Five Lessons from Five Years of Teaching

An early career retrospective

The author (right) and his mentor teacher (left) raging against the hedonic treadmill.

This month will mark five years since I completed my teacher training program, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to reflect on some of the greatest insights from my first few years in the classroom.¹

I’ve written in the past about the things I wish I’d known as a student; the focus of this post is different. It’s the things I wish I’d known my first few years of teaching (or, alternatively, the advice I would give to anyone just starting out/suddenly thrust into the role of educator).

You’ve probably heard many of these lessons before, perhaps in slightly different forms and wordings. I know I had. All I can say is, even the ones I “knew” were true prior to entering the classroom turned out to be significantly more true than I had imagined.

1. People Can Learn 1-2 Things at Once

In my early days as an English teacher, I used to drive myself crazy making extensive comments on student essays. Of course, I knew many students would ignore these comments and look only at the final grade—but I felt I owed it to the conscientious minority to give them all the resources they needed to improve their skills should they wish to do so.

In retrospect, this was a mistake, and not just because my efforts were wasted on the majority of students. The truth is, even for the students who did really care, it wasn’t a particularly effective strategy. It turns out that even the most motivated learner just has a hard time taking in more than 1-2 pieces of information at time (and usually the range is more like 0-1…). This means that attempts to cram extra content into a rubric, lesson, or curriculum generally backfire—either by diluting the most important point or overwhelming the recipient.

There’s a cheat code here, which is chunking. That is, if you pack concepts inside of other concepts, the “1-2 things” you’re teaching at a time can secretly contain three, or five, or ten sub-things. But know your audience, and proceed with caution. For a kindergartener, for example, the sound of the letter A might represent the upper bounds of a concept they are able to master in a single lesson. For a third grader, one concept might be the mental category of vowels. For a doctoral candidate, “one concept” might be, I don’t know, the Intersectional Semiotics of Assonance in Early-19th Century Abolitionist Poetry. As a teacher, you’ve got to use your common sense about what short-hands students do and don’t already know.

(To operationalize/give a rule of thumb: If the thing you want to teach requires significant background on some whole other topic, it’s probably too much for a single lesson. Conversely, once students have a concept, you can connect it to new ones as many times as you want—and probably should do so; see #2 below.)

I realize I’m violating my own rule by offering five pieces of advice here, not two. As you’ll see, though, there are really just a couple core ideas, and I’ll be chunking them into bigger buckets at the end.

2. If It’s Important, Repeat It.

It’s tempting as a teacher to think that just because you’ve said something, students have heard it. In reality, there’s a near-guarantee that at any given moment in any given class, at least one student will be either physically or mentally absent. This can be frustrating obviously, but you do yourself no favors as a teacher by ignoring reality; for better or worse, brute force repetition seems to be the single best way to maximize the odds that an important message is actually received by all students.

Repetition applies equally to individual classes and the course as a whole. If a lesson is centered around a key point, for example, the point should be introduced at the start of the period and reinforced repeatedly throughout. If a unit is built on a core idea, that idea should be repeated at least once per week, and preferably far more frequently than that. If there is a piece of information essential to students’ performance—a big deadline, say, or instructions for an upcoming assignment—it should be repeated ad nauseam until, when prompted, the class is able to chorus back the answer with a few eye rolls.

Furthermore, even if students did hear the information the first time around, repetition serves to tag it as something especially worth committing to memory. Just as we might bold or italicize the main idea in a written text, repetition is one of the few tools at an instructor’s disposal by which to draw attention to what really matters. (Other tools include placing the information at a privileged part of the lesson—i.e., at the beginning or the end—and explicit signposting like “this is important!” or “write this down!”) Repetition conveys meta-information about which of all the words that come out of the teacher’s mouth students should most prioritize.

While “if it’s important, repeat it” might seem like an especially obvious tip, it’s one whose potency never ceases to amaze me, and whose importance therefore bears repeating. This is both because truly important information is worth repeating, and because repetition itself has the effect of marking certain information as more important. Another way of saying this is that the most important information should, all else being equal, probably be repeated. Additionally, repetition of important information is an important, if repetitive, pedagogical tool of underrated import, and therefore important for teachers to repeat repeatedly. (Repeat after me: This is important!)²

3. Good Routines > Great Lessons.

Done well, teaching is a profoundly creative act. That said, even the most inspiring class project or activity can be rendered tedious and confusing by the time it takes to explain its instructions. Furthermore, the cognitive load required for a teacher to plan and execute a truly original lesson often limits said teacher’s ability to attend to the more subtle aspects of the job: modifying lessons on the fly, supporting struggling individuals, monitoring general attention and engagement, etc.

