I am late getting to my weekly reflection. This morning I was administering the SAT and was offline most of the morning - I did not want to post and run. But as is my wont, I often spend at least part of Friday night or Saturday morning reflecting about teaching and related subjects. In part my reflection today is fueled by a book, in part by personal experiences, in part by news about schools and my profession as an educator.
let me start with 7 principles (not mine), then explain a bit more:
- Start where your students are
- Know where your students are going.
- Expect to get your students to their goal.
- Support your students along the way.
- Use feedback to help you and your students get better.
- Focus on quality rather than quantity.
- Never work harder than your students.
Let me repeat the last, for it is key: Never work harder than your students.
I have actually emphasized part of the title of the book fueling at last part of this reflection. It is by Robyn Jackson, a National Board Certified Teacher, administrator and educational consultant in the DC area, in a book published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development titled Never Work Harder than your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching. Jackson argues that one can by following in a disciplined fashion the 7 principles, which she explores in some detail, a true master teacher. Take that for what you will. I do not think, after my years as a classroom teacher and observer of education and policy, that there is any one approach, and I am always somewhat skeptical of attempts to reduce things to checklists and arguments for a supposedly replicable simple model. Thus I came to the book with some skepticism. While some might approach the book in that fashion, let me assure you - before I cease functioning even partially as a book reviewer - that one need not approach the book in that fashion, and there is much of value contained in this slim volume. For example, allow me to simply pull out a few selected quotes that I think are useful:
The master teacher mindset means knowing that having all the answers isn't nearly as important as knowing what questions to ask.
The master teacher mindset means not trhying to teach like anyone else. Instead, you teach in ways that fit your own style.
What made Joe Clark or Jaime Escalante so successful was that they found a way to reach their students by being who they were.
So often, we undermine our goals as teachers because we send students mixed messages about what we want them to learn and why. What we assess and how we assess is different from what it is we really want students to learn.
Raising standards is not the same thing as raising expectations. Holding students accountable for more and more information does not change what we believe about a particular student's ability to master that information.
There is no cause and effect relationship between raising standards and raising expectations. Just because you raise your standards does not mean that you have altered your belief about whether your students will be able to meet your standards . . .Higher standards then may actually lower expectations.
Let me end my selections from the book with a quotation the author offers from Jerome Bruner:
True learning is figuring out how to use what you already know in order to go beyond what you already think.
I am at an odd point in my school year. I have actually completed all the instruction necessary to "cover" the material on which my two groups of students will be tested. Monday my AP students will sit for their AP exam. Tomorrow I will spend 3-4 hours with them in a final skull session, answering question they cannot answer for one another, pointing them at the crate of materials I will bring to the house of the student who has volunteered to host it, trying to help them feel confident but not over confident. Yesterday one of my best students, for whom the only question is whether she scores a maximum 5 or "only" a 4, confided in me that she can get serious anxiety attacks and is so concerned about getting a 5 that she felt she might be setting herself up for a major attack. I tried to help talk her down, but am not sure I was helpful.
There are so many resources to which the students can turn that some will be tempted to keep cramming until close to midnight, even though they have to be at school no later than 7:30 on Monday morning (I have told them to aim for 7:15 or earlier). The purpose of the skull session is that when they leave, they have a maximum of 2-3 hours more in which they are llowed to think about the test, but then I want them to stop studying and relax, enjoy dinner, perhaps play a game or chat with a friend (not about the exam) or watch a movie or listen to music. Most of them are 10th graders, and this will be their first AP test. As a teacher I have to prepare them, to motivate them, but also sometimes I have to help walk them back from the precipice of overdoing, of panic. But some want so much to do well for me, which is nice, but which is not as important as the other things they will have learned during the course of the year.
All of my students will sit for a state mandated test on May 20th. My AP students will have no trouble with it, and we will have sufficient time in the two weeks plus to prepare. For my non-AP students, we have already started to review, but I cannot do nothing but traditional review and practice tests, so we have competitions, games, in which we get to review the information but also have some fun.
