"Courage to be less helpful"

I sense a recurring theme in my SDL experience, and educator/blogger Peter Pappas captures it with this directive: "Teachers, have the courage to be less helpful."

Last night I was sharing SDL thoughts with my son Max, who is working on his education license in New Zealand, where he will teach math.  We talked about how small children learn as they struggle in their play. The learning is in the effort, and the caregiver who can't resist the urge to grab Barbie and stick those claw-like plastic fingers through that miniature sleeve has robbed the child of the learning.  I don't know how many times my children came back from the farm shed, disgruntled because they'd been welding or pounding something and their helpful dad took over their project (to improve it, of course). We must remember that "theirs" is better than "best."

Teachers have my husband's well-intentioned urge to smooth the learning--and the cost is ownership, which I'm coming to believe is the peak of the SDL hierarchy. 

This week, again, I see my SDL thinking seeping into the more traditional classes I teach. I'm reading my comp students' research papers right now, and I have to slap my own fingers when my pen tries to re-write another sloppy sentence.

Research projects, awaiting corrections or sincere reading?

That's not to say that modeling doesn't have its place. But my eyes are opening to the many ways we hobble students' real learning in the name of helping. Highlighting unwieldy sentences, or marking them with a question mark tells the students I had difficulty understanding. The job of re-working the sentence to communicate with their reader is then theirs. 

But backing off my role as Sentence Perfecter involves risk. My students will be sharing their papers with "real" readers (as opposed to their "fake" reader: me) after their final revision. So in refraining from polishing their writing (grabbing the welding wand), I will allow some less-than-elegant prose to be read by our community members. And this calls for courage on my part: courage to be less helpful.

Trusting the Process

When I introduced SDL to my students five weeks ago, I told them that while they were free to explore learning in the modes and means of their choice, we had three classroom responsibilities:
 

Þ   We have the responsibility to publish and promote AHSneedle.com (news site).

Þ   We have the responsibility to produce and promote the Javelin (yearbook).

Þ   We have the responsibility to adhere to legal standards of student press.

Under the huge yellow umbrella of journalism that graces my wall, I've posted these SKILLS FOR THE 21^ST CENTURY that dominate our learning:

CRITICAL THINKING

PROBLEM SOLVING

COLLABORATION

LEADERSHIP

AGILITY

ADAPTABILITY

INITIATIVE

  

ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT

EFFECTIVE ORAL COMMUNICATION

EFFECTIVE WRITTEN COMMUNICATION

ACCESSING & ANALYZING INFORMATION

CURIOSITY

IMAGINATION

During the first weeks of class I watched my student burst out of their cages. They wanted to make video and paint ceiling tiles and design t-shirts, and figure out how the button-making machine worked. They started blogs and made some posters and stickers. A lot of this felt like Art-and-Crafts time. My rooms were strewn with poster-paint and glitter. This didn't look like a newsroom.

But I trusted the process and reminded myself that what we were sacrificing in news production, we were reaping in ownership and enthusiasm. My hungry students were telling me through their project choices that they are starving to create and play. They crave glue guns. They long to make things. THINGS.

Last week, after teaching a three-day journalism lesson to 5th-graders, two of my SDL students came to me with a problem. In preparing their lessons for their students, they turned to our news site for examples of incorporating student quotes. What they found there disappointed them. They told me that our news coverage had fallen off since the beginning of SDL--in quantity and quality. I reminded them that we had been working on other things, but agreed that our raison d'etre was, indeed, student journalism. "Everyone needs to write stories," they said.

On Friday we had no school, but the girls came in and organized their plan for holding our news site to a higher standard.  They've committed to taking on editor responsibilities (which then frees up our seniors to finish the yearbook), including story idea generation and assignment.

They wrote up the expectations for news contribution and coverage and developed the system for selecting and assigning stories. Together we sent out an email explaining the changes.

This shift of emphasis from craft center to newsroom needed to happen. But I love how organically it transpired. The ownership is huge. The commitment is personal. I'm anticipating good things.

First Prize! Hamster Cake!

If you could award only ONE hamster cake for classroom excellence, who would win it? You, for your spectacular teaching? Or your students, for their spectacular learning?

Hamster cake!

I suppose this doesn't have to be an either-or proposition; excellent teaching and learning are hopefully two sides of the same coin. But while "teaching" my Student-Directed classes these past weeks, I'm having a wee identity crisis. Mainly, I'm realizing that in my years' quest to be a rock-star teacher, have I let slide opportunities for students to shine as the best LEARNERS possible.

You see, I've built a fat ego around my teaching ability. I can not only lead that sloggin' horse to water, I can make him want to drink the stagnent slime awaiting him at the brink. (Wait, I can transform stagnent slime into sparkling ginger ale!) Dangling modifiers? Booyah! Lie/lay? Done! Want to document a research paper? Analyze a poem? Interview a reluctant witness? Pow! Bam! Whack! You need it taught, I'm your gal: persuasive speaking, interpretive reading, essay writing, beanbag juggling! Nothing I like more than to break down a task and TEACH it!

And the more interactive the better: my students use play-dough to learn phases of revision; they use colored blocks to better understand how clauses fit together; we use markers and kites and gobs of paper--plus GoogleDocs and GoogleForms and Twitter and Jing. And puppets. And hop-scotch. We write for real readers and we annotate texts collaboratively. I know how to get a room of sullen, awkward adolescents to engage in SUSTAINED HIGHER-ORDER CONVERSATION about the a writer's rhetorical methods! I deserve that hamster cake!

But "teaching" in my Student Directed classroom forces me to put my role in quotation marks--and to re-think how to best help students learn. I may be good at driving my students from ignorance to knowledge, but if my room is Student Directed, I'm no longer at the wheel. They are. And my goal must be to keep the power in their hands.

This means I have tamped down my razzle-dazzle "Let's do this great thing MY WAY!" teaching show and found--surprise?--my students stepping bravely onto the stage. Meghan is writing a blog that is utterly delightful. Josh is producing tech-help videos for the journalism department. Lisa organized the yearbook sales over conference times. Sierra and Lillie taught a three-day lesson to fifth-graders.

Because they are polite young people who have been trained by 11 years of teacher-directed teaching, they are inclined to use my ideas if I offer them. And this is a danger, because each time they tilt toward my (very good!) idea, they sacrifice a bit of ownership. And students' ownership of the learning is the key to Student-Directed Learning success. Nothing fizzles enthusiasm faster than a teacher puffing her way in. This means I have to submerge my teacher ego. I have to re-frame my goal. I've got to stop fighting for the hamster cake.