Such an easy place, the start. It is a new beginning, a rebirth, a place to forge ahead into a new world. Or, in educational terms, it is the enviable opportunity to try something new, to change directions, to let the pendulum swing in an opposite direction. Educators, by and large, are incredibly creative people. People that don’t like change, challenges to the way that they do things, and any more on their plates than already exists. More work? Nope. How I do things is working perfectly fine, thank you. Change is hard, and if you stay in education long enough, the pendulum will swing back to where you are right now. Just be patient. I am old enough to remember “basic competencies” that I had to meet in elementary school. I also remember desks in rows, worksheet after worksheet, and multiplication facts read at high speed on a record player (yes- vinyl.) So, I guess that Commodore 64 and floppy disk were good enough, right?
So, I was in the enviable position of striking out on my own. How to eliminate desks, start to take down the walls, so to speak, and cede some control to students? To anyone that has met me, I am positively mouthy. I can lecture, that you can take to the bank. I had 80 minute blocks in which to dispense wisdom, run labs, and debrief classes for the next day. How can that not work? In short, it did- and didn’t. I plowed through, setting deadlines (because life has those,) differentiating, and pushing students to “keep up.” Inevitably, I found students failing, giving, up, and sadly, walking across the stage at graduation, having failed my course three times. I was failing some students. those who could “play school?” The won. They made it. But I wondered how much they took from any class. Increasingly, my lower achieving students rarely developed the skills necessary to be successful in the workforce. They took two remedial science classes, grabbed another science credit doing whatever was deemed appropriate, and they walked out of school as literate citizens. Um, no. Something was missing.
So began my quest for more a method that was more student centered. A way of conducting my classes such that students were able to reflect on their learning, have some choice, and begin working towards understanding themselves as a learner. “When will I ever need this?” should be struck from their vernacular. My set line was that knowledge kept them from being manipulated in life, but I realized that I was referring to skills, not plate tectonics. So began my first iteration of focusing on students through the lens of reflection and goal attainment. I was still living in a world that graded in 101 deviations, and measured achievement from A-F. So, hybridization it was for my unsuspecting lambs.
I called them PDP’s, or Personal Development Plans. I stopped going one learning target at a time, and gave one stop shopping for what they should be able to demonstrate. Personal reflection and feedback (go meta!) became the focus. I wanted them to explain and defend their understanding, not hand me a paper that had cut and pasted and reworded information that was JUST close enough that a Google search couldn’t prove that they had not tried. I used LNQ’s (Little Nice Quizzes) as formative assessments, and students had to create final projects, not unit tests, as evidence of attaining the targets. It’s a start, right? The issue? The class still had to remain within shouting distance of one another. I lectured, they plowed ahead, kids fell behind, and eventually gave up in their attempt to show understanding. Frustrated, both high achievers and struggling students found change difficult.
It was a start, but not the end. Time to brush myself off, and look at things from a new angle. With zero support from my colleagues, I was on my own to forge ahead. To quote Clark Griswold, “Nothing worthwhile is easy, Ellen.” So Ellen, let’s get to work.
Mr. H's Not So Secret Classroom 