And on Friday we will all step away from test preparation to look at examples of the kinds of final projects (optional for the seniors but due for them on May 10) which my non-seniors will complete after the state test. They have to do at least 4 hours of work (most do much more), they cannot do a paper or an essay, and they have to show me that they have learned something. I also tell them to have fun. This is perhaps the most enjoyable part of the year: I get poems, videos, games, mobiles, dioramas, montages, cartoons, comic books, songs . . . and some show amazing insight. . .
Never work harder than your students - working hard is not necessarily working smart. But I do work hard, and I challenge my students to do the same. Which is why at some point I have to step back and let them go, to see what they can do.
Focus on quality rather than quantity - I often give a lot of extra credit on these final projects, because if a student can give me one truly insightful piece of work should not that matter more than perhaps a series of multiple choice questions that sample all of the possible items on which I could assess the student's grasp of facts and concepts? And if I want my students to be able to do that, I have to give them opportunities along the way, including the opportunity to fall flat on their faces, but then pick themselves up, figure out why they fell, and then fix it.
Which leads me to perhaps the most important thing I have learned in this my 15th year in a public school classroom. I want students to take intellectual risks. Sometimes they are going to fail. If I am going to encourage them to take those risks, I cannot punish them when they are not successful, provided that they are willing to learn and correct what was wrong.
Which means I have to find ways next year to allow students to redo work, including perhaps some tests, not merely to raise their averages (although if I want them to take risks, I have to hold them harmless if they are willing to push themselves and learn from the experience), but something more important: to help them develop metacognitive skills, the ability to monitor and then self correct their own learning, and thereby begin to become independent of what I as a teacher can do for them.
I am now partway through a series of events where I am being honored for my teaching, for which I am receiving a prestigious award. I am usually asked to make some remarks. I am finding the award is challenging me to live up to it, that is, rather than to rest on accolades given for work already done to attempt to be as worthy as possible for what the award represents.
Perhaps on Monday my AP students will, when they examine the four Free Response Questions, discover that they were well prepared for all four. That happened last year. I was lucky. I cannot as a teacher cover every possible topic, but I had covered enough that the students felt comfortable. Perhaps this year they will find they really don't know a lot about two of the questions. I have already told them that will be on me, to relax, and to do the best they can, because perhaps I will not be alone as a teacher in failing to prepare them for those questions: last year on one free response question with a rubric score of six points the mean score was less than 1.9, and yet, as I reminded my students, 55% of those who sat for the test got an overall passing grade of 3. We will not be able to discuss the test until Thursday, and then we will, if they want to.
I am a teacher. That does not mean that I peel back skulls and pour in knowledge. To some degree I frustrate them because I will often answer a questions with a further question, to try to help them take ownership, to learn to operate without turning to me as the expert. And when the answer can come from another student, that is even more useful, for it removes the focus from being on me as resident expert and helps students learn that learning often has an important social component, that our knowledge is not necessarily something with which we compete but with which we share, for our mutual benefit.
Something else I have realized in this my 15th year. I have always been reflective, long before I became a teacher, thus it easily became a part of my teaching practice. What I have to do as a teacher is to provide the space for my students to become reflective learners: Use feedback to help you and your students get better. Their reflections can give me the feedback to be a better teacher for them. As a teacher, I may be older and start with more content knowledge, but the learning should be a shared experience - I can, should, and usually do, learn as much from them as they do from me. As important as the content knowledge may be, the learning about one's own learning, the developing the ability to reflect and to share the results of that reflection, may be just as important.
It is nice to be given an award as an outstanding teacher. But that is insufficient. I acknowledge that I am a very good teacher most of the time. I also know that I can never afford to sit back, that there are more things to learn, most of all about my students, by listening to them, by giving them the space and the safety to explore. Maybe if I can continue to do that, I can become a better teacher, and a better person.
And guess what, since it is a shared process, since I will be encouraging, challenging and trusting them, I can also abide by the 7th principle: Never work harder than your students. Except it is not a competition. Ultimately it is a shared journey. And as they will discover when they get fully involved in those final "fun" projects, when you are working at a task that fully engages you, it is not a question of how hard one is working. It is like a pilgrimage - the destination is important, but so is the journey. As T. S. Eliot says in another context, but with words I view as relevant here:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
And because I love this poem, allow me to end with the rest of that final stanza:
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Peace.