Why? Why? Why?

If you always do, what you've always done;

then you'll always get, what you've always gotten.

I had this up on my wall in my classroom for many years. Not so much for the kids, but for me.

I was always reconsidering my students' learning because I really had no one else to blame except myself when the understanding and application wasn't improving.

And when teachers tell me that

"the kids always get <<whatever concept it was>> wrong" or

"the kids can never apply their knowledge in the assessment",

my reply was always the same:

Always? And they would reply "Always".

So my final answer would be:

"Well, the only commonality in all this is you. What have you changed in your teaching to fix this up?

Now this caused some consternation with some teachers. One person lost their s@$t and I did receive an earful of abuse.

But then, that same person returned (after they calmed down) and said "OK - what could I do?"

Hats off to this person - they had the courage to ask for support, and we worked together to come up with some strategies and ideas to improve student learning. This was a teacher with years of experience in the classroom.

The main problem was that they had become comfortable teaching in the same manner, every year. In fact, you could say that they had become lazy.

They were looking at their students - watching their reactions to the learning. They were simply delivering.

So don't just deliver content - really teach it, always checking that your students are learning. Your kids will thank you for it and you will feel so empowered.