Be Better: It’s Not About You

A lot has been written about the Millenials and how self-oriented they are. But I’m going to raise an uncomfortable truth about us educators, because I think it needs to be addressed head on if we are serious about improving education: we educators are often self-oriented, too, sometimes willfully blind to how much this could impede our students’ progress.

I’m a high school teacher, and I think we high school teachers are the worst when it comes to being self-oriented in our work. We tend to have our pet subjects and our pet method for teaching and wash our hands of the rest of the teaching process. I confess that I think English teachers are the worst of the worst here (and I’m an English teacher), tending to teach our favorite authors/genres/historical periods and to use the methods we find most comfortable. Many high-school English teachers think there are Important Things That Must Be Learned. For some this is the five-paragraph essay. For others it is the writing process. For some it’s imperative that students know the difference between a gerund phrase and a participial phrase. For others it’s imperative not to teach formal grammar and instead to learn it organically as it comes up in the literature and the writing. For some it’s a must to read Shakespeare. For others it’s to read as few dead white men as possible.

These are all profiles of the typical English teachers I’ve worked with over the past decade. No one is better or worse than the other — we are all equally bad in that we tend to let our own interests, biases, beliefs, and strengths define how and what our students are learning.

Take me, for example. I was terrified at the prospect of teaching poetry to my high-school students for a long time. Sure, I had my favorite poets. I took a Pablo Neruda seminar in college that left a deep, lifelong impression on me, and I jumped at the chance to include his poems in my courses. But those were safe, comfortable poems. I knew what I was doing with them. T.S. Eliot? Forget it. E.E. Cummings? No thanks. The Beats or the romantics? Not my style. I didn’t understand most of those poems and I was afraid that my own deficiencies would be so obvious to my students as to be laughable. How could I teach something I didn’t really like or understand? So I stuck to my safe poets for years: Pablo Neruda, Louise Gluck, Shakespeare. These were poems I’d been taught, and so I taught them — confidently and (I like to believe) pretty successfully.

Until I landed my first job in an IB school and had to teach IB literature, which included the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Not only did it include the poetry of Sylvia Plath, but it required a fifteen-minute oral exam for the students on one of Plath’s poems, selected at random, and I had to lead them through a question-and-answer portion of the oral exam — all of it recorded, sent off, and re-assessed for the final marks by the IB itself.

Gulp.

It was a turning point for me as a teacher. In addition to Plath, I had to teach the other IB texts stipulated by my department — all new, unfamiliar, and a little scary to me. There were Oedipus Rex, Othello, and Ibsen’s Ghosts, none of which I’d ever even read. I suddenly found myself immersed in their worlds, trying to learn as much as I could about Greek tragedies, Iago’s motivation for evil, and the nineteenth-century Norwegian context which made Ghosts so scandalous. But it was the study of Plath and those looming oral exams that really pushed me outside my comfort zone and into new realms of exploration in my teaching. I dove in head first to her poetry, trying to learn everything I could about her life, her motivation, and her greatest works. I was fascinated to discover a whole world of sound devices, something I had rarely considered before, aside from meter and rhyme. I was learning new terms every day — assonance, consonance, enjambment, synecdoche — and their effect on the poetry, the way it was meant to be heard or understood. I was bowled over by Plath’s brilliant use of language and ultimately I couldn’t even remember what I’d been so afraid of. Why had this seemed scary?

It was a great lesson for me — I learned more that year about new genres, authors, and styles than I had ever learned before, and all thanks to the IB’s requirements pushing me far outside my safe little world of my favorite teaching texts. And this is not to say that I never teach anything familiar; I just finished teaching Plath again for the second time in another senior IB course, and will teach her again this spring to my juniors. But in addition, for the first time, I’ll be teaching four different poets for the final semester of my senior IB course, something I would never have dreamed of doing just a few years ago. But now, thanks to that initial Plath experience, I realize that I need to expand my horizons and push my boundaries in the name of what’s best for my students. In this case, I believe the best preparation for the challenging IB exams will be to study a great deal of poetry. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a wee bit nervous about it, but I’ve learned that this kind of nervousness usually leads to good things in the classroom. Fear of the unknown is healthy; inertia due to that fear is not.

