How Do You Feel Today (about my class)?

English teachers have it rough. Socially, I mean. There’s rarely a week that goes by that I don’t meet someone who,  after discovering I am an English teacher, tells me about how much he hated English in school, all the assigned books he didn’t read, how he doesn’t know anything about grammar or spelling, and/or that he’s a terrible writer.

Math teachers have it worse, perhaps. The whole world is proud to announce how much they hated math in school. They brag about how inept they are at computation and join in with others in the Great Mathematics Hate-athon.

I’m sure there are factions of science haters, social studies detesters, and even PE loathers out there. We’ve done a fantastic job in education of making students despise what we are trying to sell them and of making them feel incompetent at doing what we ask them to do.

I’m convinced that teachers should have two main goals for whatever they teach: to make their students enjoy the subject and to develop confidence in their abilities in that area. Teachers should strive to help students form positive dispositions about what they are learning and about themselves as learners.

In order to accomplish this lofty set of goals, we have to undo damage inflicted upon them by educators past and by societal norms about education. We have to erase the scars of bad grades, scathing comments, harsh criticisms, and failed attempts. We have to empower our students by helping them experience success. Setting each student up for excellence is key, and providing the type of feedback that ignites hope rather than quenching dreams is crucial.

We have to show our students that, though the world wants to convince them it’s not cool to read, write, solve math problems, or engage in other scholarly pursuits, there’s value and enjoyment in learning how to do these things. Reading can unlock worlds of experiences and can thrill you more than any movie or video game. Writing well can give you power over others, help you get your way in the world, provide an outlet for self-expression, and allow you to understand your own life more clearly. Math is everywhere, and being computationally helpless leaves you vulnerable to others who will take advantage of that weakness. Learning to think like a mathematician is important whether you’re hoping to make money, run a household, launch a business, invest wisely, shop ‘til you drop, or create something in the kitchen, the craft room, the workshop, the laboratory, or on the computer. Science is just cool. Every branch of science contains something that will blow your mind if you give it a chance. Social studies helps us make sense of the world we live in and gives us perspective beyond the here and the now. There is something life-changing lurking within the curriculum of every subject in the school day. We have to find those bits of awesome and introduce our students to them.

Dispositions are difficult to change, but I think we can make some progress if we follow several simple suggestions:

• Stop taking ourselves so seriously. It’s school, not brain surgery.
• On a similar note, don’t be afraid to have fun. No one should spend eight hours a day doing something that is miserable.
• Celebrate successes—even tiny ones—and be gracious about failure.
• Unleash curiosity. It’s okay to wonder and explore instead of always seeking the right answer.
• Remember that no matter what the world says, the test is not as important as the learning leading up to it. Passing the test but hating the subject is still a failure in the long run.
• Think like our students. Get to know what they like and how to reach them.
• Let learning be its own reward. Ditch the extrinsic motivators. Trained seals work for treats, but they won’t keep working when the treat supply dries up.
• Sell your subject. Use comedy, mystery, or drama but not horror. Fear is a bad motivator if we want more than compliance.
• Play! Explore! Tinker! Laugh!
• Build bridges of trust with students. Let them know we want to see them succeed and that we’ve got their backs.
• Take moments to step away from the curriculum to share something interesting about the subject we are teaching: something we’ve read, a brain teaser, a brilliant quotation, a surprising bit of trivia, an anecdote, or other fascinating nugget.
• Connect. Connect ideas. Connect with the students. Connect students with one another and maybe with students somewhere else. Let them make connections to their lives, to other things they are learning, and to the world they inhabit, the things they care about.   

We have to remember that our most reluctant students don’t see relevance in what they are learning, don’t believe in their own capabilities, and cannot foresee a future where it’s important that they know and do what we are asking of them. Even many of our high-achieving students choose to live in the world of compliance rather than of intellectual excitement.

If we teach every day as if our subjects matter and do all we can to ignite the excitement of learning in our students, we can make a difference in some kids’ lives. We can change the dispositions of many. We can open their eyes to possibilities that will impact their decisions to go to college, to pursue careers they never considered, to add to the body of knowledge in the world, or simply to continue curiously and courageously learning throughout their lives without apology. 

Far-Away Results

Where will your students be in 15 years?  What will they be doing? What will the world expect of them? How will the things you are doing in your class right now prepare them for that far-away result? 

In 15 years, my former students won’t be writing DBQs, but they will be taking in information, evaluating its content and credibility, and communicating their own conclusions about what to do with that information.   

In 15 years, they won’t be engaging in a Socratic Seminar about themes in Romeo and Juliet, but they will be in situations that require them to speak articulately to advance an argument, communicate clearly, organize their thoughts logically, disagree without attacking, support their conclusions with evidence, listen and respond to others, and connect ideas to the “real world.” 

