Preparing for Classes

Preparing for Classes

The weather has already begun its ramble towards autumn, teachers, professors or whatever label given to describe those who strive to assist others, young and old, towards new skills and understandings, feel energy in their souls even in their bones. The energy combines nervous anticipation with hope for each new student. 

When a teacher looses that sense of energy, darkness has replaced light. The darkness might be from personal loss of commitment or the commitment was never there at all. Darkness can also come from the setting. Is the school or system so dysfunctional that there is no place for light and energy to enter? This is happening in more and more schools and systems in the USA than I have ever witnessed. 

Too many agenda are being run and played in education. This overload started in the 80's when politicians and special interests such as religion and business decided making their goals priorities in school settings was not just acceptable but appropriate. Since neither view is a true part of the teacher student relationship in a free and student centered setting, the base relationship gets warped and drained of prime elements of legitimacy. When the ethos of the messenger - teacher - is weakened, the message suffers. The message of course was to be learning of whatever the student was seeking to acquire. The warped messages now include so many agenda, is it any wonder students cannot find their desires met? 

"What is the purpose of education'" was always a key question in educational and educational philosophy coursers. If a teacher cannot answer that question in a way through which the effort needed has value, then the energy begins to die. 

The answers to improving education are as simple and as difficult as the answer to that fundamental question.

It would seem a truism to say that education and educational systems should make sense. Yet, do they? Does anybody really want them to make sense? Finally, to whom should education and education systems make sense? I like to share with my students in an early field experience student teaching course the idea that for our planning for classes and likewise, I believe for education systems to work, we need to look and think from the students' perspectives. It does not matter if the students are first grade students in an inner city setting that is surrounded by high crime and great poverty or if the students are freshman at a prestigious university. The system and its plans should make sense based upon the students' place in and understanding of the world and education. 

Of course, this can sound simplistic, but it remains that very rarely in my 35 plus years at all levels of education plus nearly as many years as an educational consumer has the system even taken the time to try to explain how it works so an individual will reach specific goals not just universal ones such as "get a degree." If systems did make sense from the student/consumer's perspective, our success rates for achieving schools and successful students would be far better than they are. Why don't systems make sense from the students' views? 

Quite quickly, the answer is that most who are involved in education are so concerned with what they are supposed to be doing or achieving that a very basic question is forgotten. That question is, "What will the student be doing, thinking feeling, and experiencing as I do whatever it is I do." (The question can be rephrased to reflect an institutional approach as opposed to that of one practitioner.) Let's look at an example we should all be able to understand - the classroom teacher. 

If a teacher thinks, plans and teaches from a point of view of "What do I have to do," everything that happens is seen in reaction to what the teacher does. So with the best of intentions and the firm direction of a school district, the teacher decides that he must teach some skill or concept from a sequenced curriculum. The teacher then proceeds, again, with the best of intentions to make plans using his or her knowledge of instructional practices or whatever else you want to call all that we teach teachers about what they should do to be effective teachers. The lesson is constructed. It is presented and the teacher finds himself telling and retelling, teaching and reteaching what the students should do and learn. The teacher is then urged to reflect upon what he or she would do differently to improve the lesson. 

The student is not asked to reflect in a similar manner. Has the teacher been provided with a lens to ask, "What does the student need and want to learn?" "What does the student need to do and think in order to learn that skill or concept?" What will it look like when the student masters the skill or concept?' We have tried to approximate this type of thought with all sorts of statements of behavioral objectives. This practice of objectives stated in terms of student behavior is even fading as misunderstood or inadequately understood statements of standards are becoming the planning loci of teachers, schools and systems. What might be different if the planning started from the learners perspective?

