Monthly Archives: March 2011

Why?

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Everyone who has children will remember the “why” stage. It starts at around age 2 1/2 and lasts, give or take, 6 months to a year. Everything from the simplest to the most complex gets a “why?”

And then, to our great relief, it stops.

Why?

Well, if you really think about it, it’s because we stopped humoring them with answers or gave them lame explanations or said something stupid like “Because” or “I don’t have time to get into it right now”. Or “I don’t know, stop asking!” And made them feel like their questions weren’t really worth our time or attention.

And that’s when kids start to turn off. Age 3! They’ve just learned to talk and already they’re shutting down. Then, we spend the next twenty years trying to turn them back on again.

We wonder, when we ask our children what they think about something or what they did at school, why they don’t really have an answer for us. Well, we have taught them that we don’t really value what they have to say and don’t really care what’s important to them. So why should they really bother us with the details?

Then we complain that kids can’t think for themselves and don’t know anything about the real world. Well, how can they if no one will answer their questions?

We complain that they are not engaged and don’t really care about anything. Has anyone stopped to wonder if what we’re teaching them has anything to do with what they’re interested in? Maybe we should have listened when they were asking “why?”

They are now waiting to be spoon fed what we want them to know and we are frustrated when they don’t light up and participate. Again, we have taught them so well not to ask questions that they no longer have the ability to recognize what information they would like to know. They can no longer do any sort of critical thinking on their own because no one ever asked them “Why do you think?” when they were two and asked “Why?”

So now it comes full circle. How do we turn them back on? The better question would be, why do we turn them off in the first place?

So we have two responsibilities. The first is to make sure that children are not turned off. The second is to reverse the notion in children that what they think and question is not valued but celebrated.

How do you turn children back “on” in your classroom?

How are you going to help parents celebrate their children’s curiosity and encourage those parents to seek answers with their children when their children have questions?

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If the sky is so blue, why is it raining?

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That’s how I feel sometimes when I hear and read all of the inspirational talk out there about the future of education. What it needs to be; where we have to go; the life skills that we should be developing in students; what they should be able to achieve; and my favourite “we’re training students for jobs that haven’t even been invented yet”!

But there don’t seem to be any guidelines or tools or rubrics or formulas. I have come to realize that there aren’t going to be any because what we need to teach is ever changing, it is life. Education inspires real life ~ real life inspires education.

So, where does this leave us?

The kids you have in front of you today are different from the kids you had last year or the kids you’ll have next year.  So why are you teaching them the same thing? It’s true, the PLOs haven’t changed but the things that make the PLOs relevant have…hmmm now that’s interesting. The world keeps turning. So look at your PLOs and look at a newspaper. See how you can make what you’re teaching relevant to what’s going on in the world regardless of the age of your students.

Give your students real world problems to solve as they relate to your curriculum. You’ll be surprised what they come up with.

Oh, and one more thing. If you’re having a really good discussion, please don’t say “We have to stop now because it’s time for math!”

Please share how real life inspires education in your classroom so that together we can create some rainbows!

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Help! There’s Broccoli In My Carrot Patch!

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My green thumb came only as a result of the mistakes I made while learning to see things from the plants point of view.

- H. Fred Dale

My passion, other than teaching and learning, is gardening (and learning about gardening). Today I was cleaning up my veggie plot, getting ready for planting the really early stuff like spring greens and checking out the shoots on the garlic bulbs I planted last fall. I started thinking about the cliched metaphors about gardening being like teaching or raising a child, the nuturing, blah, blah, blah…then I really started thinking about it.

When you grow something, like a carrot, you can read about what kind of soil carrots need, you can buy the right kind of fertilizer, ask other gardeners how they get rid of white flies and you learn to grow really good carrots. You can always grow really good carrots. Except sometimes it rains too much or not enough and your carrots aren’t quite as good as usual, but they’re still not bad.

Then one year you have just the right soil mix, add the best fertilizer at just the right time, the weather is perfect and your carrots don’t grow. You can’t figure out what ‘s wrong with your carrots because you did everything just right. Then you realize that the seed packet wasn’t labelled and you planted a handful of strawberries instead. Well, strawberries need different conditions than carrots, so even though you did everything just the way a carrot would want it, it didn’t work for strawberries. You’ve figured out the problem so now you can create a perfect little world for strawberries, the problem is a classroom’s not like that AT ALL!

The first day of school you get a handful of seeds, they’re all different and you don’t know what any of them are. You don’t know what kind of soil they like, how much to water them, when to fertilize them, how much room to give them. You have no idea what they’re going to turn into.

What you find out, as you water and fertilize, is that they all have different needs. What makes one thrive kills another. So what do you do? Do you do what’s best for some and sacrifice the others? As you start figuring out which seedlings are what do you separate them so you can care for each group differently? That seems logical, but experienced gardeners know that even though it hasn’t been proven scientifically, companion planting yields the best produce. Plant tomatoes and basil together and they both taste better. Plant peas and lettuce together and the peas provide the nitrogen that the lettuce needs to grow. Plant marigolds near broccoli and they keep flies away.  But plant beans near garlic and neither do well. Plant small, early yield plants in amongst bigger, slower growing ones and you get more produce in the end.

