I started officially back at school today. Meetings and prep all this week, first day with kids next Monday. So as I transition fully into teacher mode, I think this is as good a time as any to reflect on what my goals are for this coming school year. At first glance I don’t have any huge mountains to climb this year: I finished my thesis, my Master’s degree is complete, I don’t have any big conference performances I’m preparing a group for this year, etc. But I want (and need) to have a direction, things to work on to help me be a better teacher and make this year better than the previous year. I want to be able to tweak my instruction and my approach to how I do things so that I can avoid stagnating as a teacher. “Just make sure everything is as good as last year” is not much of a hill to climb, after all.
As the summer progressed and I read, reflected, listened to podcasts, and wrote, I identified three overarching goals that I would like to focus on this year. I wanted them to be fairly abstract and personal (I’ve always been more of a “big picture” guy than a details guy) so that I could bring about fundamental changes in my teaching as opposed to just shoot for something like “try and get 20 kids into All State.” At the same time, they also needed to be things that are concrete enough that I could tell at the end of the year whether I accomplished them. This is what I came up with:
Goal #1: Stay in my “upstairs” brain rather than move to my “downstairs” brain when dealing with situations that trigger my fight or flight response, specifically and most importantly in interactions with students.
Goal #2: Overhaul my choir concerts to make them better planned, more organized, less stress for me and a better experience for my audience.
Goal #3: Approach my job and its day to day challenges with more positivity instead of resorting to negativity and complaining.
Two of these three are goals that deal explicitly with my own reactions and responses to things in my life, particularly the things that drain me and aggravate my anxiety. The other goal is centered around an area of my choral program that I think I can make more efficient and effective. If you’re interested, I am going to go into a little more detail about these goals below:
Goal #1: Stay in my “upstairs” brain
This terminology of “upstairs” and “downstairs” brain comes from the book that I read this summer, Fostering Resilient Learners by Kristin Souers with Pete Hall, which discusses how to educate students who have experienced trauma in a trauma-sensitive or trauma-informed manner. When humans experience danger, their “fight or flight” response is triggered. Our first impulse is to flee the danger. If that isn’t an option than our next impulse is to fight. If we cannot connect to our biological conditioning or process our situation effectively, we freeze, unable to determine a course of action. These behaviors manifest in class with our students who have experienced trauma. When they are triggered or in a state of stress, their brain functions are centered in the limbic system, which controls arousal, emotion, and the flight/fight/freeze response. Souers refers to this, using terminology borrowed from Dr. Dan Siegel of the UCLA School of Medicine, as the “downstairs brain.” When students are in their “downstairs brain,” their capacity to learn becomes disrupted.The goal then becomes to try and move students who have escalated into their prefrontal cortex, “the upstairs brain,” which not only controls higher learning functions but also regulates the limbic system.
What really hit me about all of this in Souers’ book was how easy it is for an escalated or misbehaving student to pull me, the teacher, into my downstairs brain. This can happen to any teacher, but I realized that I am particularly at risk of becoming escalated in these situations. I am fortunate that I grew up fairly free of Adverse Childhood Experiences and trauma, but I do struggle with what I am fairly certain is an undiagnosed anxiety disorder that makes me particularly sensitive to having my flight or fight response triggered by a variety of relatively commonplace situations. I looked back on the past decade of teaching and all those times that I lost my temper with a kid and I realized that I had let their misbehavior, defiance, or emotional escalation yank me into my “downstairs brain,” at which point the situation deteriorated.
Thus I am resolved to take more time to become aware of my own triggers with students, take a breath when a student activates one of my triggers before forming a response, and then try my hardest to keep myself and my reactions firmly in my “upstairs brain” so that I can help pull the child in question into their upstairs brain rather than allowing them to pull me to their emotionally dysregulated state..
Goal #2: Overhaul my concerts
I love teaching choir, and I love it when my kids perform….as soon as the concert is over. The rest of the day I am a complete mess: I am stressed out, running around trying to do everything myself until the choir is supposed to walk out on stage, so sick with nervousness that I can’t eat anything even if I had the time to eat, it’s just awful. I don’t enjoy concert day at all and sometimes I’m so stressed that I am not that mentally present during my concerts, I am just conducting on pure adrenaline. This summer, with a little help from Choir Ninja, I started to evaluate how I plan and organize my concerts. I asked myself some questions:
I spend all of this time preparing my students musically for their concerts, usually a couple of months at minimum, but then I throw together ALL of the logistics of the concert in the last week and a half, and most of that is really the day of. Why would I spend so much time preparing the music for the concert and yet spend an absurdly small amount of time planning everything else that goes into a successful concert? How much less stressed would I be if I got to the week of the concert and so much of the work was already done?
Why am I doing all of this by myself? I make myself sick trying to make sure everything gets done in those last few hours before the concert. Kids come up to me all the time asking “do you need help?” and I usually just tell them no because it would take longer to explain it to them in that moment than for me to just do it. Plus, my control freak brain rationalizes, they would just do it wrong anyway. But what if I assigned jobs and trained students on what to do prior to the day of?
In addition to the questions above, I also asked myself, am I doing everything I can to give my audiences an amazing experience that I could be doing? That question came about largely through listening to several Choir Ninja podcasts that deal with making great concerts, truly knowing your audience and your community, and making sure you take care of them.
Personally I think my concerts are pretty good. They are relatively well-organized, they aren’t too long, the product on the stage is high quality and there is a lot of energy coming from the kids and from me, so I think our audiences walk away mostly happy. I have always believed that middle school performances (and all choral performances) are something that should be enjoyed, not endured, and so I have always tried to create an experience that my audience won’t just tolerate because their kids are up there.
But, ten years in, I think I can do better.
So I am in the process of planning and re-working a lot of things regarding how far in advance I prep for my concerts, how can I make the day of and night of the concert go more smoothly, and how can I take into account giving my audience an incredible experience from the moment they walk into the venue until the moment they get in the car to drive home. I’m really excited about the possibilities here to take my concerts to the next level!
Goal #3: Positive Attitude
It is TOUGH to stay positive as a teacher. I’m not going to reiterate here the myriad of challenges placed upon public school teachers in the 21st Century United States, but all of those things can make the daily grind of teaching a minefield of potential negativity and reasons to complain.
I fall into this trap ALL the time: a kid acts up in class, a parent sends me a nasty email, some sort of new school policy makes it more difficult for me to do my job or manage my choral program...it doesn’t take much for me to start spiraling into negative thoughts. And I love my arts colleagues, but unfortunately when we all get together and one of us is in that negative place, we can pull the rest of the team into that place as well. The next thing I know, I’m in an awful mood and feeling incredible anxiety that my school is falling apart and that everything is terrible. So much of this is just completely irrational and it doesn’t accomplish anything, and I’m tired of feeling like this so much of my school year when the reality is, I love my school and I love what I do! So I can’t help but wonder if I wouldn’t be healthier and happier if I actually acted like I love my school and my job more often.
This is going to be a challenge for me, but I want to be positive. I want to strive to meet tough situations as potential opportunities and not sink into my limbic system whenever something doesn’t go my way. When I talk with colleagues, I want to curb my complaining, and I want to be that encouraging person who pulls them back towards positivity when they are in that dark place.
I hope that when the school year wraps up, I can look back on these three goals and feel successful that I at least partially accomplished them. What are your goals for the new school year?
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