Which brings me to my main point — we can’t stick just to what we know and feel safe with because we erroneously convince ourselves that’s what’s best for our students. We do them (and ourselves) a disservice if we believe that. Whether you are a second-grade teacher or a college professor, ask yourself: when was the last time you tried something totally different and slightly outside your repertoire/comfort zone? It might be teaching a new genre of book for the very first time (say, graphic novels), holding a Socratic seminar instead of lecturing, tossing aside the textbook in favor of Essential Questions and primary-source documents, or having students work through an important assessment at their own pace, according to goals they’ve laid out, instead of a one-size-fits-all assessment approach.

I think one of our bigger failings in education is that we lose our students’ interest because we are so wrapped up in our own interests. I would never have chosen to teach Plath, and it wound up being a great learning experience for me and my students. While studying Plath again this past semester, my  senior students were given the opportunity to vote on the genre of literature they wanted to study for their final semester: either four poets’ works or four fiction writers’ works. The class voted almost unanimously to study the poetry in the final semester. Secretly, I thought they were nuts. But they would never have even had the opportunity to vote if I had stuck to my comfort zone; I would have assumed everyone wanted to study fiction, because that’s what I would have wanted.

We need to remember (especially in the high school years, but in pre-K – 8 as well) that a little fear, a little discomfort, a little newness can be a great thing for our classrooms. Don’t fall into the rut of doing “your thing” over and over again. Make use of your talents, but don’t make them a crutch. Because ultimately, it’s not about you and what Important Things Must Be Learned. It’s about modeling learning itself — in this case, you yourself can be the model.

Be Better: Rethinking Feedback

A big mistake many of us in education make is to equate “feedback” on our work with judgment of our work. There’s good reason for why we do this: most of the feedback we get as educators comes in the form of performance evaluation — there is a prescribed set of criteria against which we get rated by our supervisors during class observations. But we should by no means think that this and this alone is “feedback” — it’s only one very narrow, very specific kind of feedback. In fact, I think this erroneous thinking gives “feedback” an undeserved bad name, because most of us equate it with that nerve-wracking experience of having a supervisor come in and judge our performance, and (let’s be honest) more often than not, little is really learned from this experience, especially if it only happens once a year.

This isn’t the meaning or purpose of feedback at all. Feedback is a dialogue. It’s a mirror. It’s an answer to the questions you have specifically about how to take your craft to the next level. Feedback is an opportunity for growth. Unfortunately, so few school systems seem designed to foster and promote opportunities for authentic, meaningful feedback for teachers and administrators. So many of the blog posts and articles on feedback I read, from both the education and business sectors, focus on how leaders can give feedback better, but we are missing the point entirely about feedback if we continue to think of it primarily as something that supervisors dole out to their charges.

Early in my career I had the wonderful fortune to take a teaching assignment at an international school in Hong Kong where I learned more in a year than I think I have in the whole decade since. One of the coolest things I learned there was the true nature and purpose of feedback. Instead of having a supervisor come in and observe my teaching, fill out a form, and provide me with some cursory comments, every member of the department was paired up with another, and we were expected to observe our feedback partner a minimum of three times per year. These observation and feedback sessions included sit-down discussions of our goals prior to the observation, and follow-up and feedback after.

My colleague, Kelley, and I were paired up, and I remember a distinct moment during our first post-observation feedback when the lightbulb went off for me: we were having this open, honest conversation about what had gone well and what could be improved, and I realized that it was entirely unlike any feedback session I’d ever had before. Something was missing. That something was anxiety. There was none. It was a totally authentic discussion about how my goals had not fully been reached based on my learning objectives, and we strategized ways that I might try another approach. But the whole conversation just felt so free and open — no worries or fears that she wouldn’t like my performance or rate me down, simply because there was no performance rating to be done. The sole purpose was feedback, not ranking, and this was accomplished beautifully by pairing up two colleagues in the same “rank.” I got more valuable feedback on my work, answers to my questions, and brainstormed solutions in that one session than I have gotten from supervisors combined in the whole decade since. The reason isn’t because my supervisors give bad feedback, but it’s because the design of the process is so inherently different. Supervisor evaluations are usually designed to ensure a kind of quality control check, whereas colleagues working together as learning coaches is designed to promote growth via authentic feedback.

