Exceeding expectations in an unexpected career

I graduated from college with a degree in parks, recreation, travel, and tourism not long before COVID-19 hit and shut down parks, recreation, travel, and tourism. I’d never taken an education course and only took enough literature courses to fulfill graduation requirements, but when a friend of a friend told me a nearby high school was desperate for a 9th-grade English teacher, I considered the opportunity. I had often imagined teaching as a profession but had decided against it because my mother, a career educator, repeatedly reminded me, “The work is heart-wrenching, the demands are unrealistic, and the salary is untenable!” But now I was ready to defy Mom, spread my wings, and dive in.

So, in August 2020, I took the job less than a week before I’d meet my students for the first time — online. I’d missed the opening orientations and had to figure out how to Zoom with teenagers whose names I didn’t know, whose curriculum I had no understanding of, and whose learning needs I couldn’t fathom. This, in a Title I rural high school in central North Carolina, hundreds of miles from where I grew up in suburbia.

Our school’s population of 835 students was 60% Hispanic, 12% Black, 24% white, 1% Asian, and 3% multiracial. Only 42% of our students scored proficient in reading according to state tests. A majority of my students had individualized education programs (IEPs) and were English learners (ELs).

Setting a course

I was initially hired on a one-year emergency teaching license. However, I soon learned that a university about three hours away offered an online certificate program that I could complete over three years to obtain licensure as a residency teacher. The need for secondary English and math teachers was so dire in North Carolina that I was able to find a scholarship to pay that bill.

Because so many of my students had IEPs and were ELs, special education and English as a second language (ESL) teachers dropped in and out of my Zooms from time to time. I’ll never forget the look on the face of Katie, our ESL teacher, when she realized she was going to be working with a completely inexperienced teacher with no education or English degrees. She must have sensed that my heart was in the right place because she gently supported me, guided me, and became my good friend.

Katie was the first person to introduce me to the idea of units guided by student choice. This notion led me to books like The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller and Readicide by Kelly Gallagher, all of which fed into what became my own teaching philosophy.

Year one: Connecting through student choice

While I didn’t know much about our English language arts curriculum, I figured reading and writing would be pretty important components of my classes. I also intuitively felt that getting to know students and their interests and dreams would be critical. Being so naïve about what I was supposed to be doing worked in my favor. Katie and I spent the first few weeks building relationships with the few students who tuned in to Zoom classes, and this turned out to be essential groundwork for learning yet to come.

As a high school student, I hadn’t enjoyed much that I’d been required to read. But after college, I became a voracious reader. This led me to believe that I might be able to get my students to enjoy reading if they had a choice in what they read. From the first day of class, I told students that we were going to be reading every day. Multiple students told me outright that they hated reading, and I tried to make my responses positive and upbeat: “You hate that book? I’m sorry! Why don’t you go pick a different one?”

When students were still attending school virtually, they were able to use our school library’s online portal to check out a hard-copy book. They could then drive by the school to pick them up. Katie and I took boxes of books from the library to the front of the school and walked them out to students’ cars to say hello, masks and all. Because our students were too young to drive, this was a great opportunity to meet their families, too.

I wanted students to figure out what they enjoyed reading, which meant I needed diverse and high-interest options. As we prepared to return to in-person school on a hybrid schedule in spring of 2021, our school librarian helped me stock my classroom library with appropriate books outside the traditional literary canon, including graphic novels and books by authors that my students could relate to. I asked on Facebook and NextDoor if anyone had young adult books they were looking to part with. I also completed grant applications for classroom library funds and received $2,000 from a Walmart Communities Grant. I made sure to arrange these books so they would be accessible and attractive to students as they trickled back into the classroom.

Year two: Learning what you love

In my second year, I was assigned all 10th-grade English classes, which meant I’d have many of the students I’d taught the previous year. We also were back to full in-person learning right from the start. I was eager to expand what had seemed to work from the previous year; however, this year would pose a new challenge — preparing students for the North Carolina end-of-course tests that would count for 20% of their final grade.

