Our first week is over! We have taught our students for 11.5 hours (and followed it with 25 hours of debriefing!) and it's gone pretty well. It's been tough. Teaching in a low-income school is always a roller-coaster of emotions, and early on, highlighted by periods of extreme difficulty and a few small success to celebrate. This week was just that.
Everyone teaching from our team is a Teach for India fellow, and accordingly, none of us have taught kindergarten-aged children before. Our first day featured a large number of students crying and screaming their eyes out. As the week went on, that number decreased, and I am proud to say that on Friday, every student was in their class and dry for most of the day!
I've spent most of the week thinking about my struggles with teaching in the classroom, but also the challenge of now building a school and organization.
One big challenge for me has been managing personal priorities with our bigger goal. An experience on Friday really illustrated this challenge. I've had some issues getting my students to line up and exit the classroom to go to the bathroom, and eventually out the door at the end of the day. Procedures and systems like this require a lot of planning, setting clear expectations, and a high level of execution. I didn't feel I was in a good place in my own class on Friday, as I was leaving our students to go.
As the day ended, I told my students that they would not be allowed to leave until they were seated and ALERT. I was ready to follow through on my commitment, but the challenge was that we had spent a week planning a school-wide procedure for exiting, and so every classroom's actions were dependent on me leaving my class by a certain time. In the end, I let them go without following through on my consequence, because it was necessary for the rest of our team.
It was a tough decision, and I know that it could hurt my classroom when I return on Monday. But I think that it was the right choice because unlike my fellowship with Teach for India, we are trying to build an excellent school and not just achieve excellence in individual classrooms.
One challenge that we, along with any startup, will have is managing that balance of individual priorities and priorities to our team, especially when they are conflicting, as in this situation.
I think my biggest learning was that the situation could have been avoided had I set up my own individual lineup procedure better. Creating organizational systems requires individual excellence as well as team excellence. In this situation, I think I brought it down a bit with a weak lineup procedure, but I'm excited to go in on Monday and improve.
In the grand scheme of things, we've made a lot of progress. Most of our kids know their behavioral expectations for sitting in class, they are comprehending us in English, and they are producing amazing work working with Clay and Lego! Future artists and architects!
Everyone teaching from our team is a Teach for India fellow, and accordingly, none of us have taught kindergarten-aged children before. Our first day featured a large number of students crying and screaming their eyes out. As the week went on, that number decreased, and I am proud to say that on Friday, every student was in their class and dry for most of the day!
I've spent most of the week thinking about my struggles with teaching in the classroom, but also the challenge of now building a school and organization.
One big challenge for me has been managing personal priorities with our bigger goal. An experience on Friday really illustrated this challenge. I've had some issues getting my students to line up and exit the classroom to go to the bathroom, and eventually out the door at the end of the day. Procedures and systems like this require a lot of planning, setting clear expectations, and a high level of execution. I didn't feel I was in a good place in my own class on Friday, as I was leaving our students to go.
As the day ended, I told my students that they would not be allowed to leave until they were seated and ALERT. I was ready to follow through on my commitment, but the challenge was that we had spent a week planning a school-wide procedure for exiting, and so every classroom's actions were dependent on me leaving my class by a certain time. In the end, I let them go without following through on my consequence, because it was necessary for the rest of our team.
It was a tough decision, and I know that it could hurt my classroom when I return on Monday. But I think that it was the right choice because unlike my fellowship with Teach for India, we are trying to build an excellent school and not just achieve excellence in individual classrooms.
One challenge that we, along with any startup, will have is managing that balance of individual priorities and priorities to our team, especially when they are conflicting, as in this situation.
I think my biggest learning was that the situation could have been avoided had I set up my own individual lineup procedure better. Creating organizational systems requires individual excellence as well as team excellence. In this situation, I think I brought it down a bit with a weak lineup procedure, but I'm excited to go in on Monday and improve.
In the grand scheme of things, we've made a lot of progress. Most of our kids know their behavioral expectations for sitting in class, they are comprehending us in English, and they are producing amazing work working with Clay and Lego! Future artists and architects!
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