Now Available for order at SUNY Press

Teaching as if Students Matter

A Guide to Creating Classrooms Based on Relationships and Engaged Instruction

At the moment, you’ll find links to purchase the book and some key takeaways from it.

In the near future, you’ll find additional resources and instructional activities that support the ideas presented in the book.

Thanks and we hope you find Teaching as if Students Matter a useful resource.

Jaye and John Zola

Who should read Teaching as if Students Matter?

Pre-service teacher candidates

This book explains how we believe teachers can create relationships with students and set up their classrooms and instruction to do so successfully. Pre-service teachers can explore the ideas in this book with other practitioners at school sites and with professors in classes on methods and foundations of education.

New teachers

What we have to say challenges some of the more traditional advice given to novice teachers. New, enthusiastic teachers who want to personalize their teaching and provide engaged instruction will find specific suggestions and tools to help accomplish these goals and supplement their work with induction coaches and mentors.

Classroom teachers of all content areas and grade levels

Teaching is an ever- revitalizing profession, and every teacher can find new or different ways to think about their pedagogy and their relationships with students. Our experience and expertise lie in the secondary grades, but the core ideas and principles we advocate are also appropriate and adaptable for elementary classrooms.

Our Story

We met when we were both asked to help plan and organize a meeting of the Rocky Mountain Regional Social Studies Conference in Denver. It turned out that we shared educational and personal values, and a bit later we married. The week of our marriage, John was hired at a middle school in a neighboring school district. We taught at different schools for two years until our first child was born. Jaye’s school allowed us to do a job-sharing arrangement where each of us taught for a half day and parented for the other half. The pay wasn’t great, but we were able to co-parent and maintain our careers as teachers. Luckily for us, we had opportunities to write curriculum and teaching activities for small publishing houses and social studies curriculum development centers. This provided extra income and helped us become better teachers.

We had an opportunity to transfer from the junior high school to a high school and continue job sharing, which gave us the chance to teach many of our students for the six years they were in secondary education. Talk about having long-term relationships with your students! We came to know them well. Several years later, we both helped create and teach at New Vista. There, we had the opportunity to implement our ideas about engaged and authentic learning, as well as put into practice our values related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Since retirement, we’ve continued to write curriculum, conduct professional development workshops, coach colleagues and work in local and international schools.

About

Some takeaways from each chapter

Chapter 1

It All Begins with Relationship

…As you can see from the story about Travis, creating a relationship with a student who is challenging can involve many kinds of interactions to keep the focus on building the relationship. While there is no one magic solution, there are lots of ways to take positive steps.

Be patient. Don’t get mad…take some deep breaths and don’t take their behavior personally. View disciplinary issues from a distance to develop a perspective on the situation.
Remember that this is a young person whose behavior is telling you something, even if the way they are communicating it is inappropriate.
Make sure you’re not punishing a student who may not know the rules, language, and culture of the school’s power structure.
Set expectations and hold students to them in a firm and consistent, yet kind way.
Look for options in the curriculum and choices around assignments that might give the student some control over their learning.
Find interests that allow you to develop a relationship that isn’t focused only on the discipline issues.
Use humor and be careful to never resort to humiliation, sarcasm or name calling.
Get information and help from a counselor, administrator, or colleague.

…A culturally responsive teacher looks at the background and identity of each kid based on their racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and class background and their gender identity and sexual orientation. That teacher is open to who the student is in the moment and who they are becoming. We are more competent when our classroom policies, pedagogy, and practices acknowledge, celebrate, nurture, and respond to each student’s unique self. A culturally inclusive teacher learns about student cultures, in-group differences, and identities to make instruction more inclusive. Diversity then informs classroom management and pedagogy. The units and activities in these classrooms recognize injustice and oppression and work to make the world a better place.

Chapter 2

Managing the Classroom with Relationships

…By the third day, you have the beginnings of a classroom culture for engaged learning, you’re practicing classroom agreements of inclusion, respect, participation, and doing real work, and you’re creating relationships with students by greeting them at the door, checking in on them when you see them in the hallways, and watching and listening to learn how each one ticks. A teacher’s life is busy, to say the least!

On this day, you might want to continue working with small groups by giving students a short, interesting reading from the course content. It could be something on cloning, a brief historical dilemma, a choice faced by a character in literature, or a playground dilemma. Pick something interesting, but avoid highly contentious topics that are likely, at this point, to be overly polarizing. Students don’t yet have the skills to work with such issues, and that is not your intent here. Your goal is to set up an interesting conversation, not provoke a heated argument.

Chapter 3

Planning for Engaged and Authentic Learning

…When authenticity and meaning making drive classroom instruction, teachers must help students develop comfort with ambiguity. While content is important and is the grist on which the wheels of thinking grind, making sense of ambiguous situations and information are authentic life skills, important in a democracy. Meaning making is the process by which we do this. Life abounds with ambiguous questions and challenges, from the economic to the political to the personal.

Chapter 4

Teaching with Discussion

…Not all discussions need to open with closed questions that check for understanding and then move to open questions that ask for higher-order thinking. Sometimes a discussion can begin with a simple prompt to get students to begin thinking about the issues or ideas at play, such as:

What did you find interesting in the reading/lecture/experiment/problem, etc.?
What was confusing for you or puzzled you in the reading/lecture/experiment/problem, etc.?
Pick an idea in the reading/lecture/experiment/problem for us to begin our discussion?
Is the author right?

Chapter 5

Assessment and Grading for Student Success

…The revision process requires students to do something with teacher feedback and comments. As they revise, they engage with your feedback to fix things as simple as consistent spelling errors (their vs. there vs. they’re) or more substantive problems with reasoning or sentence structure. This is where practice can make better. You are providing support and scaffolding so students can learn how to meet class expectations. It’s also a concrete way to respond to a student who says “I tried” on an assignment. You’re providing a chance to use that effort in service of an improved assignment. Just about any assignment can be revised.

Chapter 6

Relationships with Families, the Profession and Yourself

…When you’re positive, healthy, and take care of yourself, you can bring your whole self to the classroom. It’s easy to feel stress as a teacher and have a sense of not being able to do it all. We are on every day, all day, with limited time to prepare lessons and grade work as we try to maintain lives of our own. Part of the centering process is honestly addressing these aspects of our life and figuring out ways to stay healthy. We have to practice self-care by allowing ourselves to be more important than our never-ending to-do lists. There is always more to do, and it can feel like so much of our professional life is out of our control. Creating and working on a balance between our job and our out-of-school life takes attention and persistence.