And let’s not forget the other benefit of this style of feedback: I got to see several of her classes that year, and those of us who’ve had the pleasure of sitting in on a colleague’s classes know that they are often some of the best, most practical, and cheapest (free!) professional growth opportunities available. Watching Kelley interact with her students, try innovative assessment approaches, and teach familiar texts in new ways expanded my thinking about teaching and learning and set off a flurry of ideas in my brain about how I might adapt some of her approaches to fit my course needs.

Interestingly enough, there was never any supervisor at the end of the process asking to check off on our forms or judging our work as a team. We were simply expected to schedule the observations throughout the year at convenient times for us and carry them out, and we did. I think this also really helped shape the process, because it didn’t feel like another judgment of our work from above — it was a tool for us to use, and we took that seriously and used it to our advantage.

As a result of this experience, I have come up with my own series of feedback forms for colleagues who would like to try this feedback team approach, and they are available here MbD – MbC – FeedbackForm12&3. My only caveat is that they can seem a bit long — this is just the model that works for me; I’m highly verbal and like to write down all my ideas extensively (secretly I just really love filling out forms). So I’ve stipulated at the top that this process should not be arduous or another one of those “just-write-down-whatever-so-the-higher-ups-see-something-filled-in-and-get-off-our-backs” things. Working as a feedback team is really all about getting someone to give you the honest feedback you need to confirm your suspicions about what you do well and what you need to improve on, and be a sounding board and a source of inspiration for how you might move closer to your teaching/admin goals. So, by all means, use/adapt/edit/truncate the forms as you see fit. Do what works for you; if that means not writing anything down but going through all the useful prompts verbally, then go ahead and do that. It’s about making this kind of feedback work for you, not just ticking off another box on your to-do list.

If you aren’t able to work in feedback teams, you might try another humbling but helpful activity: filming your class and watching it, or ask a colleague friend to watch it with you and help point out some interesting obeservations. When I do this, I’m surprised by what I see on the footage that I didn’t see during the class — those students there in the corner zoned out, not engaged — how had I missed that? I only seemed to see the kids in front of me, attentive and interactive. Or how much I talk and cut kids off? Yeesh. Do I always do that?

Feedback is a popular buzzword in education right now, but I think we’ve misunderstood its true purpose and have mistaken it for performance evaluation. For sure this is one aspect of feedback, but it’s only one facet, and I’d argue that it’s often the least helpful kind of the three mentioned here. While there is a crucial place for performance evaluation and feedback by supervisors, there is an equally or more crucial place for peer-to-peer feedback and dialogue and self-assessment because of their inherent purpose: to provide feedback against teacher goals for learning/teaching in a non-judgmental format.

Imagine your school with every teacher engaged in a feedback team, tasked with observing and being observed at least twice a year. The conversation, creativity, and collaboration that develops out of this model is worth a dozen PD sessions. Try it — find a willing partner, department, or grade level and see what kind of results you get. I’m willing to bet that you’ll never again think of feedback as anything less than an ongoing, open dialogue — as it should be.

 

Be Better: Feedback from Students

As promised in my previous post, “Be Better,” I’m going to highlight a handful of the ways we individual educators can take our own initiative to improve our craft.

This week, that way is by feedback. There are two kinds of feedback that I think are valuable to every educator: feedback from students, and feedback from colleagues (peers and admin); today I’ll post some ideas on student feedback for teachers.

I’m starting the second semester off with some (overdue) feedback from my students. I usually do this the easiest, most anonymous way I know — booking the school’s laptops and asking kids to fill out a brief survey from Survey Monkey.

I ask questions like:

1. What works for you in English class this year — engages you and helps you learn? (choose as many as you’d like)
2. What doesn’t work for you in English this year — what doesn’t engage you and doesn’t seem to help you learn? (Choos as many as you’d like)
3. Whether or not you *like* English class, do you feel that you have improved since the beginning of the year?

I give many multiple choice options for the first two — basically everything we do over the term: SPIDER Web Discussion, Dialectical Journals, grammar, reading, viewing, etc. — and I find the results interesting (and often surprising). Many times I have discovered my suppositions to be erroneous. For example, last year several students in a class complained vociferously about SPIDER Web Discussion during class time, but on the feedback form (which is electronic and totally anonymous), the majority of students in that class ranked it as something that “worked” for them.