For this reason, there is an immense payoff for investing early in a set of class norms and procedures, which students then learn to basically run on their own. It’s not that every lesson should feel the same—far from it—but that cycling between familiar protocols helps promote student comfort and a more efficient transfer of knowledge. Note too that routines are a recurring how, not a recurring what: A standard discussion protocol can be applied to any text or topic in the world; the scientific method can be applied to any material a teacher dares toss on a Bunsen burner. This variety in focus—again, along with some variety in the routines themselves—prevents any one schtick from getting stale.

(To give a simple example from my own classes: I’ve historically started every lesson by taking attendance with an icebreaker question, many of them suggested by students throughout the years. This warm-up has the immeasurable benefit of ensuring that everyone speaks at least once during the period, as well as the perk of making students not completely dread the start of class; in end-of-year surveys, attendance questions are frequently cited as a favorite class tradition. While this daily five-or-so minutes does add up, it pays massive dividends in class culture and buy-in throughout the year. More concretely, it ensures that as early as mid-September, there is zero friction to starting class.)

4. Experience Is the Teacher.

When there’s a lot you want students to learn, it’s tempting to deliver it as directly and efficiently as possible. (This approach is sometimes referred to as the “piggy bank” model of education, wherein information is “deposited” in the empty brains of students via lecture.) Sadly, while brilliant orators do exist, chances are you’re not one of them—and even if you’ve got the chops, attentive listening should not be mistaken for deep mastery of the subject matter.

The trick here is to design classroom activities that are themselves educational. Ironically, these activities often involve ambiguous goals (e.g., observation/exploration of a relevant artifact); creating something whose evaluation is subjective (e.g., a skit, a diagram, an original experiment); or discussing a sincere open-ended question (i.e., one to which the teacher does not have an answer). In other words, they likely require the teacher to admit partial ignorance or relinquish control to the students. This leap of faith can be daunting—and certainly doesn’t always lead to brilliant analysis on the part of those who, let’s be honest, probably get more of their information than they should from TikTok. But in the long-run, assuming the teacher has instilled generalizable methods and habits for knowledge production (see #3), active learning is the surest path to growth.

Remember also that experience is your teacher as an educator. As with any skill, the single best way to get better at teaching is to do it iteratively, reflect on what does and doesn’t work, and adjust accordingly in response to feedback.

5. Students Care That: a) You Have a Plan and b) You Like Them.

A veteran Providence Public Schools teacher I knew once observed that deep down, students just want to know two things: a) Does my teacher have a plan? and b) Does my teacher like me? In my first few years in the classroom, this simple idea became a mantra to which I turned whenever my responsibilities felt overwhelming or ambiguous.

So often as educators we’re worried whether students like us, whether we’re going to get through all the material, or whether anyone noticed that we have a toothpaste stain on our shirt. But these are ego-driven concerns, and when viewed through student eyes, they seem ridiculous. In contrast, the human need to know that everything is under control looms large—even more so the need to be seen and appreciated. It’s remarkable, actually, the garbage pedagogy you can get away with as a teacher if you just prepare some kind of classroom activity, and genuinely care about your students.

But how exactly do you pull this off as a n00b? How do you convey that you have a plan when, really, you’re just scrambling to get your lessons together the night before? And how do you convey to students that you like them when, really, you’re only a few weeks into the school year and barely know them?

Well, it turns out that a plan can be revealed to students as you go, simply by…

1. Distilling 1-2 key points per lesson, and

2. Repeating those points.

And the best way to show new students you like them is to trust them with their own learning, simply by…

3. Giving them easy-to-use routines, and

4. Creating learning experiences.

Attend in good faith to these two channels—the informational, the psychosocial—and everything else will follow. Teaching is simple, but it’s not easy.

1. While I earned my MAT in May 2018, I’ll caveat by noting that I’ve actually taken three semesters away from the classroom in the five years since then. However, this non-teaching time is more than canceled out by years of additional classroom experience prior to, and during, my Master’s program. For the purposes of this post, I’m simply referring to this combined experience as “five years of teaching.”

2. Note well: Repetition is far less valuable in written communication—in which readers can refer back to different parts of the text as often as they want—than in oral communication; I use it here for mostly comedic effect.