Gary Rubinstein’s TFA Blog

I’ve been around a lot of TFA institutes, starting with my own in 1991. Now that I’m a veteran teacher, I wonder if the institute culture gets CMs ready for the reality of lesson planning.

I remember a lot of CMs pulling all nighters in preparing a one hour lesson. This is a bad habit to get into. New teachers should learn to plan efficiently. That means that a one hour lesson takes about two hours to plan. It’s true that a really great lesson with a well structured activity can take several more hours, but you should realize that when you’re actually teaching your own class in the fall, you won’t have time to create those great activities on a daily basis.

Every CM should get experience planning some ‘normal’ lessons. These aren’t the lessons that they’re going to be talking about for years to come, but that’s OK. I think a ‘great’ teacher is really only ‘great’ 40% of the time. Then 40% of the time, they’re ‘good.’ 15% of the time, they’re just ‘OK’, and then if you take some risks that don’t pay off or you just didn’t have enough time to plan well and sleep, 5% of the time, they’re pretty bad.

But since CMs only get an average of an hour a day to teach, they want to make sure that their lessons are very creative and unusual. It’s good to learn how to make those types of lessons also, but don’t neglect the basics. A ‘regular’ lesson where there’s ten minutes of direct instruction followed by some class discussion and then guided practice and independent practice is the ‘bread-and-butter’ of the teacher. Even though you might think that type of lesson is too boring for the summer school, you should get some experience doing that now since you’ll be doing it a lot in the fall.

If you haven’t already, please check out my YouTube TFA workshop (see below)

From 1995 to 2003, I used to present a workshop at the TFA institutes about classroom management and the realities of the first year of teaching. The ideas were considered useful enough to be published as a book in 1999 (It’s called ‘Reluctant Disciplinarian’). That book was adopted by the New York City Teaching Fellows as required reading.

I’d volunteer to do these workshops, but each year TFA would tell me that they’ve incorporated my ideas into the institute curriculum so the workshop was no longer necessary. The regional office at New York, would still let me come and do the workshop and the feedback from those participants led me to believe that TFA still has gaps in the training that the 2008 corps is currently going through.

TFA has a tendency to ’sugar coat’ the first year. The institute staff, though they are fine people, are not diverse in that they had similar good first years of teaching. Most people don’t, which is why most people don’t become trainers. So you get a very narrow perspective about the first year and how difficult it could be if you don’t prepare properly.

Well I finally got around to posting this workshop on YouTube. If you’re at the New York institute, I’m going to be speaking to the New York Corps Members after the institute, but before you start teaching. If you’re at one of the other institutes I hope you take a look. It’s an hour long and in 7 parts. If you’re really in a rush, you can watch parts 3,4, and 5 to get the gist.

Anyway, I created the workshop to fill two gaps in the TFA institute training. 1) Realism. If you know what could happen, I think you’ll prepare more seriously and seek out as many different perspectives as you can. 2) Humor. TFA takes itself way too seriously.

Here’s the link

The problem with ‘investing.’

This is a buzzword I’ve been hearing a lot from new TFA CMs. ‘Investing,’ they’ve learned, is a very important thing to establish in your class right away. If the students are invested, they will be motivated to learn. If they’re motivated to learn, they will learn, which will make them even more invested. Sounds nice.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way with a real class.

You see, investing is something that you should not force on your class. You don’t come in on the first day saying ‘This class is a team, and if one of us failed, our team failed. I’m going to help everyone learn, and we’re going to help each other out, and then we can all progress together.’

In an ideal world, or in the movies, that might work. But to a group of kids who have heard speeches like that before, they are just empty words and promises.

You can get ‘investing’ and you can get motivation and you can get learning. But they don’t happen in that order.

Start with the learning. Don’t talk about how great you are as a teacher and how much you believe in them on the first day. Teach them something. Make it a clear lesson with an activity that makes sense. If everyone completes the activity and then you assess them and the students did well and they believe that they’ve learned, then suddenly they feel some confidence. They feel confidence in themselves and confidence in you, their teacher. After enough successes like this, the students naturally develop a sense of ‘investing.’

Let the ‘investing’ develop naturally when the students believe you can lead them, not because you said you can, but because you proved you can with some good teaching.

Note:
I’m a TFA old timer, Houston 1991. I’ve been following the evolution of the TFA institute and training philosophy for 17 years. Throughout the years, I’ve presented workshops at the different institutes and have gauged the progress of the training model by the feedback I’ve received. My ideas eventually became a book ‘Reluctant Disciplinarian’, which may or may not be circulating around the institutes. You won’t find it on any reading list, required, recommended, or otherwise. (More on that in another entry.)

It’s been a long time since I’ve worked at an institute (1996), but I have a sense about what goes on there from the comments CMs make when they attend my workshops at the post-institute training for the NY region. Let me know if I’m off-base about what I think is going on there.