But it’s easy to give surveys with questions like these. It’s much harder to ask tough questions that you might not like hearing the answer to. Guess what? You should still do it. So I bite the bullet and include questions like these:

1. If you could change some things about the way Ms. Wiggins teaches, what would it be? (choose as many as you’d like)
2. How do you like English so far this year?
3. Would you recommend your Ms. Wiggins as a teacher to other students?

These questions all have multiple choice answers that I try to keep as kid-friendly as possible. But I require a fill-in-the-comment-box question that must be filled in for the survey to be completed, which asks: What can Ms. Wiggins do to improve as a teacher — to engage you more in class and help you learn better?

I’m human; I just want to be loved and adored by my students at all times, but that isn’t the point of my job (it’s the point of my ego). My job is to cause learning and find better ways to do that. If I don’t get honest feedback from kids about how I’m doing and how I can get better, then I’m not really serious about wanting to be a better teacher.

We have to get over our egos — we owe it to our students. The great irony of us teachers is that we are great at doling out feedback every class period of every day — assessing papers, congratulating a student on a project, chatting with another to discuss her attention difficulties — but we are pretty timid when it comes to asking for feedback on our performance. How can we give out feedback every day and be too fragile to invite and accept it back?

Like I said, I’m human. I’m always terrified to read the feedback my students leave on the surveys, always anxious it will once and for all confirm that I’m a horrid person and they all hate me. But there goes my ego talking again — it’s not about me, the person, at all. It’s about me the teacher. As they say in one of the greatest movies of all times, The Godfather, “It’s business, not personal.” It’s about my performance as teacher in the classroom. And, truth be told, I’ve rarely had a student say anything that hurt my feelings. Most of their feedback is overwhelmingly positive. But the interesting, unavoidable fact is that it’s the critical feedback that is the most helpful. The student who noted that I rarely used the board touched on a fear of mine that I tend to talk too much. The student who said their class felt put down when I compared them to my other classes helped me understand that my motivational approach wasn’t working. And the student who said I didn’t vary my class enough helped me see I was too enamored with my favorite teaching method to see that we needed more variety in class. While it’s very affirming to see positive feedback from students, now it’s the critical feedback I look forward to, because I know it will help me grow more.

Another real benefit of regular feedback sessions like this (which only take about 15 minutes of class time) is that the students really appreciate that their voices are heard, especially if they have a gripe and are too scared to tell you about it face to face (I wouldn’t have ever done that in college, let alone in K – 12). I make a point of showing them the Survey Monkey bar graphs on the overhead projector when the results are all in and I’ve looked through them, and I highlight comments or concerns that warrant a change in the way we do class. I may publicly express surprise that a certain text ranked as their first choice for the year, or I may acknowledge that several students commented on how little grammar we were doing and vow to change that the very next week in response. I find students are surprised and a little stunned that they get “heard” in this way and that teachers consider their opinions about the course as valid and thoughtful. I recommend debriefing the feedback in this way, not only so they see that their comments are read and considered but also so they understand that it’s a dialogue and not a one-way rant or something to blow off. And showing them that their thoughtful comments can have a direct impact on how the class is run is a great way to develop that dialogue. This is one reason it’s important to do this kind of feedback regularly, throughout the year, and not only at the end, when anything they say will have no impact on their own experience.

Other low-tech ways of soliciting feedback is to have a suggestion box in the classroom or pass out an index card to each student at the end of every week or two and ask them to jot down answers to two questions: What worked for you this week, and why? What didn’t, and why?

But I find, paradoxically, that the cold, anonymous, impersonal nature of the online survey is really the best vehicle for getting authentic feedback. Students will always worry that you recognize their handwriting and may not be honest enough in handwritten surveys. I noticed when I switched to anonymous online surveys that the quality of the feedback was far more honest and less sugar-coated — a good thing for any educator who wants to improve.

I’ll confess I’ve had a busier than normal first semester with four preps, all of them new to me this year, and I’ve let my feedback slip. I plan to do my first round with students tomorrow morning on my first day back after winter break. My goal is student feedback three times this next term — see if you can do something similar, and post your thoughts on the results here in the comments section.

