Challenge and Mindset

It is that magical time of year, when educators and students are starting a brand new school year.  It has been 14 years since I prepared a classroom for the first day of school and this is the 5th year that I have not been leading in a school as we prepare for the first day.  The last 4 years I have not been able to drive by a school during the first week of school without wiping tears from my eyes and wondering how I ventured so far from the classroom- teaching children- which was my unwavering dream from the age of 8.  This year will be different- no tears or feeling sorry for myself.  I now have a strong vision for why I am in this space and how it fits into my dream.  More importantly, thanks to  friends and mentors who reminded me that I should not be standing in front of educators talking about instructional practices that I have not personally tried, failed, refined and found success with a variety of students in a variety of settings, I WILL be in classrooms with students this year.  (Also thanks to friends who will let me in their classrooms and will share their students with me.)

My focus when I am in classrooms will be inspired and informed by two opportunities that are currently contributing to a significant change in my professional path.  The first is an extraordinary opportunity that I have been blessed with to see Carol Dweck and James Nottingham on their Mindset Conference tour in September.  The second is the influence, guidance, friendship, and mentoring I have received as a result of my association with Challenging Learning (Challenging Learning USA).  I have been a believer and fan of Challenging Learning for a long time, but I now have an even better understanding of the intentionality and authenticity that makes their work and their company so effective.

I am going to be intentional about two things- Challenge and Mindset, and I am going to be authentic by practicing both with students and engaging in dialogue with teachers about how they incorporate them into their classroom culture.  At a time when educators are feeling overwhelmed by so many initiatives, improvement plans, and change programs, I invite my educator friends to join me in focusing on just two words-challenge and mindset.  We can do this by filtering all of our instructional and assessment plans through two questions :  Am I challenging ALL students?  and Am I modeling and encouraging a growth mindset?

Am I challenging ALL students?  As you plan your units, activities, and daily lessons, focus less on content coverage and more on the idea of challenging the students.  Once you have a true culture of challenge, covering the content is easy.  Hold all students to high standards and expect all students to engage in challenging activities.  Obviously students all need different levels of support along the way, but they can all engage in the challenge and achieve at high levels.  Regularly introduce concepts that encourage cognitive conflict and avoid swooping in to save them at the first sign of struggle.  Instead, encourage and support their struggle without offering the solution.  You will be amazed at how much content they will learn on their own once they achieve that EUREKA moment.  When questioning students, think carefully about whether your response to their questioning is ending the learning process or whether it is challenging them to continue their thinking.  Challenge yourself to respond to their responses with more questions rather than accepting the answer and moving on.  Plan your lessons so that you are talking less and are, instead, engaging the students in dialogue.  True dialogue will help them build their efficacy through their collaborative efforts to construct understanding and form their own judgments and inferences.  (References to The Learning Challenge, Challenging Learning through Dialogue and a book coming out soon- Challenging Learning Through Questioning)

Am I modeling and encouraging a growth mindset?  There has been a lot of focus on growth mindset, especially in recent years.  Unfortunately, although there have been great intentions, much of the work around growth mindset had been slightly misguided.  Growth mindset cannot be an additional "subject" that is taught in class and it cannot be achieved by simply changing the phrases that we use to praise student work.  Shifting mindsets is more about creating a different culture by evaluating how we instruct, thinking about the messages we send about expectations for success, and modeling growth mindset behaviors every day.  If you are focused on challenging all students, you are already on your way to modeling and encouraging a growth mindset.  In her book, Mindset:  Changing the way you think to fulfill your potential, Carol Dweck discusses how people with a growth mindset seek and thrive on challenge.  She shares stories of people like Mia Hamm and Patricia Miranda who took on physical challenges in order to succeed athletically and Christopher Reeve who challenged himself in recovery from a severed spinal cord to do things the doctors told him he would never do.  On the other hand, she shares that people with a fixed mindset thrive on the "sure thing" and shut down when challenged.  If we can challenge all students in a non-threatening environment, we can  help all students to thrive on challenge rather than the "sure thing".  Dweck does acknowledge the difficulty in shifting mindsets and talks about the journey to a true mindset and how it takes time and effort to achieve it.  In their book, Challenging Mindset, James Nottingham and Bosse Larsson build on Carol Dweck's famous phrase, "The Power of Yet" from her Ted Talk in 2014 by introducing YETIs that can be used to help students on their journey to a growth mindset.  The Y in YETI is for you, and it encourages students to focus inward on whether they are open to learning, determined to improve, and willing to have a go at improving.  The E stands for evaluate and prompts students to evaluate their progress towards the learning goal.  The T is for setting targets that will help with improvement and deeper learning.  The I stands for improve and involves selecting a strategy that will effectively support movement towards the target.  There are YETIs for older and younger students for a variety of concepts in which students may need support in reaching their goal. With the use of strategies like the YETI and a focus on mistakes as not only learning opportunities, but the only way to really enhance learning, we can help students (and ourselves) to make the shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, or for those who already have a growth mindset, we can continue to feed it!

