10 Questions To Help You Become A Better Teacher This School Year, Part 5

5.  How can I use my strengths.

This one is tricky.  I'm not going to try and sound like an arrogant jerk, so I'll include one strength that I've been told by several people and I'll include one strength from my point of view.

Passion.  This is a strength several parents and colleagues have said I possess.  So how can I use this strength?

Well, I try to use it to model and to inspire.

When I talk about the writing process, I model my passion for it by sharing the pieces I've had published.  I show them all the drafts I've kept.  I show them the feedback editors have made.  And above all, I try to illustrate for them how fired up I got when I was writing.  I even get fired up just talking about the process.

Passion inspires.  I'm stealing this from someone, but it's great and they ask this question: think about a time you were inspired or motivated by someone who was totally generic or totally boring or totally vanilla.  It doesn't happen.  When you were inspired or motivated, it was by someone who was passionate about their subject matter.

Active learning.  This is a strength that I think I possess.  Even as I type this blog post (which is a form of learning), I am listening to a podcast called "Growing and Building a Winning Team" featuring an interview with the CEO of Zappos, Tony Hseih (again, more active learning).

I try to model something Seth Godin said, once a week, read a book specific to your field.  After 10 weeks you'll be the most well-read person in your business or profession.  

I absolutely devour books on teaching and technology and, now, leadership.  Every time I read a new book, I think two things - how can this make me a better teacher and how can my students learn from this.

This leads into my Sticky-Note Book Report/ Hypertext Blog assignment in College Comp 2 where I assign a non-fiction book to my seniors from my ever-growing personal classroom library.  This library grows because I dump the books I read each summer in there and stockpile them for my students to read.  I have had many students mention how in other college classes, they come across these same books, examples - Lies My Teacher Told Me, Tipping Point, Here Comes Everybody.  Likewise, students will donate their former college books or text me suggestions to add to the library.

So how can I use this?  To model what it looks like to be curious and interested and learning . . . all the time.

I just heard a podcast yesterday that talked about the two basic reasons for failure: isolation and failure to learn.  Isolation because the person usually is afraid to ask for help and fails.  Failure to learn because the person left school with the foolish idea that learning was over.  NOT!

I try to model how important it is to grow and learn and change.  Given the economy, this is vital.  Very few of us will ever get a job where - like the Greatest Generation - you do one thing over and over and over for 35 years and then you retire.  The world doesn't look anything like that anymore.  You have to grow and learn.  And that's what I try to constantly model.  And I try to be passionate about it all!