Be Better

In my last post I suggested that you should always try to improve your craft as a teacher or administrator. I do truly believe that if you aren’t actively working to be better at your job, then you aren’t actually doing your job. Part of it is just being a professional. Professionals work towards mastery — even if we never get there. Machines just do their jobs unthinkingly and without meaning or growth goals. I think most people want to be professionals and not machines, but many times we feel thwarted by a whole host of things ostensibly out of our control: feckless administrators, red tape, inconsistent policies, underpaid/overworked teachers and staff, unmotivated students, student poverty, testing…the list could go on.

But all too often teachers are afraid to admit or say that none of those, nor even all of them together, is an excuse for us to do sub-par work. We are professionals, and professionals do not allow _________________ to be the reason we can’t do our best in the classroom every week. Fill in the blank with the excuse of your choice. I know many of them well. I have often filled in that blank myself, raging in private over ________________ and why it means that the students are short changed, or why the talented faculty can’t actually do their jobs, or why I do double the work of a colleague who makes double the pay I do. I’ve moaned about “the administration,” about losing class time to testing or assemblies, about the culture of grade inflation. Believe me, I know your pain.

But your particular  pain does not give you the right to shrug your shoulders and say, “It’s impossible to teach because of _________________.

Picture your craft (and yes, I believe teaching is a craft — an art that requires both technical and creative skills, like carpentry or dance) the way you wish it were without any restrictions, impediments, or bureaucracy — what does it look like? What kind of work could you do if you could be free to do it to the best of your ability? Close your eyes and really imagine it. What kind of educator do you dream of being if only _________________ weren’t the problem?

Now go and be that educator in spite of the fill-in-the-blank. I’m serious. Please don’t think I’m being flip. I mean it sincerely and genuinely, and I speak from my own experience; I work as a full-time classroom teacher right now and come home daily with many headaches and grumbles about ____________________. But I never let it affect my craft. You see, they are independent of one another, even if they don’t seem that way. Yes, I’m beholden to certain rules and standards at each school I work in, but my classroom is like a laboratory in which I’m constantly testing modified or new approaches to see which ones cause learning better. I want my students to leave class every day feeling excited, wanting to continue our discussion out into the hallway. Do I let ____________________ stop me from that goal? Never. I work around it. I’m the educator I want to be in spite of it.

Because we don’t live in an ideal world and I don’t rule it, then of course I must work within the framework I have. but here are two insights I’ve learned that are like gold to me they’ve been so tried and true:

1. Creative, engaging, feedback-seeking educators are the ones that change lives and see broad gains in student achievement; teachers who focus solely on content and drill n’ kill often only reach the top students, who are already motivated.

2. It’s best to take bold, educational risks in the classroom that aim to cause greater learning without first asking for permission. I’ve often found that people say no to untested or new ideas, but they will congratulate you later on those same ideas put into action when they see excellent results. I have seen this firsthand with SPIDER Web Discussion and introducing new units.

These insights have really helped me be a better teacher in spite of __________________. I try to be that engaging, creative teacher looking for new and better ways to reach my kids, and I often try new things in my quest to do that (and announce success later, rather than ask permission first).

All of this is to say that we professionals, we educators who really do want to be better at our jobs, must cast off our _________________ excuse and take responsibility for our own time every day with students and colleagues. We may never be able to work in our ideal professional environment, but we have an opportunity every day to be the kind of educator we want to be in spite of that.

Let’s be better.

For my next series of posts, I’ll be suggesting several ways educators can “be better” at their jobs — be professionals and not machines. I’m a pragmatic girl when it comes to professional development, so I’ll have some very specific suggestions for how teachers and administrators can “be better” and create a ripple effect around them in their professional communities

If You Aren’t Trying to Improve, You Really Aren’t Doing Your Job

A brief thought on the cusp of a new year:

Our job as educators is to actively work at getting better. If you are a classroom teacher, like me, and your job is to cause learning, but you aren’t actively searching for ways to better cause that learning, then you aren’t really doing your job. If you are an administrator and your job is to help support teachers cause learning, but you aren’t actively searching for ways to help those teachers, then you aren’t really doing your job.

