In 2017 my first book on educational methods, titled It’s Like Riding a Bike-How to make learning last a lifetime, was published. With more than 10,000 copies printed, I decided that now is the time to share my thoughts with the world for FREE.
Over ten weeks in the summer/fall of 2023 a chapter of the book will be shared each week via this blog. Feel free to read in any order that works for you. Feel free to bookmark entries to read all at once at a later date. Feel free to share with others. Feel free to disagree with anything you read or to scream your affirmations from the mountain tops. This is for YOU. This is for our kids. This is how we teach so that it lasts a lifetime.
Chapter 14
Bold Humility- The best teachers are oxymorons
Throughout the history of the world, great teachers have all used metaphors, parables, and stories to present their points. There is a reason all of the great religions use narratives to detail virtuous living. Metaphors allow us to reflect on our own practices and beliefs without a direct affront to who we are and what we do. A well-crafted metaphor allows us to make associations and allow our minds to craft a deeper, more lasting understanding of often complex ideas and circumstances.
As educators, we should seek ways to incorporate metaphors into our classrooms and into our daily practice. As an administrator, I use metaphors to show relationships between real-world practices and the artificial environments we often create in schools. As teachers, we must embrace our student’s drive, desire, and ability to take chances in a safe and secure environment. We must motivate and celebrate. We must set goals and allow for learning to occur even through temporary failure. Too often we have made school so completely isolated from the real world that as educators we lost sight of what our primary mission is. If we want a kid to learn to swim, we put him in the water. If we want a student to be prepared for the world, we need to put him in the world. We have to get beyond crafting buildings and classrooms that are so far removed from any real-life setting that our students gain no real knowledge of how to apply learning and thinking strategies in their future.
To move our students into an environment of supportive risk-taking, we as lead learners must do likewise. It’s not enough for us to simply encourage risk-taking with our students. We must be willing to do so ourselves and to find others who will lift us up when we fall. Teachers must, I am afraid to even write it, they must…. have been willing to have conversations with their peers. I know this is terrifying for so many of you. Others may look at this step and think, “That’s a piece of cake. I have no problem talking to my peers. I always get what I want”, which is exactly why so many others are afraid of it. There are always those who enter a conversation with a predetermined will to get their way and others who walk in with no desire to debate. This is not about imposing one person’s will and desires on others. It is about having a rich, open conversation about the destinies of children. Teachers must be prepared to debate their personal feelings, to share their own biases, and to explain why they believe standards, engagement, assessments, and really any instructional practice implemented in their room is important. There will be debate. There will be compromise. There will be minds that are changed and there may be some conflict. Change is difficult, especially in schools run by people who were so good at playing school when they were kids. But today’s kids are different and so are their needs. As teachers, as leaders, as change agents, and destiny shapers, we must embrace our power to decide both what and how our students will learn from us.
It is ideal to say that 100% of our students will achieve, but having a teacher commit to reaching 100% of her students all of the time is asking for a teacher to become immovable and inflexible. I tend to stick to the rule of 80. I ask teachers to commit to reaching 80% of their kids on 80% of the standards they have signed off on. Imagine being a 9th-grade teacher who inherits a child who has been in the system since kindergarten. If each teacher in the system agreed to ten standards a year (one per month) per subject area to teach to mastery (Power Standards), as a 9th-grade teacher you can look back and identify at least ninety standards this child has been exposed to and hopefully this child is now proficient in at least seventy-two (80%) of them. When you start calculating how this adds up by subject area per year, the learning that takes place in the mind of a child is really exponential. Students are no longer learning isolated facts that have little relevance. Each year teachers are building on prior conceptions and taking learning to greater depths.
As an adult today, can you look back and identify seventy-two things you learned to a mastery level before 9th grade in any subject area? You may have been exposed to a lot more than that, but becoming proficient, becoming a master, verified by evidence, is a whole new ball game, and it can’t be done by just picking up a book. It can only be done by applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and creating, in short…by doing.
As a teacher, you may be thinking, “OK, I can do this. I can sit back and decide which standards are important. I can even work with my teaching peers to reach a consensus. But that doesn’t help me actually teach it. Plus, my administration would never allow me to have such autonomy. They don’t trust my judgment. How can I prove that my students are learning what really matters? My school and district only care about those big tests at the end of the school year. How can I do this and still work within their system?”
The major theme of this book is differentiated learning. I hesitate to call it differentiated instruction because I don’t believe that all learning is tied to explicit instruction. There are many ways to learn. Some may learn through reading, some through lectures, and some through trial and error. This is not a lesson in learning modalities and a review of what kinesthetic and tactile learning looks like. This is a reminder that learning happens every day in a variety of ways. As educators, we are charged with the task of teaching, but we need to understand that teaching is only happening if learning is evident. As teachers, it has become our job to begin proving our significance and impact. We are now expected to be able to prove that learning is happening and that we are having an impact on it. How do we demonstrate that learning is evident, though, if it happens in a variety of ways? How do we do it today?
For years, we took the easy way out and said we would measure learning by watching and evaluating a teacher. Building principals would schedule one or maybe two trips into a teacher’s classroom during a school year, would study the actions of a classroom teacher, maybe even provide her with some feedback, and then give her an evaluation score based upon her behaviors. What we found out with the advent of the standards movement, however, was that by only collecting evidence from the teacher we often made incorrect inferences about student learning. Some came to believe that we needed to have high-impact summative assessments to measure student learning in order to quantify teacher success.
The tests we gave our students were often multiple choice, criterion-referenced, fill-in-the-bubble formats that did very little to inform us on whether or not students truly understood material beyond recall. These tests were often good predictors of whether or not students would perform well later in life playing Trivia at a local restaurant but did little to provide evidence of greater life success and citizenship. Even at the university level, entrance into higher education is often based on far more than a single test score. Simply getting a good score on an entrance exam like the ACT, SAT, or GRE often only forces an admissions officer to take a deeper look into an applicant’s grades, extracurricular activities, and citizenship. There is nothing wrong with using a test as a screener for more information. This is what your family doctor may do when checking your blood pressure and pulse. Our troubles begin when we begin thinking that a singular test provides all of the evidence we need. We cannot think that although our students learn the material in a number of ways, they should all be prepared to demonstrate it the same way. Like a lawyer proving his case to a juror, it is often a culmination of evidence that leads to a verdict. There is rarely a singular data point that unilaterally leads to a decision of guilt or innocence in a courtroom. A lawyer collects and presents a variety of evidence to prove a point. There is not one simple test that can be presented to a judge or jury to draw a consistent conclusion.
In our classrooms, we need to begin removing our own assessment arrogance and realize we need to get into the evidence-collection business and not the test-grading business. Our job is to assess learning so as to make instructional decisions. Our job is to help our children learn and grow like never before. We must embrace our power and influence. We must be bold enough to make the decisions necessary and humble enough to seek support. It is through Bold Humility that we make the changes necessary to help our children change their destinies and enter the world they will help create.
Read earlier chapters by visiting https://schmittou.net
Lasting Learning: Serving leaders, educators, and students. 