As we think about challenging all students and modeling and encouraging growth mindset, it helps to have a vision for what our classroom would look if we say yes to the two questions I have posed above.  For me, that vision can be formed by thinking about how students would respond to the following questions on a survey:

• Does your teacher believe that you can solve challenging problems on your own?
• What does your teacher value?

My vision includes students who say yes to the first question and  who answer the second question with words and phrases like:  students, learning, risk taking, growth, resiliency, student voice, learning from mistakes, student choice, self-efficacy.... 

Change one thing

As all of our educators head back to school for a new year, I am a little envious of the teachers who will be standing in front of a new group of learners over the next couple of weeks.  I miss teaching students every day and I especially miss the excitement that comes with a brand new year.  Students will walk into new classrooms, with a new teacher, a new set of classmates, ready to unpack new school supplies.  What will not be new to many of them is the anxiety that resides just below the surface and is fed by questions like:  Will my teacher understand me?  Will I have any friends?  Will I get the help/challenge that I need?  Will there be adults who care about me and accept me for who I am?  Something else that will not be new is the knowledge that things WILL be different this year than last.  The curriculum content will change, the teacher's expectations will be different, and classroom procedures will vary from past years.  Amazingly, young learners do not typically struggle with this part.  They are amazingly resilient and adaptable to change.  Especially if they are well supported and cared for.

I am completely immersed in my passion and efforts to support change in our schools that will benefit our learners.  I will not re-hash what I have already shared in my blogs about the documented need and urgency for change, but suffice it to say, our children need us, as educators, to shift our practices.  I have been disheartened in the last few weeks to witness multiple occasions where high quality and well informed efforts to support and inform change have been thwarted or adjusted because they do not align with the "American market".  I find this to be frustrating, embarrassing, and discouraging.  I have great faith in our educators and I am certain that our schools are brimming with talented, motivated teachers who are very capable of making the same changes that are being made in other parts of the world.  Rather than making changes to high quality change efforts to fit the "American market", I will continue to challenge our educators to create a new culture where we are as resilient and adaptable to change as the students who enter our classrooms.  Like the students, though, it must be done with support and care from the system.

I challenge our schools and districts to embrace ONE substantial change this year that is focused on learning rather than just a cursory response to student achievement data.  Maybe it is a focus on process over content, it could be a shift to competency based practices, it could be a commitment to challenge students to lead their own learning, or perhaps it is the integration of academic subject areas.  Work collaboratively and set aside your other initiatives long enough to really figure out what supports, steps, resources, etc... are needed to truly make this ONE change.  I am not talking surface level, check-the-box-and-move-on kind of change.  I mean real change that looks and feels different, infiltrates the entire system and has a measurable impact on student learning that is not only visible, but also long-lasting.

We must move beyond doing what we have always done and we must stop limiting our vision for change by the current structures and paradigms that we hold so dear.  We are preparing students for a future that we cannot even fathom.  It is difficult to justify educating them in a setting that has changed little in the last 100 years.

We can do better

I am going to pick up where I left off in my last post, when I shared the statistics from Jenkins' Loss of Enthusiasm for School Curve and I said I wasn't okay with just over 1/3 of our high school freshman still loving school.  Well, today in the car, my 16 year old daughter said to me, completely out of the blue, "I don't want school to start up again.  I just don't like it.  It's way longer than it should be for what I get out of it." and then she looked at me with a very sad and distraught face.  She goes to a good school, she does not get in trouble,  she knows the value of an education, she wants to go to college, and it is not hard for her.  She shouldn't feel this way.  My heart broke a little today as it does every day when she tells me how much she doesn't like going to school.  What makes it harder is that I know that many other children are uttering the same phrase, and that many of them have even more reason to say it.  Some of them do not have a nice school to go to, and some of them find school very difficult because it is not welcoming to them or it is not equipped for them.  I know we can do better.

