Professionalism is a fascinating domain in my life. On one side, I have an intense sense of responsibility to others and the commitments I have made. On the other, I struggle with consistency in all domains and object to doing things for which I don’t understand the purpose. Additionally, I have an optimistic sense of what can be accomplished in a given time period.
Those attributes combined have created some periods of intense overwhelm. While I would not wish those upon anyone, they have taught me how to better manage my commitments, increase my capacity to accomplish tasks, and to research productivity strategies.
- Getting things done (David Allan) Web Resources
- Measure what matters (John Doerr) Web Resources
- Agile Manifesto (various)
- Radical Candor (Kim Scott) Web Resources
- Seven Habits of Highly Successful People (Stephen Covey) Web Resources
- Strengthsfinder 2.0 (Gallup) Web Resources
- Thinking Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)
- Think Again (Adam Grant)
- Brain Rules (John Medina)
- Design Thinking (Stanford d.school)
- Change by Design (Tim Brown)
- Plus TED talks, podcasts, software solutions, etc…
Most of these books are written with a business professional in mind and do not translate well to the school environment. In particular, educators are subject to the daily schedule and students appearing in your doorway. Those make it difficult to structure your time for efficiency. Some highlights include writing things down so you don’t have to continually re-remember them. Organize your tasks by the time and location where they can be done. For example, instead of having a to-do list for physics that includes: setup the lab, grade tests, prep lessons, build a rotational motion demo. You have lists based on when and where tasks can be accomplished. Everything that can only be done when a classroom is open gets on the same list. Things that require you to be on campus, another, and then there is a list of items that are flexible such as grading or something you need to read. There is no need to concern yourself with to-do items that you can’t accomplish. If the classroom is occupied, no need to worry about setting up a lab. My early location/time lists were: anytime; need internet; classroom open; at home; server room; driving. Then when the time or location came up, I would work off of that list. When I got in my car to drive home, I’d look at the list (which was mostly phone calls I needed to make) and take care of a few while I sat in 520 traffic.
Those books were read primarily because I developed a fascination with how people accomplish things. I would not recommend such a deep dive. Instead, I recommend talking to lots of different colleagues about what they do. You are not looking for the perfect system; you are looking for a system that works for you. That will most likely be a hybrid of various approaches.
Professionalism | Executive Functioning
| Approaches recommendations for improvement receptively and responsively | 🗸 |
| Displays openness and comfort with visitors observing class | 🗸+ |
| Seeks out diverse opinions of others for guidance | 🗸 |
| Manages and prioritizes professional tasks and responsibilities | 🗸+ |
| Communicates and responds to students, parents, and colleagues in a timely and constructive manner | 🗸+ |
On the positive side, my strong sense of responsibility has me meeting commitments well. However, I often overload myself with commitments which puts me in a bind of either sacrificing my time and health to meet them or failing to come through for the school (or family). If I commit to something, I will get it done, the only responsible way of maintaining balance is to reduce commitments on the front end. Saying no, or it will have to wait, on requests has been an area of growth for me.
“… but, I bet you can’t figure it out”
This phrase has tended to get me to work on a problem regardless of my capacity to take it on. A recurring joke whenever I attempt to set time boundaries.
Task prioritization has been a challenging area in my particular role. Responsibilities tend to rank in the following way:
- Active teaching of a class
- School-wide emergent needs (wifi is down or SLT tasks)
- Tech department projects
- Lesson planning
- Emails
- Grading
This makes the tasks of teaching a class the most important and least important thing in your day. Timeliness in returning assignments suffers under this model.
Feedback is something that I have always craved and valued whether it is from a supervisor, colleague, student, parent, or my own reflection. Through the PDP, I have learned that I don’t outwardly present a desire for feedback, often coming off as defensive yet demonstrating through my actions later on that the feedback was received and acted upon. In particular, acknowledging and appreciating feedback is all that is needed, responding or countering reduces feedback in the future. This has been the most valuable feedback of the last year and it has already made this process worthwhile.
