In
the middle of October, Grant Wiggins gave space in his blog for a guest writer. Some of you read the Wiggins blog, and for
whatever reason, the experience of the guest writer resonated with you. I know this because a handful of you sent me
links and a few more shared comments or made references to the article over
this past month.
For
those of you who don’t follow the Wiggins blog, his guest writer had recently
left the classroom after fourteen years to become an instructional coach. The first assignment she gave herself was to
shadow two high school students, a sophomore and a senior.
For
two days, she followed these students wherever they went during the school day,
sat when they sat, took notes when they took notes, and took tests when they
took tests. (She reports that she passed the Spanish test but failed the one in
Business.) “My task,” she said, “was to do everything a
student was supposed to do.”
To be
clear, her goal was not to criticize what teachers were doing. She wanted to understand the student perspective
in order to inform her own professional development. At the end of the two days as a student, this
is what she reports learning:
·
Most students sit all day, and
sitting is exhausting:
“By the end of the day,” she says, “I could not stop yawning and I was
desperate to move or stretch.”
·
Students are passively listening
90 percent of the time:
“In eight periods of high school classes, my host students rarely spoke,” she
says. “It was not just sitting that was
draining but that so much of the day was spent absorbing information but not
often grappling with it.”
·
Students feel a little bit like a
nuisance all day long:
“I lost count of how many times we were told to be quiet and pay
attention.” She also found, to her
dismay, that “There was a good deal of sarcasm and snark directed at students.”
For
each of these points, the writer created “implications” for herself to improve
her teaching. For example, she vows to
include lessons with more movement, use a timer to keep herself from talking
too long, make a public pledge of no sarcasm to her classes (and ask her
students to hold her accountable), and design tests that include time for students
to ask questions of the teacher.
I
don’t know who the teacher is or in what kind of school she works, but some of
you, like me, found her experience intriguing.
I can’t help but wonder what we would find if we tried this experiment
at HSE. What would it be like to sit on
the other side of the desk? What
implications for your teaching might you discover?
In
the spirit of the Wiggins blog, I have two proposals I hope some of you
seriously consider:
- Guest Writers: Do you have something important you would like to say to your peers about curriculum and instruction or about life? If so, come and talk to me. If you have read my entries, you know they can be wide-ranging. There aren’t many limits to the topics you could cover. I welcome guest writers for “From B106.” If Grant Wiggins can do it, why not us?
- Student for a Day: Would you like to spend a day sitting on the other side of the desk? We can make this happen. The experience was a powerful one for the teacher who was the guest writer for Grant Wiggins. If this possibility is intriguing to you, come and see me. I would love to hear what you learn from the experience.
Have
a great (and short) week and wonderful Thanksgiving, HSE. At this time of year, I am particularly
thankful for having the opportunity to work with all of you.
Phil
A few
thoughts on being thankful…
- Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough. --Oprah
- When you practice gratefulness, there is a sense of respect toward others. –Dalai Lama
- Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not a coincidence. –Erma Bombeck
- When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light, for your life, for your strength. Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself. –Tecumseh
No comments:
Post a Comment