I really started to believe this about a year ago.  Last July (2018), I experienced my first Annual Visible Learning Conference in Chicago.  Despite the fact that I had already read much of the work of Hattie, Nottingham, and Fisher & Frey, hearing them share how their ideas have been applied in schools and classrooms around the world was impactful for me and left me energized and excited.  I was fortunate to join John Hattie, his son Kyle, and Sarah Martin for the Lunch and Learn where they talked about Stonefields School in New Zealand and how the Visible Learning practices are embedded in everything that they do.  I came back from the conference with big dreams of opening a brand new school for our region built on the practices that I had been so excited to hear about at the AVL.  I shared this idea with my boss and he didn't say no.  This was a big deal to me because I have always been a dreamer, but had often been met with reasons why my ideas would not work.  No money, the parents won't understand it, the community won't support it, our kids can't do that, there is no time....  This time what I heard was that I needed to find other models, figure out funding options, decide what my vision is, and start talking to people.

Fast forward one year.  I now know for certain that we can do better because there are places all over the world where educational communities have worked together to be innovative and brave as they create schools that do not look like what we have always had.  And it is working!  Stonefields School in New Zealand, is one example.  They have grown from 50 to 600 in their first 8 years and they have remained innovative and learner centered and have been very successful.  This year at the AVL, Ka'Imiloa Elementary School in Hawaii was honored as a Visible Learning School.  They had a complete transformation in their culture as a result of a community commitment to Visible Learning.  Highweek Primary School in Newton Abbot, UK has worked with Challenging Learning since 2016 and has already seen significant changes in student and staff mindsets and they have seen all members of their learning community join in their efforts to make learning a priority.  Michael Fullan introduces deep learning in his books Deep Learning: Engage the World Change the World and Indelible Leadership and he discusses the successes of  New Pedagogies for Deep Learning (NPDL) Partnership which includes hundreds of schools engaging in systemic change.  I could keep going, because there are a lot of schools making significant changes in response to the research.   They are making shifts in their schools to more closely match the flexible learning needs of all students in the 21st century.  There are schools where achievement gaps have almost disappeared, where dropout rates have plummeted, where all children seek challenges because they want to learn, and where community involvement is constant and effective.  Clearly, we CAN do better.

Robert F. Kennedy once said- "Every time we turn our heads the other way when we see the law flouted, when we tolerate what we know to be wrong, when we close our eyes and ears to the corrupt because we are too busy or too frightened, when we fail to speak and speak out, we strike a blow against freedom, decency and justice."  At this point, at least for myself, I do not believe that I can continue to close my eyes and ears.  I know that we can do better, and therefore to do nothing is to tolerate what I know is wrong.  I am absolutely frightened about this next part of my journey, but there are great models out there, I know where to find sound research, and I also know that I have met and continue to meet a lot of brilliant people who will have ideas that will build on my own.  One thing I have learned in the last year is that I am definitely not alone on this journey.  And my motivation?  It is, and will always be, all children.   However, there will be this constant echo in my head that will keep me fighting... "I don't want school to start again.  I just don't like it."

Schools are for learning and learners- PERIOD

Anyone who knows me knows that I am passionate about finding ways to remove any of the static that causes our focus on learning and learners to be fuzzy or unclear. I know that we need to be engaged in the hard work of change in education and I am dedicated to doing my part. I had yet another amazing experience at the Annual Visible Learning Conference where I gathered many nuggets of information that had already set the gears in my mind into overdrive. Then I read this article from Alfie Kohn and started putting some of the pieces together. I especially loved the last line- "Everyone may not get there, but at least in theory all of us could." In the article, he talks about how standardized tests and comparative grades create rankings that make it impossible for all students to experience success because someone always has to be failing. His point is well made and I strongly encourage educators to read the article.

If we believe that everyone is entitled to an education, and if we truly want all children to have a shot at being successful in this world, we cannot continue to let the classroom be a place of such intense competition. There will always be playing fields, courts, pools, concert halls, chess tables, etc... where we can foster and encourage competition for those children who crave it, but education should be for ALL children in ALL contexts.

There is no question that rankings and that aura of competition impact the performance of students. Very early in their learning, students become aware of their "position" in relation to their peers and the subsequent expectations of their teachers and they perform accordingly. During a session on feedback, Shirley Clarke shared that 88% of 4 year olds who are placed in an ability group remain in that group throughout their schooling. During his keynote address at the AVL Conference, John Hattie shared a number of differences that had been noted in the classrooms of teachers with high expectations of students verses teachers with low expectations. Teachers with low expectations put students in ability groups and develop different activities for each group, whereas teachers with high expectations work with all students and expect them to do the same work, but they realize they may need different levels of support and different amounts of time. The children who are placed in ability groups and who are given easier assignments will never be pushed to perform beyond that level. They will meet the low expectations held by their teacher. On the other hand, the students who are given the time and support needed to complete the work will live up to the high expectations of their teacher.

