The Best Leaders are Teachers

The best leaders are also great teachers.

Like great teachers, who demystify for their students critical areas like how best to learn, organize information, and study, great leaders are regularly teaching their people what they've learned about what does or doesn't work.

Here are some of the benefits that arise when leaders take on the role of educators and empower their teams.

Knowledge Transfer: When leaders take the time to share their knowledge, they help team members avoid pitfalls, make informed decisions, and accelerate their own growth.

Would You Do It For Free?

I recently attended an entrepreneurship gathering sponsored by a local university. The program allowed each attendee to speak for a few minutes about their company and services. The last speaker was a videographer and web marketer. He spoke with great passion about finding a voice and telling a great story, important components in today’s evolving marketplace. But the line that resonated most with me was his comment about why we are all doing what we’re doing.

Most people in that room had left an established, more guaranteed position in order to venture off into entrepreneurship and follow their dreams. This speaker spoke to a common chord within each of us when he said, “You all love what you do so much that you would do it for free.” That is, of course, if not for the fact that we must put food on the table.

4 Learning Lessons from the Garden

My time outside gives me much opportunity to think and reflect. As a former educator, a few ideas come to mind. The first relates to the eighth identified intelligence – naturalist intelligence — from Howard Gardener’s famous list. In its most literal terms, a naturalist is someone who shows expertise in the recognition and classification of plants and animals. From an educational vantage point, it describes a child who possesses naturalist inclinations while sharing many traits of kinesthetic learners. These children flourish from being able to touch, feel, hold and try practical hands-on experiences, but generally prefer to do so outdoors, surrounded by nature and animals.

5 Areas Where Teachers Need Support Right Now, Part II

A critical, “non-academic” area that teachers must master is their ability to teach and support students’ social-emotional needs and development, while growing their mindset and confidence to succeed. Let’s focus on the latter, our mindsets and the role they play in our success.

In her bestselling book Mindset: The New Psychology Of Success, Stanford Professor Carol Dweck talks about people’s mindsets with regards to their ability to perform new tasks. She describes people who stay squarely in their comfort zones and others that venture well beyond them. Dweck labeled these mindsets as “fixed” and “growth,” respectively.

Preserving you: Preventing teacher burnout

Think of the first time you encountered teacher burnout. Where you were. What was going on at the time. The feelings. The experiences. The surroundings.

I'll tell you what it was for me. I was a new teacher in an Orthodox Jewish independent high school. I was fresh. I was idealistic. And I was going to change the world.

Each morning, my colleagues and I would convene in the teacher's lounge. On occasion, we would play a game.

Typically speaking, one doesn’t think of teacher lounges and games; there were no chess or Scrabble boards to be found. The game that we played had no name. I have named it in arrears the “make the calendar disappear” game.

Where did it all go? Thoughts about student memory and retention

Have you ever taught something and your class really seemed to get it, only to revisit the concept a short while later, and it’s as if they never heard of it? Better yet, have you patted yourself on the back after your students aced an exam only for you to ask a related question two days later and get back a class full of blank stares? It’s almost as if their minds were one big etch-a-sketch that had once memorized lots of information before being wiped clean.

If you’re like me, you’ve had that experience more than once. And we all know how it feels. It can be one of the most frustrating experiences for a teacher, seemingly invalidating all of the hard work — in terms of preparation, content delivery and reinforcement — of the past many weeks. Why does this happen and what can teachers do to ensure that students properly process and retain key information?

education, relationships, memory, teachingNaphtali HoffJanuary 14, 2016education, memory, retention, teaching, teachers, students, learning, schoolComment

Connecting with parents

Many teachers use the relationships and the trust that they engender with parents to lay the foundation for student success. Unfortunately, in my years as a teacher and a principal, I too often observed an unhealthy dynamic between teachers and parents. Such teachers commonly found parents to be people that they needed to “deal with.” They viewed them as nuisances, if not worse. They wanted parents to stay out of their way and let them do their thing. After all, they were the experts.

Parents, for their part, can be quick to get upset with teachers for such things as rules, policies, perceived negative attitudes towards their child and, of course, poor student performance.

The sad reality is that the ones who suffer most from this tension are children. They need to feel the security of the rapport between school and home, rather than to be confused by an undercurrent of disharmony. As the African proverb states, “when two elephants fight, it’s the grass that gets trampled.”

education, leadership, relationshipsNaphtali HoffOctober 14, 2015education, connection, teachers, parents, relatingComment

Connecting with our students

As teachers, we know that there is more to our jobs than sharing content and enhancing student skills. We understand intuitively that in order to fully reach our students we need to connect with them and create the right atmosphere for learning. The research of Dr. John Hattie confirmed this when concluding that the most effective way to improve education was to raise the quality of pupil-teacher interactions.

Below is a list of strategies that can help you establish healthy, meaningful relationships with your students and interact in a manner that is healthy and fulfilling.

Set the proper tone. Find ways with which to positively engage students from the outset. Greet them as they enter the room with a “good morning” and a high-five. Smile when you see them and let them know that you’re happy that they’re there. Convey the message that you expect a great day from them and anticipate their success.

Create a healthy learning environment. One of the most powerful educational quotes that I have ever read has nothing to do with teaching. The author, former teacher and child psychologist Dr. Haim Ginott, wrote about the central role that teachers play in making the classroom’s “weather.”

4 Learning Lessons from the Garden

My time outside gives me much opportunity to think and reflect. As a former educator, a few ideas come to mind. The first relates to the eighth identified intelligence – naturalist intelligence — from Howard Gardener’s famous list. In its most literal terms, a naturalist is someone who shows expertise in the recognition and classification of plants and animals. From an educational vantage point, it describes a child who possesses naturalist inclinations while sharing many traits of kinesthetic learners. These children flourish from being able to touch, feel, hold and try practical hands-on experiences, but generally prefer to do so outdoors, surrounded by nature and animals.

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