As she packed up her room for the last time, Mrs. A glanced over my student roster:

“Put Gabriel1 near your desk. Read Camila’s 504 closely. You’re her pediatrician when she enters your door. Elena smiles. But ask her how she’s doing every day—things at home haven’t been the same since dad died. Luis will shut down if you call on him. Now, he did get a perfect score on his state test last year. Oh! And your second period…you might want to pray each day before you get to school!”

I latched onto her every word, scribbling down as much as I could on my coffee-stained yellow legal pad. “Don’t let them call you by your first name.” and “Don’t you even think about smiling until December.”

She was right, in large part. Any seasoned teacher would tell you that the tone you set on day one dictates the classroom environment for the rest of the year. Setting up an atmosphere of discipline, high expectations, and no nonsense paid dividends.

But I made an assumption that stifled my students’ growth as independent thinkers: I thought that I had to be the sole, unyielding authority figure in the room.

My Classroom

In my classroom2, the desks faced forward, and I stood behind my 6-foot-wide makeshift lectern, with a drawing monitor (not pictured, but like a graphic designer would have), annotating notes, lecturing as my physics professor did in college. I didn’t use the markers and the SmartBoard—to think teachers would turn their backs to the students?! How could they be trusted? The boundary was clear: I was the sage on the stage, and my students were to listen, take notes, and regurgitate. That’s how you manage 130 seventh graders, right?

The math instructional coach for the district said otherwise. After watching a few minutes of one of my classes, he gave me a challenge:

“Get to the point where you can run a lesson without saying anything the whole period.”

Absolutely not?! I looked for any excuse:

  • He’s probably never taught at a Title 1 school, he doesn’t understand my classroom
  • It’s easier with high schoolers, seventh graders are too immature
  • I don’t have time to waste on stupid experiments, state tests are just a few months away

Every day I taught a lesson in my same-old lecture style, and I’d feel convinced that the students were starting to grasp it (the entirety of the seventh grade curriculum can be boiled down to one concept: equal ratios—it’s not that hard).

But every time my students took a test…well, let’s just say you can’t curve a 0/100.

So I had that nagging feeling he was right. I guess I should’ve known. This wasn’t just some sideline know-it-all phony I could ignore. He was my eighth grade Algebra teacher 🙃

I’d seen him do the “silent” lesson he described multiple times in class a decade prior. And it obviously worked.

When February rolled around3, I gave in. Coach4 assured me that the students would rise to the occasion. I was skeptical, but I was desperate.

My vice principal gave me an article5 that actually outlined the right way to ease into the “silent” format. It started with letting students lead the discussion. I’ll let you read it yourself:

The rest of the year, I leaned in. I don’t think I spent more than 20% of the time talking. The students took the lead, and I followed their cues. Even my most shy students understood the (metaphorical) assignment: no opting out.

By March, my teaching podium had transformed into a student workbench. Gone were the graphic-designer tablet and my spotlight. I set up a document camera and the day’s worksheet. To start class, all I had to do was utter a few names: “Maria, you’re doing bellringer #1, Carlos #2, Alyssa #3” and it was off to the races.

My students learned to help one another, giggling and racing back up to the front to erase and redo when their neighbor pointed out a missing negative sign. (Some classes liked to heckle. On occasion, I’d allow it.)

Independent thinking, collaboration, and problem-solving confidence all flourished where learned helplessness was eradicated.

To this day, I can’t believe I was so wrong in my original assumptions.

In May, my former Algebra teacher stopped by again to observe my class. He stood in the back, silent, just like he did in eighth grade, just like he did every time he visited.

But this time, I got to stand beside him. He’d taught me something I hadn’t fully understood back then—not in formulas or theorems, but in the power of expectation. And in that moment, as I watched my students confidently take the lead, I realized the most important lesson wasn’t mine to teach—it was theirs.

Footnotes

  1. Not real names, but you get the idea. ↩

  2. I never did change that wall color. It haunts me to this day. ↩

  3. Yes, I waited that long before making this sort of a drastic shift in instructional mode. But I wasn’t just sitting on my hands. The prior major shifts had to do with throwing out the crap open-source curriculum we were using in favor of hand-tailored material designed by me each night, specific to my students and their performance the day prior. ↩

  4. It’s funny to call him “Coach” because he coached a middle school basketball camp my parents embarassingly forced me to attend. (Spoiler: It didn’t work. I am not in the NBA.) ↩

  5. And at this point, I was pretty skeptical of educational research and professional development (especially trainings I had attended throughout the year). I’d pretty much discounted most of my studies at the Graduate School of Education in college, too, because nothing applied to actual practice in my classroom…most of that theory is meant for maybe the top 10% of schools in the nation. ↩