Ten Teaching Tenets

Authenticity is essential for gaining trust and building safe spaces for honest exploration. More immediately, trust is prerequisite for asking students, adult professional learners, and colleagues for the social grace to move beyond their comfort zone and try new things. My first teaching experience was with a TRiO Upward Bound program at Oklahoma City Community College. After one week of disastrous instruction, two of the students pulled me aside. They pointedly shared that my teaching was falling flat, and that I was clearly being something that I was not. In their words, I needed to stop “playing teacher” and “do better.” One weekend of soul searching later, I led the next week by showing more of my authentic self. Things improved, and I keep in touch with those two students to this day. Evidence from George’s True North, Scott’s Radical Candor, and Fey’s Bossypants confirm these lessons learned from teenagers.

The two most important qualities to model and instill are a growth mindset and grit.  Carol Dweck's Mindset identifies the willingness to embrace the challenge of learning as a critical ingredient for those with higher acheivement - both in education and life.  Similarly Angela Duckworth's Grit similarly identifies passion and persistence as essential for overcoming challenges and obstacles that get in the way of development.  My personal success has resulted from these three ingredients, and I attempt to model the behavior throughout teaching and coaching relationships.  By sharing  examples of tragedy and triumph -- and most often, the tragedies along the way to triumph -- I hope to impart these ideas into students.

My first full-time teaching experience was at Edmond North High School, the highest performing secondary school in the state of Oklahoma by most measures (attendance, AP scores, ACT scores, graduation rate, college graduation rate, etc.) North’s culture was remarkably collaborative, with every teacher personally charged with success of every student in the building. From day one, I would ask veteran teachers about their classroom approach, what books to read, and life advice. Many themes emerged – all of them focused on implementing best practices based on research.

Learning how to learn remains my ultimate goal in the classroom and coaching relationships. The call to action in the National Research Council’s How People Learn highlighted the importance of helping students monitor their own learning. Believing that it was better to teach a student to fish, I would routinely bring conversations to “thinking about thinking.” The goal was to help students to uncover how they learn – and more importantly, empower them to develop those skills against the material in the course. This process often involved modeling the behavior of my own learning and how to sustain the persistent grit to overcome setbacks. This process has been the most transferable skill to mentoring professionals in the commercial workspace. Inspiring a growth mindset and equipping that person with the attributes to develop themselves is a powerful combination. I have gifted out countless copies of Dweck’s and Duckworth’s books on growth mindset and grit, as they are accessible to working professionals. The hope is to teach people how to learn, point them towards a treasure trove of resources, and (more often than not) get out of their way while cheering them on.

Leadership at North focused on building a “Learning Organization” – heavily influenced by Peter Senges’ Fifth Discipline. Instead of attempting to inspire individual lifetime learners, the goal was to build a culture of lifetime learning. By fostering a safe space for individual exploration and learning, we could reinforce each other’s’ personal mastery. The resulting dialogue led to a culture of team learning, where students would help each other learn through various insights. When I shifted from an individual contributor role to leadership at a Fortune 500 company, I quickly realized that the traits that led to my early success were not scalable. I went back to the learning culture literature and imported ideas from Coyle’s Culture Code and Garad & Gold’s Learning-Driven Business. These works focus on building an ecosystem where knowledge sharing and continuous feedback inspire virtuous cycles for development – with individuals reinforcing each other’s curiosity and lifetime learning through new viewpoints.

Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory heavily influenced my development. For example, in Advanced Placement economics courses, I developed simulations that placed students into the roles of various actors within a fictious marketplace. The result was a palpable, first-hand experience that brought complex abstract ideas to life. Similarly, I implemented course-based research experiences when teaching at Lake Forest College. Using survey research methods and the Amazon MTurk platform, students were able to generate and test research questions via live survey research, collected through the course. Leading with real examples to tackle abstract concepts make lessons more impactful, enhances salience and engagement, and increases openness to calls to action – both for traditional students and professional learners. Learning by processing actual situations in a community of learning fosters critical conversations filled with fruitful insights and teachable moments.

Adult learners are particularly responsive to social and emotional learning strategies. Although I was familiar with concepts like Goleman’s emotional intelligence beforehand, my first substantive experience with SEL was while serving on the Local School Council for Greeley Elementary. Greeley adopted CASEL 5, and I soon worked to translate those core principles into my practice working with adult professional learners at CDW. Self-awareness, self-management, and social awareness seem like lessons that should be learned well before adulthood; that said, bringing conversations back to what, how, and why people are thinking a certain way unlocked metacognitive conversations in a more meaningful fashion.

Adult professional learners consume information in different fashions; as a result, I choose to meet them where they are. Similarly, when charged with developing working professionals, I focus on delivering content through multiple channels – including one-on-one coaching, micro-learning videos, facilitating mastermind groups, impactful emails, and brown bags among other content vehicles. By communicating across multiple platforms with actionable, relevant information, I am able to both equip targets with practical and useful tips while encouraging further engagement. Similarly, when teaching, I routinely provide multiple options for projects throughout courses, empowering students to decide how they display mastery of the material. For example, in my most recent Introduction to American Politics course, assignments allowed students could choose to observe a city council meeting and delivering field research notes, analyze a policy issue in Congress, analyze issues in an upcoming election, interview a local elected official, or interpret a cinematic production’s political messaging. Empowering students to select how they learn fosters additional buy-in. Notably, when I adopted this model, I found a majority of students doing multiple assignments with their peers, while only turning in a single assignment. Tomlinson’s works were fundamental to developing this practice.

As possible, I develop individual development plans for colleagues. This is a direct result from time teaching in high school. During my last three years of high school teaching, I only missed two Individual Education Plans meetings – both because of conflicts with other IEP meetings. They were among the most meaningful discussions I had as an instructor – with student, parents, and support staff all together crafting a plan for a student. Although these meetings were officially focused on overcoming challenges presented by a disability, I learned from colleagues to focus on students’ goals and abilities. From there, we could collaboratively build a plan to achieve their goals by harnessing their abilities. After planning our work, we worked our plan.

During my time in the private sector, I routinely find myself tasked with communicating complex ideas in brief periods. With the constant competition for attention and fragmented focus, having a concise learning objective and call to action are essential for effective communication. As a result, I have been forced to focus on the core message and distilling lessons to brief communications. In my current position, when I address my primary cohort of attorneys, the cost to the firm is roughly $3 a second. Realizing that the cost of time is that valuable, I work to reduce any presentation to maximize impact while minimizing time commitment. The result is surprising: increased engagement, enhanced consumption of other materials, and greater demand for individual coaching. The last one is most valuable, as it empowers me to use everything above in a bespoke, individualized manner.