Teach Like Yourself

How Authentic Teaching Transforms Our Students and Ourselves

Gravity Goldberg

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781544337333
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Professional Development

What your students need is you. Your fullest most authentic self. Gravity Goldberg's Teach Like Yourself helps you be the biggest, boldest, and most powerful version of your teacher self. It reminds you why you became a teacher and coaches you to bring your unique gifts and talents into the classroom. The difference between a so-so lesson and one that leaves a lasting impact on students has everything to do with how confident and connected you feel to yourself and your students.

Read this book when you need an extra shot of bravery. It's a perfect resource if

• You want to coach yourself into fulfilling your teacher potential
• You are looking for more balance in your teaching and personal life
• You want a pep talk for saying no to what doesn't help students and yes to what you know does
• You want to grow and deepen your practice without losing yourself in the process

In this, her fifth and most personal book, Gravity uses her gifts for developing teacher agency as she invites you to take on five powerful practices:

• Naming your core beliefs
• Viewing teaching as a practice
• Building balanced relationships
• Driving professional growth
• Taking care of your whole self

To support you as you make these five practices lifelong habits, Gravity includes illuminating stories, reflection questions, short videos of advice from her and other educators, a full-color Teach Like Yourself Manifesto poster, and a Teach Like Yourself Facebook group moderated by the author.

Chapter 1 Authentic Teaching

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Source: One 21 Production

If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.

—Joseph Campbell

Right now I am pregnant with my first baby. I am at a threshold, not quite leaving my old identity behind but about to take on a new one. I will no longer just be Gravity or Dr. Goldberg, but I will also be known as Mom. This has brought along excitement and fear of the unknown, fear of losing myself, and fear of not being quite good enough. One of the last times I felt this way, standing at a major life threshold, was when I became a teacher. One day I was a twenty-one-year-old college student who had spent my whole life known as Gravity, and a few months later I was walking into my own classroom where I would be known as Ms. Goldberg. I was excited about finally being in my classroom, and I eagerly anticipated meeting my new students. But I was also terrified I would not be good enough and everyone would realize I was a fraud, not quite ready to have these humans under my guidance and care each day.

What feels strangely similar between becoming a mom and a teacher are the ways others have attempted to support me during this transition. As a new teacher, my colleagues all wanted to give me advice: “Don’t smile until November”; and “Don’t let your papers pile up, do a little grading each day”; and “When the principal comes in to observe you, stick to what you do well. Don’t take any risks.” They meant well and wanted to see me succeed. Likely most of this advice had been handed down to them from their more experienced teacher friends. As a soon-to-be mom, everyone has advice too. “Take the epidural,” and “Don’t let that baby into your bedroom or you will never get them out,” and “Puree your own food so your baby doesn’t wind up living on mac and cheese and chicken nuggets as a toddler.” Do you remember all of the advice you received as a new teacher? Or maybe you’re in your first year and getting unsolicited advice all of the time.

During a recent phone conversation with my aunt she gave me the best advice so far. She offered, “Trust your instincts. You will know what is right for your baby. Don’t overthink it. And don’t take everyone’s advice. Listen to yourself.” If I were to go back and meet my first-year teacher self, I would steal my aunt’s words and tell them to myself daily. “Trust your instincts. You will know what is right for your students. Don’t overthink it. Listen to yourself.” In many ways, this book is a longer version of this advice I wish I could go back and offer myself and the advice I want you to have for yourself. It took some time for me to realize that being my true self as a teacher was exactly what my students needed. But it turned out that figuring out who my true teacher self was required lots of reflection and searching. What took even longer was my journey to actually living the practices of my authentic teacher self with all of my students. I had to take time to really own it. I want teachers to take less time than I did to get there.

Being your true self as a teacher is exactly what your students need.

What do you think would help you teach more like yourself?

What Helps Us Be Authentic Teachers?

Over the past two decades I have served as a science teacher, reading specialist, third-grade teacher, special educator, literacy coach, staff developer, assistant professor, consultant, and yoga teacher. This means I have taught students from age four through eighty. Each and every teaching opportunity helped me refine and define what it means for me to teach like myself, to take my aunt’s advice, and to bring my best and most authentic self to each set of students. What I realized is that my specific teaching assignment and my students would often change, but the one constant was me and how I chose to show up as a teacher.