Reading remained a daily routine for my students. We discussed different genres of books and what to look for when choosing a book. We conducted book speed-dating activities in which each student spent five minutes at a time with different books from my shelves and ranked their interest in them. As students shared those impressions, they found potential new friends with similar interests.

I took students to the school library so they could learn (or relearn) how that resource worked. I shared that I expected them to bring a book to class every day and that we would all read together silently at the beginning of each class. If they didn’t have a book, they would grab one off the classroom library shelf. Always having a book on hand was nonnegotiable in my classroom.

Establishing reading as routine

I told students that reading is like running a half marathon in that anyone can run a half marathon, but not before they’ve run a mile. Getting all the complex neural networks communicating in the brain takes time, attention, self-regulation, and endurance, much like running does. We started with five minutes of independent reading daily at the beginning of the year and trained our way up to 15-20 minutes by the end of the year.

When daily reading time started, I put a timer on the board and played peaceful instrumental music on a low volume in the background. Once everyone was reading, the timer would begin. While the timer was running, students were not permitted to talk. I modeled what I expected by sitting at the front of the room reading myself. This was not the time to grade papers or take care of other teacher tasks. When students were not using their reading time wisely, the timer would restart.

Following independent reading, we would typically jump into the lesson for the day. Each unit focused on one specific genre, diving deeply into what that genre entailed. I shared short examples of the genre and had students find similarities or differences between the lesson example and their independent reading books. We examined short passages as a class, in pairs or groups, and independently. Over time, our explorations moved from short article excerpts to memoirs and personal narratives, then on to short stories, literary analyses, and poetry.

Confusion and doubt

When I shared my independent reading practice with colleagues, many of them questioned the practice. One colleague said, “Independent reading doesn’t work. If you read a novel as a class, at least the kids who didn’t read might still be able to take something away from the discussion.” I felt both chastised and baffled, because in my room independent reading was working. By the end of the year, students were begging to spend an entire 45-minute class period reading their books of choice outside. (And when the weather was nice, that’s exactly what we did.)

Throughout the year, colleagues expressed concern that I wasn’t using classic texts such as Romeo and Juliet (which I thought romanticized suicide to an already at-risk age demographic). Some days, my colleagues’ comments would cause me to second-guess what I was doing, because I really was going out on a limb as a new teacher. However, I looked at that ancient play, looked at the national suicide rates for teens following the pandemic, looked at my students, and just said, “I can’t do this.” And I didn’t. (There are plenty of beautiful sonnets out there if the objective is just to expose all students to Shakespeare.)

Ultimately, I couldn’t justify telling my students which texts were important to them when my life experiences were so different from theirs. Is it fair to force everyone into one option that could be the opposite of what they need, that could even harm them, when instead we could celebrate texts that both meet their needs and push them academically? Thankfully, I worked for a creative first-year principal who figured that it couldn’t hurt to let me do my own thing. It felt validating to have her confidence, so I stayed the course.

Seeing success

At the end of my second year of teaching, the evidence was in, and my hunches proved correct. I found myself in the coveted “blue” category: the top 17% of English teachers in North Carolina who “exceeded expected student growth” on the end-of-course exams. This result was not just for one class, but for all six classes I taught. Although not every student in my classes showed growth, most did, and many showed unusually high growth.

I ended that second year as the school’s and county’s Beginning Teacher of the Year, titles I will always cherish. Plus, I had the confidence to continue to listen to my heart as well as my head. Today, I am fully licensed and have moved to a different state, but I’m in the fourth year of what I hope is a long teaching career. I believe that the big difference was letting students choose their reading material and then building their capacity to read and concentrate over time. We trained for a marathon, not a sprint. Offering choice in a structured environment made a difference for us all.

This article appears in the October 2023 issue of Kappan, Vol. 105, No. 2, p. 58-59.