Let's start with that hypothetical first grade student in an inner city school in a high crime and poverty area. If we ask the child what she or he wants to or needs to learn, in some form they would say something about reading, writing, math, and making a living. The answer would not vary from one schoolhouse to another, no matter what baggage is brought from the environment. The question of "Why learn those abilities" is where the divergence would show. So, now we know that the child has some basic concepts of what might happen if school works for them. One could then continue the conversation to learn what reading means to the child instead of trying to tell the child what reading means. A response to this by a child might be. "Understanding the words." With that information, we could then prepare to explain to the child or children that there are a lot of words; but there are a certain few words that seem to show up everywhere. We can then share with the children that in order to reach their goal of reading, we will have to do things to learn those frequent words. We could then also explain that words can be unlocked using tools that help us figure out what the marks on the page mean. The marks on the page have shapes and each shape represents a sound or set of sounds. 

Our second task then will be to learn those marks and the sounds. When those marks are put together, that is when all words are made. So we will have to learn what the marks look and sound like not just by themselves but also when they are with other letters and sounds. Clearly, we go on to develop with the students, tasks that we will have to be able to complete in order for them to do what they want which is to read. This would be one aspect of planning and working from the students perspective. 

Be careful if as an educator, you are saying those wants are a given. My inner-city student teachers were surprised when I had them ask the students they encountered why they wanted to learn to read.  They learned ideas such as being safe, getting my daddy out of jail, stop the shooting or shouting or fighting, or to have enough food.  All students of any age seek power from learning.  Power over or for what is still a critical question that should be examined in a further discussion of student wants. 

Other aspects of planning would be what would the child be doing physically as he or she were practicing and mastering these parts. That planning would take into consideration that the learner is a child not a little adult who acts and performs like a little adult. The planning would be from the eyes of one who understood what holding a pencil and using paper were like for a child. The planning would understand how interesting everything going on in the world is to the child. That would help to shade planning that ensured the type of space both in physical space and in time that a child can comfortably control. How big might each chunk of the task be for an individual child to feel confident and strong enough to work upon and complete the task. Most lessons and plans in early literacy would then begin to be quite brief strings of activities that are molded, repeated and modified until the what the child is doing looks like what we had learned literacy would look like if the child had mastered the skill. 

With such a perspective on the tasks of learning the students and teacher could learn to utilize effective and research based cooperative group learning environments as well as l whole group review, drill and practice. Combing the new perspective of planning from a students' expressed needs and desires the shared responsibilities to each other that are a part of correctly applied cooperative learning work groups, would change the flavor of a classroom from one of constant struggles for control that are the teacher's responsibility to places of effort or work that are the students' responsibility and owned by them because they own the goals of the inquiry as well. 

Instead of what I have suggested above for a very basic area of learning - literacy, teachers/educators have been programmed to believe planning is to have students do activities that when done often enough in a certain pattern should lead most children to be able to read. Of course, if there is one correct way and pattern to learn and master any field beginning with literacy, everyone would be doing it and nearly all would be successful. However, just in the field of literacy, I have found no such agreement or holy grail. In fact there have been hundreds of reading programs and approaches developed and used over the decades. So, instead of teachers and students joining to set goals and plan steps to reach the goals in ways that are agreed to by all, the teacher/instructor/professor becomes the keeper of the magic formula as well as the determiner of success rather than the students. 

The literacy example could be expanded to be applied in any school setting through post graduate work. Surprisingly, it is often at the post graduate level that the process begins to look like what I believe should be the nature education from the start. In post graduate work, a student is more of a colleague who is asked what problem or area of exploration is of interest. A plan of what might be needed to be done to solve the problem or better understand a field is then jointly planned. The post-graduate student in the best of situations owns her or his own goals and efforts.

So I have rambled. Why shouldn't education at every level make sense to the students, the consumers? Why shouldn't the goals and plans at every level of education be owned by the students? Helping students to grow and learn to reach for life goals is not the heroes journey where one is trying to turn students to our greater goods - as if education were a battle. It should be built on the students' sense of what will be good for them and then explained and developed from that perspective. "If you want to be able to read that book, we can do these things - learn all of the parts that are used to build the book; learn the ways that those parts work alone and together; and learn how to make sense of all of the parts together. Are there other things we may need to do? Where can we start?" I just want to start a conversation about seeing and thinking from the learners perspective as opposed to the more current and frequent, "What do I have to do to get them to read?" Does any of this make sense? Can you help flesh this out further?