Remember That There Is Nothing to Fix

For several decades, people have been obsessed with self-help books that popularized the research and theories of the medical and psychology fields. The problem was, it grew out of a 20th century problem-oriented paradigm that focused on curing illness, disease, and deficits. The self-help movement that arose operated on the assumption that there is something wrong with you that you need to get help from outsiders to fix. Frankly, that whole idea always left me depleted, beaten down, and feeling insecure about myself.

Fortuitously, we are now in the heyday of a happiness movement. It started about twenty years ago when Martin Seligman championed a new branch of psychology that, studies what makes humans thrive—positive psychology. In 1990, Flow: The Science of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was published in the United States, and it quickly became a bestseller. The so-called science of happiness hit the mainstream with that book, and if you haven’t read it, I suggest you do. Other popular books, such as Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman (2006), The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor (2010), and The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin (2015), suggest that the tide has turned, and the self-help movement has evolved into one of self-acceptance and self-discovery, which feels entirely different. This new movement assumes you are already awesome, with many unique talents and quirks that make you, you. Instead of anything needing to be fixed, the idea is to accept and embrace yourself and to build from your strengths. Most of the people I know feel much more motivated when they start from ownership rather than feeling like there is something wrong.

Most of the people I know feel much more motivated when they start from ownership rather than feeling like there is something wrong.

In the field of education, however, I think we are too often operating in the old-think of the problem-based self-help movement. Coming at us from every direction are blog posts, articles, in-service providers, workshops, and even op-ed pieces that offer teachers steps and strategies that will “fix” something that is wrong with your teaching. If anyone is approaching us teachers as in need of being fixed, I end up walking out the door or closing the book because this person assumes there is something wrong. This person who never met me or my students and never stepped into my classroom thinks she can solve a problem I have not yet even articulated. This doesn’t mean we shy away from coaching and mentoring. As teachers, we can constantly learn from those who approach us from a strength-based model. The teacher community does not need one more teacher-help resource that assumes we lack something or that something about our practice needs to be fixed. Instead, we need the equivalent to the teacher-acceptance and discovery model. There are, of course, many workshops and professional books that don’t assume we need to be fixed and instead treat us like professionals with much to offer and build upon to strengthen our practice. Those are the books that line my bookshelf with sticky notes and highlights.

As I sit down to write this book, I assume you are already a talented educator and there is nothing I need to help you fix. You are in teaching for a reason. You’re here not only because a university or teacher prep program gave you a degree; most importantly, you’re here because you believe that you are supposed to be here. I do think that a bit of self-discovery and ways to consciously build from our strengths as teachers is really helpful—at least it has been for me. This means we all can grow in our teaching practice and view each day as a learning opportunity—not from a place of insecurity but instead from a place of humble confidence. We must know our strengths so well that we can leverage them and bring our best, most authentic self to our students. This book will help you discover the unique strengths and talents that you bring to the profession and, most importantly, to your students.

You’re here because you believe that you are supposed to be here.

Stop Comparing Ourselves to Someone Else’s Highlight Reel

Many of us feel the need to fix something or change something about our teaching when we look at others and make comparisons. When I compare myself to others, I tend to paint them in the rosiest light and see only their strengths. But when it comes to me—I am the toughest critic. I focus only on my perceived faults. I have found I am not alone in this comparison game. Many teacher friends have admitted they torture themselves by comparing themselves (almost always negatively) to their peers and mentors. Of course, most books, coaches, and conferences highlight the positive practices and leave out the terrifying challenges that led to that success.

Nothing epitomizes this more than Pinterest and my preferred favorite: Pinterest fails. Pinterest posts show us perfection in just a few easy steps. My feed is often filled with pins like “10 Minutes to Washboard Abs” and “Pumpkin Baby Photo Shoot,” featuring a photo of a smiling infant stuffed inside a carved-out pumpkin with her legs and arms hanging out of tiny holes. Of course, I have never met anyone who worked out only ten minutes a day and had washboard abs. And the “fails” photo shows the reality: a baby crying hysterically and trying to get out of an ill-carved pumpkin, red-faced with snot running down her nose. No one posts or pins the thousands of attempts that were messy failures prior to the one lucky example the camera caught. Those Pinterest lessons seem so perfect on the screen but almost always fall flat and miss the mark with our students. It is easy to compare and then feel bad about ourselves, leading us back to thinking we need to be fixed.

