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As you move through your career as a teacher, you’ll discover new ways of doing things that you’re excited about, so excited that you want to share them with your colleagues and convince them to try them, too. Because if a methodology is working in your classroom, and your colleagues adopt that same approach, students benefit more and you and your colleagues get better at the method through collaboration.
But trained professionals aren’t always open to changing the way they work if things are going relatively well, and as peers, we don’t want to come off as the know-it-all telling everyone what to do. So the most effective way to share a new idea is to talk about it in terms of “I.” I’m doing this new thing and it’s working really well. Here’s what I’m seeing in my classroom. This is what I love about this approach.
I heard this idea explained really well in an interview given by Peter Liljedahl, who is the creator of the Thinking Classrooms movement that started with math instruction but has spread to many other subject areas and has grown like crazy over the last few years. Peter’s unconventional approach to teaching looks and is very different from what we typically see in a standard classroom, and yet he’s been able to convince tens of thousands of teachers to try it.
Anyway, his advice is to use the word “I” a lot when talking to colleagues about things that you’d like to see more people try. Use yourself as the example, as the testimonial. On top of that, he advises you to invite people into your classroom to see this new thing in action. And this reminded me of a system I shared in 2016 called a Pineapple Chart, where within a school, teachers kind of “advertise” upcoming lessons they’re doing that would be good ones for visiting teachers to watch, and they create a little calendar of events. You can learn so much from just watching your colleagues teach — it’s free professional development, and it’s right down the hall.
So the next time you have an idea that you really want to spread, start with the word “I.”
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