After a decade in the profession, I feel like there are really just two types of teachers: One wants to learn. The other believes she knows all she needs to know. One is generally optimistic about learning. The other is generally cynical. One never finds enough time in the day to accomplish all he wants to, but he still finds the time to meet with a concerned parent, write that college recommendation letter, chat with a teary student about her grade, and sit down with a colleague to discuss the best way to assess an upcoming project. The other just doesn’t have the time. One asks for feedback from students, parents, and colleagues. The other shuts his door and eschews it.  One welcomes working in teams to design and assess student assessments so that they are as fair and well-rounded as can be. The other designs alone, needing to have the sole input. One tries a new task or approach in class, reassesses, and tries again. The other is forced to try a new approach in class and then goes back to her tried and true way of doing things. One gives feedback many times, in multiple ways, with both low and high stakes. The other gives a grade. One aims to cause learning. The other is trying to cover all the content by June.

Yes, it takes an incredible amount of time, energy, and effort to be the first kind of teacher — it’s true. But that’s your job. Really. And I truly believe that if you aren’t actively working to be better at it — questioning your methods, challenging yourself, seeking feedback — then you simply aren’t doing your job. You’re just a body in a chair but not really an educator, not really someone whose job it is to cause learning.

Every teacher and administrator should take the opportunity of the New Year to make a resolution that he will use every work day as an opportunity to grow and be better at his job; that she will actively seek multiple forms of feedback on how she’s doing that job; and that he will cast off the fear of change and honest feedback and embrace the rocky road of self-improvement. This is what it means to be a professional educator.

May 2013 bring wonderful things to you and education the world over.

Ten New Year’s Resolutions for Teachers

Here are ten “resolutions” I wrote for myself to try to stick to for the coming year. Feel free to share yours below in the comments sections.

Ten New Year’s Resolutions for Teachers

1. Don’t be boring. If they looked bored, they are. Learning should be engaging.

2. Stop talking so much. You really aren’t that interesting. Students are far more interesting if you let them show you all that’s on their minds.

3. Be clear, and explain everything in multiple ways multiple times. Just because you know what “be specific” means as feedback on a piece of student writing doesn’t mean he knows what that means.

4. Show more models — show models of good, average, and below-average student assessments when assigning tasks. Ask students to assess these themselves in groups so they really understand how the criteria work before beginning the task themselves.

5. Be a model — do as much of the work alongside of them as you can. Writing a timed essay, even for an “expert” like you, is far more stressful than you expect. Remember how nervous you get while you complete tasks with them, anxious about whether you can write something worthy of their praise. Good ego and empathy checks.

6. Remember that problem kids have problems. Without fail, every difficult student you’ve ever had has always had a difficult background or was going through serious family problems. It’s amazing how much pain is in kids’ lives and how good they are at hiding it. A little understanding on your part during these cases is often more valuable than being a stickler over deadlines.

7. Challenge kids slightly beyond what you think they can achieve. Explain that you do this because you care about their education and because you respect them. Explain that you see them as intellectuals, even if your students are only nine. They value feeling your equal.

8. Give feedback every day, preferably in writing. Twenty-five minutes of class time spent reading every students’ journal entry from the previous night and giving feedback and practice grades on it (while students read each others’ and/or chat) is actually an excellent use of class time. You know daily who is where they should be and who isn’t. You no longer have to wait until the first big assessment for a big picture, and students are surprised you seem to care so much about their homework. They often improve more and more quickly because there is so much feedback.

9. Get feedback more often. Ask students to fill out anonymous Survey Monkey feedback surveys every month; film your class; invite a colleague in to watch you teach and assess it. Don’t be afraid of this; how can you give out feedback every week to students on their work and not be willing to receive it on yours?

10. Develop talent. Your dad always says everyone is one of two kinds of educators: a talent-developer or a slot-filler. Talent developers recognize that their primary job is to bring out the innate gifts in each child, even if those gifts have little to do with your subject area. Slot fillers are just that — filling slots, checking boxes, running down the list of content to deliver. In every way, every day, try to develop kids’ talents. Remember that you are who you are today in part because of the “talent developers” in your life who allowed you to bend the rules or propose something unorthodox because of a passion or interest of yours. Remember above all that your job is about developing talent, not quashing it.

No Song and Dance Needed

When I came across this New York Times article a couple weeks ago, titled “Technology Changing How Students Learn, Teachers Say”, I was immediately intrigued. I wanted to know more about the way our technology use is affecting learning, or even how it affects brain development.

