Читать книгу Empower - John Spencer - Страница 5

She came rushing up to me in a panic at the start of class.

“What’s wrong, Katie? Everything okay?”

“Well, Mr. J, I’m going to have to change my project. I really like making my own pair of sandals, but I just have to change what I’m doing. Is that allowed? Will I lose points for switching my project?”

We were in the middle of our first attempt at a 20% Time project in my class. My students were given 20 percent of their time to work on something about which they were passionate and curious, and they had to take their learning and make something for a final project.

Katie had been quiet for most of the project. She didn’t get fired up like a lot of my students when it was first introduced. She didn’t ask a lot of questions about how it would be graded or why we were doing something different.

In fact, she had enjoyed her time so far, making sandals. It was a project that meant something to her, so I was surprised to see how anxious she was to change her project.

I responded, “Yes, you can change your project, but I thought you liked what you were doing.”

Katie explained that she wanted to learn sign language. Her young cousin was deaf, and she had always told herself she would learn sign language when she had time. But between school, sports, and a summer packed with work she kept on putting it off.

Now her cousin was coming to live with her family for a short period of time due to a house fire. The situation was awful. It was even more heartbreaking to Katie because she had never taken the time to learn sign language.

The 20% Time project had given her a new hope that she might have some time to learn sign language in school.

Our conversation ended with me saying, “This is why we are doing this project. I want you to be able to learn because you have a purpose for learning beyond a grade. I’m going to help you learn sign language as best I can in the next six weeks!”

But I didn’t know a thing about sign language.

Sure, they were reading, writing, speaking, listening, and creating. But it was one of the first moments I ever felt helpless as a teacher, because I was not the content expert in the classroom on what my students were learning.

Yet I had a number of students like Katie (engaged and excited to learn), so I pushed forward. I helped her research local groups that used sign language; she jumped on YouTube Channels teaching her how to start learning sign language and even Skyped with one of the people who started this YouTube channel.

She was learning, but she was also making. She was solving her own problems and coming up with ways to learn faster and share that learning with the world on her blog.

When it came time for our class to present in TED-style talks, I wasn’t exactly sure what Katie had planned for her presentation.

That day, as I was rushing around to make sure everything was working, I missed seeing her Aunt and cousin walk into the auditorium and greet Katie.

After a few of her classmates had already presented, she stepped on stage to share her learning journey.

Katie was shy, and she was shaky at first in front of the audience. As she shared why she changed her project, the crowd began to engage in her story. At the end of her talk she told us that she had been working on learning the words to the song, “I Hope You Dance,” and was going to perform it in sign language.

People began to tear up immediately as the song started over the speakers, and she began to sign.

I found myself mesmerized by this shy young woman expressing such emotion and grace on stage. It is something I’ll never forget.

Just then, in the midst of this wonderful moment, the technology stopped working. The sound cut off, and the crowd began to murmur and look around in surprise.

I scrambled for what felt like five minutes (but was really only five seconds), trying to fix the problem. Underneath a table, looking for an aux cord, I heard the audience whispering completely stop.

Katie had started to sing the song herself, acapella. She was signing and singing at the same time, continuing right where the music left off.

It was beautiful.

Tears came to my eyes, and as she finished, the audience erupted into a standing ovation. Katie, a bit red in the face, gave a quick wave good-bye and rushed off the stage.

The next day in class, we had a round table reflection on the project and final presentations. Every student wanted to know how Katie had pulled this off. They wanted to know how she kept singing when the music stopped. What she said next will always stay with me:

“I didn’t want to let my cousin down. And I didn’t want to let all the people who helped me learn sign language down. I think though, what really got me is that I didn’t want to let myself down. I’d never worked so hard on a school assignment before. I spent hours and hours after school and on the weekends to get prepared. If I had stopped, that work may have been for nothing. Really, I didn’t even give myself an option not to continue and finish the song in some way.”

This story changed the way I thought about student work. For years, I had worked so hard to inspire, challenge, and engage my students.

Now the tables had turned.

Katie inspired me. She inspired her classmates. She inspired that audience, and her story continues to inspire today.

