to support them with questions that prevent them from guessing or skipping words. The goal is for them to use their knowledge of word patterns and the text’s meaning automatically. Here are some prompts/questions to try:
If the word has a prefix, say it. If the word has a suffix say it. Look at the word that’s left and say it. Now put it together.
Can you figure out if the vowel is long or short? It’s interesting that students could parrot the long vowels: a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y. But confronted with a word like stripes, they couldn’t say the long i and substituted other vowel sounds. No internalization of these sounds had occurred.
Sometimes, skipping the word and reading to the end of the sentence, then going back, rereading the entire sentence and trying to say the word helped. For example, one student stumbled and stopped on the word diapers. She quickly figured it out using this strategy because the end of the sentence noted that they were often wet and dirty.
If students don’t “get it” quickly, tell them the pronunciation in order to prevent guessing and a long a pause in the reading. Make note of the word and work on challenges you observed by creating individualized word sorts that give additional practice opportunities. It’s important to remember that when five to six years have gone by, it’s not possible to have a quick reversal, even with an extra daily class that includes daily interactive read alouds, choosing and practicing reading a poem a week for fluency, and guided and self-selected independent reading.
Time and Place Matter
When you work with a student one-on-one in order to provide reading feedback and support, find a separate place where your conversation and the student’s reading aloud are private. Self-confidence and self-efficacy are huge issues for students with reading challenges like Sofia’s. It’s crucial to continually point out every increment of progress and build the YET mindset of “I think I can with hard work and support.” Help them feel safe and provide beautifully written and illustrated books for reading.
Some Closing Thoughts
Believe me, it’s tough to be patient when you’re working thoughtfully, carefully, diligently, and progress, at times, seems minimal at best. Avoid blaming yourself, other teachers, and the children. Instead, DON’T GIVE UP. There’s no recipe or program to fix things. Your vigilance, observations, questions, and dogged determination to find ways to intervene—ways that move the children forward—will eventually bring about the changes you hope and pray for.
Know, too, that it’s difficult to engage and motivate the Sofia’s in our classrooms. They come with greatly diminished self-confidence, a lack of automaticity with reading, a lack of fluency, a lack of word knowledge, and little practice reading real books. However, as you support and help them read wonderful books, discuss them, plan interventions to increase reading skill, and provide books for self-selected independent reading, progress will surely come. It might not happen the year you learn with them, but with the kind of support that monitors reading behaviors and uses what’s observed to plan interventions, I have to believe it will come.
Let’s face it. By 1:00 pm a third of us are wishing for a diet coke, a third want a Macchiato, and another third want a power nap. Being the kind of teacher who plans purposefully, patiently meets students where they are, and keeps up to date with the latest tips and research can be exhausting. Of course, there are also the unplanned events that claim our attention like parent emails, unexpected meetings, and the social interactions that seep into our classrooms and fill it with peer drama and mediation. While that caffeine and sugar boost give us a quick fix it also leaves us jittery, rounder around the waist, and crashing later in the day. This led me in search of other, healthier, and more sustainable ways to get that much-needed energy boost.
By looking at the research from positive psychology and sociology I found that one of the best things we can do for us and our students is to focus on building from strengths. It turns out that we train our brains to look for whatever we think matters most. If we believe that focusing on strengths is important we will begin to look for them and then find them everywhere with every student. On the other hand, when we look for what is not working, we can also find that everywhere. The biggest difference is that strengths make us feel good and when we feel good we are happier, more energized and more successful teachers.
Every day I sit with a reader and ask him about his process. I get curious about what this particular reader thinks about, notices, and does as he reads. I really listen. Then I allow myself to be impressed by what he already knows how to do. By focusing on a reader’s strengths I fill up on positivity that can’t help but give me a boost.
After noticing a strength I explain it to the reader so he can also relish in the hard work that is paying off. While giving the feedback I really take in his change in facial expression and demeanor. The toothy grins, the rosy glow, all show me just how much the reader feels his pride. His pride gives me even more of an energy boost. Finally, I sneak peeks at the reader for the rest of the day, and enjoy the energy ripples of communicating to students what they already do so well.
Of course, this does not mean I only reinforce strengths when I confer, as I also teach students strategies, but the teaching comes second. At first, I had to train myself to look for what the reader could do so I could build from strengths. I put sticky notes on my conferring clipboard to remind myself of my intention. After a few weeks of daily practice it became more natural and now it is automatic.
Think this is all fluff, like whipped cream atop a latte? Think again—this positivity practice makes a difference. The next day, and the next day after that, you see its impact on the reader. In psychology, they call it the helper’s high. In teaching, I’m thinking of it as a double shot of positive feedback that gives each of us a needed boost.
