The Conscious Teacher

Deborah Nichols Poulos

• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781684095599
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Elementary Education

The Conscious TeacherBy Deborah Nichols Poulos The Conscious Teacher is about all kinds of strategies and techniques educators might employ to become more effective teachers. In an accessible, conversational style, Deborah Nichols Poulos presents unique approaches to teaching that will inspire new and veteran teachers alike.She begins with her personal story of not being able to read all through elementary school. Her early failures convinced her she was dumb. At first, she struggled, but when she still failed, she adopted an avoidance strategy that served her well until junior high. An experience in the seventh grade flipped a switch and started her on a journey to becoming an outstanding student and, later, to applying the lessons she learned as a child to her own teachingWhat makes The Conscious Teacher unique are the inspirational lessons that are unlike what most teachers get in their teacher-education courses or student teaching. Ms. Nichols Poulos points out, for example, that from the very first day, it is important that students learn they will be treated with dignity and respect no matter what. And especially helpful are the steps Ms. Nichols Poulos employs to set up a behavior management plan that works. She explains the strategic steps she takes before school starts—how essential it is to get to know each student before they walk into class on that first day. She also illustrates how setting up classroom routines helps students know what to expect and how to make the best use of every minute. And she emphasizes the importance of the parent-student-teacher team and includes many examples of how to communicate with—and involve—parents, even those who may be difficult.Foundational to her program are reading and writing. Among other things, she lays out the steps for students—even as early as fourth grade—to write five paragraph essays and their own student-authored books, and to research and write reports that include bibliographies. When she differentiated curriculum to support all students' needs, she found their learning accelerated. All teachers will appreciate her ideas about how to teach the basics of math, as well as advanced math concepts. And her ideas for teaching the arts are inspirational, as she describes in detail how her fourth graders performed Shakespeare's Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Caesar, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. She also shows how to integrate social studies with literature and writing. Her experiences taught her that young students are much more capable than many people realize.The Conscious Teacher is an indispensable guide for all new teachers. Many of the ideas Ms. Nichols Poulos provides will also be an eye-opener for parents and experienced teachers as well. The Conscious Teacher is simply a must have for anyone truly interested in giving young children a positive and solid foundation for their later schooling.

Part IV

First Things First: Set the Stage for Effective Learning

Chapter 1

Take Strategic Steps before School Starts

Well before your students arrive at their new classroom, you need to think about some important policies or practices you want to set into motion once school starts. These are strategies and techniques you should not leave until after school begins, believing you can figure them out as you go along.

Preparing thoroughly for any new class of students well before the first day of school is essential. The best teachers don’t leave anything to chance. As soon as the Conscious Teacher has access to information about her students, she should plan everything from her classroom setup to the various ways she will interact with her students. “Forewarned is forearmed!”

Of the following guidelines, the first, “Determine to model a culture of respect,” is the most important: the others in the rest of the book all evolve from and depend on it. Creating a classroom in which mutual respect is the standard—expected of everyone—is essential to establishing a comfortable and safe place for students and teacher alike. Once the standard of mutual respect is established, truly successful learning is more likely to follow.

1. Determine to model a culture of respect

The foundation for any teacher’s relationship with her students is respect. If a teacher doesn’t establish a relationship of respect between her students and herself, how can she expect to be respected by them? From the very first day a teacher lets her students know whether or not they can trust her by watching her behavior.

• Does she lead through the power of her authority?

• Does she intimidate and threaten?
• Does she raise her voice and display anger?

or

• Does she establish reasonable behavioral ground rules and then repeatedly reinforce them through teaching strategies that model respect?
• Does she always maintain an affect of calm and support?
• Does she demonstrate an attitude of mutual respect?

The most successful teachers take the second route. I will be mentioning throughout this book how the teacher always models respect, particularly in difficult situations.

The Three R’s: Respect, Responsibility, and Resourcefulness

In my school (West Davis Intermediate, WDI, in Davis, California), the teachers worked together to develop the following guidelines to help both the teachers and the students understand how to behave respectfully, and why it is so important. I feel the concepts are so important that I am including them here:

School climate directly reflects the extent to which students practice respect, responsibility, and resourcefulness in the classroom and on the playground. We at WDI are committed to helping students understand the importance of these behaviors and practice them in their daily lives. It is our goal that these “Three R’s” will be the behavior norm for our school community, and we are actively engaged in bringing this goal about.

We have focused our attention this fall on respect, with teachers and support staff helping students become more conscious of ways that they can demonstrate respect in their interactions with adults and peers. By clearly identifying examples of respect or disrespect, adults and students alike have been able to practice more effective ways of relating to one another.

While we cannot expect change overnight, building a climate of tolerance and respect will be the key to realizing the rest of our goal—fostering responsibility and resourcefulness as well.

The ideas come from “The Three R’s of Self-Esteem” by John K. Rosemond (Hemispheres, January 1993). Rosemond also brings up what he had noticed when talking to parent and professional groups as he travelled across the country. Seeking out teachers who had taught 30 years or more, he asked them how they would compare children of 30 years ago with those of the ‘90s, and it sounded like what I have been hearing these days:

Their words, of course, are different, but their answers are always the same. Today’s children, these teachers tell me, are lacking in respect, responsibility, and resourcefulness. As a veteran North Carolina teacher recently told me, “Today’s child is self-absorbed, often does no more than it takes to just get by, and gives up almost immediately if a problem even looks hard.” In other words, we abandoned the Three R’s of child rearing to our peril.”

Does this sound familiar? Given that it does, I feel strongly that we need to go back to some basic ideas, beginning with this: True self-esteem develops as a child discovers that despite frustration, failure, fear, and other adversity, he is capable of solving problems on his own and can stand successfully on his own two feet. Parents can, and should, provide the opportunity, support, and guidance the child needs to make this discovery, but they cannot guarantee the discovery itself.

Thomas Jefferson said pretty much the same thing when he said we have a right to the pursuit of happiness, but that the outcome of the pursuit is a matter of individual responsibility.

Along those lines, many parents fail to realize that by trying to make their children happy, they end up with children who cannot make themselves happy; by protecting their children from any and all frustration, they end up with children who cannot tolerate frustration; by solving problems for children that they can solve for themselves (albeit with struggle), they end up with children who give up quickly when the going gets tough. In short, you do not help children learn to stand on their own feet by letting them stand on yours.

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Table of contents

• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• My Own Story
• On Not Being Able to Do Math
• College
• Life after College
• My Education and Teaching Experience
• Before You Decide to Become a Teacher… …You should realize that teaching is a time-consuming career
• How to Get the Job You Want: Consider Substitute Teaching
• First Things First: Set the Stage for Effective Learning
• Instruction in the Classroom
• Teaching Gifted Students