Owning It. Alex Kajitani
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alex Kajitani is the 2009 California Teacher of the Year and a top-four finalist for National Teacher of the Year. He speaks nationally on a variety of education and leadership issues and delivers powerful keynote speeches and workshops to educators and business leaders. Also known as “The Rappin’ Mathematician,” Alex is on a mission to make sure all students master their times tables so they can be successful in mathematics and life. Thus, he created the first-of-its-kind, interactive, online times tables training program (www.MultiplicationNation.com).
Alex is the coauthor of Chicken Soup for the Soul: Inspiration for Teachers, has a popular TEDx Talk, and has been featured in many media stories, including The CBS Evening News, where Katie Couric declared, “I love that guy!”
To learn more about Alex’s work, visit www.AlexKajitani.com.
To book Alex Kajitani for professional development, contact Solution Tree at [email protected].
About the Contributors
Mindy Crum Hall is a fourth-grade teacher at a Title I school in North San Diego County, where the majority of her students are second-language learners who live in shared housing. Mindy has taught first through fifth graders since 2000.
Pete Fisher is a former behavior specialist and the 2006 Teacher of the Year for Escondido Union School District in California. He is a five-year standing cadre member of Southern California’s Positive Environment of Network Trainers (PENT) and a trainer of Crisis De-escalation and Crisis Control.
Megan Pincus Kajitani is a professional writer, editor, educator, and former university career counselor. Her writing has been published in books, magazines, and newspapers, and she served as a career columnist for The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.
To learn more about Megan’s work, visit www.mpk-ink.com.
FOREWORD
by Harry K. Wong
I remember the first time I met Alex Kajitani. I had just finished speaking at a conference when he approached me and introduced himself as a new teacher in a struggling, inner-city school. We chatted a bit, and he thanked me for my work. Before turning to leave, he handed me a CD filled with rap songs he’d created that he said were helping his students learn the mathematics lessons he was teaching.
Given that I’m more of a Broadway musical type, it took at least a week before those rap songs made it out of my bag and into my stereo. But from the first beat, I realized that what Alex had created was much more than a collection of songs. He had created a solution—a solution that got his students engaged, gave them the skills they needed to learn the concepts he was teaching, and motivated them to come back the next day. Moreover, he had created something that other teachers could use to do the same.
Quite simply, Alex was owning the challenge of engaging his students where they lived, while teaching them academic content they would use in their future lives. Instead of turning away from his struggles (and his students’ struggles), Alex embraced them. He tried and found ideas that worked and put them in a format that other teachers also could use to be highly effective.
That’s what this book is as well. No jargon. No fads. Instead, every chapter contains straightforward solutions, which you can use immediately, at no cost, to enhance your success as an educator. Owning It offers the kind of real answers that real teachers seek, for all the roles they play—from working with students in the classroom, to interacting with colleagues in staff meetings, to representing this crucial profession in the community.
Since writing The First Days of School, I’ve spent my career highlighting the work of highly effective teachers who provide well-managed, safe learning environments in which students thrive. I’ve followed Alex as one of these teachers. No longer a new teacher, he has grown to represent a new generation of education leaders who are using innovative, yet commonsense strategies to push the boundaries of what is possible for our students, our schools, and our profession.
Authentic, creative, and, above all, effective, I hope you find this book as relatable and real as Alex himself. I hope it stays on your desk as a resource that you return to as often as necessary. And I hope the solutions in these pages help you on your path to truly owning it as a teacher.
INTRODUCTION
There’s this myth in teaching. This myth says you will struggle in your first few years but that, by your fourth or fifth year, you’ll be experienced, things will be easy, and you’ll have your act together. The truth is, while some years are better than others, teaching is hard every year, and every year, as teachers, we are asked to do more and more.
We live in a time of what some theorists call “accelerating change”—with exponentially faster technological, cultural, social, and environmental change than any other period in the known history of our planet (Kurzweil, 2001). We feel the effects of this firsthand in our schools and in our profession.
Each year, the group of students that enters our classrooms is vastly different from the group a year before. These students come with strong, evolving influences, from the latest technology to the year’s newest hit television (or internet) show. Primarily, they come already equipped with new ways of thinking and operating in society.
Yet, as teachers, it is still our responsibility to ensure that they learn the academic content that someone else has deemed they learn, along with noncurricular life skills. It is also our responsibility to work with one another to help these students learn, which means we have to master grown-up communication and collaboration skills. Finally, it’s our responsibility to represent our profession—and our schools and districts, and even our nation’s educational system—to the wider community (the public) via all of the ever-changing modes of communication available to us.
Being a teacher is a multiskill, multifaceted, multipurpose role, a role that doesn’t end when the bell rings, rather one we embody in our classrooms, in our schools, and throughout our communities. Thus, the great, challenging, overwhelming, enlightening, and rewarding responsibility it is to be a modern-day teacher.
Let’s own this great challenge and responsibility—this great opportunity to make a difference.
What This Book Is
Whether this is your first year or your thirty-first year, this is a book that any teacher, of any age or subject, can use to address the many challenges we face each day. Every challenge this book addresses is one that I, and the many colleagues I’ve worked with over the years, have faced. Every strategy I list is one that I’ve used, refined, and taught to others.
I mean for this book to help you identify the root causes of many of the challenges we face as educators, give you easy-to-implement strategies for success that work, and ignite the best in yourself and your students. In short, I mean for it to help you be a highly effective teacher who loves what you do.
You may notice a running theme permeates this book’s chapters, and that is the idea that whether we are talking about students, teachers, or members of the community, people are not fixed. We all have enormous capacity to learn and grow. Carol S. Dweck (2006) refers to this capacity as a growth mindset. In this spirit of growth mindsets, if you are a new teacher, then I’m excited for you to try some of these strategies, and I assure you—they are powerful. If you’ve been teaching for a while, some of these strategies will still be new to you, while others may not be. The reason they’re included in this