Double Duty Strategies

Dear colleague,

During my most recent workshops in South Dakota, Michigan, and Colorado, I tried to emphasize a simple point: a great teaching strategy should accomplish not just one of your objectives as a teacher but rather many of them simultaneously. In a job as complex and demanding as teaching, we're after maximum bang for the buck. Double duty strategies are essential in the pursuit of more learning and less stress.

Let's look at some illustrative examples from The Will to Learn.

Strategy #1 is Track Attempted Moments of Genuine Connection. (You can dive deep on these here.) When I'm working my MGC clipboard, I'm achieving several things at the same time:

• Cultivating Credibility with students by signaling that I care about them individually
• Cultivating Belonging in the classroom by creating an environment in which every individual is valued, known, and respected
• Crafting mental models of each of my students from which I can better teach them
• Building relational capital with every student in every class period
• Developing interpersonal depth inside of myself (after all, it takes inner work to come to value and respect every single student I teach); this depth has greatly enriched my life outside the classroom

Or take Strategy #7, Woodenization. (Deep dive guide here.) This one really is an attitude toward teaching: if there's something I want my students to do well, it's up to me to clearly teach them how to do it. As I find myself Woodenizing things like notes for learning and how to study during my first weeks of school, I'm accomplishing lots of things at the same time:

• Signaling Credibility by actually teaching them — all of them — how successful learning works
• Signaling Value by teaching even small things (e.g., how to complete the provisional writing warm-up) that too many teachers just assume students know how to do
• Strengthening the Effort and Efficacy beliefs by 1) making good effort clear and 2) making the goal of good effort clear
• Signaling Belonging by teaching ALL students how to put forth effective effort, not just a remedial subset of students
• Making my job a lot easier (as students get clearer on what good effort looks like and begin to put it forth, I have fewer students at risk of failing)
• Creating greater clarity within *me* about what good learning looks like and how it works
• And perhaps paving the way for future parent emails like the following: “[My children], who are in college now, still say that your class taught them not simply world history, but more importantly how to be successful in school.”

That's a long list! And all of these benefits accrue from me just doing one thing: Woodenizing effective effort.

The longer I teach with The Will to Learn strategies, the more I realize just how much they accomplish. It really is true that I can simply seek to be world class at these few things — and I've made an even shorter list of strategies here, what I call the “minimalist approach” to The Will to Learn — and give myself permission to ignore lots of the rest of the things teachers are expected to be great at. (After all, I'm not great at lots of things. This is a huge “secret” to any success I experience as a teacher.)

Anyways — find the double-duty (or quintuple-duty?) strategies and master the heck out of them.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR