For the past few months, I’ve experienced the mixed blessing of constant travel. Mixed because although I love the chance to partner with truly amazing people, to get to those people, I also have to suffer the unavoidable frustrations of air travel. Over the past seven days, for example, I’ve missed three connecting flights through Atlanta, and twice had to fly out on a different day than the one I’d planned.

Right now, in fact, I am writing this column from Atlanta airport, where I am waiting for a 10:30 flight instead of getting off my 7:30 scheduled flight to Austin.

So, sitting here in Atlanta, with a few extra hours, I thought I would share some strategies I’ve learned to use over the months and years I’ve been flying. These are tips I’ve gathered either by asking pilots and flight attendants for their suggestions, or the old fashioned way, through experience. Here, then, in no particular order, are my suggestions for my fellow radical travelers as you venture out into the airports around the world.

1. Take a photo with your cell phone of your car’s parking space at your home airport so you never forget where you parked it. When you arrive home from you flight five hours late, you won’t want to take an extra thirty minutes searching for your car. If you snap a photo, you’ll always know where it is.

2. Always carry on your luggage. Checked luggage can get lost, but more importantly, checked luggage can keep you from getting on an alternate flight. When you try to reschedule your trip, you will be asked, “Did you check luggage?” If your answer is yes, you won’t get the earlier flight home. Checked luggage also gets you on to the plane or out of the airport much quicker since you don’t need to check or get your bags.

3. Never take the last flight or the last connecting flight. Flight attendants tell me they are told to always do this. Taking the second-to-last flight dramatically increases your chances of getting where you want to go.

4. Always allow yourself more than an hour for connecting flights. Another tip from flight attendants, and another way of making sure you actually get to where you want to go.

5. Bring something to do in case you have to wait. I always bring a book, a notebook for ideas (analog and digital) and other items I need to keep me busy. If I have 100 emails I need to write, or a great book to read (I’m amazed by Jhumpa Lahari right now) it makes the wait much better.

6. Bring extra socks and undies. You usually won’t need them. But they don’t take up much space, and if they’re there when you want them, you’ll be very happy.

7. Use ziplock bags for liquids. You can toss the bags when you get home, so that each trip you have a clean bag to hold shampoo, toothpaste and so on. I like to use the hotel’s plastic laundry bags for my own dirty laundry when I head home, too.

8. Avoid Atlanta and Chicago O’Hare airports. Just trust me on this one.

9. Try not to fly at the end of the month. For reasons I don’t fully understand, flight crews can run out of time at the end of the month, and so you are more likely to be delayed because of a missing crew at the end of the month than at any other time.

10. Find out if your credit card gets you access to the airline’s clubs and if it does, use it. Consider getting a card that gets you free access if you don’t have one. Also, keep in mind that for $45.00 you can get access to a club for one day. Most of the time, that’s not a good deal, but on a day when there are three or four hour waits to get to a customer service agent, you can probably get served in a club in 15 minutes if you pay the daily rate.

11. Plan your diet. You can probably get a list of the restaurants in your airport, even read the menu ahead of time. Most of the food in an airport will shorten your life and expand your waist. But if you plan ahead, you can find something that is fairly healthy. I also recommend you bring a couple meal replacement bars just in case you need them. Like your extra pair of socks, these bars are good to have when you need them.

12. Buy an adapter that converts one outlet into three. This little piece of magic ensures that you’ll never have to search for an unused outlet again. Whenever you find an outlet being used, you just ask the user if he or she minds sharing, then plug your computer and your fellow traveller’s into the outlet. You get access to power, and you might just make a new friend.

13. Consider getting noise canceling headphones. I don’t always wear them, but when I’m sitting near an especially loud, especially opinionated person, I especially enjoy slipping on my headphones and turning up someone like Gustavo Santaolalla. Please don’t, however, get a bluetooth headset so you can talk loudly as you walk through the airport.  Please just do that for me.

14. Get a frequent flyer card, and use it, especially to call for advice when you are significantly delayed. If you have a bad experience, call the customer service people, explain your situation, and ask them if they can help you out in any way. You might just get an upgrade to First Class, or points or money. I picked up $50.00 for my extra delay here in Atlanta, and it didn’t take more than a couple minutes to call.

15. Don’t take out your frustrations on gate staff, flight attendants, customer service people or other airline employees. Whatever you’re experiencing, it isn’t their fault. Also, losing your cool won’t help you get what you want. The people working for the airline, I might add, feel it when you lose it. One customer service person told me on the phone that she sometimes looks over and sees her colleagues in tears because of what people say. I hope I haven’t caused anyone to feel that way.

There are other tips, of course, and I’m sure those of you who read this can share your ideas. I’d like to write more, but it looks like my plane is going to board, so I’m turning this over to you. What are your tips? What have you learned about the experience of travel. We want to know, so please share you suggestions and experiences here.

By the way, from this point on, watch for this column to be posted late each Tuesday night. Next week I’ll be posting a guest blog on “authentic work.”

As I was going through security at the Kansas City airport a while back, a TSA official asked me to wait so he could check my suitcase by hand.  This was the third time in three trips through security that I had been stopped, so I was getting a bit ticked off (and starting to feel like a marked man).   After he looked my bag over, the fellow politely explained, “I’m sorry I had to hold you up. Your iPod speaker was lying vertically, and we couldn’t see what it was. If you lay it flat in the suitcase, you probably won’t get stopped again.”

This little interaction took only a few seconds, but it removed every ounce of my grumpiness, and better, it has helped me move through security much quicker. In fact, my suitcase hasn’t been hand checked since.  Simply by explaining why he was doing what he was doing, the TSA guard made me feel better about what he was doing, and at the same time he gave me some valuable information.

What this TSA official did tapped into something that I think is fundamental with most of us. We want to know why.  Spend 30 minutes with a toddler, and you’ll quickly learn that “why” is one of her or his favorite words.  When we get older, we might stop asking the question as much as we did when we were younger, but we still want to know why.

Explaining why doesn’t take much time, but it satisfies a genuine and deep-seated need for most people.  By taking just a few seconds to explain why, we move away from a power-tripping way of interacting (“just do it because I said so”) toward a more respectful way of interacting (“let me explain why I’m asking you to do this”).  Explaining why communicates that we have thought about others’ perspectives and needs and decided to address them up front.

Over the past month, I’ve had the pleasure of observing many teachers as part of a project for the Teaching Channel.  Again and again in my observations, I’ve found that by simply explaining why, teachers, like the TSA official, can work a special kind of magic.

Here are just a few of the many “whys” I’ve heard teachers explain:

• “When you practice this with a partner, you be more likely to remember this.”

• “I need you to sit down, because if you sit like that on the desk, it is unsafe, and you might get hurt.”

• “When you talk about a new word from a new language, you are more likely to remember it.”

• “If you draw a picture of the new word, it can help you remember it.”

• “Let’s move to the next activity quickly so we have more time for our review game at the end of the period.”

When teachers gave these brief explanations, their students were much more motivated to act.  In one class, when the teacher explained why students were going to learn about propaganda (“we all need to know how to recognize whether the people who want to lead us are telling or stretching the truth”), students were immediately excited about the experiential learning activity the teacher had set up.

In some classes, teachers got their kids fired up for learning by asking them to explain why they thought a topic was important. When students come up with their own answer to the question why, it is especially powerful.

And explaining why has an additional major benefit. To explain why, we have to ask and answer the same question for ourselves:  “Why am I teaching this?  Why should students learn this?”

When we think deeply about why we are teaching something, and we come to a clear understanding of a subject’s importance, we often teach with a lot more conviction and passion … and students learn better.

Explaining why is encouraging, respectful, and motivating. It fulfills a basic need, and it helps us tap into our passion for a subject.  It only takes a few seconds, but it is a powerful habit to adopt.  Why not explain why for every request or suggestion we make?

I would go so far as to say that if we can’t explain why, if we don’t deeply understand why we are teaching something, we are likely wasting our students’ precious time.

“We strive for the excellence the Greeks called arête …–to function as you are supposed to function, to achieve your personal best.” George Sheehan

In Personal Best, the great philosopher-runner (or running philosopher) George Sheehan elaborates on one of his core beliefs: Our struggle to achieve personal bests helps us know and actually create who we are. We all have felt the “joys of indolence,” Sheehan reminds us, but the true measure of a person is how he competes with himself. The heroic human journey, he says, is “to function as you are supposed to function, to achieve your personal best … not to excel against others, but to excel against yourself.”

Sheehan writes about running, and for him, running is much more than a way to lose a few pounds; it is a way to achieve a happier, more authentic, fully realized life. Talking about why he runs, Sheehan writes as follows:

My end is not simple happiness. My need, drive, and desire is to achieve my full and complete self. If I do what I have come to do, if I create the life I was made for, then happiness will follow.

Sheehan’s idea that meaning and happiness can be found in striving to achieve our personal best extends far beyond running. In fact, I believe it is an even more powerful concept when applied to professional pursuits. Sheehan himself describes how the same striving for excellence that he sees at the heart of a dedicated writer is manifested in the creative life of a famous writer:

“I am writing the best I can,” said the author of some bestselling popular novels. If I could writer any better I would. This is the peak of my powers.” It matters little that she cannot write any better. It matters, more than life, that she is doing it with all her might.

How does Sheehan’s heroic notion of the quest for excellence apply to teaching? I believe it matters “more than life,” to borrow Sheehan’s phrase, that we see teaching as exactly the same kind of opportunity for excellence, that every day in the classroom we embrace the challenge to achieve a personal best. It matters greatly that our quest for excellence is our quest to create an opportunity for our students to experience as much growth, joy, empowerment, and learning as possible.

Like a race, the classroom provides a clear standard by which we can measure our growth. Runners like Sheehan compete with themselves to see if they can run faster, longer, or with more ease or joy. As teachers, we can compete with ourselves to see if we can have even greater positive impact on all of our students.

To pursue a personal best in the classroom requires several things.

First, we need to have a clear understanding of how well our students are learning or not learning. Thus, formative assessment becomes an essential tool for anyone striving for a personal best because, like a runner’s stop watch, it tells us how close we are to our ideal.

Second, we need to have access to new ideas, coaches, collaborative colleagues, and other resources and supports so that we can make adjustments when we fall short of our ideal. The real joy of teaching is learning how to reach all the students we teach.

Finally, we need the courage to see the classroom reality exactly as it is and have the perseverance to continue striving for excellence. And since inevitably some days won’t go as well as we had hoped, if we really want to achieve personal bests, we need to accept that there will be times when we feel uncomfortable.

To learn, to see the classroom exactly as it is, we need to venture outside our comfort zone. If we don’t take risks, we are in danger of being satisfied with what William James, one of Sheehan’s favorite authors, describes as “lives inferior to ourselves.” Sheehan sums this all up as follows: “It’s more comfortable not to try. But life is, or should be, a struggle: Comfort should make us uncomfortable; contentment should make us discontented.”

The rewards of challenging ourselves, of pushing ourselves for a personal best are enormous. When we pursue excellence, we gain a deeper understanding of our purpose, a fuller knowledge of the contribution we make, and the satisfaction that comes from doing work that makes us proud. Most important, of course, if we strive to be the teachers we were meant to be, we will make a bigger difference in the lives of children. By our example, we can even encourage our students to start their own journey — to strive for their own personal bests.

I wasn’t a very good student when I was in high school.  Rightly or wrongly, I saw many school rules as unnecessary power trips, only in place to keep me in place. I did my best to fight those rules at every turn.

But I did worse things than fight the rules. One of the worst was treating teachers cruelly, especially when I was part of a group.   Cruelty is easier when you do it with others.

One teacher I treated very poorly was Miss Stumpf, a newly minted English teacher.  In Miss Stumpf’s class I took every opportunity to communicate that I didn’t care. I went into her class, an alienated teenager, looking for ways to sabotage whatever learning experience she had planned.

One day I was walking home tired after a tough football practice (we always had tough practices after we lost, and we always lost) and Miss Stumpf drove by, stopped, and asked me if I wanted a ride. (This was back in the early 70s when teachers still felt safe making such simple offers.)  I was very happy to not have to walk, and I accepted the ride.

Something amazing happened when we talked. I found myself speaking with her in the same way I would talk to my friends or family.  In a matter of seconds, literally, my understanding of her was transformed. In the midst of our friendly interaction I realized that she really cared about my success.  I realized, too, that the teacher that I had treated so terribly was just as real a person as I was and certainly a lot nicer.

From that day forward I had a different relationship with Miss Stumpf. The reason why was simple: I now saw her as a real person.

My experience with Ms Stumpf exemplifies something Martin Buber talks about in I and Thou.  When we see others as objects, we can do terrible things to them simply because we don’t recognize that they are real.  Of course we know that they literally are just as human as we are, but we don’t see them having the same feelings as we do.  When we see people as real, however, as subjects, we see them as fellow human beings. Seeing through empathetic eyes rather than cold dehumanizing eyes transforms our relationships with others.

One of the simplest ways to move from being an object to a subject is to do what Miss Stumpf did, to have one-to-one conversations.  I’ve written about one-to-one exchanges as an important part of instructional coaching, but I see them as important relationship-builders in all settings, and especially in the classroom.

We can (and I think should) make one-to-one conversations a ritual of our classrooms. They can be scheduled through out the school year. They might be scheduled informally outside of class, or formally, in class while all other students are engaged in an activity that doesn’t require teacher direction.

One-to-one conversations could focus on student progress, but they can also focus on our progress. We can ask children for feedback on what is and isn’t working for their learning. What matters in these simple exchanges is that we try to connect with our students and reveal ourselves as real.

Organizational theorist Peter Senge has written a comment that I love: “the way forward is about becoming more human, not just more clever.” Senge’s words are just as meaningful in the classroom as they are in the boardroom.  And one way we can become more human is through more one-to-one conversations.

There are people still in darkness

And they just can’t see the light

If you don’t say it’s wrong then that says it’s right

None of us are free, one of us are chained.

None of us are free.

–Solomon Burke

“Speak truth to power” is my good friend Jean Clark’s favorite phrase.  When we do the work of reaching out to students, doing our best to ensure all students are learning, we have to, according to Jean, “speak truth to power.”

I think Jean has in mind the same thing as the late, great, soul singer Solomon Burke when he sings that none of us are free when one of is chained.  (You can see Solomon Burke sing the song with the Blind Boys of Alabama here). To speak truth to power is to speak out when we see oppression in its many and varied manifestations.  To speak truth to power is to speak up when we hear racist or sexist comments, when we hear people dismissing children by holding low expectations for students who hold amazing potential, or whenever we hear others being objectified, dehumanized, or stereotyped.

When we speak truth to power, we often have to be the voice for others who have lost the ability to speak for themselves, when institutions or individuals misuse their power to diminish others. Speaking truth to power, I believe, is not just about standing up to those who are above us in an organization.  When we speak truth to power, we should also stand up for what is right when we see oppression rise up in more subtle ways.

When we see someone being bullied, it is easy to recognize that we must act, but when we stand up against an organizational culture, it is much harder to step outside the culture and say what needs to be said. Too often, organizational culture trivializes those actions that are most important for moving forward, such as a deep belief in the moral purpose of teaching, a commitment to personal learning and growth, or articulation of the importance of being empathetic towards our students or their parents.

I had lunch not so long ago with a wonderful instructional leader, an unabashed Radical Learner, and during our meal together, I learned that she had just finished her PhD and that she passionately loved continuing studying about leadership, organizational change, and instruction.  She related that when her colleagues kind of gave her a blank stare as if to say they had no idea why someone would be so committed to learning, my friend held up her hand in the universal sign for loser, and said, “Yeah, I know, I’m a loser.”

Such is the power of culture.  We don’t want to suggest we are better than others, and we don’t want to stand out from a given culture in which we live or work, so we tend to acquiesce or put ourselves down.  But the truth is that my friend is anything but a loser—just the opposite, her personal learning makes her a better leader, a person much better able to make a difference.

And this is when speaking up is especially important.  Learning, personal growth, and commitment to students, these values need to be celebrated, not downplayed.  School culture can be as oppressive as any power-tripping egomaniac. Speaking truth to power, then, is not just about addressing oppressive leaders.  Speaking truth to power is about creating the kind of culture that is best for everyone—students, educators, and parents.

As Susan Scott has explained, culture is shaped one conversation at a time.  When we speak truth to power, we speak up to create cultures where learning, humanity, and respect are celebrated, not trivialized.

And we need to take Solomon Burke’s words to heart:  “If you don’t say it’s wrong, then that says it’s right.”

In Good Boss, Bad Boss, Robert Sutton shares the ideas of one of my heros, David Kelly, the founder and chairman of IDEO.  Dr. Sutton writes as follows:

David [Kelly] sees his job, or the job of any boss, as enabling people to experience dignity and joy as they travel through their workdays [Kelly refers to this as love; Sutton and I call this humanity] and to do work that keeps the lights on… David explains that great bosses work to strike a balance between love and money over time.

Once again, Sutton’s (and Kelly’s in this case) ideas have implications for schools–especially when we substitute academic achievement for money.  An overemphasis on achievement, that sells humanity short, can create schools that look like dehumanizing factories for producing test takers, rather than places of learning, development, and joy.

Since the introduction of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), school leaders across the United States have felt intense pressure to turn their eyes almost exclusively toward achievement. Post-NCLB testing is ubiquitious, and there is more than a little truth to Michael Fullan’s tongue in cheek renaming of NCLB as No Child Left Untested.

Nonetheless, the heightened focus on achievement has had benefits.  Since NCLB, schools are much more concerned with providing professional learning that actually leads to meaningful improvement in teaching and learning.  In many schools today, teams spend more time analyzing data, and many school administrators spend more time observing teachers. Today, educators, in a limited way, know more about how learning and teaching are occurring in their schools.

Unfortunately, test scores don’t tell the whole story.  Focus is important, but focus can be destructive when it becomes tunnel vision.  And tunnel vision is exactly what we have in too many schools today.  Leaders in one district I’ve met with, for example, told me they were only interested in reading and mathematics.  “You’re not even interested in writing?” I asked (not mentioning life skills, music, the arts, science, learning strategies, languages, and all the other learning a school could provide).

No, they said, “We are focussing all of our professional learning exclusively on reading and writing.”

When David Kelly describes the important balance between love and money, he sketches a teeter totter with a heart on one side and a dollar sign on the other, depicting the balancing act that good leaders must enact.  I’ve recreated the sketch below, replacing money with an A+, to symbolize achievement.  In far too many schools today, the scales are tipped, and too little attention is given to the human side of learning.

To get the schools our children deserve, we need to give at least as much attention to humanity as achievement.  This means leaders (superintendents, central office staff, principals and other leaders) need to treat teachers with unmistakable respect, listening more than talking, communicating their faith in their colleagues in school, providing meaningful choices for the professionals in their schools and meaningful professional learning that is delivered respectfully and effectively.

To get the schools we want, teachers similarly need to treat students with unmistakeable respect, listening more than talking, communicating their faith in their students. Teachers also need to create learning experiences that emphasize love as much as learning, and they need to teach children about empathy, equity, and respectful interactions.

Testing won’t go away tomorrow.  Standardized assessment is woven into the fabric of school today.  The best way to do something about testing, however, is not to throw up our hands in frustration, but by fighting for humanity. We can fight for humanity everyday we treat a colleague with respect, every time we create a lesson that makes children smile and want to come back for more.

When a balance between love and learning is realized, students will experience at least as much joy, dignity, and fun at school as they do test prep, drill, and rote memorization. More joy, dignity, and fun in our schools, that’s a fight worth fighting.

In Good Boss, Bad Boss, Robert Sutton writes that one characteristic of good bosses is that they carefully balance the amount of control they exert over versus the freedom they provide for their subordinates.  Too much control stifles creativity and enthusiasm.  Too little control leads to less productivity and focus.

Sutton uses a comment by former LA Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda to illustrate the importance of leaders balancing control and freedom: “I believe that managing is like holding a dove in your hands.  If you hold it too tightly, you kill it, but if you hold it too loosely you lose it.”

Sutton calls this Lasorda’s Law because, as he writes, “it captures the delicate balance that every good boss seeks between managing too much and too little.”  Sutton backs up his belief in Lasorda’s law by citing Daniel Ames and Frank Flynn’s hypothesis, which pretty much mirrors Lasorda’s Law. Sutton summarizes Ames and Flynn’s research as follows:

Managers who are too assertive will damage relationships with superiors, peers, and followers; but managers who are not assertive enough won’t press followers to achieve sufficiently tough goals.

Lasorda’s Law, I think, also has implications for work in the classroom.  Just like a good boss, an effective teacher maintains control in the classroom while also ensuring that there is sufficient freedom.  Too much control damages relationships. Too little control leads to too little learning.

Students don’t want to be bullied or bossed around, but they want structure, respectful interactions in the classroom, and someone who will resolve conflicts and maintain calm.

As part of being appropriately in control , teachers must exude a respectful level of confidence.  Again, Sutton’s ideas about bosses help us understand effective leadership in the classroom.  For example, in Good Boss, Bad Boss, he asserts that good bosses exude confidence even when they don’t feel confidence.  Sutton writes:

Faking it until you make it can trigger a self-fulfilling prophecy: by acting as if you know what you are doing and in control, even if it isn’t true at first, such confidence can inspire you and others to achieve great performance.

This is sage advice for teachers. Indeed, I’m certain that many educators would be quick to admit to employing the “faking it” strategy. In part, this means that teachers need to remain calm no matter what craziness descends on the classroom. Books on conflict resolution and relationship building such as Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen or Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott, although designed for the corporate world, can teach us a lot about remaining calm and in control under pressure.

But, in addition to remaining calm, a second, important, part of being in control is being aware of what is going on in the classroom.  This heightened sensitivity to what is happening was given an incredibly appropriate name by Jacob Kounin, “withitness.”   Withitness has been described as:

the ability to at all times be perceptually and cognitively aware of what is occurring in one’s classroom. Teachers who are aware of what was occurring during class time, in terms of student behavior and work, and who made their awareness apparent to their students had high work involvement and low misbehavior from their students. (you can find the full document on withitness here).

Confidence and withitness are a critical part of the Lasorda Law, but that does not mean that teachers need to control every students’ every action.  Kids need to play; they need to have fun, and that’s just as important in the classroom as it is on the playground.  Indeed, when teachers create a setting where students know that their teacher has things under control, they are much more likely to genuinely enjoy and get the most out of their learning—the ultimate goal of effective teachers everywhere.

I started reading Robert Sutton’s new book Good Boss, Bad Boss because (a) I was interested in what the book might teach me about leadership in organizations, and (b) because I have found all of Sutton’s books to be insightful, practical, and helpful (and, I might add, very entertaining). I expected, of course, to learn a lot about being a boss. What happened, though, totally surprised me:  as I read Good Boss, Bad Boss, I found my head spinning with the parallels I noticed between good bosses and good teachers.

One of Sutton’s main themes, Power Poisoning, especially has implications for anyone who embraces the profession of teaching.

Sutton references many studies to support a fundamental assertion of his: power poisons our ability to understand our subordinates’ needs and damages our ability to empathize with their experiences. In particular, Sutton references Dacher Keltner’s research studying power dynamics.  One especially fascinating study Sutton mentions  is Keltner’s “cookie experiment:”

Three-person student teams were instructed to produce a short policy paper.  Two members were randomly assigned to write it; the third member evaluated it and determined how much to pay the two “workers.” After about thirty minutes, the experimenter brought in a plate of five cookies.  It turned out that a little taste of power turned people into pigs: not only did the “bosses” tend to take a second cookie, they also displayed other symptoms of “disinhibited eating,” chewing with their mouths open and scattering crumbs.

The “cookie experiment” is just one study from Keltner’s fifteen years of studying power. Keltner (quoted in Sutton’s book) summarizes what he discovered about the potential hazards of power in graphic and dramatic terms:

People with power tend to behave like patients who have damaged their brain’s front orbitofrontal lobes … a condition that seems to cause overly impulsive and insensitive behavior. Thus, the experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and socially appropriate behavior.

Power, Sutton explains, doesn’t affect everyone the same way because of course “there are empathetic and civilized bosses.”  But power can poison our ability to see the world through other’s eyes if we are not careful.  “There is ample evidence,” Sutton writes, “that power turns people into insensitive jerks.”

Few people have more direct power over others than teachers. Like a boss with plenty of reports, teachers observe, direct, evaluate, reward and punish students.  And like good bosses, teachers need to be vigilant to ensure they don’t let power poison their perceptions.

Thus one important task of all teachers, whether in kindergarten or college, is to avoid Power Poisoning.

There is much we can do to fight Power Poisoning, but the most important strategy may simply be to go out of our way to deeply understand how our students are experiencing our class and our school.

We can deepen our empathy for students by creating time for one-to-one conversations with students, by asking kids to do assessments of their feelings and not just their learning, or simply by taking the time to carefully observe our students to try and sense exactly how they are experiencing school.

We can also deepen our understanding of our students by taking classes that we find challenging (I gained a deeper insight into learning while having a significantly frustrating time understanding instruction in a class on how to use my little digital camera, for example). We can also learn a lot about our students by sitting in other teachers’ classes, if they don’t mind, so we can carefully watch how students experience school.

The simplest way to better understand our students might be to take a moment each day to focus on one student in every class and ask, “how is she or he is feeling about this learning experience right now?”

Few things are more damaging to learning than the power tripping that occurs when teachers let power poison their perceptions and limit their empathy.  And few things are more nourishing to learning than teachers who clearly understand how students feel. Empathy can be like miracle-gro for kids.

We can avoid Power Poisoning by walking a mile in our kids’ shoes. When we do so, my guess is we will find that our better understanding of our students often empowers them to be more open to learning.