7 Habits of Highly Affective Teachers

1. My emotional state has made an impact on my teaching. I remember one really negative experience that occurred during my first year of teaching. There was a girl in class who arrived late, didn't do any work, and spent most of the class time on her phone. One day in the computer lab I discovered she had snuck away to an adjoining room and was hanging out with another kid who was skipping class. I became upset and roughly asked her to come back to the classroom. She was not moving as fast as I wanted her to so I began to urge her on in a negative tone. She called me an asshole. I became even more upset and decided to make a scene about sending her to the office. I think I just repeated, "So I'm an asshole? I'm an asshole? I'm trying to teach and you're skipping class, but I'm the asshole?"

That wasn't good. I haven't let anything like that happen again.

I could have thought about Wormelli's list and focused on the choosing the ethical thing to do, which was not chastise a child in front of a class of peers so everyone could see that I didn't take any shit.

2. I find Cultivating Perspective and Reframing to be the most important item on the list. I have found that my life is better, and not as frustrated, and I solve more problems when I remind myself that there are other reasons why people do things than what my first thought tells me. Students are not behaving inappropriately because they want to show disrespect to me or the curriculum, there's probably a ton of other things that are having a bigger impact on them and it's causing them to act out. I find I have a lot less negative, inappropriate behaviors in my classroom because I'm able to remove my personal feelings from the situation and analyze other, more realistic, reasons why the student might be distracted from their learning.

Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 30, 2018 at 1:37 PM

    It is obvious to me that this moment in your teaching career has been something you will constantly reflect on & a mistake you will never make again. I agree with your choice from Wormelli's list, as thinking about the ethical thing to do makes the most sense in this situation.

    I also think it is important to remember where students might be coming from, or what is behind the behavior they are exhibiting in class. More often than not, I'm sure the circumstances behind a behavior would break our hearts as well as help us understand what is causing someone to act in a certain way.

    ReplyDelete

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