Yet this was one student. I wish I could say every student of mine had at least one experience in school like this.

Most did not.

I was never a perfect teacher. Not all of my students were empowered like Katie was in this project. And I didn’t spend 100 percent of my time embracing this type of empowered learning that was happening in my classroom that day.

But it was a start.

After this project, I shifted my focus. It wasn’t easy. It was extremely messy. But it was worth it. Empowering students became my goal, and giving students the opportunity to pursue their passions, goals, and future was the mission.

If you grew up in the United States or a country with similar education structure, chances are you spent 6.64 hours per day in school, 180 days a year, for 12–13 years.³

The 6.64 average hours a day in school is actually better represented in minutes.

What are we doing with all of this time? More importantly, what are our students doing?

We aren’t asking what are our students are learning during the fourteen thousand hours they spend in school. That is already well documented.

Everyone knows you learn your basic reading, writing, and math skills in the younger grades, and then start to get very specific with world history classes, physics and biology classes, and algebra and geometry classes as we get older.

We’ve been learning the same subjects in the same pattern for quite some time. Are there variations of this?

Sure.

Are we going to assume most of you reading this book are following the traditional education path laid out more than one hundred years ago?

Yes.

The question is, what are our students doing during these classes?

Are they taking notes? Are they listening to adults speak? Are they studying for tests and quizzes? Are they watching PowerPoint slides move across the screen? Are they filling out worksheets and packets? Are they regurgitating information, filling out problems, and checking their answers in the back of the textbook? Are they writing research papers? Are they raising their hands? Are they sitting in the chairs for 80 percent of the day?

Are they following procedures, filling in bubbles, watching the clock, and acting appropriately compliant in every way possible so as not to upset the adults in charge?

Or are they building the knowledge and the skills to pursue their passions, interests, and future?

If you grew up in an education setting like we did, then you spent much of your time being actively compliant—trying to navigate a system that was designed to produce people who followed the rules and waited to be told what to do. Then you graduated. And you waited for someone to tell you what to do.

It was a dependable formula. You went to school, followed the rules, graduated, and stepped into a job as a compliant worker.

As author and New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman aptly points out,⁴

So why do we spend so much time in school, playing the game of school, following rules, and waiting for others to tell us what to do? Why do we rarely give students choice in what they learn, how they learn, when they learn, and why they learn?

This problem extends well beyond school. It impacts us as adults. Those fourteen thousand hours we spent in school from K–12 really do make a difference in how we see the world.

Have you ever met an adult who doesn’t really love what they do, who is just going through the motions in their job and everyday life? Even sadder, how many people have you talked with who constantly complain, showing no visible passion for anything in the world?

I’m sure that, like me, you have met those people. I’ve also seen the making of these adults in schools across our country: students who are consistently being “prepared” for the next test, assessment, or grade level ... only to find out after graduation that they don’t really know what their passions really are.

They feel lost and confused.

These are the same students who are never allowed to learn what they want in school. Forced down a curriculum path that we believe is “best for them,” they discover it is a path that offers very little choice in subject matter and learning outcomes.

It would be too easy to throw up our hands and blame “the system” or “the politicians” or anyone else for the game of school that students are playing.

It’s also pretty easy to say that we went through the same system, and we turned out fine!

School doesn’t have to look like this, because the world and natural learning doesn’t look like this.

But what can you do? It’s not as easy as inventing a new school or designing a new curriculum. You have a test, a curriculum map, a bell schedule, and a set of programs that often push compliance over empowerment.

But you are still the one who can transform the learning space. You are the one to innovate. You are the one who spends hours with your students.

As former Teacher of the Year (still currently teaching) and author Bill Ferriter describes⁵ so clearly,

When we empower students, the fourteen thousand hours have a new purpose. It’s not all about what we want students to learn, it is about what they learn through their choices in what they do (create, build, design, make, evaluate).

This book is about that shift.

Most teachers would agree wholeheartedly that our students need to be more engaged. They’d raise their hands in unanimous affirmation if asked, “Would you like your students to be more engaged in class?”

As teachers, we say the same thing.

