5 Transformations
A Mini Guide for Middle School Teachers
This mini-guide offers five invitations for teachers, each a way to transform our practice to serve middle school learners in particular. These build on and complement the ideas explored in the book Finding the Magic in Middle School.
#1: From Professional to Personal
Do you ever notice yourself wearing the “teacher mask”? It’s a face that we educators sometimes hide behind. A way to appear calm, in control, focused on the topic at hand, even when something else important is happening within us.
The teacher mask hides our authentic selves — our emotions, stories, and questions — out of a sincere effort to be “professional” or to be safe. Being professional is wonderful when it means dedication, or that you seriously prepare and expect excellent outcomes. But when “professional” starts to mean formal, distant, or impersonal, then there is a leap you can make, one that middle schoolers in particular need you to take.
The invitation is to take the mask off. Maybe not all at once, and maybe not all the way off. Simply let students see a bit more of the real you. Acknowledge a mistake. Speak to an emotion you’re feeling in the moment. Share parts of your life story, especially your own tween and teen years.
Adolescents need to see whole, complex adults. They need to see us trying to make sense of things, day by day, imperfectly.
When you share yourself more authentically, they gain this kind of model. And equally important: they trust you more. By opening yourself more, you align the words you say with the subtle nonverbal signals you send about your real state. The more aligned these are, the more safe and trusting others will feel around you.
#2: From Hero to Ensemble
Teaching can be a strangely isolating profession, if only because teachers often spend most of the day as the only adult in the room.
In some ways this fits the archetype of the hero, fighting singlehandedly for justice. But heroic stories, idolized as they are in Western cultures, often hide the fact that groups are far more effective in creating change, fighting for justice, or simply, enjoying life. The more likely path toward doing our best work, or being our best selves, is to be part of a group of heroes. An ensemble.
How does this apply to teaching? We can’t do this work alone—particularly if you’re looking to try new approaches as a teacher, and particularly if you’re working with a group as socially motivated as middle schoolers.
Their learning needs to be social to tap into their full motivation. Your ability to foster good collaboration, or to create social safety so that students can speak honestly, depends on your experience having had the same environment for yourself. You need to know what a great collaboration feels like to set the conditions for it among your students.
And we need this sense of team, this ensemble, to do the heroic work of teaching. To be ready to receive whatever challenges our students may bring up; to do the work of becoming more self-aware and authentic in how we show up around students.
Who is in your support group? Which other educators, whether close friends or just others you know of, seem to be on the same adventure as you? Could you create or join spaces of honest sharing and mutual support among teachers?
#3: From Teacher to Guide
Adolescents are on an extraordinary, life-changing adventure. Someone on an adventure doesn’t need a boss hovering over them, or an instructor lecturing them. They need a guide. A wise companion.
The book explores in much more depth what this looks like, beginning with the work of building your own self-awareness. The more we can catch ourselves slipping into old habits of broadcasting, lecturing, or following a curriculum sequence regardless of how our students are making sense of it, the more we can evolve.
Consider mindfulness training to support your awareness and your ability to choose differently from what habits tell you.
Consider advisory-like spaces for adults, where you can speak from the heart, listen deeply, and practice tools with like-minded peers.
Consider the spirit of adventure as the guiding force for a class, with less regard for the fearful messages in our education system (“they won’t get a job if they don’t know this!”) or the constant time pressure (“they’ll fall behind!”). Adventures move at their own pace. It would be better to create one unforgettable moment of insight for a student than to teach them hundreds of facts they will have forgotten in a few years’ time.
#4: From Classes to Quests
A traditional class motors along steadily, day by day and week by week, much like a machine. This is not a good thing. Humans are not machines. We are far more dynamic than that, and our attention is linked to our emotions and our relationships. The monotony of the same old classes stretching on day after day, in the same tone and pattern, is almost guaranteed to reduce our motivation and our ability to retain information.
We learn in bursts. We retain information better when it is encoded with emotion. We learn when we have to relate to others with new ideas. We care most about subjects that seem relevant in the real world beyond school. We engage when our learning changes our sense of who we are.
In short, rather than a steady class, we need other people, emotions, and a sense of meaning generated together in order to have a good learning experience. We need a Quest.
A Quest, in this sense, is a facilitated adventure. It pursues a question that is both personal and real enough that adults struggle to answer it. It does not have a formulaic answer. If the solution can be Googled, it’s not a Quest. It does not limit itself to one academic subject. The journey is undertaken by a team. The final assessment is done not by teachers or parents, but by people in the real world, testing your ideas against their expertise.
#5: From Fragments to Wholeness
Each of these transformations can be seen as a shift from fragments to wholeness. From showing just a sliver of yourself — the professional teacher persona — to revealing more of who you really are. From teaching alone to teaching on a close-knit team. From broadcasting facts to guiding a student holistically. From abstract subject classes to Quests that cut across disciplines and address a real-world challenge.
For students and for ourselves, in our wholeness lies our power. When we activate more of ourselves, we tap into our creativity. We make connections between disciplines. We allow our work to change our identity, keeping us evolving and growing. We see multiple solution paths.
This perspective of wholeness also invites us to be more patient. When everything is fragmented, we get distracted from what really matters, and so we rush. We might rush to complete a curriculum sequence even if it sacrifices deep understanding of the core skills. Or we don’t attend deeply to students’ emotions, thinking we should keep focused on their academic progress, as if their academic self is distinct from the rest of them.
What is one part of you that you have kept off to the side—and what would happen if that part brought ideas to your professional self?