teaching

Inspire to be Inspired

Wynette Richardson  was an active advocate for Citizen Schools during her three years as an English/Language Arts Teacher at Henderson Middle School in Henderson, NC.  Wynette is a currently an English Instructor at Halifax Community College in Weldon, NC, and is also a Motivational Speaker and Workshop Facilitator for Verbal Elations.  Follow her on twitter, @verbalelations for motivational updates.

Wynette Richardson

As an educator and motivational speaker, the greatest reward is seeing students excel to their maximum potential. Often times, we do not understand or know what our students have experienced, have not experienced, or want to experience. Therefore, as aspiring educators, we must bring them life! How do we do that? Simple. Here are a few tips on how to part life into our future leaders.

First, we must bring our life experiences to them by engaging, motivating and believing in the youth. When need to engage the students with experiences we have encountered, good and bad, to let them know that no matter what their circumstances are, they can learn from what they have done. Read more…

Finding Balance in the Classroom

Greg Beach is a First Year Teaching Fellow at the Edwards Middle School in Charlestown, MA

As I’m sure was the case for many Teaching Fellows, I joined the Citizen Schools ranks unsure of what to expect. I was drawn to this program by what I believe to be its strongest component, the apprenticeship. The community-building, hands-on learning experience of the apprenticeship was inspiring to me. More to the point, it was an aspect of my first post-graduation job that was easily explained to others. Read more…

The Good, The Bad and The Motivation: Tales of a Teaching Fellow

Destiny Waggoner is a Second Year Teaching Fellow at Sharpstown Middle School in Houston, Texas

As a Teaching Fellow, you’ll have good days and bad days. You’ll have days when you love coming into work and days when you really don’t want to, but you do instead. These are stories from the days I loved, the days that made me not want to come to work and the reasons why I still did.

The days you want to come…

There is an apprenticeship called “What about me?”  It is an all girls’ apprenticeship, which allows a safe space for girls to open up about their experiences and learn about female development.  As I’m sending off my girls to “What about me?,” I have a young gregarious male student stand-up and say, “This isn’t fair, why isn’t there a class for all boys, we have questions too you know.  I have hair growing everywhere, why is it growing you know where?  These are questions we need answered Miss.” Read more…

The Human Touch – Nurturing Students by Showing that you Care

  • October 31, 2011 by
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Otto Katt is a second year Teaching Fellow at the Irving Middle School in Roslindale, MA

“One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.”
- Carl Jung

Well, kids would probably listen if Robot Abraham Lincoln was teaching the class.

Building relationships with students is one of the most critical aspects of succeeding in the classroom. Behavior management, instructional techniques, and content knowledge are crucial to being an effective teacher. But, without that emotional investment from students, without them feeling that you are genuinely invested and care about their success and wellbeing, there might as well be a robot in front of the room droning on about fractions, prefixes, and Abraham Lincoln.

One of the highlights from my first year teaching was during the depths of winter, when the grind was really getting to me. As I made my way to the cafeteria to meet the oncoming horde, a smile pasted on my face, students began passing me on the stairs.

One student shouted out,“Hey Mr. Katt”,

and then another student, “Hi Mr. Katt”,

and then another, “How’s it going Mr. Katt?”

“Can’t wait for class Mr. Katt”

“Mr. Katt did you watch the game last night?”

With each exchange the smile on my face became less pasted, and more sincere. In less than a minute my outlook and mood had swung from a sense of dejected apathy to a sense of mission and zest. While that day’s lesson may not have necessarily been drastically better, I certainly know I was more invested in my student’s outcomes.

What motivated those students to take the 5 seconds to engage someone who makes them do their homework when they’d rather fool around? Why would students, who know I’m going to call home when they misbehave, care about how my day is going? It begins with me investing in their well-being. It starts with me genuinely caring about how their day is going, what struggles they are facing, what challenges they are facing in school and life.

Here are ways to engage students outside the classroom:

Arroz con Leche

It’s the conversations in the hallways about that show they saw last night, about how the Celtics really need to play better defense.

It’s hanging out on the steps of the school waiting for parents and talking about how we were going to improve our interaction in class.

It’s bus rides to college field trips talking about arroz con leche, arepas, and the empanadas (one of my other favorite memories is debating the culinary nuances between Dominican and Puerto Rican cuisine with students).

Mr. Katt

It starts in the gym, sweating through my dress shirt and ties, scuffing up my wingtips as I take the rock to the hole impressing students that this old man can show them up on the court.

Students want to feel wanted, cared about, and at times even loved. That’s not something you can learn in a training, from a book, or in a class. It comes from within. And at the end of the day, the care you show for your students, often comes right back at you.

Share your stories of a teacher who impacted you by caring or how you’ve impacted your own students by showing that you care!

Why Steve Jobs Was An Education Innovator

Colin Stokes – Citizen Schools Director of Marketing and Communications


Is your classroom an Apple store? Or a 7-11?

Lots of talk this week about the way Apple’s design thinking changed our culture.

In my work as a marketer for Citizen Schools, I think a lot about how design can transform education.

But I don’t mean graphic design. (At least, not only graphic design.) The kind of design that Apple broke ground on is experience design—shaping the patterns of interaction that influence our emotions and our behavior. (Read more about this, with longer words, here.)

Apple’s brand is strong not because of its logo, or its many memorable ad campaigns. Apple users learned to expect certain patterns when we experienced their products—moving a mouse to control an arrow, hearing a click when we spun the scroll wheel, starting an awesome app when we touched a rounded square.

We've come to expect a certain experience when we enter these 'gleaming shrines'.

Even being approached by those cheerful techies at the Apple Store. Don’t you behave a little differently when you enter those gleaming shrines? You know you can touch the machines, but the employees are always just a few feet away, wandering around among the customers. They’ve built structures into the space that make it so much more than a computer store. Visual, yes—and also sensory, environmental, interpersonal.

The real units of brand-building are these patterns of experience. This is only getting truer and truer as mass media fragments, and people relate to organizations more through snippets of content on Facebook than through the commercials they fast-forward through.

Teaching as branding

How would his classroom look and feel?

So we marketers have been learning to do this better—to stop thinking in terms of standardizing words and images, and think more about providing rewarding, structured experiences that build great relationships with people.

But the Steve Jobs approach isn’t just true of marketing. It’s true of any communication designed to change behavior. It’s true of teaching.

Great teachers run their classes like Apple stores, or Starbucks or IKEA or any other great experience brand. They obsess over their classroom space. They cultivate a persona that strikes a balance between authority and kindness. They divide learning time into consistent chunks, marked by rules and rituals. Many—particularly those working with low-income kids where school has, shall we say, low brand equity—even use taglines. (KIPP is known for this practice—but they don’t call it branding; they call it “culture.”)

KIPP classroom culture

Students enter these rooms and change their behavior—focusing their attention, drifting into boredom, or dissolving into anarchy—based on the patterns (or lack thereof) that they experience over time.

If more teachers follow Mr. Jobs’ playbook, their students will fall in love with a very important brand: that of learning.

What do you think?