In 15 years, you won’t find many of them working with a partner to stage and perform a duet acting scene from a play, but most will be collaborating with others, considering the visual and emotional impact of stylistic choices, preparing for a presentation, speaking in front of a group with poise and confidence, analyzing the motives of others,  and communicating to achieve a desired effect. 

In 15 years, most former orchestra students won’t be rehearsing Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, but the discipline, persistence, attention to detail, teamwork, patience, troubleshooting, concentration, focus, and direction-following they practiced will serve them well in their work and leisure pursuits. 

In 15 years, they won’t be solving a math problem, working on a coding assignment, or collecting data for a biology lab, but they will use logic, reasoning, problem solving, and analysis as they solve real-world problems as parents, employees, public servants, leaders, doctors, lawyers, programmers, and educators.

In 15 years, most won’t be playing flag football in P.E.class, but they will need to exhibit good sportspersonship, work on teams, develop “plays” and strategies, learn how to win and lose, exercise to remain healthy, and move with purpose and coordination. 

Even in the best project-based learning situation, the tasks students are doing right now in school aren’t the things most people do in the real world. Even so, what we ask them to do as students ought to develop the skills and dispositions they need to thrive in the world beyond school. If not, these don’t seem like worthwhile pursuits. 

As you are thinking about what you teach and how you teach it, ask yourself this key question: What transferable skills and dispositions does this require of my students, and how am I deliberately teaching students to develop them? 

This question has two important components:

1.  Transferable Skills and Dispositions: When planning instruction, great teachers ascribe to the adage, “Begin with the end in mind.” Unfortunately, we sometimes are a little short-sighted when we think about what “the end” is. The “end” shouldn’t lie in the course the student is currently taking. If the end is a unit test, a performance assessment, a product, or a standardized test, we are merely preparing students for a hurdle they have to get over to reach whatever is next. For some teachers, the end lies in a class the students will be taking down the road  (“I’m teaching you this because you’re going to need to do this in AP next year” or “You will have to do this in college.”). I’d argue that preparing students for the next level of academia, though helpful, is still a goal that matters more to us than it probably matters to them. Transferable skills—the ones we should focus on—are the ones necessary for success in life, that students will need to develop so they can go as far as they choose to go on the road to career and life success. Along with those skills are dispositions, habits of the mind and heart, that will accompany those skills. Teamwork, persistence, patience, empathy, tolerance, altruism, self-confidence, self-reflection, impulse control, and curiosity are among the dispositions we should help our students develop. Before we teach or assign anything, we should identify the transferable skills and dispositions involved; if these elements aren’t evident, we may want to reconsider what we are teaching and why.           

2.  Deliberate Teaching:  It’s not enough to provide tasks and activities for students that allow them to develop transferable skills and dispositions that will help them achieve far-away results. We have to be intentional and strategic about teaching students those skills. Asking students to reason through a problem won’t help the student who doesn’t know how to read the problem, take it apart, analyze its components, apply prior knowledge, choose the best tools for the job, work through a solution, and evaluate the solution’s effectiveness. Each of those transferable skills needs to be taught, probably not to every student but definitely to many. Skills don’t develop by accident, and they don’t improve without some metacognitive reflection. 

A few examples might help clarify these components. 

Note-taking is a skill students need to master to be successful in school that they also need in the real world. In life, however, no one tells people what kind of notes to take, when and how to format them, and what they should write down. The transferable skills inherent in note-taking include recording important information, organizing ideas, evaluating the relative importance of ideas or details, summarizing, and more. If I make those decisions for my students (by providing a format, telling them what to write down, allowing them to copy my notes, and showing them how they should organize them), I haven’t taught my students how to do anything on their own. If, however, I teach my students to use various formats of notes, allow them to consider the best format for this particular situation, ask them questions about how they plan to organize their notes, provide time for them to compare their notes with a partner, and ask them to  evaluate the effectiveness of their own note-taking efforts, I’m teaching skills they can transfer throughout their lives. 

An English teacher requiring students to self-select books and read during daily silent reading time in class has the opportunity to teach numerous transferable skills and dispositions: developing a “reading life,” monitoring comprehension, building reading stamina, finding value and enjoyment in reading, knowing what to do when comprehension breaks down, evaluating what they read, thinking critically, setting goals, monitoring progress and growth, and responding to a text and to other readers. Most of these skills aren’t going to happen on their own, though. Merely letting students read unbothered isn’t going to grow these skills in students; the teacher’s intentional instruction matters. With strategic use of mini-lessons and conferences with students, teachers can identify what skills each student needs to strengthen, offer just-in-time instruction to build that skill, and monitor growth and progress. 

