What teaching Teen Exec taught me

This summer, I spent a lot of time teaching. For four weeks, I worked as a camp counselor, where part of my job was teaching dance to elementary school students. I also taught eight Teen Exec workshops for students entering grades 6–8 at the Weston Public Library.

The two experiences were pretty different. With dance, I could demonstrate a step, watch students try it, and usually see right away where they were having trouble. It was harder to tell whether a middle school student was learning how to plan a busy week or make a thoughtful decision. Both experiences made me pay more attention to what happens when you try to teach someone something you already know how to do.

I first created Teen Exec as a series of workshops about practical executive functioning skills. This summer, I offered two workshops on each of four topics: time management and planning, organization and focus, goal setting and decision making, and follow-through and self-management. Most sessions had around 10 students, although the groups ranged from four to 12.

Teaching the workshops more than once gave me a chance to keep changing them. It also made me realize that teaching something required me to understand it differently. When I was putting together the first versions of the workshops, I read books and workbooks, collected strategies that seemed useful, and included some things that had worked for me. There was a lot I wanted to cover.

This summer, I found myself asking a different question: If students remembered only one idea from each workshop six months later, what would I want that idea to be?

Answering that was harder than I expected. To decide what students really needed to remember, I had to think more carefully about why a strategy worked in the first place. I couldn't just know that planning my week helped me. I had to understand what problem it solved and explain that in a way that would make sense to someone else.

I started removing things. Instead of trying to teach every useful time-management strategy I knew, I wanted students to understand why it helps to see their week before they live it. In the organization workshop, the main idea became that a good system should make school easier. I began to realize that choosing one important idea wasn't making a workshop less challenging. Deciding what mattered most required me to understand the topic better myself.

I also changed the way I taught those ideas. I found that explaining something was usually only a starting point. Students needed to see an example and then have a chance to use the idea themselves. We might introduce a concept, work through a situation together, ask students to decide what they would do, and then have them think about how the same idea could apply in their own lives. The activities usually taught me more about what students understood than my explanations did.

That became especially clear because every group was different. Some students already had detailed systems for keeping track of schoolwork. Others hadn't thought much about how they planned their time. Some students raised their hands almost every time I asked a question. Others seemed more comfortable writing something down, talking with a partner, or listening before they contributed.

Even teaching the same workshop twice could feel completely different. One of my favorite sessions of the summer had only four students. They were close in age, interested in the topic, focused, and comfortable participating. Everyone had a chance to talk, the discussion moved easily, and I could tell pretty quickly whether something made sense.

Afterward, I thought about why that workshop had gone so well. I had taught the same material before, and I hadn't suddenly created a much better lesson plan. A lot of things about that particular group had simply made discussion easier. That made me pay more attention to what I needed to do when a group was different.

I learned not to build an activity around the assumption that students would volunteer answers. Sometimes it worked better to give everyone time to think first or let students talk with a partner before asking anyone to share. I also noticed that if I spent too long explaining something, attention started to drift. Usually that meant students needed something to do.

Over the summer, I became much more comfortable changing what I had planned. Sometimes a discussion was going somewhere useful, so I let it continue longer than I expected. Other times an activity that looked good when I designed it didn't work particularly well with the students in the room. After workshops, I shortened explanations, rewrote questions, changed instructions, and occasionally removed an activity. Teaching the same topics again gave me a chance to try those changes and see what happened.

I think that experience also changed the way I look at my own teachers. My Teen Exec groups averaged about 10 students. I taught for one hour. I knew exactly what I was going to teach, had created the material myself, and had slides and activities telling me what came next. There was still a lot to pay attention to.

Were students following the explanation? Had I been talking too long? Was there someone who wanted to participate but hadn't had an opening? Did we need another example? Was an activity helping, or was it time to move on?

I had always known that teachers prepared lessons. I don't think I noticed how many decisions they make while they're teaching. My teachers are doing that with larger groups, several times a day, for an entire school year. The students in those rooms don't all start in the same place, participate in the same way, or need the same thing from a lesson.

I noticed something similar while teaching dance at camp. I could know a combination perfectly and demonstrate exactly what I wanted students to do. Then I had to watch the students try it and figure out what explanation or demonstration might help next.

Teaching this summer made me realize that knowing how to do something and knowing how to teach it are different skills. Preparing the Teen Exec workshops pushed me to understand the material more deeply because I had to decide what mattered most and how to explain it. Teaching the workshops added another challenge. I had to pay attention to how different students responded and adjust when something wasn't working.

I think I notice those things more in my own classes now. There is the lesson a teacher planned, and then there are all the decisions that happen once students are in the room. After spending part of my summer on the other side of that experience, I have a much greater appreciation for both.