Wearing smaller shoes.

For a moment, just for a moment, forget that you've grown up.  Put yourself back in that time where the world was full of wonder and fun. Get yourself a piece of a4 paper and roll it up into a "telescope".  Put it up to one of your eyes and put your free hand half way down the tube in front of your other eye.  Hey Presto, you can see through your hand!  This is all it takes to put yourself into your student's shoes.   Those tiny tiny shoes.  A simple willingness to be a little goofy and just take some pleasure in the unusual.

Have you ever done the worksheets you hand out to students or do a "dry run" of the activities you give them at home alone?  This is now one of my "standard tests" and if it's just plain boring I think I probably shouldn't be giving it to my students. 

Of course I didn't always do this and tended to work it all out in my head until one day I took some stuff I did in the classroom into a collegial meeting.  It's just stuff I picked up along the way that I knew the students had fun with to just share it with the others so they could use it too.  Well...  What came next sort of surprised me.  A pair of teachers started playing the games and were having fun.  Then another joined and had fun too.  Then another.  Rather than join in I just stood back and watched.

One was fresh out of university, one was in the last stages of their career and the other two fell in between and there they all were, just having fun.  It occurred to me that sometimes we aren't really that different from our students despite the gap of years and all of the "wisdom" we are supposed to accrue in that time.  It's a rather simple thought really, "fun is fun".  The impact this has had on how I approach teaching though has been huge.

I have been able to cull many of my original resources (although they still remain in my files)  in favour of others that are just as effective in teaching students but just more fun.  I know they're more fun because I enjoy them more than others.  Rather than just evaluate them I also play with them.

As a result my students are more engaged and I have a much easier time as a CRT.  Behaviour issues are kept to a minimum and, though my classrooms can be a little rowdy at times, it's rowdy with the sound of enjoyment gained from learning. 

What I really like though is the ongoing effect to flow from it.  The students that I get often enough become more passionate and invest themselves more deeply in their own learning.  They start wanting to know more and it causes a shift in preferred activities from pure fun to educational fun.

Regards,

Mel.