Similar to feedback, classroom observations are a gift. Having someone take the time to watch your teaching and have a conversation about it is invaluable. Whether it is supervisors or colleagues, I encourage them to watch a class and will often have them participate in some way. In many ways, co-teaching Evolution of Society with Matt and Philosophy courses with Terry has been a co-observation experience with many tangible benefits. Matt pushed me in terms of group work and structure, Terry has a presence and facility for leading discussions that is impressive and continues to be something I aspire to. Additionally, every class has observers built in, your students, asking them for feedback or help in setting the culture of the class is both informative and also is a useful tool for moving the class culture back on track.
In addition to receiving feedback from others, it is also important to validate or confront your own assumptions. You can’t trust what you believe, or even what most people believe without putting it through these types of tests. One of the more profound examples in my career was the slow realization that learning styles were a myth (despite a lot of early professional development asserting others). This might be news to the reader, see here for articles on the topic. Additionally, what was true a few years ago may no longer be true. As the world changes, what is a good idea or a bad idea also changes. None of us alone has enough insight into the world to figure that out. It requires conversations with colleagues, ideas from the outside world, and an internal challenge of assumptions. In particular, finding people who you disagree with but also respect their thinking is particularly valuable (and difficult). While seeking diverse opinions falls under the professional practice section, it intersects with professional development as well.
Assessment Practice
| Designs major assessments that reflect course outcomes and posts them at the start of each trimester | 🗸+ |
| Designs assignments to be graded and returned in a feedback cycle of seven calendar days | 🗸- |
| Ensures the number of assignments in each course is neither excessive nor deficient — providing appropriate time for quality student performance and meaningful teacher feedback | 🗸+ |
Coming straight out of undergrad into the classroom with no training meant that creating assessments was a struggle. Thankfully, my first year was teaching math with a textbook and the sequence was straightforward. In that initial year, I had no arc to the class, a limited concept of building towards any particular goal but a near limitless supply of time and energy being 22 years old with minimal responsibilities. My focus was guided by my own experiences in math classes. For the classroom culture, I wanted maximum engagement and inclusion (something that I rarely had learning math). For assessments, it was nightly homework, leading to quizzes and tests followed up by test corrections to regain missed points. Why? Because that was what my high school math classes looked like five years prior.
Halfway through the first year, I felt a strong desire for students to do a substantial project. My precalculus class worked on delivering math lessons to our elementary students and the honors precalculus class worked through all of the financing and negotiating involved in buying a car (we even had the theatre teacher come in to do some role-playing as the dealer). These themes, teaching others and building projects, would continue to make appearances throughout my career.
Over the years, lesson planning expanded from day-to-day to making the term, or the year, feel like a well-thought-out journey with moments of challenge, celebration, and success. Turning physics from equations into projects like egg drops or musical instruments allowed different students to shine. Presenting publicly gave them recognition. Creative freedom combined with some teacher coaching afforded the ability to subtly differentiate in a variety of ways. When punctuating the experience with projects, it became natural to have all these milestone events marked out at the beginning of the term and advertise them often in class. It also added clarity to the purpose of classes as I could reference future situations where today’s concepts would be useful. Now, when taking on a new course, such as data science this year, I look for this understanding this first before diving into the specifics (and then frequently communicate to the students where we are in the progression).
The best I ever did with grading timeliness or the cadence of homework was in my third and fourth year of teaching. For those years, we had an interesting schedule with three different period lengths. That required some intentional pre-planning to make sure that labs ended up on the 100-minute days and so on. In this era, I would assign HW throughout the week and have it all turned in while the students took a weekly quiz. I would grade all the homework in the class while they took the quiz and then return HW grades on their quizzes the next class day. The intent was to show that doing well on HW correlated with doing well on the quiz.
Despite this early success, moving into a split role of being the tech director and science teacher at Eastside Prep set me back considerably. There were many things that only I could do at that time and grading and creation of homework took a backseat to tech responsibilities. Even this year, a slight derailment mid-term took me from near-immediate feedback in data science to multi-week delays after progress reports. Some of this was due to the challenge of learning data science while teaching it, making grading much more onerous. However, the pattern has shown up often enough for me to know that further structures would be helpful to ensure time for grading within other work responsibilities.