Asking and answering that key question—What transferable skills and dispositions does this require of my students, and how am I deliberately teaching students to develop them? —is the best way I know to turn good teaching into transformative teaching. Educators who become strategic about building transferable skills and dispositions in their classrooms are the ones who make a difference in the long run. Their students succeed now and are ready to achieve far-away results throughout their lives.

Your Hidden Objectives: Are You Accomplishing Them?

What are you teaching tomorrow? If I asked you that, you might respond in several ways:

“Cellular respiration.”

“Pythagorean Theorem.”  

“Act II of Romeo and Juliet.”

“The French Revolution and the American Revolution.”

“I don’t know yet. I have to make it through today first.”

Maybe answering a question like that makes you uncomfortable. In many cases—perhaps most—we gauge our classroom experiences not by what we are teaching but by what our students are learning or doing. Teachers who want to make the learning clear to students do so by informing them of the learning objectives for a particular lesson or for a unit as a whole. Students like to be told what they’re supposed to be learning or doing so they can figure out whether it’s happening.

When we shift our thinking to what our students are doing, we come up with more thoughtful objectives, and sometimes we see where the weaknesses in our instructional plans lie. Your students might be explaining how their cells extract energy from the foods they consume, determining the length of the third side of a right triangle when they know the lengths of the other two, or comparing and contrasting the French and American Revolutions and using their discoveries to determine features common to all revolutions.

If you discover that all you can say is that tomorrow your students are learning what happens in Act II of Romeo and Juliet, you might consider how you’re teaching it and what you might change to make that learning more meaningful. Perhaps your students could debate whether Shakespeare’s portrayal of the blossoming love between the teens is convincing or ridiculous. Or your students could analyze how Shakespeare uses figurative language to communicate the feelings of the young lovers to the audience and discuss how figurative language might strengthen their own writing.

     

Whatever your stated objective is, I also invite you to consider something bigger, something I like to call the Hidden Objective.

The Hidden Objective is the overarching transformation you hope will occur in your students because they took your class. It’s the life-altering difference you hope to make in them that will benefit them even if they never take another course in your subject area. It’s something you would probably never overtly tell your students, but it’s something that you would be completely delighted sometime in the future to discover has taken place and that you played a part in it.

Here are some of my own Hidden Objectives from my own teaching of English, humanities, and the AVID Elective:    

• My students will read for pleasure and will share their love of reading with others.
• My students will feel confident as communicators who can speak and write powerfully for a variety of audiences and in any situation.
• My students will be able to form an opinion of their own, back it up, and share it with others in a way that makes others consider it.
• My students appreciate the arts as a means for understanding others, understanding the world around them, and understanding themselves.
• My students seek out arts experiences of their own to add value to their lives.    
• My students use their talents and abilities to make the world a better place for someone other than just themselves.
• My students will realize that learning doesn’t always have a quantifiable outcome and that the best learning is learning for its own sake.
• My students will take charge of their lives, advocate for themselves, and not just let life happen to them.

Considering your Hidden Objectives gives you life and direction as an educator. The objectives become a part of your mission, the driving force that propels all your other efforts. Reminding yourself of these objectives and checking in on your progress not only keeps you on track but also gives meaning to the work you do.

If you’re lucky, you’ll run into one of your former students years later, and, in thanking you, that student will let you know what impact you’ve made on his or her life.

It’s not likely that the former student will say, “Thank you so much for being my teacher. Because of you, I know what happened in Act II of Romeo and Juliet.”  The former student probably won’t say, “Because of your class, I can analyze the effect of figurative language on a reader. That has taken me far in life.”

Perhaps—and this will warm your heart when it happens—you’ll hear your former student say, “I write all the time for my job, and I think that I’m good at it because you taught me the importance of always considering how the audience will respond to what you write. I choose words carefully, reread my writing for clarity, and anticipate my readers’ reactions in advance. Thank you for teaching me that.”

Unfortunately, we don’t always get to know about the impact our work has on students. Rest assured, though, that because of our collective efforts and the many Hidden Objectives that drive our interactions with students, we have made and will continue to make differences in the ways they view themselves as thinkers, citizens, community members, readers, writers, problem solvers, mathematicians, historians, scientists, leaders, athletes, performers, scholars, family members, students, employees, team members, listeners, speakers, partners, innovators, caretakers, creators, planners, hosts, guests, producers, and people.

I’m interested in hearing about your Hidden Objectives. If you’d care to share yours, add them to my Google Form here. If I get enough responses, I will share them in a future post. There’s power in seeing the impact we are each making and how it affects the big picture of our students’ experiences.