Given the current political state of education it makes me think that the carrot growers are insisting that they know exactly what the garden needs and so are the broccoli farmers. They both have the studies to back them up. They’re just forgetting that not all vegetables are carrots…or broccoli.

Despite the gardener’s best intentions, Nature will improvise.

~Michael P. Garafalo

and so, I think, should we.

We start off doing what works most of the time and when we see that the shoots are coming up we feel great. Then we notice that some of the shoots aren’t doing as well, so we water them a little more, or a little less, than the others. We add a little fertilizer when things slow down a bit and then we leave things alone for a little while to see what happens. We constantly adjust to what is and we don’t assume that just because something worked last year it will work the same way again. After all, we have a whole different handful of seeds.

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Giving Up Power Without Losing Control

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I have been playing around with this idea lately, both in general classroom management and in creating assignments.

It started with trying some activities that demanded a lot of student input. Of course, I had my own ideas about how I wanted these activities to go (or how I thought they should go) but tried to keep my leading questions and selective listening to a minimum. Not always easy! I’ll admit to having said I’m having a student-led, open-ended discussion when I’m really leading my students to what I want them to get to almost as directly as if I’d just told them myself. Does it make a difference to their learning that they got there somewhat on their own? Maybe.

Here are a few things I’ve learned along the way:

Creative, independent thinking is a learned skill, at least as it applies to classroom assignments and discussions. I know we’ve all heard how preschoolers are geniuses when it comes to lateral, creative thinking, but by the time we’re 8 or 9 years old it has been programmed out of most of us.

Don’t be discouraged if the first few times you expect your students to think for themselves all you get are blank stares. They expect you to have an answer that you are either going to give them or expect them to guess correctly and give you. This is okay. This is the reason you’re reading this blog and thinking about this kind of teaching. With practice they will start thinking again.

My own daughter’s class is reading Charlotte’s Web. My daughter loves Charlotte’s Web. We’ve read the book. We have the movie. Her teacher had given them some very thought provoking questions to answer before they read the book. Questions like, “Can you think of a situation you’ve seen or heard about where animals have been treated unfairly?” or “How would you feel if you told the truth about something and no one believed you because it seemed very unlikely? Have you ever been in this situation?” I was excited that she was being asked to do more than flip through the book to answer questions like “What was the farmer’s wife’s name?” I asked her what she thought of the questions, assuming she would be enthusiastic about being asked for her thoughts and opinions. Her answer, “I hate it. You have to have ideas.”

Hmmm, she’s a “good” student. Is this what our education system is aiming for? More on that momentarily…

Start within your comfort zones.

By this I mean yours and your students’. As you go through these ideas try one at a time. Try them in subjects or types of assignments where you feel confident. For example, if making up new games in PE is something you’ve already tried successfully, expand from there. If your students are confident with their art skills have them be more self-directed in art. As both you and your students become more experienced at you handing over the power to them, expand outward to other areas of your learning environment.

Don’t be discouraged if you falter a bit. We all know what it’s like when you come back from a conference full of new ideas and try them all out in your classroom. None of them really work or they work for awhile and then don’t really work and you get back into your same old rut. This happens when you do too much at once and can’t assimilate it into what is already working with your class. It’s kind of like introducing a new food to a baby. At first they might hate it, but you keep giving it to them, maybe mixed in with foods you know they love. After 3 or 4 tries they stop spitting it out, by the 25th try it’s their favourite food. Baby steps. Trust me.

Focus on learning outcomes rather than information to be disseminated

What do you want them to be able to do at the end of the assignment? What do they need to understand? Focus on that and decide as a group how they are going to get there. You and/or they can fill in the gaps as they go. You won’t always  be able to depend on your lesson plan to tell you how they’ll get from Point A to Point B, but if you’re clear about Point B, they will find a way to get there.

Be more transparent. You will not lose respect or your place as the “expert”.

It’s okay to tell your students, “We need to understand how a plant absorbs nutrients from the soil and uses water and sunlight to survive. How do you want to find this out? How do you want to show that you understand it?”

Involve your students in the whole process from creating the assignment, to the timeline, to the assessment.

Brainstorm what should be assessed in the assignment: writing style, artistic ability, scientific understanding, neatness, etc. How much weight should be given to the different criteria? You may get some silly answers at first, but if the students have to reach a consensus they will be applying critical thinking strategies to weed out the answers that are unrealistic.

I also began applying some of these processes to the rules and routines I had set up in the classroom. I let the students do more things their way. Sometimes their way didn’t work, but then they understood why I had set up a specific routine. E.g. We don’t all sit or lie wherever we want to on the floor because if someone needs to get some supplies they step on people’s hair, fingers, papers. Sometimes their way did work and they were much happier because of the changes we’d made. They felt respected.

As I work my way through this process – and I’m still working through it – I have had a minor epiphany: demanding compliance is just a way of faking engagement. Isn’t that why students are expected to sit quietly, face the teacher, etc. etc.?…because that’s what they would be doing if they were actually interested!!

So…when do you find yourself focussing on the power instead of the learning?

What can you change tomorrow that will make a difference to the power struggle in the room?

What are you willing to “give up” or risk for some amazing rewards?

Please share some examples of how “giving up control” has gained “buy in” in your classroom.

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