Category: pedagogy

Be Willing to Change the Game

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About a year ago, I pasted a quote into Evernote by Chris Lehmann (probably from Educon 2011):

If we want our students to grow, we must do that ourselves. This weekend we believe differently. All of us have a stake in the game. Solutions must include us (and our students). We cannot solve problems by doing things TO students.

This morning, as I bumped into the quote again, I was reminded of a teacher I met this past weekend. We were discussing change and what kind of “change agents” we want to be. He paused, turned his head slightly, eyes widening: “I just realized,” he said. “I ask my students to take risks all the time….and yet I don’t put myself out there at all.”

He was referring to sharing and working online, being willing to reach out to others to learn and grow. He’d been satisfied, thus far, to be the director who told his students what to do without doing the work himself. He looked as if he had walked into a strange, new place with no idea how he had arrived.

I smiled. I’ve seen that look before. And it can be both scary and exciting.

During our session, this teacher had shared some amazing insights, and I was eager to find his space place online to learn more.

“I don’t have a space online,” he’d said. “But I guess that needs to change.”

We must model the kind of learning we want from our students. And we must also be willing to learn from them as they explore their interests and passions.

First, we must believe in the change. And then we live the belief.

This seems pretty simple, doesn’t it?

 

 

Letting Go

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The phrase “letting go” bounces around in my head constantly and has for years. I first realized the importance of our ability to remain detached when I read William Glasser’s  Choice Theory back in the late ‘90s. For so many reasons and in so many ways, letting go simplifies our lives. But as much as I believe in the concept, it’s tough. Human nature is such that we believe we can mold people into who we want them to be. As teachers, we try criticizing, blaming, managing–none of this really works.
Glasser has ten axioms, but this single phrase says it all: The only person whose behavior we can control is our own.
Nancy Buck, who writes a blog on the Glasser site, says:
Everything that we do from birth until death is an attempt to successfully and effectively meet our needs for safety, love, power, fun, and freedom. Although we are driven to meet these needs, we do not know how to meet them responsibly – the ability to meet our needs in ways that don’t interfere with other people’s ability to meet their needs.
Glasser believes our most important “need” is for love and acceptance. That if teachers could shift their thinking in this direction, those constant battles for control would end. I’m not sure I agree with his stance on grades (eliminating all grades but A and B). I know why he proposes this, but I believe that moving away from traditional grades completely serves us better.
Despite a few other concerns with this approach, the idea of letting go appeals to me. We can spend our lives trying to change people, but in reality, we can only change our own behavior. And by letting go, we actually empower our students to take charge of their own learning, take steps to manage their own lives.
Isn’t that what we want for all of them?

 

The Poet Speaks

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What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. T.S. Elliot, Little Gidding

As I sat in church Sunday, listening to the Homily on beginnings and endings and the coming of Advent, I thought, too, about teaching. Our school years certainly begin and end, giving us closure on one episode and an ability to re-do or start again. But I also thought about how difficult this shift in thinking about teaching and learning is for some. Letting go of traditional beliefs means an end to what we know, what is comfortable, and what made sense in our past.

As Carol Dweck says, people hold onto a mindset for a reason. At some point in their past it made sense in forming who they were and who they wanted to be. When we ask people to shift their mindsets about how people learn and what they should do in the classroom, that “end” can be difficult, almost painful. As Dweck says, it’s like letting go of yourself.

But beginnings can also hopeful if we approach them well. We need to look for examples of what is working, using those positive models to frame reasons for change. As the Heaths said in Switch: Knowledge alone doesn’t change behavior. “To create and sustain change, you’ve got to act more like a coach and less like a scorekeeper. You’ve got to embrace a growth mindset and instill it in your team.”

Authentic Learning Works

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How Liveblogging is Changing Journalism

Reading this article about Amir Abo-Shaeer, the recent MacArthur award winner, took me back a few years. Amir has established an experienced-based learning program for his students.  Fast Company reports he runs the engineering Academy “like a business.”

“Students help write grants; they do PR, and they develop our website.” He calls his approach project-based learning and says the students learn both soft skills and business skills so they are ready “to join the world of work.”

“We are going to be left behind if we don’t see a paradigm shift,” says Abo-Shaeer. He therefore wants to see his project-based learning applied to all subjects and taught across the United States in order to meet the demands of “students as consumers of education.”

I applaud Amir for his work and insight into how students learn best– and what we can accomplish when we create the right design for learning.

Years ago, I taught high school journalism along with the standard English courses. Whenever I stopped to think about the difference in the two courses, I was struck with how much the journalism students gained from their real-life work. They wrote, published (yes, even back in the 1980s we used a Mac and published our newspaper at the local printer), and sold advertising. Working in teams, they learned to lead, collaborate, and share. We had real deadlines, and we stuck to them.

In contrast, my English classes, for the most part, sat in rows quietly, discussing the previous night’s reading or taking a quiz.Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet learned how to transfer what I had designed in my journalism classes to the rest of my day.

The journalism students tended to become better writers than my English students. They also approached their learning eagerly, often spending far more time working on our newspaper than our class guidelines required of them. Students engaged in debate about truth and fairness, they set goals, and they learned communication skills. Each student focused on his or her strength, whether advertising, photography, or writing, and yet, they all learned the skills. Heck we were even blogging back in 2004!

I guess  I am a slow learner because I finally realized I could apply similar principles to my English classes. And, as I’ve written before, much improved  learning came from this approach.

Amir has created a powerful program for his science and engineering students. His philosophy of education resonates with all of us who have worked to create project-based, authentic learning in our classes. And now he has been rewarded fully with a grant to teach other teachers.

This works.

image credit: By digitaljournal.com