The good news here, is that there is a lot of great information out there to guide our work. John Hattie's meta-analysis is an amazing collection of evidence about which variables in education can have the greatest effect and many other education researchers have complimented his work by clarifying how and when these variables do have the greatest positive impact on student learning. Of all variables, he found that the average effect size was .40 which is known as the "hinge point" point or the growth per year. We know that collective teacher efficacy, with an effect size of 1.39 can have a tremendous impact. However, it is important to read Jenni Donohoo and Peter DeWitt"s work related collective teacher efficacy and collaborative leadership and Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan's work on Professional Capital to truly understand how collective teacher efficacy can be leveraged.

One of the variables that I see as a potential game changer and that was the topic for a lot of sessions, is feedback. It only has an effect size of .66, but many believe it could be much higher if the feedback is used effectively. James Nottingham, in his session on feedback, pointed out that 1/3 of all studies on feedback showed a negative impact on learning. He emphasized the importance of the timing of feedback, specifically that feedback should not be given until after the teacher and students have agreed on the criteria. Shirley Clarke also talked about the importance of co-creating and communicating learning intentions and success criteria in order to provide effective feedback. Similarly, when Hattie shared the differences between teachers with low and high expectations, he noted that teachers with low expectations focus on activities and behaviors and communicate the details of the activities to be completed, whereas the teacher with high expectations focuses on learning and communicates learning intentions and success criteria.

The 2007 publication of The Hidden Lives of Learners, which documented the extensive observational research of Graham Nuthall, uncovered important information that can be used to inform the effective use of feedback. He found that in the classroom, 80% of the feedback that students receive during the day comes from their peers and that 80% of that is inaccurate. Knowing this, it is important to teach students to accurately offer and reflectively process feedback. You can find excellent strategies and guidance for for creating this culture in the classroom in James and Jill Nottingham's book Challenging Learning Through Feedback, or Visible Learning: Feedback (Vol. 2) by John Hattie and Shirley Clarke.

I do not think many of us need motivation to lead this charge of change in education because we see and hear evidence of the need every day. However I want to end with a statistic that has haunted me since seeing it during John Hattie's keynote. He shared this graphic which captures the data Lee Jenkins collected when asking 3,000 teachers the following questions: “What grade level do you teach?” and “What percent of your students love school?”. It shows that from kindergarten to grade 9, student enthusiasm for school drops from 95% to 37%. I don't know about you, but I am not okay knowing that just over a third of our students still love school by the time they start high school.

Understood or Accepted?

As part of a reflection on Father's Day, my dad sent a message to my sister and me late Sunday night (well technically it was early Monday morning since it was after midnight, which is typical for him) telling us what he thought to be the best thing about being a dad.  In his message, he told us about an exercise he used to complete with his students where he would ask them if they could only choose one, would they choose to be understood or accepted.  He went on to share that, while most started out by saying that they would choose to be understood, the majority ended up changing their mind after a few strategic questions.  He asked them if they thought that any white American can truly understand what it is like to be a black person in America or if any black American can truly understand what it is like to be a white person in America.  He proceeded to tell them that he had two daughters and asked if he could truly understand what it is like for his daughters to face the problems and challenges in their lives that are shaped, in any way, by their sex.  His final rhetorical question was this:  "Do you think it's possible for a person who is not the same race as another to accept that person if he/she does not understand that person's life experience, and do you think that a father can accept his daughters even if he does not fully understand what it is like to grow up female?"

Our classrooms are extremely diverse and are made up of students who come from very different backgrounds with different needs, strengths, dreams, perspectives, likes, dislikes, personalities.... just DIFFERENT.  Our teachers cannot possibly understand everything about every child.  The children cannot possibly understand everything about their teacher or about one another.  However they can certainly make the choice to accept one another.  I was struck by the words and phrases that I found in the Merriam-Webster definition of accept:   receive willingly; give admittance or approval to; regard as proper, normal; to recognize as true: BELIEVE; make a favorable response to.  Think about these words and phrases and then imagine what would happen in classrooms if every teacher truly accepted every student, if every student truly accepted every teacher and if every student truly accepted every other student.  I am now thinking of the John Lennon's song Imagine and I really want to sing, but I am not at all good, so I will refrain.

