THE EVOLVING CLASSROOM, K-6
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The Teaching Tweak That Made All The Difference...
Teaching on Automatic
For years, I worked to be the best teacher I can be using the information available to me; tweaking my approach to reflect understand-ing gained as I continue to seek research-backed information about the process of learning. One thing I have always innately valued is the voice of my students. I personally find discussions mentally invigorating as students broaden my own point of view by sharing their own. To me, this time in whole group debate seemed like a particularly engaging part of my lessons.
An Interesting Premise
This year, I read an article where an education and cognitive science expert articu-lated the dangers of whole group discussion. In the article, he suggested that only a handful of students are actually engaged in this style of processing - an interesting premise to a veteran teacher who routinely leads whole class discussions thinking they support student integration of new ideas.
I often video my lessons as a self-reflection tool and decided to video whole class discussions over a period of time to see if his list of sins were relevant to my own classroom discussions. It was shocking to look through the data I collected, which showed only four students repeatedly contributing ideas, and was a sobering record of the minutes my own voice held court.
I began planning the process of each discussion alongside the topic and list of thought-provoking questions. I also spent time explicitly modeling and having students practice sharing ideas with a partner. The emphasis here was on ways to add to a partners thinking and how to disagree respectfully; skills I felt would be important if students were discussing ideas without my devoted mediation.
Here’s What I Did
Using “Stop-and-Jot” before students shared ideas with a partner or small group became a cultural norm with our classroom. Modified versions of Maitre D’, Think - Pair - Share, and Jigsaw provide structure and variety to keep it interesting for my students. Once students realized they were truly going to have the opportun-ity to share ideas, they became willing to take a minute to jot down their thinking and commit to a point of view on paper. With all students having the opportunity to verbalize their thinking and hear the opinion of peers, I was able to call on any student to quickly share with the whole class as a way of summing up the processing activity.
Unexpected Outcomes
My first feeling when the approach became established was that I am now superfluous in my own classroom. In every discussion, peers voiced the points I had noted as important for reiteration or essential to the concept being explored. My role changed within the learning community and it took a little time to work through this shift.
Videoing the new approach after four weeks revealed only two students remained reticent. However, it also showed peers taking steps to guide and encourage these classmates to contribute their thinking. The increased development of social collaboration and a visible sense of student responsibility to hear the voice of everyone in the learning community were completely unexpected outcomes.
A second unexpected impact was, in my opinion, on the general happiness of my students, which I measured in number of smiles per lesson and frequency of eye contact between peers while sharing. These intangibles, while often being seen as irrelevant to SAT scores, provided me a foundation upon which I can maintain high behavioral standards including the expectation that students will grant me their eyes and ears for the short period of time I need to plant the seeds of new concepts and skills, immediately preceding the discussions and other active processing events.
I Will Never Go Back
In my experience, people learn socially and largely remember the facts and ideas that they spend time thinking about and using. Student engagement is often presented as a Holy Grail that requires teachers to dance, sing, and play the banjo in order to capture five minutes of concentrated focus from students. This very small tweak in my lesson approach achieved active student involvement with content and required no extra energy to facilitate. I am a hard working educator, but I know the value of working smart and leveraging natural human persuasions to achieve the largest impact for my students.
Feeling the shift in classroom culture, hearing the rich exchange of ideas, and seeing the impact on the quality of open response answers in quizzes all together mean that I will never go back to whole class discussions using the traditional format.
Teachers today graduate with good content knowledge and a few behaviorist strategies under their belt, but the science of learning is not yet a significant part of the training. The recent surge of information from mind, brain, and education research available to the public can be overwhelming, and often represents findings viewed through the eyes of theorists rather than experienced educators. Developing discernment to filter out the meaningful information from the misinterpretation of scientific data takes time, but is essential when we are responsible for the wellbeing and success of the young human beings in our care.
In this case, an interesting perspective from a trusted source, offered enough merit to make it worth investigating in a classroom setting. Every teacher is an active researcher and we all need to cultivate the skills necessary to design a classroom “experiment,” collect data, and draw conclusions from what we see in order to test the often contradictory theories presented to us as fact. Stepping back to analyze our habits as teachers and making adjustments that work for our students and ourselves is what keeps us in the drivers seat, proactively sustaining relevancy in our classroom and in our career.