We teachers have no shortages of challenges in our professional lives.
Today’s post kicks off a series in which educators identify their biggest ones and what can be done about them.
Student Engagement
Penny Kittle, a teacher and literacy coach in public schools for 34 years, now teaches first-year writing at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. She is the author of nine books, including Micro Mentor Texts: Using Short Passages From Great Books to Teach Writer’s Craft (Scholastic, 2022). She is the chairman of the board of the Book Love Foundation, which grants classroom libraries to teachers throughout North America:
Teachers are challenged to engage students in lessons, in projects, and, like never before, as readers. Engaged students chase curiosities. They collaborate. They bring joy to class and persist through challenging work. Engagement is essential to a roomful of creators learning together. It is everything.
This vision of teaching is still possible, I assure you, as I enter my 41st year of teaching this fall.
A relentless challenge to engagement is prescribed, rigid curricula and assessments. As leaders prescribe curriculum, require textbooks, and insist that all students receive the same instruction with the same materials every day, we must reach higher. We must bring student voices and experiences to our curriculum. Engagement and, therefore, learning hinge on how we respond to the students before us.
From our first year of teaching, we see a wide range of student abilities and interests. We must adapt to their needs. We combine our goals with the curriculum to engage their minds. Two boys in the same 5th grade class can improve their research skills while studying different subjects. My high school students were adept at showing comprehension of a wide range of texts. Some students studied together as a class, some studied in book clubs, while most read independently.
We must use results from our assessments of skills to plan units, recognizing the growth of individual students and challenging them to bring their bright minds to the task. Our curriculum can stay as vibrant as the children before us. It is the greatest challenge of teaching and the most satisfying.
Young writers will be seduced by the ease of AI when doing the writing themselves does not engage them. But that is less likely to happen if we place student ideas and voices at the center of our work. We study writing stories together, but each student demonstrates unique narrative skills. The voice they choose might be first, second, or third person. The setting might be their city or an unknown universe. The plot might move forward or backward in time. We study mentor texts together from a wide range of authors. Those texts must capture a range of life experiences and center voices too often silenced.
We study a range of skills, using micro texts that capture sentence variety, as well as whole chapters of young-adult books that capture dialogue and text complexity with seeming ease. Students begin selecting texts for class study independently, surprising me with a range of what they notice.
Engagement increases when students meet regularly with a writing group of their peers. As Isaac said to me in class one day, “Can I start over? Now that I’ve heard what others are writing, I want to take this more seriously.” An audience of peers is important to young people—let’s open up more space for them to gather and listen to each other. Give them time to talk about writing—perhaps only sharing ideas at first, then moving to what they’ve been trying in daily practice in notebooks, and finally to their drafts of larger works.
I ask students to audio record their stories, essays, and poems, so they can listen to them. The best fine-tuning of sentences often occurs when we hear those sentences read aloud. Students tell me they listen, return to writing, and rerecord. This work happens because the student cares about the piece and imagines sharing it with peers. I watch writing groups at work, in which members are wearing earphones and turning to smile or nod at each other as they listen to good writing. They make friends and find solace as they learn how peers have handled challenges.
The quest to engage and empower young people in this modern age requires our will, our creativity, and our intellect. I’m grateful to be on that journey with the smartest, kindest people I know: teachers.
‘Academic Acceleration’
Chandra Shaw has more than 25 years of experience in education, as a teacher, reading specialist, instructional coach, and now a literacy consultant at one of her state’s regional service centers. Chandra is a TEDx speaker and amateur YouTuber:
Two of the most common challenges teachers face in the classroom these days revolve around learning loss caused by the COVID shutdown and worsening student behavior.
As educational institutions continue to grapple with the aftermath of the pandemic, teaching professionals, which more and more include a large number of alt-cert individuals, find themselves navigating uncharted territory in terms of playing academic catch-up and managing disruptive student conduct. The prolonged closures and disrupted routines have left many students lagging behind in their studies, magnifying existing educational disparities.
Even more detrimental, the shift to remote learning brought about a myriad of behavioral issues, ranging from an increased lack of engagement to outright defiance. Addressing these challenges requires a multifaceted approach that prioritizes both academic acceleration and behavioral intervention.