Have you ever watched really young children playing in the park?  They often have very few inhibitions with one another.  They do not notice that children are different from themselves.  They do not seem to care about gender, size, socioeconomic status, disabilities, hair color, clothing choices, or even language.  They accept everyone around them and just want to play.  The lack of acceptance and the detection of differences is something that is learned over time through society, family, school, and various forms of media.  This is good news!  We know that universal acceptance is a skill that our children and adults have, at one time, possessed. 

I generally think of myself as an accepting person, but I am pretty certain that I was guilty a time or two (or twenty) during my teaching years of putting too much energy into trying to understand a child when I would have been better off to just accept him or her as they were.  It happens, and it will happen.  In fact, sometimes it needs to happen because there may be something that we really do need to understand about a child in order to help him or her.  For the most part, however, I enjoy thinking about classrooms where we just accept children for who they are while creating learning opportunities that can be accessed by all of them.  And then if we create opportunities for them to truly engage in dialogue about complex topics, they will actually learn a lot about one another as they learn together!  They will begin to have some understanding AND acceptance! 

Real World

"We need to prepare them for the real world"  This is a response that many of us have uttered when explaining why we do some of the things that we do in the classroom, or why some of our policies exist.  There are certainly aspects of this statement that ring true.  Educators do, in fact, play a role in preparing students to function effectively as they navigate through life.  However, what now gives me pause, and where my thinking has changed as a result of much reflection, is this:  what exactly IS our perception of the real world and are our so called "life preparing" policies really serving that purpose?

Let me first address the complexity of the "real world", because one thing I have learned in my years as an educator is that many of our students face a reality that I can not even imagine.  In fact, some students live a reality every day that I am not sure I would even survive.  The real world for a 4th grader who was once sent to my office for fighting at recess included a $20 bill in his back pocket wrapped around a grocery list that included well more than $20 worth of food items which he was responsible for buying after school if he had any hope of feeding his brothers and himself that night.  And that sweet blonde five year old with a shy smile who gave me a hug every day, but could turn violent and out of control at any moment?  Part of his real world includes a memory of men with guns coming into his trailer at night while he hid under a blanket.  We must be careful about making assumptions regarding what we may think we know about what the real world looks like for our children.  This may involve either shifting or abandoning some of our "life preparing" policies.

I believe our true intention is to enact policies that will prepare students to be responsible in their future jobs.  For example, when we penalize students for late work by giving them a zero or reducing their grade, we are preparing them to be responsible so that they will complete work on time in their jobs.  This works fantastically for the students who are ALREADY conscientious, and who are concerned about having their grade lowered because of late work.  For students who are not conscientious and not concerned about their grade being lowered, the result is often an opportunity for them to avoid doing the work altogether.  We definitely want to teach our students the responsibility to complete their work on time, but first we must get them to COMPLETE THE WORK.  Some schools have begun to build time into their weekly schedules for students to attend required extra work sessions (with support) where they complete work that has not been turned in.  In many cases, they get full credit for the work because the school is placing value on the student completing the work.  The consequence is being held accountable to spend the extra time at school to complete the work rather than the consequence being the grade.

Re-dos and re-takes are another example of a "life preparing" policy we need to carefully consider.  Only allowing students one opportunity to assess or to complete an assignment is not consistent with the real world.  There are all kinds of opportunities for do-overs in real life...on the ACT,  the MCATs, the Bar Exam, the drivers license test.  It is important to note in each of these cases, it is the highest score, or the passing score that counts.  It is not a combination of scores, nor is there a limitation enforced as a result of the retake.  As Rick Wormeli says in his article, Redos and Retakes Done Right (Educational Leadership, November 2011), a lawyer who passes the bar exam after several attempts is not limited to practicing law one day a week.

I do not know if it falls in "life-preparing", but the concept of averaging scores to come up with one grade is a policy that also does not align with the "real world" for which we are preparing our students.  A salesman who meets his goal to sell 30 cars in a month for the first time does not report the average of his last three months.  A teacher who receives excellent ratings on her final evaluation after working to make improvements to her instructional practices does not want her initial and final evaluations to be averaged.  All milestones achieved in jobs and life are celebrated when they are achieved, they are not averaged with all previous attempts.