But I read the article and found little that resonated with me. It was mostly about how teachers are noting a decline in attention in their students and a need for instant gratification and entertainment based on youth’s excessive tech use. Here is an excerpt that really got my attention:

“I’m an entertainer. I have to do a song and dance to capture their attention,” said Hope Molina-Porter, 37, an English teacher at Troy High School in Fullerton, Calif., who has taught for 14 years. She teaches accelerated students, but has noted a marked decline in the depth and analysis of their written work.

She said she did not want to shrink from the challenge of engaging them, nor did other teachers interviewed, but she also worried that technology was causing a deeper shift in how students learned. She also wondered if teachers were adding to the problem by adjusting their lessons to accommodate shorter attention spans.

“Are we contributing to this?” Ms. Molina-Porter said. “What’s going to happen when they don’t have constant entertainment?”

This excerpt got my attention mostly because I couldn’t identify with it at all. I read the rest of the article, which is more of the same — anecdotal evidence by teachers like the above — and finished feeling highly unsatisfied. The article shot up into the “Ten most emailed articles” on the New York Times web site, demonstrating that it clearly hit a nerve with the public. So why, I asked myself, couldn’t I connect to it at all?

I started thinking about my SPIDER Web discussion model and how students are really taking off with it at this time of the year. We’ve had four months now to practice and hone, and students are really starting to get it. Just this week my eleventh grade IB class had a real breakthrough with it and the discussion felt so much more organic and authentic; as one student remarked: “Everyone spoke today, but not because they had to. It felt like everyone spoke because they really had something to say.”

I don’t ever do a “song and dance” in my classroom. I’m against it on principle, first and foremost because the belief that you need to do one espouses the theory that you are still the center of attention, you are still the fountain of knowledge dispersing information; you are the all-important teacher that students must pay attention to.

Five or six years ago, I shifted my thinking on this entirely when, while working at a Harkness school in the U.S., I realized that students knew far more than I was giving them credit for and that I was doing most of the thinking for them. When I woke up to the new reality that my students needed a coach more than an instructor, my teaching changed forever. I began developing SPIDER Web discussion more in depth, and I didn’t need to do a song and dance; students came to class excited and ready to engage because their work and contributions suddenly mattered. It was no longer an exercise in providing the right answer so the teacher could check off a box. Students felt intellectually respected by both their peers and their teacher because their ideas were the focus; their ideas mattered to all of us, and immediately engagement rose across the board in every single student in all my classes. My dad recently said something to me that hit me like a hammer: For most students, whether they are in class or not doesn’t matter. Their presence doesn’t change anything. It should matter — their presence should be important to what gets done every day, and their absence should be a loss to the group as a whole so that their work and contributions mean something. For most students, their presence at school doesn’t mean anything — the same thing will get accomplished in the classroom whether they are in attendance or not.

This really did resonate with me. I felt chastened by it as an educator and see it as a personal challenge: How can I create a learning environment in which students not only want to engage every day but in which we need them to; their absence would be our collective loss? It’s not about short attention spans. It’s about creating a classroom in which students’ ideas and work truly matter. How can a student feel that his ideas matter in a class with lectures (or discussions in which he’s not required to participate), reading books he may not care about, writing papers for an audience of one? We educators have not been very honest with ourselves here — we are often too boring and too focused on our own plans or interest to notice that our students have much more to offer that we aren’t tapping into.

When I read the Times article, I realized that it wasn’t just that the situation teachers described didn’t resonate with me; I realized that what they described was nearly the opposite of what I experience. In most of my classes, students put aside their phones and laptops, their gossip and their math test fears, and they sit down and engage for 40, sometimes even 80, minutes with each other other in intellectual conversation. They police themselves, they assess themselves, and we all discuss what went well, what didn’t, and what was most interesting about it afterwards. I think, whether they realize it or not, that students really like to have a space in which to let go of all that other stuff, all the distractions, and just engage in the most basic human interaction invented: authentic conversation. No song and dance needed.

SPIDER Web discussion is just one way to do this; for me, personally, it has been the single most powerful tool in my teaching toolbox. But there are myriad other ways for teachers to do this. The real point here is that I don’t believe student attention is declining as a result of technology. I believe students’ waning attention spans (or a better word: boredom) is a valuable piece of feedback that we ignore at our own peril. The response we need is not to amp up the volume with noisy attention-getting techniques or “fun” units with no real learning attached. The response we need is to ask ourselves: how can I design my classroom so that students’ contributions matter, and matter to a degree that the students themselves know it?