The Story of Teach Different

Transcript

Hello, everybody. This is Steve Fouts, the founder of Teach Different. Welcome to our first podcast. I want to introduce myself and tell you a story that will explain what Teach Different does, and why we do it. It specifically relates to this 3-step method that is embedded in everything that we do. It’s in our 3-step think alouds, and our online professional development course work. It’s really the crux, or the DNA, of the conversation technique we’re trying to teach. If you use this method, you’re going to become the teacher your students remember for amazing conversations. 

I  came up with the method back in the fall of 2017. My principal brought me in and asked me if I would be willing to teach one class at a nearby school in the middle of the day to help out with a staffing shortage. They just needed somebody for one class period. I was able to leave halfway through the day, and I was excited for the opportunity to mix up my day and go somewhere where nobody knew me. I walked into the class in September to establish my rules and  introduce myself. Nobody knew me at this school. Long story short, by the middle of October, I was in the middle of a nightmare. Looking back, I have to admit that I lost  control of this class. I actually had to have security guards in my room to help me manage the class after a while. No one was engaged in what I was trying to teach, and I was struggling with the things you struggle with as a first-year teacher. But, here I was chosen to go over here because I was one of the more  seasoned professionals. It was embarrassing. If  I didn’t right the ship, then I was going to lose them for the entire year. I knew that.

There was a specific student who was creating a lot of my classroom  management issues, his name was Jarvis. If you’re a teacher, you’ve had a Jarvis. This is a student with the rare combination of leadership ability among peers, intellectual potential that he’s not taking advantage of, and then some  

behavioral issues that make it hard for you to control the class. Jarvis was especially challenging in my environment. One day, at the end of the class, I had five minutes.  It had been a particularly bad day and I wanted to take five minutes to try to get Jarvis’s attention, because I felt like I had a teaching moment. I just point blank asked him, Jarvis, what is wrong?  He looked at me and told me that it was his dad’s birthday today, and his dad was murdered in the front seat of the car while Jarvis was in the passenger seat two years back. 

I just stepped back and had this rush come over me of the meaninglessness of what I was trying to teach on that day, and how frustrated I was because no one was engaged. Here was somebody who gave a reason why he wasn’t engaged. I couldn’t get mad at him. I had to look at myself and realize that it’s so much greater than what we try to teach some days. The challenges that we face with students who come to us with all these things that are going on in their lives, and in their minds that are getting in the way of listening. It’s not that they don’t want to learn, they just can’t concentrate when things like this are on their mind. Class was dismissed that day, and I went home.

I majored in philosophy in college and I’ve always been motivated by interesting quotes and big ideas. I thought about Jarvis’s life and some of the violence that goes on in these neighborhoods. That’s when I found this quote by Confucius, that I’ll never forget because it’s the quote that started the development of this 3-step method, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” I thought to myself, I’m going to put this quote on the board tomorrow, pass out a slip of paper, and ask all of the students what they think of it. 

What ended up happening is that I got a conversation going for 50 minutes, and when the bell rang it actually interrupted us. People didn’t want to leave at that moment, and the star student was Jarvis. He’s very charismatic and he talked about how anger has destroyed him, and destroyed people he knows. Other students spoke up, and soon we were exchanging stories about the risk in trying to get back at other people and how you lose your perspective. 

I left that class, came home, and basically said to myself, you better not change that approach. You better do that again and see if it works. The next day, I got another quote, put it on the board, passed out the slips of paper, and the conversation worked again. It didn’t last as long, but we talked about things that mattered to the students and they were sharing stories. I needed to build a relationship with the class, where people cared about what we were talking about. 

This is really what Teach Different is in a nutshell. This is our methodology. The 3-step method considers not just what we as teachers need to teach, but how we can connect with our students. What are they interested in? Have a conversation about it, and get really good at linking the theme of that conversation to  something that you’re teaching. I spent the rest of that school year in a very  productive classroom, where I felt like I knew how to get their interest, and they  appreciated and reciprocated it. 

Jarvis became an asset to that class. He already had the charisma and he had a deep mind, but he was never asked to weigh in on his big ideas. Now he was thinking in a group, and I provided that for him. That’s really how the 3-step method was developed. Once you have a sense for what you’re teaching, get a theme that you like, and find a quote that is interesting. Establish a claim from the quote that the author is making, come up with a really good counterclaim to create some tension with the conversation, and then end the conversation with, what we call, an essential question. A really deep question that takes students out of the experiences that they’re sharing about the quote and gets them to conceptualize more and do symmetric cognitive work. 

You’ll love the method the more you get used to it. It’s easy, and simple, but not simplistic. Over the coming weeks we’re going to produce podcasts that give  examples of conversations that you can have in your classrooms, and we’ll give you some tools you can use to get these conversations going. We’re going to interview students and teachers and brainstorm different ways you can connect these conversations to content that you’re already teaching. You’ll have engaged  students who are interested in what you’re teaching. I really hope you enjoyed this story and I hope to see you soon.