I learned I didn’t need to do so much comparing from one of my mentors at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Kathy Collins. This totally smart, funny, and talented educator shared her challenges and faults with us. She would move back and forth between self-deprecating stories of some big failure to teaching us a remarkable way to work with primary-grade readers. She helped me embrace and acknowledge the parts of teaching and learning that are most often left out of our conversations. The fact is, lessons and ideas almost never work out the first time, and we almost all fail several times before we succeed. By bringing all of this into her workshops, Kathy modeled for me what it sounds like, looks like, and feels like to show up as her true self. Because Kathy was sharing all her experiences, not just the Pinterest-worthy ones, with us, I realized that the comparisons I tended to make were based on half-truths. It wasn’t fair to me or my teaching to compare all of myself to someone else’s highlight reel.

As her student, I trusted her and wanted to soak up every moment of learning with her because she was so human. She took risks, laughed at herself, was thoughtful and reflective, and viewed each moment as a chance to learn more. The more Kathy was herself, the more I could show up as myself too. Because I didn’t just see her highlight reel, I could see how she refined her practice, considered alternatives, and carried a growth mindset into her work. I could do the same.

This pattern proves true no matter the age of the students. When I watched Kathy teach first graders, they hung on her every word, took risks in their learning, and spent time sharing reflections with their first-grade partners. It was remarkable how much these five- and six-year-olds were able to do because of Kathy’s modeling. When teaching a reading mini lesson, she didn’t make her reading look easy or magical; she made it look real. She showed how she worked hard and tried a few strategies. I saw student after student go back to their seats and have the confidence to try strategies themselves because they were not comparing themselves to a magical reading lesson but instead to an authentic one.

Focus on What We Can Control

When we teachers walk into classrooms as ourselves and share our stories, our learning process—warts and all—it gives permission for our students to do the same. When we silence our challenges, hide them from our students, and play the “teacher role” it sends the message that students should play the “student role.” Then we are all playing school instead of digging into the learning.

“Doing school” (Pope, 2003) refers to the commonly expressed experience of high schoolers who see school as a game that must be played. The students focus on how to get the best grade, get teachers to like them, and then get into the best colleges. In his book Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz (2014) explains how common it is for college freshmen in elite colleges to suffer from anxiety, depression, and self-destructive behaviors as a result of doing school and feeling pressure to be perfect. Further, Dr. Peter Gray cites research by Twenge and colleagues (2010) that students today are more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression than previous generations of kids due to a decline in students’ sense of personal control over their fates and shifts toward extrinsic goals and away from intrinsic goals. Gray (2010) states, “Intrinsic goals are those that have to do with one’s own development as a person—such as becoming competent in endeavors of one’s choosing and developing a meaningful philosophy of life. Extrinsic goals, on the other hand, are those that have to do with material rewards and other people’s judgments.”

Put in the context of doing school, many students today feel pressure to fit the ideal and make the grades (extrinsic goals) and are consumed with fears of failure or perceived failure by others. Gray (2010) explains, “To the extent that my emotional sense of satisfaction comes from progress toward intrinsic goals, I can control my emotional well-being. To the extent that my satisfaction comes from others’ judgments and rewards, I have much less control over my emotional state.” The theory of Twenge and colleagues (2010) is that when people feel they have no control over their lives and how they are measured, it can lead to anxiety and depression. When our brains are anxious and depressed, we cannot fully show up as ourselves, and we cannot be fully present to learn.

As a teacher, when I focus too much on external goals—evaluations, test scores, and formal observation feedback—I become anxious. My brain swims with “what-ifs” such as these: What if this lesson is not good enough? What if I ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Authentic Teaching
• Chapter 2 Name Core Beliefs
• Chapter 3 View Teaching As A Practice
• Chapter 4 Build Balanced Relationships
• Chapter 5 Drive Professional Growth
• Chapter 6 Take Care Of Yourself
• Chapter 7 Teach Bravely
• Appendix Book Study Guide
• Join the Teach Like Yourself Movement
• References
• Index
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