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Over the past three decades, I have taught in several states and two foreign countries, in private as well as public schools. I have taught 4th grade through adult, special needs as well as advanced placement. I have tutored privately and taught classes of forty or more. I have mentored teachers and led departments. Meanwhile, I have pursued my academic fascinations, earning various degrees and National Board certification. In my varied experience I have had constantly to remake myself as a teacher, to develop methods to suit context. My love for literature and my passion to embody text led me to a second career as a professional actor. I missed teaching and returned; now my students benefit both from my deep connection to the living potential of words, and from my honed craft in sharing it. My central goal, in class and out, is to develop community, to build the kind of positive relationships that facilitate learning.
I have learned, for instance, not to grade individual pieces of writing. I use a portfolio system to mentor students in their process of writing. Over the course of a semester, students get intense, practical, personal feedback, both from peers and from me; they use that feedback to revise. The notes I write to students are tailored individually to the issues they face, and the direct instruction I provide in class arises from this feedback. Most importantly, we devote our energy and focus to the refinement of ideas and expression, not to grades.
In my instruction related to reading, I design activities to engender open-ended, creative thought. Naturally, my theatrical background lends itself to an experiential kind of classroom. Together, we converse and role-play and write and think about our lives and our world, and whatever we’re reading becomes significant, personal, valuable: a path to deeper awareness. We often look at books in dialectic with one another: King Lear with As You Like it, for instance, Our Town with The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Heart of Darkness with Siddhartha. Students observe how one book refracts the concerns of another, and end up reflecting more deeply on both.
Students appreciate being responsible for, and valued for, their individual insights in class; this creates the kind of community among us which makes learning natural, fun, inevitable. I commit daily to the integrity of my relationships with my students: I work hard to create an atmosphere of trust, honesty, and safety.
It leads to comfortable, eager collaboration on extracurricular projects as well. In Montrose I designed and ran a process-oriented social issues theater program, where students used art to facilitate community dialogue. We toured Colorado and conducted an exchange with a school in Alaska. At Chaparral, I started a fencing club, created a writing center, advised the G.S.A., played ultimate Frisbee with students, and performed and attended plays with them. In Ouray I take a dozen kids each fall for a weekend of theater in Denver, seeing plays and then meeting the artists. All of these projects grow out of passions and concerns my students and I have shared, and in pursuing them with joy, we learn and grow together.
John Kissingford, April 2020
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