Owning It. Alex Kajitani
and they work. Even if you already have experiences with many of them, my goal is to give you a fresh perspective on why you are using them and how they can help you make an even bigger impact with your students and their learning.
This book is a compilation of columns that I originally wrote for the nonprofit organization Reaching At-Promise Students Association (RAPSA, https://rapsa.org). The columns became wildly popular among teachers, and for this book, I have thoroughly reviewed and updated them to go even deeper and reflect new changes and ideas that have come along since I first wrote them. Each column is both an exploration of our many roles as teachers and a quick-reference handbook of strategies you can pull out in many of the situations you are likely to find yourself in daily in your classroom, school, and community.
This is a book that will help teachers feel more prepared for our increasingly multifaceted roles, and a book that will inspire teachers—like you—to remember why you entered this greatest profession and what incredibly important work you do every day.
It’s a book about owning it—stepping up to and embracing our myriad roles as modern teachers and acing each one—for the benefit of our students, our schools, our communities, our profession, and even our nation.
Whether you are a teacher, a coach, or a mentor, my goal is to make this a book you can pick up and leaf through, and find something useful to implement in your work and life immediately, along with some validation about how amazing you are, juggling all of the roles we teachers fill in a fast-changing era.
How This Book Is Structured
Lots of teaching books focus on our role in the classroom, and so does this one. But this book does something else I’ve not found in the many teaching books I read: it focuses on our roles as classroom leaders, as mentors to challenging students and students who are at risk, as colleagues and members of a staff team, and on our roles as public professionals, representing our profession throughout the wider community. To that end, I divided this book into four parts, each one focusing on one of these roles. Excelling in all of these roles is critical in our profession.
Part 1: Owning It in Your Classroom
Part 1 (chapters 1–7) provides easy-to-implement, specific strategies that all teachers can use to connect with, engage, and ensure learning for all students.
Each year in the classroom, I have students in my class who, despite living in dire poverty, perform at the top of the chart on state tests. Sitting next to them are students who could not read, tell time, or speak English. Yet my school and community expect me to teach them all and do so at a level that is challenging to each of them. That’s why I devote the first part of this book to the role we play, not as teachers of a specific subject or level, but as teachers of students and as classroom leaders who are responsible for every kind of everyday learning, who are accountable to test scores and parents, and who are accountable to every student who crosses our doorway.
I share what I’ve learned on the ground in my classroom about such topics as how to increase our powerful presence in the classroom, how to use the first five minutes of class to set the tone, how to engage and encourage all students, and how to manage such realities of classroom teaching as standardized tests and data.
This part represents a valuable quick-reference guide for any teacher looking for a little burst of fresh air in his or her day-to-day teaching or for ways to handle the many challenging classroom situations all teachers face.
Part 2: Owning It With Your Most Challenging Students
Part 2 (chapters 8–14) focuses on those few students who seem to demand more attention and discipline than the rest of the class combined. Known widely as the Pareto Principle, 20 percent of our collective students often seem to provide 80 percent of our classroom challenges (“Guru: Joseph Juran,” 2009). They are the students who are most challenging to connect with, to keep on task, and to help perform academically. They are the students who frustrate us, often to the point of exasperation.
They are also the students who need us the most. They are the students whose parents may not seem deeply committed to their education or were, themselves, unsuccessful in school. They are the students who fall into the so-called “achievement gap,” and often are lost in there (Auguste, Hancock, & Laboissiere, 2009).
That’s why I devote these chapters specifically to the ever-important role we play as teachers of students who are struggling or are at risk of dropping out of school. In this part, I offer strategies on topics such as connecting with students at risk, negotiating with them, honoring their cultural backgrounds, involving their parents, and empowering them to have a stake in their own education.
Part 3: Owning It at Your School and District
I devote part 3 (chapters 15–19) to the role we play as colleagues—both in our schools and within our districts or organizations. The days of the one-room schoolhouse are long gone, and working with a group of colleagues is an essential part of being a teacher. Just as we teach a group of students with a wide range of abilities and experiences, the teachers and administrators we work with are vastly different in their experiences, knowledge, and philosophies.
We’re not all teachers for the same reason, yet we’re all expected to do the same job. With over 17 percent of our colleagues leaving this job within the first five years (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2015), it’s time for all of us to own the fact that, as educators, we are truly dependent on each other. That’s why the chapters in part 3 provide practical and real strategies you can use to incorporate, not eliminate our differences, and draw upon each other’s strengths.
It may seem, at times, that the issues and challenges I call out in these chapters have traditionally been the responsibility of principals and district administrators to address. However, owning it as teachers means stepping forward and utilizing creative, collaborative solutions that are practical and effective for the work that we do each day.
Offering strategies ranging from coming up with creative ideas for staff meetings, to addressing the generation gaps (yes, gaps!) between teachers, to strategizing for how to approach a colleague to have a difficult conversation, I based this part on the belief that the number-one factor in the success or failure of a school is the relationships of the adults in the building.
Part 4: Owning It in Your Community
I devote part 4 (chapters 20–24) to the role that we play as public professionals, representing our schools, our students, and the whole convoluted concept of education. Teaching is not just what we do. Teaching is what we are. It doesn’t end when the last bell rings or when vacation starts. The time has come to own this role too.
As a profession, we often feel under attack from lawmakers, parent groups, and the general public, so many of whom buy into the idea that our education system is failing and that the solution is to simply “fire all the bad teachers.” The strategies I offer in this part include how to positively represent our schools and our profession in the public