From Classroom to Coaching
My path to supporting new and struggling teachers
Hey, how’s it going? I’m Erik Johnson—a veteran social studies teacher, university professor, and educator coach. In this newsletter, I share practical teaching tips, deep dives into education topics, and the occasional piece on my personal interests. If it’s your first time here, take a look at my coaching homepage, and don’t forget to subscribe!
A Free Deep Dive
What a long, strange trip it's been…
—Grateful Dead
Hi! My name is Erik.
This month, I’ve started my new business: Practical Educator Coaching. I offer private coaching to teachers, particularly those that are new to the profession or struggling with their instructional practices. My dream is to someday coach pre-service teachers during their studies, lead them through student teaching, and then mentor them through their first five years of teaching. After all, teaching is hard! If I’d had a coach by my side, I think my first several years of teaching would’ve been drastically easier.
While there’s information about me on my website, I wanted to take time to formally introduce myself to the internet, particularly because I intend on writing more articles focused on my observations on the practice of teaching.
I’m in my tenth year teaching in a large urban school. I didn’t originally set out to be a teacher, though it had always been something I’d considered. In undergrad, I studied psychology, history, and literature. Afterwards, I did a brief detour in the video games industry with a bit of time spent doing theater in the evening. But as I sought meaning in my professional life and reflected on the stories my grandmother had told me of her time teaching in a one-room schoolhouse, I realized teaching might be the career for me. I wanted to make a difference, and the mentor role teachers play really appealed to me. I wanted to be like the great teachers that I had had when I was a student. After a year or two of answering customer support tickets for the Dancing with the Stars: Keep Dancing online game, I began to pursue a graduate degree in education.
I really enjoyed learning about pedagogy in my teaching program. It kept me engaged, and I felt like I’d found my purpose. I had great professors and lots of cool people in my cohort, but I enjoyed teaching observations the most. I loved taking notes and watching the unique instructional practices of the teachers that I observed. I found it very interesting to see the ways in which students responded to different instructors and class structures. I quickly realized the practice of teaching presented an intricate puzzle. I couldn’t wait to get my own classroom and put into play the best practices I’d collected throughout my teacher training.
However, student teaching was another ballgame entirely. It was a difficult experience and a serious dose of reality. My students were cool; however, the professional environment of the school that I worked in was not to my liking. At the time, there was little collaboration (that I saw, anyway) between teachers in the social studies department. My cooperating teacher insisted I lecture daily, and our relationship became so tense that I sought out another mentor in the building. The culture of classroom management was punitive and oriented around “sending students out.” Though I’d started my student teaching nervous but optimistic, I rapidly became disillusioned with my placement and incredibly anxious overall. Despite this challenge, I learned a valuable lesson about the importance of fit and the significance institutional culture plays on teaching practices and student outcomes. I learned that not only is immediate classroom pedagogy an intricate puzzle, it’s part of a larger and more complicated system: the school as workplace and institution.
Thankfully, networking set me on a path to the school that I’ve now taught at for ten years. It’s been a deeply meaningful experience. I sincerely love and appreciate my colleagues, many of whom I consider friends. I’ve had the pleasure of teaching over 1,500 students, often teaching students both as freshmen and then later seeing them off as seniors. While teaching is far from easy, and there have certainly been some very tough times, overall I’m very proud of the impact I’ve had and the growth that I’ve done. What’s been especially meaningful is working as an adjunct professor in the same teaching program that made me the educator I am today! Through my work teaching teachers, I’ve had the opportunity to see high school students who I’ve taught be taught by teachers who I’ve taught (say that five times fast).
As a teacher, I believe in the idea of Maslow before Bloom. I center my students and their interests as if they are the most important things in the room (because they are). I teach from a place of authenticity and curiosity, and I’m proud to have been called a “goofy goober” by my students. Academically, I structure my students’ learning around meaningful and significant work, pushing them to challenge themselves in activities like history fairs or debate tournaments. I’m deeply appreciative of the fact that when my authenticity and instructional practices intersect, it prompts my students to write things like this on end-of-year reflections, “Out of all the teachers I have had, I want to thank you. You have helped me so much this year and have honestly been one of the nicest teachers I’ve had. I feel like I can go to you when anything is wrong, and I’ve never really felt that with a teacher. I hope to stay in contact with you once I graduate and just be able to catch up from time to time. You have honestly played a big role in helping me succeed in life, and I thank you for everything you have done. I hope you know I’m not the only kid who appreciates you; so many of your students always speak highly of you and say you’re one of the best teachers ever. You make our class feel more than just a class. You make it feel like an environment where we can just be us and have fun. You make every lesson fun from civics to senior seminar. Both classes are honestly great, and you have such a fun, carefree personality, which not a lot of teachers have. Thank you for everything you have done to help me get through the year and for always checking up on me.”
Teaching means a lot to me. I have a lot of thoughts about it. As stated earlier, I find the field of education to represent a fascinating puzzle. This puzzle scales from the micro level (interactions between an individual student and an individual teacher) to the macro level (impact of school leadership on staff morale and student learning) to beyond. In this puzzle, there are vast numbers of decisions being made by a vast number of stakeholders to vastly significant consequences at all times.
So, as I pursue my regular teaching practice, my professorial work, and my new coaching endeavor, I hope you’ll hang around with me as I muse about this really neat puzzle that is education. Thanks for sticking with me and stay tuned.