Engagement is more powerful than compliance.

Phil Schlechty, who founded the Center for Engagement, describes engagement as the merging of two key factors: high attention and high commitment.⁶

When students have high attention, they are focused on the learning and what they are doing.

When students have high commitment, it means they’ll push through the ups and downs of learning something new and challenging.

Still, engagement is only half the battle.

When students are engaged, they are attentive to our chosen content and objectives. They are giving their full focus to the resources, texts, and problems we are asking them to solve. They are being committed to completing our curriculum and assessments in ways in which we have asked them to demonstrate mastery.

What about the problems they want to solve? The topics they find interesting? The areas they want to dive deeper into and learn more about?

What about their future? The one where they will have to make their own paths, decide what challenges to tackle, and what opportunities to take. The future where they will struggle, make mistakes, and not be sure what direction is best.

Our goals have to change.

This book lays the groundwork for making this shift. When we shift from preparing students for what’s next, to helping them prepare for anything, a world of possibilities open up in their learning.

You may be reading this and nodding your head, thinking, “YES!” At the same time you may also have lots of questions. Don’t worry, this is completely natural. We’ve asked these same questions ourselves plenty of times:

Here’s the thing: We aren’t going to argue about all the things we’d like to change about school but don’t have control over.

Instead, we are going to focus on the areas we have control and influence over as teachers, instructional coaches, or school leaders.

Will your students still have to take some tests? Most likely.

Will your students still have a curriculum pre-designed for them? Most likely.

Will your students’ learning look messy? Most definitely.

Will school still have bells and follow a similar structure? All signs point to yes.

But that doesn’t mean we stop. It means we take the large majority of those fourteen thousand hours that we have some influence over and use them to inspire creativity and innovation in our learners.

If classroom management is an issue, give students choice in what they learn, and watch their focus increase on learning what interests them, even if it is a challenging topic.

Teach above the test. Have students learn beyond the test. When students are making, designing, creating, and evaluating, they are going way past what tests cover. Would you rather have a disengaged, compliance-driven student take a test, or an empowered maker and designer take the test?

Curriculum and standards will always play a role. But standards should not hold you back from creating an empowering learning environment.

Standards are the architect’s blueprint, and you, the teacher, are still the builder and designer. When you include students in the learning design process, the possibilities are endless of what the architect’s blueprint will actually look like in real life.

Instead of worrying about how the school year and school day is structured, absorb the concepts of this book. It will help you develop ways to build an empowered environment in the structures you set up as a teacher.

Throughout this book, we’ll tackle each of these issues head-on and find actionable ways you can overcome the tests, curriculum, and classroom management issues to create an empowered experience for every student.

This book is for the curious ones asking hard questions, wondering what it might mean to move from engagement to empowerment.

This book is for the teachers with bold ideas that seem impractical and impossible to pull off. This is for the teachers waiting for permission to take the plunge into student choice. If that’s you, please read this book as a challenge to take action and to chase that moonshot idea of student choice. Because nobody’s going to give you permission.

Empower is for curious teachers who want something they can use right now. Empower is for leaders who want to help move into a learner-centered environment. Empower is for teachers who are willing to make the jump, even if it means stepping out of their comfort zone and trying something new.

This book is for the wild ones, the innovators, the teachers who are rewriting the rules.

This is for the teachers who refuse to teach the way they were taught just because that’s how it’s always been done. This is for those who are already empowering their students to own the learning.

If that’s you, please read this as an affirmation of some of the great stuff you’re already doing in the classroom. Read this book as a thank you note for the work you are doing.

You’ve probably noticed that this book looks a little different than most teacher books.

So we’re just going to put it out there. Empower isn’t for everyone.

It is not for those looking for a doctoral thesis or a journal article. It’s not a comprehensive, definitive textbook on student-centered learning.

It is not for those who already consider themselves experts on empowering students.

It is not for those who believe students should just behave and do what they’re told.

Empowered learners are the future of our world, and how they spend their fourteen thousand hours will determine not only their future but the future of generations to come.

We can’t wait to see what your learners do because you decided to make the shift to helping students prepare themselves for anything!