In response to learning loss, educators should implement targeted interventions to help students bridge the gaps in their knowledge. This may involve diagnostic assessments to identify areas of weakness, followed by accelerated instruction and additional support. This requires educators to know the difference between remediation and acceleration, which, unfortunately, many struggle to differentiate.
Acceleration involves the teaching of grade-level material while incorporating periodic stopping points to provide just-in-time missing skills for understanding before diving back into the grade-level content. Acceleration can build confidence in students because they are not relegated to the vicious circle of remediation, or reviewing below-grade-level concepts with other struggling learners, which never seems to allow them to catch up. Instructional acceleration involves a collaborative effort among teachers, administrators, and support staff in order to address the diverse learning needs of students.
Beyond academic acceleration, fostering a supportive and inclusive learning environment is crucial in addressing behavioral challenges. Teachers should be employing proactive measures such as positive behavior reinforcement and social-emotional-learning initiatives to cultivate a culture of respect and cooperation in the classroom. However, it’s essential to recognize that addressing student behavior goes beyond punitive disciplinary action. It requires understanding the root causes of certain behaviors and providing appropriate support.
Many students have experienced trauma or heightened stress both during the pandemic and now that we’ve returned to business as usual, which can manifest in disruptive behaviors. Others simply missed out on years of socialization that would have naturally occurred through exposure to their education peers. By adopting a trauma-informed approach, educators can create a safe space where students feel understood and supported. This involves building strong relationships with students, offering opportunities for self-expression and reflection, and providing access to mental health resources when needed. Teachers should be familiar with their school counselors and know the services available to their students.
Ultimately, overcoming the challenges posed by learning loss and behavioral issues requires a collective effort from all stakeholders in education. By prioritizing targeted interventions based on acceleration and NOT remediation when dealing with learning gaps, fostering a positive learning environment, and embracing a trauma-informed approach to discipline, teachers can help students navigate these difficult times and thrive academically and emotionally.
Supporting Student Autonomy
Patriann Smith,Ph.D., is a professor at the University of South Florida with a research agenda focused on race, language, and migration in literacy. She is the author of several books, including Literacies of Migration: Translanguaging Imaginaries of Innocence (Cambridge University Press: 2024) and Educating African Immigrant Youth: Schooling and Civic Engagement in K-12 Schools (with Vaughn Watson and Michelle Knight-Manuel) (Teachers College Press: 2024):
Having spent years in the classroom, both within and beyond the United States, working alongside teachers and as a teacher for the past 26 years, I have found one common challenge teachers experience in the classroom that exemplary teachers master.
The challenge is shedding the preoccupation with teaching at the expense of giving students the autonomy to identify their goals and align them with their pursuit of learning. Many skilled teachers are capable of assessing students’ expertise with ease and presenting content based on students’ areas of need.
However, among the many teachers I have been fortunate to know, it is very clear when they’ve made an effort to “level with each student” so that the student and teacher are operating on the same wavelength about what they both agree is the student’s learning goal for a given week, month, semester, year, etc.
There is a constant returning to this goal, a consistent and understandable redirection of the student that is received as care, an intrinsic or extrinsic reward system built into this mechanism for self-growth to which both teacher and student are committed.
Some may say that classrooms are too large to implement such focused attention to each child. But I have seen teachers working with more than 30 middle school students per class routinely attending to mechanisms to help students develop autonomy over their learning.
Others may argue that teachers are not often reflecting the populations they teach, which prevents them from allowing students to develop autonomous practices. But I have seen teachers who are racialized as white or labeled as Asian American engage in exemplary teaching of predominantly Black middle school youth and they, hands down, identified these teachers as the best in the school.
There was something about the autonomy those teachers allowed that seemed to resonate with students’ desire to be human and that served as a powerful indication of how teachers can overcome this challenge and touch lives.
Thanks to Penny, Chandra, and Patriann for contributing their thoughts!
Today’s post answered this question:
In your experience, what are the most common challenges teachers experience in the classroom, and what do you think are the best solutions to them?
Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.
You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo or on Bluesky at @larryferlazzo.bsky.social .
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