I could go on, but I think I have made my point.  As we think about how we structure our policies, really how we structure our schools, if we truly want to prepare students for the "real world", it is important to be honest with ourselves about what that means.  In my real world, I love going to work every day, I collaborate with peers in almost everything that I do.  I talk A LOT during my day, I can listen to music when I need to relax, I have a lot of choice about how I complete my work, I have flexibility in my day, I receive positive feedback from my peers, but most importantly I am supported at home and I come home to a safe place every night.  Seek to know your students' current reality, but also consider the future reality you are preparing them for and question the alignment of your policies.

Don't forget why you are doing this job.

"Everyone who remembers his own education remembers teacher, not methods and techniques.  The teacher is the heart of the educational system."- Sidney Hook

Each and every one of us who chose to become an educator selected this path for a very distinct reason.  I can assure you that it was not the same reason for each of us, nor did this decision occur at the same moment in our growing up journey.  For some it was the influence of an amazing teacher and for others, it was just the pure love of learning.  There are some who started down one path and heard the call of teaching somewhere along that path.  Whatever the reason and whatever the timeline, we decided we loved school enough to make it a life sentence.  We made a conscious decision that we WANTED to go to a school building and spend our days in a classroom for the majority of our life.

In the summer of 2015, ASCD published a bonus digital version of the Educational Leadership magazine, which included a visual summarizing a survey of 20,000 teachers answering the question "Why did you become a teacher?"  The top answers were:  85%- To make a difference in the lives of children, 74% to share their love of learning and teaching, 71% to help students reach their full potential, 66% to be part of those "aha" moments, 50% because a teacher inspired them when they were young.  Educators do this job because they genuinely care about the success of children and because they genuinely love learning.  Let me share a little secret- children learn best in classrooms were they can tell that their teachers genuinely care about them and genuinely love learning.  Let me share a reality- teachers sometimes get so bogged down with compliance factors (see my blog from April 4) that they forget who they really are as an educator and why they do this job.

One year, when I was a principal at an elementary school, we had a lot of change happening all at once- we were shifting to a workshop model in literacy, we were completely changing our evaluation system, we were changing our math resources, and we were shifting our assessment practices.   My very talented and dedicated school family was quite stressed and it was evident.  After seeing an extremely strong, veteran teacher cut off a very rich, engaged discussion with her students because, as she told me, "I was concerned that my mini-lesson had surpassed the required maximum of 15 minutes", I realized that we needed a re-boot.  It was clear that my teachers were putting themselves in a box that I never intended to build.  I sent a survey to all of our parents asking them to think about a favorite memory they had from their elementary school years and something they remember learning in elementary school and how they learned it.  Then I asked them to ask their child to do the same.  I was pleased by the high level of response from our families.   I took joy in reading their memories, then I compiled all of their comments and shared them with my staff.  As you can imagine, the comments were filled with stories about fun and engaging activities, caring teachers, interactive projects, and relationships.  We wrote some of the overarching themes on rocks and put them in jars that we kept in our lounge as a  visual cue that we must remember why we do this job and that, first and foremost, it is important to make school fun for us and for the students.  The constant change was still challenging, but I realized we needed to slow down and that I needed to remind teachers they had "permission" to be themselves and to have fun with and for their students.

I love going into classrooms where the students are engaged, where I can see the excitement of learning, where I hear laughter and see smiles, where I see students willingly engaged in productive struggle, where students groan when the bell rings because it is time to go home.  Adding fun and excitement does not reduce rigor, nor does it mean that you cannot cover content.  In fact, you may find that you cover more content because students are engaged and present!  Why have students read pages and pages of a social studies book and answer questions on a worksheet when you can, instead, immerse them in the content by simulating what they are learning about and become the historical or governmental figures.  There is no need to make copies of math worksheets for students to practice their facts when, instead, they can play games that require them to use their facts in the gameplay.  Rather than giving students a test on potential energy, kinetic energy, centripetal force, centrifugal force, acceleration, deceleration, friction, etc...., you can have them build a model roller coaster and then label and describe how all of the forces and principles of physics make the coaster work.  When teaching students about volume, you don't have to give them an algorithm, you can give them graph paper and scissors and challenge them to build containers to see if they can figure out on their own how to calculate volume.  When reading to kids, it is okay, at times, to just read with joy and enthusiasm without stopping to talk about what they should be thinking, predicting, connecting or synthesizing.   And sometimes....you can just do something because it is fun and you just want to spend time building relationships with your students.

Don't forget why you are doing this job.  Love what you do and love how you are doing it.  Believe in your passion- it will work for the students and they WILL learn.